Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Copyright And Free Expression: The Convergence Of Conflicting Normative Frameworks, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

All Faculty Scholarship

Recent attempts to expand the domain of copyright law in different parts of the world have necessitated renewed efforts to evaluate the philosophical justifications that are advocated for its existence as an independent institution. Copyright, conceived of as a proprietary institution, reveals an interesting philosophical interaction with other libertarian interests, most notably the right to free expression. This paper seeks to understand the nature of this interaction and the resulting normative decisions. The paper seeks to analyze copyright law and its recent expansions, specifically from the perspective of the human rights discourse. It looks at the historical origins of modern …

Trends. Implications Of War And Peace For The Morality, Ethics, And Legality Of Killing And Incarceration, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

This article provides a perspective for the controversy surrounding the appropriateness of killing and incarceration during a war on terrorism with global reach.

Open Texture And The Possibility Of Legal Interpretation, David B. Lyons

Faculty Scholarship

This essay concerns the possibility of interpreting law. It is always possible to interpret law in the weak sense, which assigns meaning it is not assumed the law previously possessed. My concern here is interpretation in the strong sense, which, if successful, reveals meaning that lies hidden in the law. Theories of legal interpretation have recently received much theoretical attention. The received theory of law's open texture suggests that this interest is misplaced.

Slavery And The Sudan: Can Good Works Be Good?, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

This article focuses on the consequences of attempts to free slaves and abolish slavery in the Sudan.

Philosophy, Law, And Morality, Lois M. Eveleth

Faculty and Staff - Articles & Papers

Law and morality now stand as two poles of an American dilemma. We are requiring of law far more than it can deliver, while morality is constitutionally unworkable. However, a third option, viz. philosophical/secular ethics, can provide a viable conceptual-linguistic framework for understanding and achieving the seemingly-elusive unity of national vision.

Making Motions: The Embodiment Of Law In Gestures, Bernard J. Hibbitts

Articles

In contemporary America, the locus of legal meaning is habitually deemed to be the written word. This article pushes our conception of law’s “text” beyond its traditional inscripted bounds by focusing on physical gesture as a legal instrumentality. The few studies of legal gesture undertaken to date have explained its prominence in various legal systems and cultural environments, the significance of specific legal gestures in specific historic contexts, and the depiction of legal gestures in particular manuscripts or other specific physical settings, but no one has considered the general functions of legal gesture as a modality.

In an effort to …

Play Fair With Punishment, Richard Dagger

Political Science Faculty Publications

If we want to provide a justification for legal punishment, then, we must answer two distinct questions: (1) What justifies punishment as a social practice? and (2) What justifies punishing particular persons? The principle of fair play is an especially attractive theory of punishment, I shall agree, because it offers plausible and compelling answers to both these questions. I shall also suggest that there is a third question - How should we punish those who commit crimes? - that fair play cannot answer without help from other sources.

On Descartes' Presuppositionless Philosophy, W. Tyler Johnson

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

The history of human thought seems to be a quest for truth. Each looking for some evidence of a higher law, the biologist looks at living tissue, the chemist looks in the molecule, and the physicist looks inside the atom while the mathematician looks beyond matter and the theist looks toward God. Uncertainty and ignorance have traditionally been despised and rejected in favor of Knowledge and Rigor by all such scientists. Rene Descartes is commonly understood to be the father of this modernism as he was the first to replace the Church and its authoritarianism with a belief in the …

A Thousand Points Of Ambiguity, Bruce Berner

Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Introduction: "Plus Ca Change...?", Stephen B. Burbank

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Connection Between Law And Morality: Comments On Dworkin, David B. Lyons

Faculty Scholarship

Our discussions yesterday seemed haunted by a contrast--never quite formulated--between Natural Law and Legal Positivism. The standard interpretation turns on the idea of a "necessary connection" between law and morality. Positivism has often been understood to hold, and Natural Law to deny, that there can be unjust laws.

Harm, Utility, And The Obligation To Obey The Law, Richard Dagger

Political Science Faculty Publications

In a recent essay, "Political Obligation", R. M. Hare sets out a utilitarian account of the obligation to obey the law which he believes to be immune to an objection often brought against such accounts. In what follows I shall briefly review this objection and Professor Hare's response to it; than I shall go on to argue that Hare's response, ingenious as it is, fails to defeat the objection. Hare's argument is instructive nonetheless, for its failure tells us something about wrongs and harm as well as utility and political obligation.

The Moral Decision: Right And Wrong In The Light Of American Law, By Edmond Cahn, W. Friedmann

Indiana Law Journal

No abstract provided.