Law Commons^™

Two Modes Of Legal Thought, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

We should begin with a confession of ignorance. We have no jurisprudence of legal scholarship. Scholars expatiate at length on the work of other actors in the legal culture – legislators, judges, prosecutors, and even practicing lawyers. Yet we reflect little about what we are doing when we write about the law. We have a journal about the craft of teaching, but none about the craft of scholarship.

In view of our ignorance, we should pay particular heed to our point of departure. I start with the observation that legal scholarship expresses itself in a variety of verbal forms. Descriptive …

Policy, Rights, And Judicial Decision, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

H.L.A. Hart has rightly been recognized as the outstanding contemporary figure in Anglo-American jurisprudence. His deep insight, penetrating analysis, lucid and graceful expression, and wise judgment have illumined every subject to which he has put his hand, and all who are interested in the philosophy of law have been affected by his work. It is a special privilege for me to participate in this issue devoted to publication of his Sibley lecture, because I am one of those who have been fortunate enough to have studied under him. My early efforts were exposed to his searching, but always tactful and …

Discretion And Judicial Decision: The Elusive Quest For The Fetters That Bind Judges, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

"The Judge as a Legislator" is the subtitle of the third of Benjamin Cardozo's famous lectures on The Nature of the Judicial Process, delivered in 1921. Though emphasizing the restraints under which judges should act, Cardozo nevertheless compares the task of the judge with that of the legislator:

The choice of methods, the appraisement of values, must in the end be guided by like considerations for the one as for the other. Each indeed is legislating within the limits of his competence. No doubt the limits for the judge are narrower. He legislates only between gaps. He fills the open …

Chief Judge Stanley H. Fuld, Michael I. Sovern

Faculty Scholarship

There were Whiz Kids before McNamara, and never more than during the tenure of the late Thomas E. Dewey as District Attorney of New York County. Only thirty-three years old when he became special prosecutor for the investigation of organized crime in New York and thirty-five when he took office as District Attorney in 1937, Dewey surrounded himself with a remarkably talented group of young lawyers. Frank Hogan, for example, was thirty-five in 1937, Charles Breitel all of twenty-eight. Stanley Howells Fuld, who had graduated from the Columbia Law School one year after the District Attorney, was thirty-four. Nine years …