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University of Pittsburgh School of Law

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Rules, Tricks And Emancipation, Jessie Allen Jan 2020

Rules, Tricks And Emancipation, Jessie Allen

Book Chapters

Rules and tricks are generally seen as different things. Rules produce order and control; tricks produce chaos. Rules help us predict how things will work out. Tricks are deceptive and transgressive, built to surprise us and confound our expectations in ways that can be entertaining or devastating. But rules can be tricky. General prohibitions and prescriptions generate surprising results in particular contexts. In some situations, a rule produces results that seem far from what the rule makers expected and antagonistic to the interests the rule is understood to promote. This contradictory aspect of rules is usually framed as a downside …


Reading Blackstone In The Twenty-First Century And The Twenty-First Century Through Blackstone, Jessie Allen Jan 2014

Reading Blackstone In The Twenty-First Century And The Twenty-First Century Through Blackstone, Jessie Allen

Book Chapters

If the Supreme Court mythologizes Blackstone, it is equally true that Blackstone himself was engaged in something of a mythmaking project. Far from a neutral reporter, Blackstone has some stories to tell, in particular the story of the hero law. The problems associated with using the Commentaries as a transparent window on eighteenth-century American legal norms, however, do not make Blackstone’s text irrelevant today. The chapter concludes with my brief reading of the Commentaries as a critical mirror of some twenty-first-century legal and social structures. That analysis draws on a long-term project, in which I am making my way through …


Brandeis & Warren's 'The Right To Privacy And The Birth Of The Right To Privacy', Ben Bratman Jan 2002

Brandeis & Warren's 'The Right To Privacy And The Birth Of The Right To Privacy', Ben Bratman

Articles

Privacy law and conceptions of a right to privacy have, of course, evolved considerably since 1890 when future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis and Boston attorney Samuel Warren penned their now ageless article, The Right to Privacy, 4 Harv. L. Rev. 193, in which they argued the law should recognize such a right and impose liability in tort for intrusions on it. But quite apart from any argument about how attenuated the link might be between Brandeis and Warren's specific proposals and the current state of privacy law, is it fair to say, as so many scholars and judges repeatedly …