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Full-Text Articles in Law

State-Interest Analysis And The Channelling Function In Family Law, Carl E. Schneider Sep 1992

State-Interest Analysis And The Channelling Function In Family Law, Carl E. Schneider

Articles

I want to develop some themes I advanced in my article entitled State-Interest Analysis in Fourteenth Amendment "Privacy" Law: An Essay on the Constitutionalization of Social issues. In that article I noted that while courts and commentators have lavished effort on the fundamental-rights side of privacy law, they have scanted the state-interest side, thereby producing crucial weaknesses in that law. I felt that state~interest discussions in privacy cases often seemed to me unsatisfying. This is an attempt to see why. A major difficulty is that states tend to advance and courts tend to accept quite narrow specifications of a statute's …


Moral Reality Revisited, Michael S. Moore Aug 1992

Moral Reality Revisited, Michael S. Moore

Michigan Law Review

Both the moral realist and the relational theses need clarification and motivation as much as they need defense. Because I have recently focused on the relational thesis, in this article I shall focus on the moral realist thesis. I shall ask three questions about the thesis. First, what does the thesis assert? This is a matter of clarifying what one means when one either asserts or denies that moral values are objective. Second, why should we care whether the moral realist thesis is true or false? I shall examine this question both in terms of the impact the truth or …


Justifiably Punishing The Justified, Heidi M. Hurd Aug 1992

Justifiably Punishing The Justified, Heidi M. Hurd

Michigan Law Review

Contemporary moral philosophy, political theory, and jurisprudence have converged to create a quite baffling dilemma. This dilemma is generated by the apparent incompatibility of three principles, each of which grounds features of our system of law and government, and each of which carries substantial normative weight. The first I shall call the punishment principle - a moral principle, doctrinally entrenched in American criminal and civil law, which holds that individuals who are morally justified in their actions ought not to be blamed or punished for those actions. The second is the principle of the rule of law - a complex …


The Left Critique Of Normativity: A Comment, Mark V. Tushnet Aug 1992

The Left Critique Of Normativity: A Comment, Mark V. Tushnet

Michigan Law Review

"In today's legal academy, the critique of normativity is associated with the left." The preceding sentence, which I have constructed to summarize the starting point of this essay, is both largely true and arguably incoherent. The incoherence occurs because describing a position as "the left" connotes values like egalitarianism, which are obviously normative. This essay examines the ways in which some writers associated with the left in the legal academy have tried to resolve the incoherence. The first Part shows that these writers can be identified with the left even in their critiques of normativity and also shows that they …


Emblems Of Federalism, Carol Weisbrod Jun 1992

Emblems Of Federalism, Carol Weisbrod

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

This Article reviews non-state federalism-more accurately "not only state federalism"- sometimes called pluralism or essential federalism, and contrasts it with conventional political federalism referred to here as "monumental federalism" and presented through a description of a painting by Erastus Field.


What Is A Postmodern Constitutionalism?, J. M. Balkin Jun 1992

What Is A Postmodern Constitutionalism?, J. M. Balkin

Michigan Law Review

I begin with a puzzle. It must certainly strike one as odd that the subject of postmodern constitutional law arises at a time when the actual arbiters of the Constitution - the federal judiciary and in particular the Supreme Court of the United States - appear to be more conservative than they have been for many years, and indeed, are likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. Postmodernism is often associated with what is new, innovative, and on the cutting edge of cultural development. Yet if we were to define the elements of a postmodern constitutional culture, it would …


Some Lesson About The Law From Self-Referential Problems In Mathematics, John M. Rogers, Robert E. Molzon Mar 1992

Some Lesson About The Law From Self-Referential Problems In Mathematics, John M. Rogers, Robert E. Molzon

Michigan Law Review

We first describe briefly mathematician Kurt Gödel's brilliant Incompleteness Theorem of 1931, and explore some of its general implications. We then attempt to draw a parallel between axiomatic systems of number theory (or of logic in general) and systems of law, and defend the analogy against anticipated objections. Finally, we reach two types of conclusions. First, failure to distinguish between language and metalanguage in mathematical self-referential problems leads to fallacies that are highly analogous to certain legal fallacies. Second, and perhaps more significantly, Gödel's theorem strongly suggests that it is impossible to create a legal system that is "complete" in …


Law, Politics, And The Claims Of Community, Stephen A. Gardbaum Feb 1992

Law, Politics, And The Claims Of Community, Stephen A. Gardbaum

Michigan Law Review

This article aims to provide this needed analysis and then to show how it illuminates many of the exchanges taking place within the legal academy. It argues that the first step toward understanding "the claims of community" - whether in law or moral and political theory - is to recognize that, as the phrase itself suggests, more than one claim is involved. Merely to observe that the various proponents of community have as yet failed to establish a common and coherent communitarian position, though certainly true, is to miss the more critical insight: they are not engaged in such an …


Toward A Partial Economic, Game-Theoretic Analysis Of Hearsay, Richard D. Friedman Jan 1992

Toward A Partial Economic, Game-Theoretic Analysis Of Hearsay, Richard D. Friedman

Articles

In this Article, I offer a fundamentally different and nondoctrinaire way of approaching hearsay questions. In brief, I take the view that the resolution of a hearsay dispute, when the declarant is not on the stand, is essentially a matter of deciding who should bear the burden of producing the declarant, or more precisely, how courts should allocate that burden. Adopting a simple procedural improvement, concerning the examination of the declarant if she is produced as a witness, allows the court to allocate the burden optimally. If live testimony by the declarant would be more probative than prejudicial, then most …


Infinite Strands, Infinitesimally Thin: Storytelling, Bayesianism, Hearsay And Other Evidence, Richard D. Friedman Jan 1992

Infinite Strands, Infinitesimally Thin: Storytelling, Bayesianism, Hearsay And Other Evidence, Richard D. Friedman

Articles

David Schum has long been one of our keenest commentators on questions of inference and proof. He has been particularly interested in, and illuminating on, the subject of "cascaded," or multi-step, inference.' This is a subject of importance to lawyers, because most evidence at trial can be analyzed in terms of cascaded inference. Usually, the proposition that the fact finder2 might immediately infer from the evidence is not itself an element of a crime, claim, or defense. Most often, an extra inference would be required to jump from that proposition to a proposition that the law deems material. Thus, inference …