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Full-Text Articles in Law
Reading John Noonan, Jospeh Vining
Reading John Noonan, Jospeh Vining
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John Noonan is a giant in American law and legal practice -- a distinguished legal historian and a true judge. His reflections on the nature of law have a special importance. This essay is a comment on basic elements in his thought.
Legal Commitments And Religious Commitments, Jospeh Vining
Legal Commitments And Religious Commitments, Jospeh Vining
Articles
In his elegant and accessible new book, Law's Quandary, Steven Smith groups our various senses of what is real for us into ontological families: the mundane; the scientific, including mathematics; and the religious. These supply "lumberyards," as it were, for thought and discussion about the world and action in it. Law itself is not one of them. Those involved in law, as citizens or professionals practicing law or speaking for or about law, are presented in the book as looking out from law to the ontological resources available in the lumberyards he describes.
Is There An Implicit Theology In The Practice Of Ordinary Law?, Joseph Vining
Is There An Implicit Theology In The Practice Of Ordinary Law?, Joseph Vining
Articles
We should have a text to help us-lawyers and theologians almost always do. Consider this from Wordsworth, and ask whether it goes too far if Wordsworth were thought to be speaking to the practicing lawyer: Here you stand, Adore, and worship, when you know it not; Pious beyond the intention of your thought; Devout above the meaning of your will. -Yes, you have felt, and may not cease to feel. The estate of Man would be indeed forlorn If false conclusions of the reasoning Power Made the Eye blind, and closed the passages Through which the Ear converses with the …
The Cosmological Question: A Response To Milner S. Ball's 'All The Company Of Heaven', Joseph Vining
The Cosmological Question: A Response To Milner S. Ball's 'All The Company Of Heaven', Joseph Vining
Articles
We do not disagree, and I do not doubt, that legal processes are sources of injustice, violent oppression, crushing of the spirit, destruction of lives, actual death. I have only to look at The Trial1 again. Nor do we disagree that there are strings of words, statements, put out by officials, lawyers, and lawyer-academics, often called "rules," that cannot be taken into oneself and that by their very nature evoke manipulation in response, avoidance if they cannot be ignored. In their name violent imposition of pure will occurs all the time, and power is exercised by those who can secure …
Legal Affinities, Joseph Vining
Legal Affinities, Joseph Vining
Articles
Not long ago, any question of the kind "How may theology serve as a resource in understanding law?" would have been hardly conceivable among lawyers. When Lon Fuller brought out his first book in 1940, The Law in Quest of Itself, he could think of no better way of tagging his adversary the legal positivist than to note a "parallel between theoretical theology and analytical jurisprudence." Two decades later, in the name of realism, Thurman Arnold dismissed Henry Hart's non-positivist jurisprudence in harsh terms. A master of the cutting phrase, he confidently entitled his attack "Professor Hart's Theology." Two decades …
Law And Enchantment: The Place Of Belief, Joseph Vining
Law And Enchantment: The Place Of Belief, Joseph Vining
Articles
The question I wish to raise is whether one must believe what one says when one makes a statement of law. The language of belief that we know, and from which moral discourse and the moral never stray far: do judges, lawyers, law participate in it? Any such question is but an aspect of a larger question, indeed issue, of what we may call the objectivity of legal language. It is raised perhaps most acutely by the broad claims now being made for artificial intelligence and in particular for the computer programming of legal advice (as a species of what …