Law Commons^™

Cunning Stunts: From Hegemony To Desire A Review Of Madonna's Sex, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

What is sex? Is it an accidental or contingent property that every person can be said to have? I am brunette and female, but the Pope is bald and male. Or, is sex more constitutive, that is, an essential part of who we are? In this respect, the claim is often made that women experience the world ditfierently than men. Or, is sex something we do?

If we consider sex as an adjective, can we or should we be able to manipulate it like a new hair style? Or does the notion of sexual malleability trivialize the significance …

The Relevance Of Coherence, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

Coherence is in vogue. Coherence accounts of truth and of knowledge have been in contention for many years. Coherence explanations of morality and of law are a newer breed. I suspect that like so much else in practical philosophy today they owe much of their popularity to John Rawls. His writings on reflective equilibrium, while designed as part of a philosophical strategy which suspends inquiry into the fundamental questions of moral philosophy, had the opposite effect. They inspired much constructive reflection about these questions, largely veering toward coherence as the right interpretation both of reflective equilibrium and of moral philosophy. …

Morality As Interpretation, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

With the growing interest in interpretation as an activity essential in the study of the arts and of society it was inevitable that the question of the relation between morality and interpretation would attract considerable interest. Given that moral views and arguments are expressed in language, are essentially language bound, there is no doubt that the understanding of moral views and argument involves, at least at times, interpretation (of arguments and propositions, etc.). The same can be said of physics. The question is whether morality is interpretative in a way in which physics is not. Some writers have claimed that …

The Meaning Of Morality, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

Many lawyers, both inside and outside the law schools, suffer from insecurity about our discipline. Instead of thinking of ourselves as the curators of a grand tradition in Western thought, many of us think of the law as a collection of doctrinal formulas and rules imposed on us by legislatures and the highest courts. We are always looking elsewhere to find a source of wisdom that will give the law coherence and meaning. At various times in this century we have looked to sociology, anthropology, psychoanalysis and, of course, economics in an effort to ground our ideas in firmer soil. …

The Rule Of Recognition And The Constitution, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

This essay is about ultimate standards of law in the United States. Not surprisingly, our federal Constitution figures prominently in any account of our ultimate standards of law, and a discussion of its place is an apt jurisprudential endeavor for the bicentennial of the constitutional convention. Although in passing I offer some comments on constitutional principles, this essay is not about how the Constitution, or indeed other legal materials, should be understood and interpreted. Rather, it attempts to discern the jurisprudential implications of widespread practices involving the Constitution and other standards of law.

The Universal And The Particular In Legal Discourses, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

My target in this article is a set of views that I shall call the functionalist perspective of comparative law. Of course, the word "functionalist" stands for a number of different theories. In order to be precise about the view that I oppose, I shall set my sights on the arguments developed in Otto Kahn-Freund's inaugural lecture Comparative Law as an Academic Subject, published two decades ago.

Law And Morality: A Kantian Perspective, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

The relationship between law and morality has emerged as the central question in the jurisprudential reflection of our time. Those who call themselves positivists hold with H.L.A. Hart that calling a statute or a judicial decision "law" need not carry any implications about the morality of that statute or decision. Valid laws might be immoral or unjust. Those who resist this reduction of law to valid enactments sometimes argue, with Lon Fuller, that moral acceptability is a necessary condition for holding that a statute is law; or, with Ronald Dworkin, that moral principles supplement valid enactments as components of the …

Why Kant, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

These essays are the outgrowth of a conference on Kantian Legal Theory held at the the Arden Homestead in Harriman, New York, September 26-28, 1986. Some of them are versions of papers originally presented at the conference (Weinrib, Murphy, Finnis, Fletcher); others are a response to the three days of provocative discussion (Richards, Grey, Benson). The underlying premise of the conference was that although philosophers and academic lawyers have devoted considerable attention to Kant's moral theory, very few have written much about Kant's legal theory. I should add: written in English. The recent German literature overflows with books and articles …

Paradoxes In Legal Thought, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

Traditional legal thought has generated few anomalies, antinomies, and paradoxes. These factual and logical tensions arise only when theorists press for a complete and comprehensive body of thought. Discrete, unconnected solutions to problems and particularized precedents spare us the logical tensions that have troubled scientific inquiry.

Anomalies arise from data that do not fit the prevailing scientific theory. Paradoxes and antinomies, on the other hand, reflect problems of logical rather than factual consistency. To follow Quine's definitions, paradoxes are contradictions that result from overlooking an accepted canon of consistent thought. They are resolved by pointing to the fallacy that generates …

How Empty Is The Idea Of Equality, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

The nature of equality and the relationship between equality and justice have long been puzzling to social and legal philosophers. One manifestation of these problems of understanding is uncertainty among lawyers and judges about the significance of legal norms formulated in the language of equality, most notably the equal protection clause of the Constitution. In an elaborately reasoned, imaginative, and richly referenced recent article, Peter Westen has urged the arresting conclusion that the idea of equality is empty, empty in the sense that any normative conclusion derived from the idea could be reached more directly by reliance on normative judgments …

Promises In Morality And Law, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

J.L. Austin thought that philosophers have much to learn from lawyers and the law. No doubt philosophers and lawyers have a lot to learn from each other wherever their interests intersect. But until now philosophical analysis has done more to elucidate important legal concepts and distinctions than viceversa. P.S. Atiyah's Promises, Morals, and Law may redress this imbalance. In this book, one of today's most accomplished students of the common law examines the nature of promises and the grounds of their binding force. Written in Atiyah's characteristically vigorous and lucid style, the book is a philosophical treatise, but one that …

Conflicts Of Law And Morality – Institutions Of Amelioration, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

In his rich, intricate, and wise examination of themes from the Crito, A. D. Woozley explores Socrates' proposal, put in the mouth of the personified laws of Athens, that the duty of a citizen is to obey a law or to persuade society that the law is wrong. If this position is understood to permit disobedience and attempted persuasion after a law is adopted, one of its implications is that on some occasions when people intentionally break the law, those who administer the law may properly decline to impose the stipulated punishment, because they believe that disobedience was justified. Suggesting …

Authority And Consent, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

My starting point is the assumption that there is no general obligation to obey the law, not even a prima facie obligation and not even in a just society. This assumption is perhaps becoming more popular. In recent years it has been defended by several writers. There is more that needs to be said in its support, but I will not attempt to do so here. Instead, I will reflect on a problem posed by accepting it, a problem concerning the relations between an individual citizen and the state. It is common to think that the state has authority over …

The Individualization Of Excusing Conditions, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

The excusing conditions of the criminal law are variations of the theme "I couldn't help myself' or "I didn't mean to do it." In this respect the defenses known as necessity, duress, insanity and mistake of law are but extensions of homely, routine apologies for causing harm and violating the rules of social and family life. While we use the plea "I couldn't help myself" to cover the full range of excusing circumstances, each of the formal excuses of the criminal law has a limited sphere. As a general matter, these spheres are dictated by the type of circumstances rendering …

Fairness And Utility In Tort Theory, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Fletcher challenges the traditional account of the development of tort doctrine as a shift from an unmoral standard of strict liability for directly causing harm to a moral standard based on fault. He then sets out two paradigms of liability to serve as constructs for understanding competing ideological viewpoints about the proper role of tort sanctions. He asserts that the paradigm of reciprocity, which looks only to the degree of risk imposed by the parties to a lawsuit on each other, and to the existence of possible excusing conditions, provides greater protection of individual interests than the paradigm of …

Legal Principles And The Limits Of Law, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

Most people tend unreflectively to assume that laws belong to legal systems. "Most educated people," writes H. L. A. Hart, "have the idea that the laws in England form some sort of system, and that in France or the United States or Soviet Russia and, indeed, in almost every part of the world which is thought of as a separate 'country' there are legal systems which are broadly similar in structure in spite of important differences." This includes for most people the assumption that laws differ from non-legal rules and principles. There are, for example, moral rules and principles, social …

The Identity Of Legal Systems, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

Laws are part of legal systems; a particular law is a law only if it is part of American law or French law or some other legal system. Legal philosophers have persistently attempted to explain why we think of laws as forming legal systems, to evaluate the merits of this way of thinking about the law and to make it more precise by explicating the features that account for the unity of legal systems. Various theories have been suggested but none has been accepted as completely satisfactory, and the continuing debate owes much to the intricacy of the problems involved. …

On Lawful Governments, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

What is the meaning of sentences of the form 'X is the lawful government of the country Y,' and what kinds of statements are normally -made by using them? Most answers to these questions can be classified as legalistic, moralistic, or compromise solutions. The gist of the legalistic approach is that the lawful government is that authorized by the positive law of the land. Critics of the legalistic approach point out that disagreement about the lawful government is not always solved when agreement is reached about the positive law of the land. For example, two people may disagree as to …

A Contextual Approach To Disobedience, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

Edmund Burke once noted that the rebelliousness of colonial America was largely a consequence of the size and prominence of the legal profession, under whose influence the people "snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze." Today, however, most members of the legal profession take a much dimmer view of civil disobedience, although some do acknowledge its justification in special circumstances. Few who write on the subject recognize that in making judgments about the morality of disobedient acts the lawyer's perspective is limited.

Disputes over whether an illegal action is morally justified in a particular instance can be conceptually …