Law Commons^™

Separation Of Law And State, Talia Fisher

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

In the framework of the jurisprudential literature, the law-state bond is assumed as a given. Points of dispute emerge only at more advanced stages of the discussion, with respect to such questions as the duty to obey state law or the appropriate extent of state intervention in social relations. This Article will be devoted to a reconsideration of the presupposition of the law-state link and to challenging the state's status vis-à-vis the law-both in its role as the producer of legal norms and its capacity as the arbiter of disputes.

The Article opens with a comparative elucidation of the Hobbesian …

Equality And Partiality, Daniel A. Cohen

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Equality and Partiality by Thomas Nagel

Law, Politics, And The Claims Of Community, Stephen A. Gardbaum

Michigan Law Review

This article aims to provide this needed analysis and then to show how it illuminates many of the exchanges taking place within the legal academy. It argues that the first step toward understanding "the claims of community" - whether in law or moral and political theory - is to recognize that, as the phrase itself suggests, more than one claim is involved. Merely to observe that the various proponents of community have as yet failed to establish a common and coherent communitarian position, though certainly true, is to miss the more critical insight: they are not engaged in such an …

Capitalism And Democracy, Owen M. Fiss

Michigan Journal of International Law

Socialism has collapsed. The long, historic struggle between capitalism and socialism has come to an end, and capitalism has emerged the victor. This turn of events was foreshadowed by the privatization movement of the late 1970s and 1980s that swept England, the United States, and a number of Latin American countries. History still awaited the renunciation of socialism by those who lived it, but that soon came in the form of the revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe and in the spiraling chain of events, set in motion by "perestroika," that ultimately led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union …

Socialism And Federation, John N. Hazard

Michigan Law Review

Federal structures are often established by national founders to manage intractable problems created over generations, if not centuries, by the migration of peoples. Military and economic pressures may stimulate union to assure survival, but ethnic, racial or religious tensions sometimes hamper draftsmen who sense the need for unity. Federation has often been the modem solution to the conflict between the need for unity and the desire for autonomy felt by groups fearing the loss of identity.

Socialist Federation--A Legal Means To The Solution Of The Nationality Problem: A Comparative Study, Viktor Knapp

Michigan Law Review

The history of federations is both long and short. It is long in that the federation originated with the Swiss Confederation, which dates back to the 1291 defense confederacy of the cantons of Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden; it is short because the second federation in world history, one that has become a model for many others, did not come into being until almost five centuries later in America.

Legal Theory And The Obligation Of A Judge: The Hart/Dworkin Dispute, E. Philip Soper

Michigan Law Review

This article offers a review of the Hart-Dworkin dispute and a qualified defense of the positivist's model against Dworkin's attack. The defense is cast primarily in the form of the second possible response to a descriptive theory: Dworkin's attack fails, I suggest, because it involves descriptive claims that can be accommodated to the positivist's conceptual theory regardless of one's view about the plausibility of those claims.

H. L. A. Hart On Legal And Moral Obligation, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

One of the central problems in both moral and legal philosophy has been to offer a satisfactory analysis of the concept of obligation. In ordinary language the word "obligation" is used in several different contexts. It may refer to moral obligation (e.g., "I am morally obligated to keep my promise to help my uncle with his knitting"), legal obligation (e.g., "I am legally obligated to report as income on my tax return whatever funds I embezzle from my employer"), political obligation (e.g., "I am politically obligated to vote"), or social obligation (e.g., …