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A Competency Model For Judges, Talip Aydin

SJD Dissertations

Throughout most modern and contemporary legal scholarship there appears an unbridgeable division between two dominant approaches to judicial decision making. Put succinctly, legal scholars argue that there exist either objective, foundational, ultimate groundings for legal theory and decisions or legal theory and practice inevitably follow a path to relativism and skepticism.

This dissertation argues for a theory of evaluation grounded in the Pragmatic, practical ontology and epistemology. Grounding the theory in this fashion avoids the philosophical views of extreme objectivism and extreme subjectivism. In contrast to these conventional stances, which are rooted in philosophical dualism, the view argued for in …

From Commonwealth To Constitutional Limitations: Thomas Cooley's Michigan, 1805-1886, Robert Allan Olender

SJD Dissertations

In response to what he perceived as the challenges associated with republican governance in the later portions of the nineteenth century, Michigan’s Thomas McIntyre Cooley penned his treatise concerning constitutional limitations on legislative power. In it, Cooley offered a vision of government where courts would check government power and would raise constitutional barriers against the impact of improper influences on legislators. As a student of history, Cooley grounded his beliefs and doctrines in experience, not philosophical reflections. Believing that “the fruits of speculative genius in government are of little value,” Cooley submitted that governing structures and law “must be the …