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Defenseless Self-Defense: An Essay On Goldberg And Zipursky's Civil Recourse Defended, Alan Calnan

Alan Calnan

In a recent symposium published by the Indiana Law Journal, Professors John C.P. Goldberg and Benjamin C. Zipursky offer a spirited defense of their theory of civil recourse, which sees the tort system exclusively as a means of empowering victims of wrongs. This essay assails that defense, finding it curiously defenseless in three related respects. First, civil recourse’s key tenets are particularly vulnerable to criticism because they are quietly reductive, inscrutably vague, and highly unstable. Second, even in its most coherent form, civil recourse theory literally lacks any meaningful explanation of the defensive rights at play within the tort system. …

Persons Who Are Not The People: The Changing Rights Of Immigrants In The United States, Geoffrey Heeren

Geoffrey Heeren

Non-citizens have fared best in recent Supreme Court cases by piggybacking on federal rights when the actions of states are at issue, or by criticizing agency rationality when federal action is at issue. These two themes-federalism and agency skepticism-have proven in recent years to be more effective litigation frameworks than some individual rights-based theories like equal protection. This marks a substantial shift from the Burger Court era, when similar cases were more likely to be litigated and won on equal protection than on preemption or Administrative Procedure Act theories. This Article describes this shift, considers the reasons for it, and …

Rights As Norms And As Ends, Gianluigi Palombella

Gianluigi Palombella

This article considers the narratives of law through the lens of the form-substance devide. Different legal theories have provided for opposite definitions of law, legal rules and individual rights, enhancing their identity as due to some substantive content or, on the contrary, to some formal-functional features. The form-substance antinomy reflects both institutional and theoretical reasons. It bears down on the relations envisaged among rights, norms and ends. Different conceptions of rights are best understood as a special articulation of those three terms, and offer different patterns for rights, depending on their relation-opposition with collective ends, ethical values, legislation. The following …

Reasons For Justice, Rights And Future Generations, Gianluigi Palombella

Gianluigi Palombella

This article focuses on some very "fundamental threats" to future generations' leaving, and considers whether most essential interests of future persons not to be harmed can be construed as rights, and in particular as human rights, as much as present persons'. The framework refers essentially to a conceptual grammar of justice. Moreover, it is suggested to articulate rights through the lens of "disposability" and "non-disposability" principles. Finally, the article shows the reasons for separating what we owe to future persons under the challenge of those threats for humanity, i.e. a matter of justice, from our right to hand down our …

The Abuse Of Rights And The Rule Of Law, Gianluigi Palombella

Gianluigi Palombella

This article deals with the abuse that can be committed in the name of rights and of the rule of law, not against them. It explains the general characteristics of the concept of abuse from a legal point of view, on the part of the holder of a public power or of a right. Moreover, it addresses the way to identify the abuse itself by the means of legal arguments, and principles. Finally, it shows how resorting to the problem of abuse of power has been used as a tool for recognizing the habeas corpus to detainees in Guantanamo by …

Relativism, Reflective Equilibrium, And Justice, Justin Schwartz

Justin Schwartz

THIS PAPER IS THE CO-WINNER OF THE FRED BERGER PRIZE IN PHILOSOPHY OF LAW FOR THE 1999 AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE BEST PUBLISHED PAPER IN THE PREVIOUS TWO YEARS.

The conflict between liberal legal theory and critical legal studies (CLS) is often framed as a matter of whether there is a theory of justice that the law should embody which all rational people could or must accept. In a divided society, the CLS critique of this view is overwhelming: there is no such justice that can command universal assent. But the liberal critique of CLS, that it degenerates into …