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Full-Text Articles in Law
International Law And Political Philosophy: Uncovering New Linkages, Steven R. Ratner
International Law And Political Philosophy: Uncovering New Linkages, Steven R. Ratner
Articles
The legal regime regulating cross-border investment gives key rights to foreign investors and places significant duties on states hosting that investment. It also raises distinctive moral questions due to its potential to constrain a state’s ability to manage its economy and protect its people. Yet international investment law remains virtually untouched as a subject of philosophical inquiry. The questions of international political morality surrounding investment rules can be mapped through the lens of two critiques of the law – that it systemically takes advantage of the global South and that it constrains the policy choices of states hosting investment. Each …
Beyond Rights And Welfare: Democracy, Dialogue, And The Animal Welfare Act, Jessica Eisen
Beyond Rights And Welfare: Democracy, Dialogue, And The Animal Welfare Act, Jessica Eisen
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform
The primary frameworks through which scholars have conceptualized legal protections for animals—animal “rights” and animal “welfare”—do not account for socio-legal transformation or democratic dialogue as central dynamics of animal law. The animal “rights” approach focuses on the need for limits or boundaries preventing animal use, while the animal “welfare” approach advocates balancing harm to animals against human benefits from animal use. Both approaches rely on abstract accounts of the characteristics animals are thought to share with humans and the legal protections they are owed as a result of those traits. Neither offers sustained attention to the dynamics of legal change …
Dignity As Perception: Recognition Of The Human Individual And The Individual Animal In Legal Thought, Joseph Vining
Dignity As Perception: Recognition Of The Human Individual And The Individual Animal In Legal Thought, Joseph Vining
Book Chapters
'To their murderers these wretched people were not individuals at all. They came in wholesale lots and were treated worse than animals.' This was Telford Taylor, beginning the presentation of the 'Medical Case' at the Nuremberg Trials after the Second World War. The 'Medical Case' was not about genocide or war or the conduct of war. It was about experimentation on human beings; and it was this trial that produced the 'Nuremberg Code', the first control of such treatment of human beings by one another. The word 'individual' came naturally to Taylor the lawyer as a starting point, and with …
Ethics And International Law: Integrating The Global Justice Project(S), Steven R. Ratner
Ethics And International Law: Integrating The Global Justice Project(S), Steven R. Ratner
Articles
Academic discourse on global justice is at an all-time high. Within ethics and international law, scholars are undertaking new inquiries into age-old questions of building a just world order. Ethics – political and moral philosophy – poses fundamental questions about responsibilities at the global level and produces a tightly reasoned set of frameworks regarding world order. International law, with its focus on legal norms and institutional arrangements, provides a path, as well as illuminates the obstacles, to implementing theories of the right or of the good. Yet despite the complementarity of these two projects, neither is drawing what it should …
Science, Humanity, And Atrocity: A Lawyerly Examination, Steven D. Smith
Science, Humanity, And Atrocity: A Lawyerly Examination, Steven D. Smith
Michigan Law Review
Joseph Vining's reflection on (as the subtitle indicates) the claims of science and humanity begins with a terse but disturbing recitation of these and similar scientific experiments conducted on human beings during the twentieth century in Manchuria, Nazi Germany, and Pol Pot's Cambodia. The incidents are conveyed through quotations, sometimes of the coldly clinical prose that the researchers themselves chose as most suitable for their purposes. These quotations are juxtaposed against others from an array of distinguished scientists and philosophers explaining the naturalistic cosmology that, in the view of these thinkers, modern science has given us: it is a stark, …
Herbert Hart Elucidated, A. W. Brian Simpson
Herbert Hart Elucidated, A. W. Brian Simpson
Michigan Law Review
There are a number of good biographies of judges, but very few of individual legal academics; indeed, so far as American legal academics are concerned, the only one of note that comes to mind is William Twining's life of Karl Llewellyn. Llewellyn was, of course, a major figure in the evolution of American law, and his unusual life was a further advantage for his biographer. In this biography, Nicola Lace has taken as her subject an English academic who also had an unusual career, one whose contribution was principally not to the evolution of the English legal system but to …
The Limits Of Courage And Principle, Jedediah Purdy
The Limits Of Courage And Principle, Jedediah Purdy
Michigan Law Review
Michael Ignatieff, the director of the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, is not a lawyer. His work, however, treats issues of core concern to lawyers: nation-building, human rights, the ethics of warfare, and now, in his latest book, the proper relationship between liberty and security. The Lesser Evil is, in part, a book a legal scholar might have written: a normative framework for lawmaking in the face of the terror threat. It is also something more unusual: an exercise in an older type of jurisprudence. Ignatieff discusses law in the light of moral psychology …
How To Be A Moorean, Donald H. Regan
How To Be A Moorean, Donald H. Regan
Articles
G. E. Moore’s position in the moral philosophy canon is paradoxical. On the one hand, he is widely regarded as the most influential moral philosopher of the twentieth century. On the other hand, his most characteristic doctrines are now more often ridiculed than defended or even discussed seriously. I shall discuss briefly a number of Moorean topics—the nonnaturalness of “good,” the open question argument, the relation of the right and the good, whether fundamental value is intrinsic, and the role of beauty—hoping to explain how a philosophically informed person could actually be a Moorean even today.1
The Value Of Rational Nature, Donald H. Regan
The Value Of Rational Nature, Donald H. Regan
Articles
Kant tells us in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals that rational nature is an end in itself; that it is the only thing which is unconditionally valuable; and that it is the ultimate condition of all value.1 A striking trend in recent Kant scholarship is to regard these value claims, rather than the formalism of universalizability, as the ultimate foundation of Kant’s theory.2 But does rational nature as Kant conceives it deserve such veneration? Can it really carry the world of value on its shoulders? I think not. As will become clear, I do not doubt the value …
Whose Loyalties?, Christina B. Whitman
Whose Loyalties?, Christina B. Whitman
Reviews
It is disconcerting to open a book subtitled An Essay on the Morality of Relationships and find that the two case studies that most interest the author are reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools and the criminalization of flag burning. Although George Fletcher begins to make his case for giving moral priority to loyalties by referring to the impulse to save one's mother from a burning house (p. 12), he is more concerned with the ties that bind individuals to groups than with the ethics of relationships between individuals. The loyalties to which Fletcher would give "moral importance" …
Beyond The Constitution, Christopher J. Peters
Beyond The Constitution, Christopher J. Peters
Michigan Law Review
A Review of Beyond the Constitution by Hadley Arkes
Authority And Value: Reflections On Raz's Morality Of Freedom, Donald H. Regan
Authority And Value: Reflections On Raz's Morality Of Freedom, Donald H. Regan
Articles
Joseph Raz's The Morality of Freedom1 is full of subtle, original, and thought provoking arguments. It also manifests abundantly Raz's philosophical good sense and sensitivity to the complexities of the moral life. These are reasons enough to class it with the handful of genuinely important books whose appearance in the last two decades has constituted a renaissance in political philosophy. But in my opinion, Raz has another, and even stronger claim on our attention: He comes closer to the truth about political morality than anyone has for nearly a century. (Possibly much longer, but we need not attempt to decide …
Law's Halo, Donald H. Regan
Law's Halo, Donald H. Regan
Articles
Like many people these days, I believe there is no general moral obligation to obey the law. I shall explain why there is no such moral obligation - and I shall clarify what I mean when I say there is no moral obligation to obey the law - as we proceed. But also like many people, I am unhappy with a position that would say there was no moral obligation to obey the law and then say no more about the law's moral significance. In our thinking about law in a reasonably just society, we have a strong inclination to …
On Preferences And Promises: A Response To Harsanyi, Donald H. Regan
On Preferences And Promises: A Response To Harsanyi, Donald H. Regan
Articles
John C. Harsanyi sketches an entire normative and metaethical theory in under twenty pages. Combining breadth and brevity, his essay is useful and interesting. It reveals the interrelations between Harsanyi's positions on various issues as no longer work or series of articles could do. But by virtue of its programmatic nature, the essay creates a dilemma for a commentator, at least for one who finds many things to disagree with. If I responded to Harsanyi in the same sweeping terms in which he argues, we would end up with little more than opposing assertions. At the other extreme, I could …
Injustice, Inequality And Ethics, Michigan Law Review
Injustice, Inequality And Ethics, Michigan Law Review
Michigan Law Review
A Review of Injustice, Inequality, and Ethics by Robin Barrow
The Limits Of Obligation, Michigan Law Review
The Limits Of Obligation, Michigan Law Review
Michigan Law Review
A Review of The Limits of Obligation by James S. Fishkin
The Ethics Of Argument: Plato's Gorgias And The Modern Lawyer, James Boyd White
The Ethics Of Argument: Plato's Gorgias And The Modern Lawyer, James Boyd White
Articles
In what follows I shall analyze Plato's text and do my best to suggest a response to it. But I should say at the outset that for the modern lawyer and law teacher this is not merely an academic exercise, for we in fact are rhetoricians very much as Plato defines them. What is at stake for us in reading this dialogue is what it means to have devoted ourselves to the set of social and intellectual practices that define the profession of law. We have a special relation to this text, for we can in the full Platonic sense …
A Theory Of The Good And The Right, Michigan Law Review
A Theory Of The Good And The Right, Michigan Law Review
Michigan Law Review
A Review of A Theory of the Good and the Right by Richard B. Brandt
Persons And Consequences: Observations On Fried's Right And Wrong, Stephen R. Munzer
Persons And Consequences: Observations On Fried's Right And Wrong, Stephen R. Munzer
Michigan Law Review
A Review of Right and Wrong by charles Fried