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Articles 1 - 25 of 25
Full-Text Articles in Law
Bridges Of Law, Ideology, And Commitment, Steven L. Winter Walter S. Gibbs Distinguished Professor Of Constitutional Law
Bridges Of Law, Ideology, And Commitment, Steven L. Winter Walter S. Gibbs Distinguished Professor Of Constitutional Law
Law Faculty Research Publications
Law has a distinctive temporal structure—an ontology—that defines it as a social institution. Law knits together past, present, purpose, and projected future into a demand for action. Robert Cover captures this dynamic in his metaphor of law as a bridge to an imagined future. Law’s orientation to the future necessarily poses the question of commitment or complicity. For law can shape the future only when people act to make it real. Cover’s bridge metaphor provides a lens through which to explore the complexities of law’s ontology and the pathologies that arise from its neglect or misuse. A bridge carries us …
Latina And Latino Critical Legal Theory: Latcrit Theory, Praxis And Community, Marc Tizoc Gonzaléz, Sarudzayi M. Matambanadzo, Sheila I. Velez Martinez
Latina And Latino Critical Legal Theory: Latcrit Theory, Praxis And Community, Marc Tizoc Gonzaléz, Sarudzayi M. Matambanadzo, Sheila I. Velez Martinez
Articles
LatCrit theory is a relatively recent genre of critical “outsider jurisprudence” – a category of contemporary scholarship including critical legal studies, feminist legal theory, critical race theory, critical race feminism, Asian American legal scholarship and queer theory. This paper overviews LatCrit’s foundational propositions, key contributions, and ongoing efforts to cultivate new generations of ethical advocates who can systemically analyze the sociolegal conditions that engender injustice and intervene strategically to help create enduring sociolegal, and cultural, change. The paper organizes this conversation highlighting Latcrit’s theory, community and praxis.
Foreword: The Dispossessed Majority: Resisting The Second Redemption In América Posfascista (Postfascist America) With Latcrit Scholarship, Community, And Praxis Amidst The Global Pandemic, Sheila I. Velez Martinez
Foreword: The Dispossessed Majority: Resisting The Second Redemption In América Posfascista (Postfascist America) With Latcrit Scholarship, Community, And Praxis Amidst The Global Pandemic, Sheila I. Velez Martinez
Articles
As LatCrit reaches its twenty-fifth anniversary, we aspire for this symposium Foreword to remind its readers of LatCrit’s foundational propositions and ongoing efforts to cultivate new generations of ethical advocates who can systemically analyze the sociolegal conditions that engender injustice and intervene strategically to help create enduring sociolegal, and cultural, change. Working for lasting social change from an antisubordination perspective enables us to see the myriad laws, regulations, policies, and practices that, by intent or effect, enforce the inferior social status of historically- and contemporarily-oppressed groups. In turn, working with a perspective and principle of antisubordination can inspire us to …
The Integrative Effects Of Global Legal Pluralism, Monica Hakimi
The Integrative Effects Of Global Legal Pluralism, Monica Hakimi
Faculty Scholarship
International lawyers widely understand that legal pluralism is a fact of global life and that it can, in certain settings, be desirable. But many still approach it with some trepidation. A prominent skeptical claim is that pluralist structures lack the integrative resources that unify people around a shared governance project. This claim has been prominent with respect to two kinds of conflicts that are routine in international law: (1) conflicts that play out within a single international legal arrangement, and (2) conflicts that cut across multiple legal arrangements. For both, the skeptical claim is directed at the pluralist structure itself. …
Against The Received Wisdom: Why The Criminal Justice System Should Give Kids A Break, Stephen J. Morse
Against The Received Wisdom: Why The Criminal Justice System Should Give Kids A Break, Stephen J. Morse
All Faculty Scholarship
Professor Gideon Yaffe’s recent, intricately argued book, The Age of Culpability: Children and the Nature of Criminal Responsibility, argues against the nearly uniform position in both law and scholarship that the criminal justice system should give juveniles a break not because on average they have different capacities relevant to responsibility than adults, but because juveniles have little say about the criminal law, primarily because they do not have a vote. For Professor Yaffe, age has political rather than behavioral significance. The book has many excellent general analyses about responsibility, but all are in aid of the central thesis about …
Choice Theory: A Restatement, Michael A. Heller, Hanoch Dagan
Choice Theory: A Restatement, Michael A. Heller, Hanoch Dagan
Faculty Scholarship
This chapter restates choice theory, which advances a liberal approach to contract law. First, we refine the concept of autonomy for contract. Then we address range, limit, and floor, three principles that together justify contract law in a liberal society. The first concerns the state’s obligation to be proactive in facilitating the availability of a multiplicity of contract types. The second refers to the respect contract law owes to the autonomy of a party’s future self, that is, to the ability to re-write the story of one’s life. The final principle concerns relational justice, the baseline for any legitimate use …
The Pragmatist Tradition: Lessons For Legal Theorists, Susan Haack
The Pragmatist Tradition: Lessons For Legal Theorists, Susan Haack
Articles
No abstract provided.
Models Of Law, Christian Turner
Models Of Law, Christian Turner
Scholarly Works
The more we examine what is behind our most difficult legal questions, the more puzzling it can seem that we continue both to disagree strongly and, yet, to cooperate. If law is a reasoned enterprise, how is it that we are neither torn apart nor homogenized by our long social practice of it? I resolve this puzzle, and arrive at a richer understanding of law, using the idea of modeling familiar from the natural sciences and mathematics. I show (a) that theorists can model legal systems as abstract systems of institutions, information flows, and institutional processing or reasoning and (b) …
R2h And The Prospects For Peace: An Essay On Sovereign Responsibilities, David Luban
R2h And The Prospects For Peace: An Essay On Sovereign Responsibilities, David Luban
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
This essay examines novel threats to peace – social and political threats as well as military and technological. It worries that familiar conceptions of state sovereignty cannot sustain a legal order capable of meeting those threats, not even if we understand sovereignty as responsibility to protect human rights. The essay tentatively proposes that recent efforts to reformulate state sovereignty as responsibility to humanity – ‘R2H’ for short – offer a better hope. Under this reformulation, states must take into account the interests of those outside their sovereign territory as well as those of the of their own people – in …
The Importance Of 'The Gap', Emily Sherwin
The Importance Of 'The Gap', Emily Sherwin
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
One of the central dilemmas of law is what Larry Alexander has called "the gap:" general, determinate rules have significant benefits from the forward-looking perspective of a lawmaker, but generate outcomes that appear wrong from the perspective of individual actors. In this 25-year retrospective of Alexander's initial article on the gap, I examine a possible way out of the dilemma of the gap, and conclude that it does not work.
Law And Artifice In Blackstone's Commentaries, Jessie Allen
Law And Artifice In Blackstone's Commentaries, Jessie Allen
Articles
William Blackstone is often identified as a natural law thinker for whom property rights were preeminent, but reading the Commentaries complicates that description. I propose that Blackstone’s concept of law is more concerned with human invention and artifice than with human nature. At the start of his treatise, Blackstone identifies security, liberty and property as “absolute” rights that form the foundation of English law. But while security and liberty are “inherent by nature in every individual” and “strictly natural,” Blackstone is only willing to say that “private property is probably founded in nature.” Moreover, Blackstone is clear that there is …
The Persistence Of Proximate Cause: How Legal Doctrine Thrives On Skepticism, Jessie Allen
The Persistence Of Proximate Cause: How Legal Doctrine Thrives On Skepticism, Jessie Allen
Articles
This Article starts with a puzzle: Why is the doctrinal approach to “proximate cause” so resilient despite longstanding criticism? Proximate cause is a particularly extreme example of doctrine that limps along despite near universal consensus that it cannot actually determine legal outcomes. Why doesn’t that widely recognized indeterminacy disable proximate cause as a decision-making device? To address this puzzle, I pick up a cue from the legal realists, a group of skeptical lawyers, law professors, and judges, who, in the 1920s and 1930s, compared legal doctrine to ritual magic. I take that comparison seriously, perhaps more seriously, and definitely in …
What Useful Role (If Any) Could Legal Positivism Play In The Study Or Advancement Of International Law?, Mortimer N.S. Sellers
What Useful Role (If Any) Could Legal Positivism Play In The Study Or Advancement Of International Law?, Mortimer N.S. Sellers
All Faculty Scholarship
What useful role (if any) could legal positivism play in the study or advancement of international law? For most of those who remember this once fashionable term at all, "international legal positivism" is redolent of the early years of the twentieth century-of Lassa Oppenheim' at best, and at worst of his model, John Austin, who famously denied that international law is or ever could be genuine law at all, "properly so called." 2 "Positive" law in its central and most usual sense is law "set by a sovereign individual or a sovereign body ... to a person or persons in …
Transparency And Determinacy In Common Law Adjudication: A Philosophical Defense Of Explanatory Economic Analysis, Jody S. Kraus
Transparency And Determinacy In Common Law Adjudication: A Philosophical Defense Of Explanatory Economic Analysis, Jody S. Kraus
Faculty Scholarship
Explanatory economic analysis of the common law has long been subject to deep philosophical skepticism for two reasons. First, common law decisions appear to be cast in the language of deontic morality, not the consequentialist language of efficiency. For this reason, philosophers have claimed that explanatory economic analysis cannot satisfy the transparency criterion, which holds that a legal theory's explanation must provide a plausible account of the relationship between the reasoning it claims judges actually use to decide cases and the express reasoning judges provide in their opinions. Philosophers have doubted that the economic analysis has a plausible account of …
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.
Nietzsche In Law's Cathedral: Beyond Reason And Postmodernism, John Linarelli
Nietzsche In Law's Cathedral: Beyond Reason And Postmodernism, John Linarelli
Scholarly Works
Nietzsche had very little to say about law and what he did say is fragmentary and sporadic. Nietzsche's philosophy, however, offers a basis for theorizing about law. I use Nietzsche's important works to interpret two major movements in legal thought. The first part of the paper examines how Nietzsche's philosophy augments our understanding of deontological theories about the law. Nietzsche produced a substantial ethical theory. The second part of the paper examines how Nietzsche's philosophy helps us to understand law and economics. Nietzsche had a great deal to say about the intellectual predecessor to law and economics, utilitarianism, and his …
Philosophy Of Contract Law, Jody S. Kraus
Philosophy Of Contract Law, Jody S. Kraus
Faculty Scholarship
This article identifies a set of methodological commitments that help to explain the methodological differences between autonomy (deontic) and economic contract theories that have opposing views about the nature of law and legal theory. It begins with the discussion of the four methodological issues that divide contemporary autonomy and economic theories of contract. The dispute over the relative priority of the normative and explanatory enterprises of contract theory may simply reflect the different theoretical goals of deontic and economic theorists. These intellectual origins may explain not only the different priorities of deontic and economic contract theories, but their different conceptions …
The Liberal Future Of Relational Feminism: Robin West's Caring For Justice, Linda C. Mcclain
The Liberal Future Of Relational Feminism: Robin West's Caring For Justice, Linda C. Mcclain
Faculty Scholarship
Robin West is one of the most prolific1 and creative members of the legal academy. Her distinctive voice, as expressed in several books and numerous scholarly articles, informs and shapes debates within such diverse areas as constitutional theory (West 1990b; West 1994), feminist jurisprudence (West 1987; West 1988), and law and literature (West 1993). Indeed, some of her early articles concerning feminist jurisprudence (West 1987, West 1988) are now "classics" in a relatively new field of inquiry and appear in virtually every anthology or textbook in the field (Bartlett and Kennedy 1991, 201; Becker, Bowman, and Torrey 1994, 90; Fineman …
Upside/Down View Of The Countermajoritarian Difficulty, Steven L. Winter
Upside/Down View Of The Countermajoritarian Difficulty, Steven L. Winter
Law Faculty Research Publications
No abstract provided.
Hegelian Vanity, Common Law Humility: On Legal Theory, Its Expression And Its Criticism, Thomas D. Eisele
Hegelian Vanity, Common Law Humility: On Legal Theory, Its Expression And Its Criticism, Thomas D. Eisele
Faculty Articles and Other Publications
Commentary on Arthur Jacobson, Hegel's Legal Plenum, 10 Cardozo L. Rev. 877 (1989).
The Use Of Evolution Theory In Law, M. B. W. Sinclair
The Use Of Evolution Theory In Law, M. B. W. Sinclair
Articles by Maurer Faculty
No abstract provided.
An Attack On Categorical Approaches To Freedom Of Speech, Pierre J. Schlag
An Attack On Categorical Approaches To Freedom Of Speech, Pierre J. Schlag
Publications
No abstract provided.
Principles, Positivism, And Legal Theory, David B. Lyons
Principles, Positivism, And Legal Theory, David B. Lyons
Faculty Scholarship
A complete theory of law, writes Ronald Dworkin, tells us what law is and what it ought to be. The current "ruling" theory of law combines legal positivism with utilitarianism: it holds, first, that law is a set of explicitly adopted rules and, second, that law ought to maximize the general welfare. Dworkin rejects both branches of that theory. He argues that law contains "principles" as well as rules and that these principles cannot be traced to any explicit adoption or enactment. Dworkin argues further that the ruling theory neglects moral rights, which must be respected, he claims, even if …
Book Review. Law And Morality By Leon Petrazycki, Wencelas J. Wagner
Book Review. Law And Morality By Leon Petrazycki, Wencelas J. Wagner
Articles by Maurer Faculty
No abstract provided.
Some Implications Of Juristic Pragmatism, Fowler Vincent Harper
Some Implications Of Juristic Pragmatism, Fowler Vincent Harper
Articles by Maurer Faculty
No abstract provided.