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Full-Text Articles in Law
Feminist Judging Matters: How Feminist Theory And Methods Affect The Process Of Judgment, Bridget J. Crawford
Feminist Judging Matters: How Feminist Theory And Methods Affect The Process Of Judgment, Bridget J. Crawford
Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications
The word “feminism” means different things to its many supporters (and undoubtedly, to its detractors). For some, it refers to the historic struggle: first to realize the right of women to vote and then to eliminate explicit discrimination against women from the nation's laws. For others, it is a political movement, the purpose of which is to raise awareness about and to overcome past and present oppression faced by women. For still others, it is a philosophy--a system of thought--and a community of belief centering on attaining political, social, and economic equality for women, men, and people of any gender. …
Is Legal Scholarship Worth Its Cost?, Paul Campos
There's A Dyin Voice Within Me Reaching Out Somewhere: How Tj Can Bring Voice To The Teaching Of Mental Disability Law And Criminal Law, Michael L. Perlin
There's A Dyin Voice Within Me Reaching Out Somewhere: How Tj Can Bring Voice To The Teaching Of Mental Disability Law And Criminal Law, Michael L. Perlin
Articles & Chapters
In this article, I discuss my historical involvement with therapeutic jurisprudence (TJ), how I use it in my classes (both in the free-standing TJ class and in all the others that I teach), its role in my written scholarship, and its role in conferences that I regularly attend. Although this is all positive and supportive of all efforts to widen the appeal of TJ as well as its applicability in the classroom, in scholarship and in “real life,” I also share some information that is far from optimistic with regard to the way that TJ is being reacted to by …
The Possibility Of Private Rights And Duties, Adam J. Macleod
The Possibility Of Private Rights And Duties, Adam J. Macleod
Faculty Articles
Is it possible for us to know what we owe others, or do we need the state to tell us? To ask the question this way could be understood as a provocation. It might suggest that the possibility of private rights and duties - a possibility that common law takes for granted and which lawyers witness in their daily practice threatens the foundations of the legal realist jurisprudential project and the liberal political project. But it is not my intention here to attack those projects. I simply want to consider the possibility that legal realism and liberalism might not be …
Understanding The Recurrent Crisis In Legal Romanticism: Two Criteria For Coherent Doubt, Chris Sagers
Understanding The Recurrent Crisis In Legal Romanticism: Two Criteria For Coherent Doubt, Chris Sagers
Law Faculty Articles and Essays
Broadly skeptical or relativistic criticisms of law and legal discourse, of the kind prevalent in the last generation in American legal scholarship, pose an inherent logic problem: they tend to impugn normativity itself just as much as they do their intended target. What seems amiss is that the act of critique is itself normative. However it is stated, and notwithstanding efforts by the critic to say otherwise, it is hard to see how the normativity implied in the very act of critique—indeed, in the very act of having purposes at all—is not at odds with the criticism itself.
As an …
Bounded Rationality And Legal Scholarship, Matthew D. Adler
Bounded Rationality And Legal Scholarship, Matthew D. Adler
All Faculty Scholarship
Decision theory seems to offer a very attractive normative framework for individual and social choice under uncertainty. The decisionmaker should think of her choice situation, at any given moment, in terms of a set of possible outcomes, that is, specifications of the possible consequences of choice, described in light of the decisionmaker’s goals; a set of possible actions; and a "state set" consisting of possible prior "states of the world." It is this framework for choice which provides the foundation for expected utility theory, as demonstrated in the work of Leonard Savage. Problems arise, however, when the decisionmaker is boundedly …
My Dinner At Langdell's, Pierre Schlag
My Dinner At Langdell's, Pierre Schlag
Publications
This essay begins on one of those cold wet April Cambridge mornings. It was too wet for fog, but too indifferent for rain. My head ached. My lips were dry and my tongue felt bloated. The fever had surely come back. Worse - the laudanum was wearing off. Tonight would be dinner at Langdell's. It occurred to me that not everyone is invited to Langdell's for dinner - certainly not wayward law professors from the provinces. This was an extraordinary opportunity. Blackstone would be there. Duncan Kennedy perhaps. Certainly the early Llewellyn. I knocked on the door.
A Reply--The Missing Portion, Pierre Schlag
Between Truth And Provocation: Reclaiming Reason In American Legal Scholarship, Francis J. Mootz Iii
Between Truth And Provocation: Reclaiming Reason In American Legal Scholarship, Francis J. Mootz Iii
Scholarly Works
Truth has regained a strong voice in American legal scholarship. Like a groggy patient slowly emerging from a traumatic operation, legal theory is being coaxed back to consciousness by Dan Farber and Suzanna Sherry. They are fighting the debilitating illness of radical multiculturalism and its attendant relativism; they proclaim that the cure can be found in the power of truth, the force or reason, and the integrity of the word. Unfortunately, the patient is unlikely to recover while in the care of Farber and Sherry, even though their operation must be judged a success on its own terms. By equating …
Book Review: Postmodern Legal Movements: Law And Jurisprudence At Century's End By Gary Minda, Chris Sagers
Book Review: Postmodern Legal Movements: Law And Jurisprudence At Century's End By Gary Minda, Chris Sagers
Law Faculty Articles and Essays
Postmodem Legal Movements does two things. First, the bulk of the book provides an overview of American jurisprudence, from Christopher Columbus Langdell to the present. This overview is necessary because, in order to understand "postmodem forms of jurisprudence, we must first explore what came before postmodernism, that is, modernism" (p. 5). Second, the relatively short latter portion of the book presents an argument about the current state of American legal scholarship and its future. Minda's picture of contemporary legal thought is that of a paradigm shift in the making.
Postmodern Legal Movements will prove useful to those in search of …
Advocacy And Scholarship, Paul F. Campos
Advocacy And Scholarship, Paul F. Campos
Publications
The apex of American legal thought is embodied in two types of writings: the federal appellate opinion and the law review article. In this Article, the author criticizes the whole enterprise of doctrinal constitutional law scholarship, using a recent U.S. Supreme Court case and a Harvard Law Review article as quintessential examples of the dominant genre. In a rhetorical tour de force, the author argues that most of modern constitutional scholarship is really advocacy in the guise of scholarship. Such an approach to legal scholarship may have some merit as a strategic move towards a political end; however, it has …
Writing For Judges, Pierre Schlag
Pre-Figuration And Evaluation, Pierre Schlag
Pre-Figuration And Evaluation, Pierre Schlag
Publications
In this response to Professor Rubin, Professor Schlag argues that a prescriptive theory of evaluation does not free an evaluator from the bias inherent in his own pre-figurations. On the contrary, the belief that better evaluative criteria will advance the cause of fairer evaluation is itself an effect of flawed and unrationalized pre-figurations of conventional legal thought. Professor Schlag argues that the evaluation question and its attendant disputes arise from a more significant development--the unraveling of the dominant paradigm of legal thought, the decomposition of normative legal thought.
Preface, Charles F. Wilkinson
Meeting The Enemy, Robert F. Nagel
The Brilliant, The Curious, And The Wrong, Pierre Schlag
The Brilliant, The Curious, And The Wrong, Pierre Schlag
Publications
No abstract provided.
The Future Of Legal Scholarship And The Search For A Modern Theory Of Law, Donald H. Gjerdingen
The Future Of Legal Scholarship And The Search For A Modern Theory Of Law, Donald H. Gjerdingen
Articles by Maurer Faculty
In this Article, Professor Gjerdingen argues that the current crisis in legal scholarship can be traced to a change in the dominant concept of American law. He argues that virtually all of the significant schools of American legal thought during the last century, from Langdellian orthodoxy to realism to the legal process school, were dominated by a concept of law that separated law and politics. This concept of law, which he terms "conventionalism," presumed that law was an autonomous, apolitical discipline dominated by the study of adjudication and classical common law categories. In contrast, the new legal scholarship of the …
Comparative Law And Jurisprudence, Jerome Hall
Comparative Law And Jurisprudence, Jerome Hall
Articles by Maurer Faculty
No abstract provided.