Law Commons^™

How Practices Make Principles, And How Principles Make Rules, Mitchell N. Berman

All Faculty Scholarship

The most fundamental question in general jurisprudence concerns what makes it the case that the law has the content that it does. This article offers a novel answer. According to the theory it christens “principled positivism,” legal practices ground legal principles, and legal principles determine legal rules. This two-level account of the determination of legal content differs from Hart’s celebrated theory in two essential respects: in relaxing Hart’s requirement that fundamental legal notions depend for their existence on judicial consensus; and in assigning weighted contributory legal norms—“principles”—an essential role in the determination of legal rights, duties, powers, and permissions. Drawing …

Contre-/Counter-, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

Examines the “counter-” move in Balibar’s thought, analysing it not in the Kantian or Hegelian sense of a synthesis that resolves an antinomic opposition (not the least of which, because the particle “contre-” functions differently than the particle “anti-”), but rather as an original counterpoint that itself becomes so powerful as to liberate itself from the oppositional relationship and transform itself into a free-standing concept, intervention, or even mode of governmentality. It is not an opposition that leads to a synthesis, but instead to a stage of “perfection” that (1) merely indexes its former counter-partner, and (2) becomes a fully …

Our Principled Constitution, Mitchell N. Berman

All Faculty Scholarship

Suppose that one of us contends, and the other denies, that transgender persons have constitutional rights to be treated in accord with their gender identity. It appears that we are disagreeing about “what the law is.” And, most probably, we disagree about what the law is on this matter because we disagree about what generally makes it the case that our constitutional law is this rather than that.

Constitutional theory should provide guidance. It should endeavor to explain what gives our constitutional rules the contents that they have, or what makes true constitutional propositions true. Call any such account a …

Interpreting, Stephanie Jo Kent

Doctoral Dissertations

What do community interpreting for the Deaf in western societies, conference interpreting for the European Parliament, and language brokering in international management have in common? Academic research and professional training have historically emphasized the linguistic and cognitive challenges of interpreting, neglecting or ignoring the social aspects that structure communication. All forms of interpreting are inherently social; they involve relationships among at least three people and two languages. The contexts explored here, American Sign Language/English interpreting and spoken language interpreting within the European Parliament, show that simultaneous interpreting involves attitudes, norms and values about intercultural communication that overemphasize information and discount …

A Prequel To Law And Revolution: A Long Lost Manuscript Of Harold J. Berman Comes To Light, John Witte Jr., Christopher J. Manzer

Faculty Articles

The late Harold Berman was a pioneering scholar of Soviet law, legal history, jurisprudence, and law and religion; he is best known today for his monumental Law and Revolution series on the Western legal tradition. Berman wrote a short book, Law and Language, in the early 1960s, but it was not published until 2013. In this early text, he adumbrated many of the main themes of his later work, including Law and Revolution. He also anticipated a good deal of the interdisciplinary and comparative methodology that we take for granted today, even though it was rare in the …

Law And Artifice In Blackstone's Commentaries, Jessie Allen

Articles

William Blackstone is often identified as a natural law thinker for whom property rights were preeminent, but reading the Commentaries complicates that description. I propose that Blackstone’s concept of law is more concerned with human invention and artifice than with human nature. At the start of his treatise, Blackstone identifies security, liberty and property as “absolute” rights that form the foundation of English law. But while security and liberty are “inherent by nature in every individual” and “strictly natural,” Blackstone is only willing to say that “private property is probably founded in nature.” Moreover, Blackstone is clear that there is …

Reconciling Positivism And Realism: Kelsen And Habermas On Democracy And Human Rights, David Ingram

David Ingram

It is well known that Hans Kelsen and Jürgen Habermas invoke realist arguments drawn from social science in defending an international, democratic human rights regime against Carl Schmitt’s attack on the rule of law. However, despite embracing the realist spirit of Kelsen’s legal positivism, Habermas criticizes Kelsen for neglecting to connect the rule of law with a concept of procedural justice (Part I). I argue, to the contrary (Part II), that Kelsen does connect these terms, albeit in a manner that may be best described as functional, rather than conceptual. Indeed, whereas Habermas tends to emphasize a conceptual connection between …

Reconciling Positivism And Realism: Kelsen And Habermas On Democracy And Human Rights, David Ingram

Philosophy: Faculty Publications and Other Works

It is well known that Hans Kelsen and Jürgen Habermas invoke realist arguments drawn from social science in defending an international, democratic human rights regime against Carl Schmitt’s attack on the rule of law. However, despite embracing the realist spirit of Kelsen’s legal positivism, Habermas criticizes Kelsen for neglecting to connect the rule of law with a concept of procedural justice (Part I). I argue, to the contrary (Part II), that Kelsen does connect these terms, albeit in a manner that may be best described as functional, rather than conceptual. Indeed, whereas Habermas tends to emphasize a conceptual connection between …

The Limits Of Legal Realism, Anthony D'Amato

Faculty Working Papers

This article will address some criticisms of legal realism, primarily those of H.L.A. Hart, that have been unanswered in the literature and have appeared to discredit the realist approach to law. The article will also articulate what I believe to be more difficult problems with legal realism.

Constitutional Theory And The Rule Of Recognition: Toward A Fourth Theory Of Law, Mitchell N. Berman

All Faculty Scholarship

This essay, a contribution to a forthcoming edited volume on Hart's rule of recognition and the U.S. Constitution, advances one argument and pitches one proposal. The argument is that Hart's theory of law does not succeed. On Hart's account, legal propositions are what they are - that is, they have the particular content and status that they do - by virtue of their satisfying necessary and sufficient conditions that are themselves established by a special sort of convergent practice among officials. American constitutional theorists are often troubled by this account because it seems to imply that in the "hard cases" …

The Fake Revolution: Understanding Legal Realism, Eric A. Engle

Eric A. Engle

Abstract: Legal interpretation in the United States changed dramatically between 1930 and 1950. The Great Depression and World War II unleashed radical critique (particularly prior to the war). Legal realism proposed radical new methods of legal interpretation to try to meet the challenges of global depression and global war. The new legal methods proposed by realism at first seemed to indicate a new legal order. In fact, they only preserved the old order, protecting it from fundamental change. Thus, the same problem, cyclical economic downturn triggering war for resources and market share recurred in Vietnam. Just as the depression and …

How And Understanding Of The Second Personal Standpoint Can Change Our Understanding Of The Law: Hart's Unpublished Response To Exclusive Legal Positivism, Robin B. Kar

ExpressO

This Article describes recent developments in moral philosophy on the “second personal standpoint,” and argues that they will have important ramifications for legal thought. Moral, legal and political thinkers have, for some time now, understood important distinctions between the first personal perspective (of deliberation) and the third personal perspective (of observation, cause and effect), and have plumbed these distinctions to great effect in their thought. This distinction is, in fact, implicit the law and economics movement’s “rational actor” model of decision, which currently dominates much legal academic thought. Recent developments in value theory due to philosopher Stephen Darwall suggest, however, …

Why Theories Of Law Have Little Or Nothing To Do With Judicial Restraint, Philip E. Soper

Articles

The question I explore here, stated in its broadest form, is this: What is the connection between theory and practice between academic claims about how judges should decide cases and the actual behavior of judges as revealed in the opinions they write? More particularly, do theories about the nature of law have any implications for the question whether a judge should adopt an "activist" or a "restrained" approach to deciding cases? As you might infer from my title, I defend here what I call "the skeptical thesis" in answer to both the general and particular questions. Judges pay little or …

Making Sense Of Modern Jurisprudence: The Paradox Of Positivism And The Challenge For Natural Law, Philip E. Soper

Articles

Karl Llewellyn once said, referring to Roscoe Pound's work m jurisprudence, that it was difficult to tell on what level the writing proceeded: sometimes it seemed to be little more than bedtime stones for a tired bar; at other tunes it appeared to be on the level of the after-dinner speech or a thought provoking essay, neither of which were quite the "considered and buttressed scholarly discussion" that one expected to find. Llewellyn's complaint serves as a warning, though a somewhat ambiguous one, to those who give lectures on jurisprudence.

On the one hand, I do not plan to present …

The Moral Dilemma Of Positivism, Anthony D'Amato

Faculty Working Papers

I think there has been an advance in positivist thinking, and that advance consists of the recognition by MacCormick, a positivist, that positivism needs to be justified morally (and not just as an apparent scientific and objective fact about legal systems). But the justification that is required cannot consist in labelling "sovereignty of conscience" as a moral principle, nor in compounding the confusion by claiming that positivism minimally and hence necessarily promotes sovereignty of conscience. We need, from the positivists, a more logical and coherent argument than that. Until one comes along, I continue to believe that positivists inherently have …

What 'Counts' As Law?, Anthony D'Amato

Faculty Working Papers

A reader of jurisprudence might conclude that only philosophers raise the question whether international law may be said to exist or is really law. But in terms of frequency, the question is probably raised more often by governments and states that are not trying to be philosophical. The increasing attention being paid to the need for, and the procedures for, objective validation of rules of international law in a burgeoning literature of international law evidences the seriousness of the problem, the responsibility of scholars for careful scholarship in this area of legal theory, and ultimately the good possibility of generally …