Law Commons^™

Of Rights And Regulation, Stephen W. Sawyer, William J. Novak

Book Chapters

This chapter explores the development of social provisioning as a matter not of right but of democratic administration in France and the United States in the nineteenth century. The authors take issue with conventional chronologies of rights development, which see civil and political rights being developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with social rights appearing in the twentieth. Such categories and sequencing obscure the ways in which democratic administrations took the problem of social provisioning seriously. A history of socio-economic rights cannot be distinguished from the less formal technologies of socio-economic regulation that were an integral part of the …

Lin-Manuel Miranda And The Future Of Originalism, Richard A. Primus

Book Chapters

This chapter discusses how Lin Manuel Miranda's Hamilton: An American Musical is changing the future of originalism. Originalism in constitutional law has recently had a generally conservative valence not because the Founders were an eighteenth-century version of the Federalist Society, but because readings of Founding era sources that favored right-leaning causes were generally predominant in the community of constitutional lawyers. Since 2015, however, the millions of Americans who have listened obsessively to Hamilton's cast album or packed theaters to see the show in person have been absorbing a new vision of the Founding. The blockbuster musical narrative has retold America's …

Christianity And The International Economic Order, Daniel A. Crane

Book Chapters

The relationship between Christianity and the global economic order is murky. The influence of certain Christian thinkers can be seen in certain aspects of the international economic system, but it would be difficult to sustain the case that the system pervasively reflects a Christian character. There is little ongoing engagement between formal Christian institutions (churches or church groups) and formal political institutions such as the WTO, IMF, or World Bank, because the work of elite global political institutions has become technical, technocratic, and specialized. At a retail level, Christians of course exert influence on the global economy in their capacities …

Democratic States Of Unexception: Towards A New Genealogy Of The American Political, William J. Novak, Stephen W. Sawyer, James T. Sparrow

Book Chapters

This chapter takes issue with the history and theory of exception along these three lines. The first section offers a critique of the idea of law at the heart of the theory of exception. By taking a closer look at the history and theory of law in early nineteenth-century America, it offers an alternative reading of the role of exception in Emerson’s America – a place and time in which the exception in law was anything but exceptional. The second section offers a critique of the idea of state and sovereignty at the heart of the theory of exception in …

The Concept Of The State In American History, William J. Novak

Book Chapters

Debates about the state rage in contemporary America. On the right, libertarian and tea party rhetoric fulminates about shrinking the state or shutting down the government, frequently in hyperbolic terms like the Americans for Tax Reform notion of" drowning it in a bathtub." On the left, concern about the fate of the welfare state and an ever-expanding warfare and penal state produces equally impassioned retorts. Discussion of the American state-its nature, its size, and its uncertain future-dominates the political landscape as perhaps never before.

The Creation Of Authority In A Sermon By Saint Augustine, James Boyd White

Book Chapters

My way of honoring Joe today will not be to describe or extol his achievements directly but to try to show something of what I have learned from him, particularly in the way I approach a new text and problem, in this case the creation of authority in one of Augustine's sermons.

Lindbergh Baby Kidnapping; And Nebbia V. New York, Howard Bromberg

Book Chapters

Contributions by Howard J. Bromberg to The Thirties in America, a collection of short essays.

Patent Law, U.S., History Of., Howard Bromberg

Book Chapters

Contribution by Howard J. Bromberg to Great Lives from History: Inventors & Inventions

Deceit In War And Trade, William I. Miller

Book Chapters

This chapter offers “a genealogy on deceit in war and trade”. It starts with deceit in Ovid and the Old Testament and works its way all the way up to the present day, considering the deceptions of such famous tricksters as Odysseus, David, the Vikings, Machiavelli, William the Conqueror, even Montaigne. It then considers the practices of some famous deceivers in contemporary business culture, such as Bernie Ebbers, Dennis Koslowski, and Kenneth Lay.

Authority And Reality, Joseph Vining

Book Chapters

Imagination has been introduced as a term of art in discussion of the social and political world. Some years ago James Boyd White turned to it in The Legal Imagination, his monumental work on the foundations of secular law and legal practice. A prominent example of its use today is Charles Taylor's Modern Social Imaginaries, tracing changes in the common mind leading to what we now call modernity. The term can have a large scope and at the same time a rather definite meaning. "Imagination" is at the center of Mark Massa's comments on the contrarian position of the Catholic …

Perceiving Imperceptible Harms (With Other Thoughts On Transitivity, Cumulative Effects, And Consequentialism), Donald H. Regan

Book Chapters

Many writers believe there can be cases which satisfy the following description: starting from an initial state of affairs, it is possible to make a series of changes, none of which alters the value of the state of affairs in any way, but such that the final state of affairs that results from the series of changes is worse than the initial state of affairs. I shall call the claim that there can be such cases the "ex nihilo" claim, since in a sense it asserts that the bad effects of the complete series of changes arise ex nihilo. Proponents …

Couples: Marriage, Civil Union, And Domestic Partnership, David L. Chambers

Book Chapters

In this country, during the last decades of the twentieth century, thousands of lesbians married other women and thousands of gay men married other men. Many of these couples recited traditional vows in churches and synagogues. Others have pledged to each other in their own backyards in words that they wrote themselves. But not one of these thousands of solemn occasions was recognized as creating a legally valid marriage. In the United States, each state has its own statute defining who can marry, and as far as the states were concerned, these couples were playing dress up. One state has …

Writing And Reading In Philosophy, Law, And Poetry, James Boyd White

Book Chapters

In this paper I will treat a very general question, the nature of writing and what can be achieved by it, pursuing it in the three distinct contexts provided by philosophy, law, and poetry.

My starting-point will be Plato's Phaedrus, where, in a wellknown passage, Socrates attacks writing itself: he says that true philosophy requires the living engagement of mind with mind of a kind that writing cannot attain. Yet this is obviously a paradox, for Socrates' position is articulated and recorded by Plato in writing. How then can we make sense of what Plato is saying and doing? What …

The Constitution As Literature, James Boyd White

Book Chapters

Although presumably no one would say that the Constitution offers its readers an experience that cannot be distinguished from reading a poem or a novel, there is nonetheless a sense in which it is a kind of highly imaginative literature in its own right (indeed its nature as law requires that this be so), the reading of which may be informed by our experience of other literary forms. But to say this may be controversial, and the first step toward understanding how such a claim can be made may be to ask what it is we think characterizes imaginative literature …