Law Commons^™

Zoning For The Mentally Ill: A Legislative Mandate, Deborah A. Schmedemann

Faculty Scholarship

Under the aegis of President John Kennedy, Congress first began to concern itself with the needs of the mentally ill over two decades ago. Bills providing for community mental health centers and congregate housing have appeared subsequently to attempt to expedite integration of the mentally ill into community life. These congressional mandates, however, have met with reluctance-if not hostility. While federal law makers have been the champion of deinstitutionalization, they have placed responsibility for implementation of their programs on the state and local levels. There, local governmental authorities have reacted defensively to exclude the mentally ill from their neighborhoods, primarily …

Judicial Overload: The Reasons And The Remedies , Maria Marcus

Faculty Scholarship

Animosity towards lawyers, perennial in our social history long before Watergate, parallels a contradictory and equally persistent belief in judges as problem-solvers for a variety of personal, economic, educational and political ills. An increasing number of litigants are bringing to the courts not only the class of disputes that has been the traditional fare of judicial decision-making, but also an array of issues that were formerly resolved in private meetings, at hospitals, in schools, or at home. The causes of this explosion of lawsuits and the possible buffers to an eventual implosion in our judicial system will be discussed below

The Division Of Legal Labor In Rural Haiti, Pnina Lahav

Faculty Scholarship

This paper explores the institutional facilities available to Haitian peasants for the settlement of their disputes. More specifically, it compares the institution of the Chef de Section - the lowest administrative appointee in the Haitian countryside and the Justice of the Peace - the lowest ranking judicial institution provided by the Haitian legal system. The paper further advances the hypothesis that at the present time there is a shift in the division of labor between the two institutions, in favor of the Justice of the Peace, and that this shift may be attributed to processes of social differentiation currently detectable …

Environmental Law And Construction Project Management, Michael S. Baram

Faculty Scholarship

Construction project management generally proceeds through sequential stages of project conception, planning, site acquisition, design and construction. Traditionally, citizens and public officials have relied on various elements of American common law to prevent, abate or get compensation for injuries resulting from the final construction stage of project management. Common law concepts of nuisance, negligence and trespass have been applied by the courts to situations where essentially private rights have been infringed by debris, runoff, noise, vibrations, structural damage and other byproducts of the construction process. The common law has therefore indirectly served as an environmental control on construction activities in …

Private Use Of Public Facilities: A Comment On Gilmore V. City Of Montgomery, Larry Yackle

Faculty Scholarship

Perhaps the principal shortcoming of constitutional adjudication in the Supreme Court of the United States is the Court's recurrent failure to set forth principles of decision that rise above the result reached in any particular case.' The other branches of the national government, the states, the bar, and ultimately the public at large require guidance concerning the pressing constitutional issues of the day. That guidance can come only from the Supreme Court, for, to be sure, "[i]t is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is."2 To the extent the Court shrinks from …

Militants, Moderates, And Social Change, Michael I. Sovern

Faculty Scholarship

The thesis of this paper is a simple generalization: To the extent that social protest draws attention to its form rather than to the grievance it seeks to redress, it is likely to be unproductive. I add a quick qualification. In offering this generalization, I am assuming that the protester is genuine in seeking to redress one or more grievances and that he is not using the grievance as a subterfuge to pick a fight. If the purpose of the protest is in fact to provoke a repressive response, then, of course, my generalization is inapplicable.

We obviously have a …

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 Social Control Of Science And Technology, Michael S. Baram

Faculty Scholarship

Science and technology increasingly work changes in the complex matrix of society. These changes pervade our ecological systems and our physical and psychic health. Less perceptibly, they pervade our culture, our values, and our value based institutions such as the law. In turn, our values and institutions shape the progress and utilization of science and technology.

As we know, science and technology have provided society with enormous material benefits and a higher standard of living and health. But we now realize that this process has been accompanied by alarming rates of resource consumption and many new hazards to ecological systems …

Lawyer's Role In Resistance, Michael E. Tigar

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.