Law Commons^™

The Values Of The Administrative State: A Reply To Seidenfeld, Blake Emerson

Michigan Law Review Online

I appreciate the opportunity to continue the conversation on democracy in the administrative state that I hoped The Public’s Law would inspire. In his review, Mark Seidenfeld critiques some of the book’s legal reform proposals. He argues that I am too optimistic about the general public’s ability to participate in the administrative process, about administrators’ competence to reason about social values, and about courts’ capacity to police such reasoning.

The aspects of my argument Seidenfeld criticizes come at the conclusion of the book’s broader study of the intellectual and institutional history of the administrative state. This history is meant to …

Toward A Multiple Consciousness Of Language: A Tribute To Professor Mari Matsuda, Shannon Gilreath

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

I am thrilled to be part of this commemoration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Professor Matsuda's influential article Public Response to Racist Speech: Considering the Victim's Story. I first read Matsuda's essay as a law student when, I must confess, the mind-numbing one-dimensionality of the law-as one must learn it in the prevailing method-drove me a little crazy. Law school is an environment where the Socratic method reduces people's stories-the stuff of which law is made-to something lawyers like to call "the facts," and where real-life people, in whom I saw so much of myself-people like Michael Hardwick, for example-get …

Theorizing American Freedom, Anthony O'Rourke

Michigan Law Review

Some intellectual concepts once central to America's constitutional discourse are, for better and worse, no longer part of our political language. These concepts may be so alien to us that they would remain invisible without carefully reexamining the past to challenge the received narratives of America's constitutional development. Should constitutional theorists undertake this kind of historical reexamination? If so, to what extent should they be willing to stray from the disciplinary norms that govern intellectual history? And what normative aims can they reasonably expect to achieve by exploring ideas in our past that are no longer reflected in the Constitution's …

Review Of What Are Freedoms For?, By John H. Garvey, Scott D. Pomfret

Michigan Law Review

In 1988, Jeffrey Kendall and Barbara Zeitler Kendall were married. Though Jeffrey was Catholic at the time and Barbara was Jewish, the couple agreed to raise their children in Barbara's faith. In 1991, Jeffrey joined Boston Church of Christ, a fundamentalist Christian church. The tenets of that faith include a belief that those who do not accept Jesus Christ are damned to Hell, where there will be "weeping and gnashing of teeth." Barbara's faith also underwent a change during the marriage: she became an Orthodox Jew. Citing irreconcilable differences, the Kendalls sought a divorce in November, 1994. Before their marriage …

The Ennobling Of Democracy: The Challenge Of The Postmodern Age, Fernando R. Tesón

Michigan Journal of International Law

Review of the book by Thomas L. Pangle.

Minority Cultures And The Cosmopolitan Alternative, Jeremy Waldron

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

I have chosen not to talk in this Article about the warning that Rushdie is sounding in his essay In Good Faith, but to discuss more affirmatively the image of the modern self that he conveys. Still, I hope that we do not lose sight of the warning. The communitarianism that can sound cozy and attractive in a book by Robert Bellah or Michael Sandel can be blinding, dangerous, and disruptive in the real world, where communities do not come ready-packaged and where communal allegiances are as much ancient hatreds of one's neighbors as immemorial traditions of culture.