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Full-Text Articles in Law

The Phenomenology Of Medico-Legal Causation, Nicholas Hooper Oct 2017

The Phenomenology Of Medico-Legal Causation, Nicholas Hooper

Dalhousie Law Journal

The language of counterfactual causation employed from the bench obscures the analytical vacuity of the "butfor" test. This paper takes issue with the consistent recourse to "common sense" as a methodological tool for determining the deeply complex issue of causality. Despite manifestly empty gestures to, e.g., robust pragmatism, the current approach imposes the dominant values of the judiciary in a manner that perpetuates the current distribution of power. Whatever the merits of counterfactual inquiry, its legal iteration requires judges to construct a hypothetical narrative about "how things generally happen." This, in turn, impels a uniquely comprehensive brand ofjudicialcreativity. The results …


Dismantling Democracy: Common Sense And The Contract Jurisprudence Of Frank Easterbrook, Deborah Post Mar 2016

Dismantling Democracy: Common Sense And The Contract Jurisprudence Of Frank Easterbrook, Deborah Post

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.


Emotional Common Sense As Constitutional Law, Terry A. Maroney Jan 2009

Emotional Common Sense As Constitutional Law, Terry A. Maroney

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

In Gonzales v. Carhart the Supreme Court invoked post-abortion regret to justify a ban on a particular abortion procedure. The Court was proudly folk-psychological, representing its observations about women's emotional experiences as "self-evident." That such observations could drive critical legal determinations was, apparently, even more self-evident, as it received no mention at all. Far from being sui generis, Carhart reflects a previously unidentified norm permeating constitutional jurisprudence: reliance on what this Article coins "emotional common sense." Emotional common sense is what one unreflectively thinks she knows about the emotions. A species of common sense, it seems obvious and universal to …


On Preferences And Promises: A Response To Harsanyi, Donald H. Regan Jan 1985

On Preferences And Promises: A Response To Harsanyi, Donald H. Regan

Articles

John C. Harsanyi sketches an entire normative and metaethical theory in under twenty pages. Combining breadth and brevity, his essay is useful and interesting. It reveals the interrelations between Harsanyi's positions on various issues as no longer work or series of articles could do. But by virtue of its programmatic nature, the essay creates a dilemma for a commentator, at least for one who finds many things to disagree with. If I responded to Harsanyi in the same sweeping terms in which he argues, we would end up with little more than opposing assertions. At the other extreme, I could …


Frames Of Reference For Legal Ideals, W. L. Morison Feb 1975

Frames Of Reference For Legal Ideals, W. L. Morison

Dalhousie Law Journal

The publication of Canada's most newly established legal journal by Canada's oldest established common law school naturally prompts reflections concerning the elements of continuity and change in legal writing, and legal thinking generally. Legal writing has so radically changed during the existence of Canada's oldest common law school, or for that matter during the existence of Australia's oldest law school to which the writer belongs, that articles written even during the earlier part of this century excite feelings of nostalgia in some people. In welcoming an article published in the Sydney Law Review in the nineteen fifties, Dean Erwin Griswold …