Law Commons^™

High-Stakes Interpretation, Ryan D. Doerfler

Michigan Law Review

Courts look at text differently in high-stakes cases. Statutory language that would otherwise be “unambiguous” suddenly becomes “less than clear.” This, in turn, frees up courts to sidestep constitutional conflicts, avoid dramatic policy changes, and, more generally, get around undesirable outcomes. The standard account of this behavior is that courts’ failure to recognize “clear” or “unambiguous” meanings in such cases is motivated or disingenuous, and, at best, justified on instrumentalist grounds.

This Article challenges that account. It argues instead that, as a purely epistemic matter, it is more difficult to “know” what a text means—and, hence, more difficult to regard …

Working Sex Words, Anita Bernstein

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

Imagine yourself tasked to speak for a few minutes about legal controls on sex-selling in the United States, or any other country you choose. You need not have thought about the particulars. As someone willing to read a law review article, you have enough to say because sex-selling overlaps with the subject knowledge you already have. Criminal law, contracts, employment law, immigration law, tort law, zoning, commercial law, and intellectual property, among other legal categories, all intersect with this topic. In your brief remarks on how law attempts to mediate the sale and purchase of sex, you have only one …

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 …

"Linguistic Cleansing": Strategies For Redesigning Human Perception And Behavior, David Barnhizer

David Barnhizer

James Madison recognized the need to balance competing interests in his analysis of factious groups. In Federalist No. 10, Madison sets out the idea of faction in the following words. “By a faction I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” Madison goes on to describe two “cures” for faction. One is to “destroy the liberty” that allows it to bloom, …

Conceptions Of Civil Society In International Lawmaking And Implementation: A Theoretical Framework, Laura Pedraza-Farina

Michigan Journal of International Law

The last two decades have seen an unprecedented explosion in the number of civil society organizations seeking to influence national and international policy making and implementation. Global leaders, activists, scholars, and policy experts have increasingly called for the inclusion of civil society in international governance and in the national implementation of international commitments. Most recently, the wave of civil uprisings that swept the Middle East and North Africa has put fostering civil society participation high on the agenda of national governments and international organizations. Indeed, most international organizations have devised mechanisms to engage with civil society and regard civil society …

Pragmatism Regained, Christopher Kutz

Michigan Law Review

Jules Coleman's The Practice of Principle serves as a focal point for current, newly intensified debates in legal theory, and provides some of the deepest, most sustained reflections on methodology that legal theory has seen. Coleman is one of the leading legal philosophers in the Anglo-American world, and his writings on tort theory, contract theory, the normative foundations of law and economics, social choice theory, and analytical jurisprudence have been the point of departure for much of the most interesting activity in the field for the last three decades. Indeed, the origin of this book lies in Oxford University's invitation …

Where Is My Body? Stanley Fish's Long Goodbye To Law, Richard Delgado

Michigan Law Review

Stanley Fish, author of Doing What Comes Naturally, Is There a Text in This Class?, There's No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It's a Good Thing, Too, and other paradigm-shifting books, and who recently left law teaching for a position in university administration, has written one last volume giving his colleagues in the profession he left behind something to think about. In his previous work, Fish, who taught English and law at Duke University, addressed central legal issues such as meaning, communication, and textual interpretation, challenging such received wisdoms as that every text has a single, determinate meaning, or …

The Reading Wars: Understanding The Debate Over How Best To Teach Children To Read, Kenneth Anderson

Book Reviews

Review essay on National Reading Panel, Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-Based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and Its Implications for Reading Instruction; G. Coles, Reading Lessons: The Debate Over Literacy; G. Coles, Misreading Reading: The Bad Science That Hurts Children; M. Stout, The Feel-Good Curriculum: The Dumbing Down of America's Kids in the Name of Self-Esteem; D. McGuinness, Why Our Children Can't Read and What We Can Do About It. What is it about teaching reading that arouses such passions in Americans? Shall we have phonics or whole language or both? Why this debate should be …

The Reading Wars: Understanding The Debate Over How Best To Teach Children To Read, Kenneth Anderson

Kenneth Anderson

The Gift Of Language, Joseph Vining

Articles

Style and substance cross-are genetically related as we now might want to say. Each draws on and is implied by the other. One point at which they cross is our sense of the nature of human language, what language is and can be, what it is not and can never be. The language of law is part of human language. Law is a distinctive form of thought, but it lives in human language. "Rule" might be thought synonymous with "law," but for all its talk of rules, the practice of law does not begin with a descriptive statement, or a …

Theorists' Belief: A Comment On The Moral Tradition Of American Constitutionalism, Jospeh Vining

Articles

The Moral Tradition of American Constitutionalism is one of those rare works that leads us to face, at the center of law and legal thought, the largest questions about human life and human purpose. There is a special reader's shudder, a certain gestural shift in the chair, reserved for that moment of realizing where one is being led-not to the edge, but to the center, so that the questions become insistent, and whatever we and others say and do in the face of them becomes our response to them.

Bioethics In The Language Of The Law, Carl E. Schneider

Articles

What happens when the language of the law becomes a vulgar tongue? What happens, more particularly, when parties to bioethical discourse are obliged to borrow in their daily controversies the ideas, and even the language, peculiar to judicial proceedings? How suited are the habits, taste, and language of the judicial magistrate to the political, and more particularly, the bioethical, questions of our time? We ask these questions because, as the incomparable Tocqueville foresaw, Americans today truly do resolve political-and moral--questions into judicial questions. As Abraham Lincoln hoped, the Constitution "has become the political religion of the nation," and many Americans …

The Substance Of Equality, Jeremy Waldron

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Speaking of Equality: An Analysis of the Rhetorical Force of "Equality" in Moral and Legal Discourse by Peter Westen

The Interpreters, Kenneth L. Karst

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Justice as Translation: An Essay in Cultural and Legal Criticism by James Boyd White

A Matter Of Voice And Plot: Belief And Suspicion In Legal Storytelling, Richard K. Sherwin

Michigan Law Review

In Part I of this article, I describe in greater detail the tensions touched upon above that divide the current legal culture between rhetorical affirmers on the one side and critical deconners on the other. In Part II, I examine more closely the persuasive discourse that White calls "constitutive rhetoric." White's understanding of rhetoric offers a paradigm for the rhetorical affirmer's viewpoint. In Part III, I begin to explore the limitations and dangers inherent in White's and, by extension, in the rhetorical affirmer's approach. In Part IV, I attempt to provide a way of bringing together important critical and rhetorical …

Law And Sex, Christina B. Whitman

Reviews

In Feminism Unmodified, a collection of speeches given between 1981 and 1986, Catharine MacKinnon talks of law from the perspective of feminism. MacKinnon does not approach her topic as a lawyer with a uniquely legal perspective on feminism; she brings, instead, a distinctively feminist approach to law. Nor is the feminism from which she speaks grounded in the standard political theories: MacKinnon disclaims and attacks the Marxist approach to feminism, the socialist approach to feminism, and, most emphatically and repeatedly, the liberal approach to feminism that has been embraced by many lawyers in their effort to use law to eliminate …

An Interested Response To A "Wholly Disinterested Assessment": Lebel On Summers On Lebel On Summers On ….Er…Um…Oh, Yeah…Fuller, Paul A. Lebel

Michigan Law Review

In 1985, I published in the Michigan Law Review a review of a recent book by Professor Robert S. Summers on the legal philosophy of Lon Fuller. Professor Summers has published in the Cornell Law Review an ironically titled criticism of my review and of another review. In a number of respects, Professor Summers' Assessment has served to increase my understanding of his book, and I trust that other readers will be similarly benefited. Although Professor Summers' response to my review of his book takes issue with what I said on a number of points, I strongly suspect that few …

Language, Law, And Logic: Plain Legal Drafting For The Electronic Age, Layman E. Allen

Book Chapters

The achievement of current demands for clearer legal drafting in the United States (New York, 1973 and President's Executive Order, 1978) and Great Britain (Renton Report, 1975) can be aided by applying modern logic to improve the language of the law. In considering how the expression of legal norms can be clarified by using some formal language techniques, particular attention will be given to alternatives for dealing with problems of inadvertent imprecision in current legal drafting, alternatives that facilitate human understanding as well as enhance the possibilities for analysis by computer. A brief sketch of the imprecision of the expression …