Law Commons^™

Liberal Feminist Jurisprudence: Foundational, Enduring, Adaptive, Linda C. Mcclain, Brittany K. Hacker

Faculty Scholarship

Liberal feminism remains a significant strand of feminist jurisprudence in the U.S. Rooted in 19th and 20th century liberal and feminist political theory and women’s rights advocacy, it emphasizes autonomy, dignity, and equality. Liberal feminism’s focus remains to challenge unjust gender-based restrictions based on assumptions about men’s and women’s proper spheres and roles. Second wave liberal legal feminism, evident in Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s constitutional litigation, challenged pervasive sex-based discrimination in law and social institutions and shifted the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Equal Protection Clause to a more skeptical review of gender-based classifications. Liberal feminists have developed robust conceptions of …

Justice-As-Fairness As Judicial Guiding Principle: Remembering John Rawls And The Warren Court, Michael Anthony Lawrence

Michael Anthony Lawrence

This Article looks back to the United States Supreme Court’s jurisprudence during the years 1953-1969 when Earl Warren served as Chief Justice, a period marked by numerous landmark rulings in the areas of racial justice, criminal procedure, reproductive autonomy, First Amendment freedom of speech, association and religion, voting rights, and more. The Article further discusses the constitutional bases for the Warren Court’s decisions, principally the Fourteenth Amendment equal protection and due process clauses.

The Article explains that the Warren Court’s equity-based jurisprudence closely resembles, at its root, the “justice-as-fairness” approach promoted in John Rawls’s monumental 1971 work, A Theory of …

Energy Justice And Sustainable Development, Lakshman Guruswamy

Publications

Sustainable Development ("SD")--an expression of distributive justice--is the foundational premise of international energy and environmental law. It posits that international answers to environmental and energy problems cannot be pursued as independent and autonomous objectives but must be addressed within the framework of economic and social development. SD has been politically institutionalized in the Millennium Development Goals and a plethora of significant international instruments. Perhaps more importantly from a legal standpoint, SD is unequivocally codified, in the most widely accepted international energy and environmental treaties. This Article affirms the importance and continuing applicability of SD to the "other" third of the …

Public Legal Reason, Lawrence B. Solum

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay develops an ideal of public legal reason--a normative theory of legal reasons that is appropriate for a society characterized by religious and moral pluralism. One of the implications of this theory is that normative theorizing about public and private law should eschew reliance on the deep premises of deontology or consequentialism and should instead rely on what the author calls public values--values that can be affirmed without relying on the deep and controversial premises of particular comprehensive moral doctrines.

The ideal of public legal reason is then applied to a particular question--whether welfarism (a particular form of normative …

Pluralism And Public Legal Reason, Lawrence B. Solum

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

What role does and should religion play in the legal sphere of a modern liberal democracy? Does religion threaten to create divisions that would undermine the stability of the constitutional order? Or is religious disagreement itself a force that works to create consensus on some of the core commitments of constitutionalism--liberty of conscience, toleration, limited government, and the rule of law? This essay explores these questions from the perspectives of contemporary political philosophy and constitutional theory. The thesis of the essay is that pluralism--the diversity of religious and secular conceptions of the good--can and should work as a force for …

Rights Of Inequality: Rawlsian Justice, Equal Opportunity, And The Status Of The Family, Justin Schwartz

Justin Schwartz

Is the family subject to principles of justice? In A Theory of Justice, John Rawls includes the (monogamous) family along with the market and the government as among the "basic institutions of society" to which principles of justice apply. Justice, he famously insists, is primary in politics as truth is in science: the only excuse for tolerating injustice is that no lesser injustice is possible. The point of the present paper is that Rawls doesn't actually mean this. When it comes to the family, and in particular its impact on fair equal opportunity (the first part of the the Difference …

Secular Fundamentalism, Paul F. Campos

Publications

No abstract provided.

In Defense Of Fundamental Rights, W. J. Fenrick

Dalhousie Law Journal

The central question dealt with by William E. Conklin inIn Defense of Fundamental Rights is "Why are fundamental rights considered fundamental?" (p. 2). In Part I he looks at traditional juridical answers to this question (all of which he finds unacceptable). In Part II he turns to the answers of philophers, in particular John Stuart Mill and John Rawls, and then goes on to formulate his own view as to what is, in his words, "the ultimate norm in a democratic society" (p.6). Lastly he makes use of this norm to determine which rights are fundamental and when they may …

The Emergence Of Critical Social Theory In American Jurisprudence: An Introduction To Professor Rosenberg's Perspective, Harlan S. Abrahams

Seattle University Law Review

Norman Rosenberg's treatment of Thomas Cooley, liberal jurisprudence, and the law of libel exemplifies both a difficulty with and an opportunity for traditional law review scholarship. The difficulty arises from the failure of many legal writers to identify and explain the jurisprudential perspectives that define their substantive approach. This problem is particularly acute when, as in Professor Rosenberg's article, the jurisprudential perspective deviates from the mainstream. The opportunity lies in bringing the problem of perspective out of the closet and legitimating its critical treatment as an integral element of all legal scholarship.

Thomas M. Cooley, Liberal Jurisprudence, And The Law Of Libel, 1868-1884, Norman L. Rosenberg

Seattle University Law Review

During the past two decades, and especially since 1970, there has been a steadily growing interest in American legal history, including the work of nineteenth-century legal figures, including Thomas M.Cooley. Most scholars once dismissed Cooley as a simplistic apologist for laissez faire economics and late nineteenth-century capitalism. Recently, however, legal and constitutional historians have realized that his legal thought was much more complex. In part, this article seeks to extend recent work on Cooley and to examine his ideas and judicial opinions on freedom of expression and the law of libel. Cooley's views about free expression, defamation law, and American …