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Articles 121 - 139 of 139
Full-Text Articles in Law
Reasons, Authority, And The Meaning Of 'Obey': Further Thoughts On Raz And Obedience To Law, Donald H. Regan
Reasons, Authority, And The Meaning Of 'Obey': Further Thoughts On Raz And Obedience To Law, Donald H. Regan
Articles
I recently published a long article' discussing a variety of topics from Joseph Raz's The Morality of Freedom.2 The article was part of a symposium on Raz's work in the Southern California Law Review. Raz responded' to the articles in that symposium, including my own. From a perspective which surveys the whole range of views on political philosophy, Raz's view and mine look very similar. Even so, we find many things to disagree about, which neither of us would regard as merely matters of detail. For the most part, we at least share a common understanding of our disagreements. But …
Synthesizing Related Rules From Statutes And Cases For Legal Expert Systems, Layman E. Allen, Sallyanne Payton, Charles S. Saxon
Synthesizing Related Rules From Statutes And Cases For Legal Expert Systems, Layman E. Allen, Sallyanne Payton, Charles S. Saxon
Articles
Different legal expert systems may be incompatible with each other: A user in characterizing the same situation by answering the questions presented in a consultation can be led to contradictory inferences. Such systems can be ”synthesized’ to help users avoid such contradictions by alerting them that other relevant systems are available to be consulted as they are responding to questions. An example of potentially incompatible, related legal expert systems is presented here - ones for the New Jersey murder statute and the celebrated Quinlan case, along with one way of synthesizing them to avoid such incompatibility.
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 …
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 …
Alternative Methodologies In Contemporary Jurisprudence: Comments On Dworkin, Philip E. Soper
Alternative Methodologies In Contemporary Jurisprudence: Comments On Dworkin, Philip E. Soper
Articles
I have two brief points to make. Both involve recent developments in jurisprudence, by which I mean by and large the subject that Ronald Dworkin has just been discussing. Indeed, the first point is little more than an acknowledgement of the debt that is owed to Dworkin, not only for his specific contributions to this field, but for the implications of his work for law teaching generally.
Error Behind The Plate And In The Law, Richard O. Lempert
Error Behind The Plate And In The Law, Richard O. Lempert
Articles
Casey Stengel, the great manager of the New York Yankees, and later the New York Mets, once dreamed, or so he said, that he had died and gone to heaven. The Lord greeted him personally as he walked through the Pearly Gates. "Casey," he said, "I'm so glad you're here. I want you to form a baseball team." Casey looked around him. He saw Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Ty Cobb, Tris Speaker, Christy Mathewson, Walter Johnson, Grover Cleveland Alexander, and others-all of baseball's immortals-and he said, "I'll see what I can do." Obviously, one can do a lot with such …
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 …
What A Sensible Natural Lawyer And A Sensible Utilitarian Agree About And Disagree About: Comments On Finnis, Donald H. Regan
What A Sensible Natural Lawyer And A Sensible Utilitarian Agree About And Disagree About: Comments On Finnis, Donald H. Regan
Articles
Before I start, let me say two things. First of all, to the extent that John Finnis is entering a plea for more attention to what is a relatively neglected tradition (in the narrow his message a hundred percent. And you courd learning about the natural law tradition than by reading his book, Natural Law and Natural Rights. My second introductory observation is that Finnis and I agree about many more things than you might expect if you just think of him as a natural law theorist and me as a utilitarian. I am very eccentric as a utilitarian. He …
Law As Rhetoric, Rhetoric As Law: The Arts Of Cultural And Communal Life, James Boyd White
Law As Rhetoric, Rhetoric As Law: The Arts Of Cultural And Communal Life, James Boyd White
Articles
In this paper I shall suggest that law is most usefully seen not, as it usually is by academics and philosophers, as a system of rules, but as a branch of rhetoric; and that the kind of rhetoric of which law is a species is most usefully seen not, as rhetoric usually is, either as a failed science or as the ignoble art of persuasion, but as the central art by which community and culture are established, maintained, and transformed. So regarded, rhetoric is continuous with law, and like it, has justice as its ultimate subject. I do not mean …
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 …
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 …
Against Evaluator Relativity: A Response To Sen, Donald H. Regan
Against Evaluator Relativity: A Response To Sen, Donald H. Regan
Articles
In a recent essay in this journal Amartya Sen introduced the notion of an evaluator-relative consequence-based morality. The basic idea can be described very simply. A consequence-based morality is a morality that instructs each agent to maximize some objective function defined over states of affairs. Such a morality is evaluator neutral if it assigns to every agent the same objective function. If different agents have different objective functions, then the morality is evaluator relative. For example, a morality would be evaluator relative if it assigned to Jones an objective function giving greater weight to the welfare of Jones's children than …
Suicide And The Failure Of Modern Moral Theory, Donald H. Regan
Suicide And The Failure Of Modern Moral Theory, Donald H. Regan
Articles
The question I want to address is when and why suicide is morally wrong. There is something peculiar in my writing on this question at all. It will soon become apparent that although I think suicide involves genuine moral issues. I also think that the moral problem of suicide is a problem which most people answer correctly. That is, I think that in the vast majority of cases where people ought not to commit suicide, they do not. They are not even tempted. Conversely, most people who do commit suicide, or who want to, are either justified or at least …
On The Relevance Of Philosophy To Law: Reflections On Ackerman's Private Property And The Constitution, Philip E. Soper
On The Relevance Of Philosophy To Law: Reflections On Ackerman's Private Property And The Constitution, Philip E. Soper
Articles
To turn to moral philosophy these days for help in trying to decide "what to do" is a bit like turning to recipe books for help in a famine. One soon discovers that most philosophers avoid ultimate questions about actual choices in actual cases, preferring to concentrate instead on a preliminary problem: how to go about thinking about what to do. One also discovers that philosophers who have written about this preliminary problem of the structure of moral inquiry are neatly divided, as logically they must be, into precisely two camps: those who do and those who do not think …
Glosses On Dworkin: Rights, Principles, And Policies, Donald H. Regan
Glosses On Dworkin: Rights, Principles, And Policies, Donald H. Regan
Articles
A great many people have attempted to explain what is wrong with the views of Ronald Dworkin. So many, indeed, that one who read only the critics might wonder why views so widely rejected have received so much attention. One reason is that, whatever may be wrong in Dworkin's theories, there is a good deal that is right in them. But what is right is not always clear. Important passages in Dworkin can be distressingly obscure, or tantalizingly incomplete. This essay is a set of loosely connected observations on themes from Dworkin. While I shall add some criticisms of my …
Jurisprudence And The Study Of Cases, Joseph H. Drake
Jurisprudence And The Study Of Cases, Joseph H. Drake
Articles
Following the suggestion of our Chairman, we have apparently agreed to assume that under the theme of jurisprudence we are to include all of the abstract, nonutilitarian subjects bearing upon the subject of law. Whether we call it a historical science, a science of sciences, or a philosophy, we all believe that it Is a valuable body of rapidly increasing knowledge, and our purpose now is to determine the methodological question as to how it can be made available for our undergraduate students in the law school.
Pre-Legal Education, John B. Waite
Pre-Legal Education, John B. Waite
Articles
It was once thought that a lawyer's vocation was chiefly to serve his clients, so that he might bring fame and fortune to himself. The profession of law was considered only a means of livelihood, merely more difficult than clerking and more remunerative, sometimes, than carpentry. To require study for the law was thought an unfair preclusion of embryo breadwinners from an adventure with that particular occupation. Fortunately, the public mind has changed; the practice of law is no longer only a means of livelihood, but has become an important agency in promoting civilization. Some one has likened law to …
Jurisprudence: A Formal Science, Joseph H. Drake
Jurisprudence: A Formal Science, Joseph H. Drake
Articles
Holland defines jurisprudence as "the formal science of positive law". The meaning of science is plain enough. A good many pages are devoted to the elucidation of the words "positive" and "law," but the term "formal" he explains only by analogy. As there is a formal science of grammar to which belongs, for example, the concept of possession, which has its material manifestation in Latin grammar in a genetive termination and in English grammar in the preposition "of," so there is a formal science of law, material manifestations of whose fundamental principles are found in various systems of actual legal …