Law Commons^™

Mind, Brain And The Law, Atahualpa Fernandez

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No abstract provided.

Reproductive Cloning Case:How Law And Bioethics Measure A Compelling Governmental Interest, Paulo Farias

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Law and Bioethics should be partners in developing public policies to deal with cloning. Law as a Government tool must enforce decisions made in Bioethics Commissions such as the NBAC and the President’s Council, because the Commissions’ discussions offer an array of principles to help legislators and policy makers understand how to find compelling governmental interests. For instance, human dignity is not a vague and obscure legal or bioethical concept. In truth, it is a way of connecting Law and Bioethics to answer questions such as the relationship between the legal protection of procreation and the Report of the President’s …

On The Potential Of Neuroscience: A Comment On Greene And Cohen’S "For The Law, Neuroscience Changes Nothing And Everything", Theodore Y. Blumoff

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In a recent article, Joshua Greene and Jonathan Cohen add their voices to an emerging discussion about the place of neuroscience in law and social policy. They argue convincingly that new data from the developing field of neuroscience will dramatically and positively change our legal system. I agree with their conclusions, but I believe that their commitment to a kind of neuroscientific determinism or essentialism is wrong, unnecessary, and even dangerous; it would move law in a direction that eliminates ongoing, normative decision-making. In the essay I have attached, I first set the stage by discussing the commitment of our …

A New Weapon Against Piracy: Patent Protection As An Alternative Strategy For Enforcement Of Digital Rights, Dennis S. Fernandez, Matthew Chivvis, Mengfei Huang

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This article illustrates how patents and copyrights complement each other to provide a better defense for creative works. Copyrights protect expression, and patents protect underlying functions. Currently, the one-time strengths of copyrights are being eroded as courts allow new technologies to flourish which enable digital reproduction and piracy. This has encouraged companies and industries to move increasingly to patent protection and any company that fails to pursue this trend may be left behind. In sum, patents are a worthwhile strategy because they assist copyright owners in controlling the technology that enables infringement while copyrights alone would leave a company vulnerable …

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

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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, …

Moral Intelligence: Mind, Brain An The Law , Atahualpa Fernandez

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This paper discusses several issues at the impact of cognitive neuroscience have to do with the current theoretical and methodological edifice of juridical science. Localizing the brain correlates related to moral judgments, using neuroimage techniques (and also studies on brain lesions), seems to be, without doubt, one of the big events in the history of the normative social sciences.The best neuroscientific model of normative judgment available today establishes that the ethical-cerebral law operator counts on, in his neural evaluative-affective systems, a permanent presence of requirements, obligations and strategies, with a “should be” that incorporates internally rational and emotional reasons, that …

Juridical Discourse And Evolutionary Dynamics , Atahualpa Fernandez

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Abstract: This article propose an explanation about Law that crosses the scales of space, time and complexity to, by uniting the apparently irreconcilable facts of the social and the natural, integrate the perception of a normative network, of a social adaptive strategy, that certainly was created and exists in function of its contributions to survival and reproductive success during the long period of our evolutionary history, that is, to resolve recurrent evolutionary problems in an essentially social species such as ours that otherwise would not have managed to prosper biologically.

Law And Neuroscience, Atahualpa Fernandez

ExpressO

Localizing the brain correlates related to moral judgments, using neuroimage techniques (and also studies on brain lesions), seems to be, without doubt, one of the big events in the history of the normative social sciences.The best neuroscientific model of normative judgment available today establishes that the ethical-cerebral law operator counts on, in his neural evaluative-affective systems, a permanent presence of requirements, obligations and strategies, with a “should be” that incorporates internally rational and emotional reasons, that are constitutively integrated in all the activities at the practical, theoretical and normal levels of every process of exercising the law.

Law And Human Nature: The Social-Adaptive Function Of The Normative Behavior, Atahualpa Fernandez

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The objective of this article is to offer a critical (re)interpretation of genesis and evolution, object and purpose, as well as useful qualified methods for interpreting, justifying and applying modern practical law, all with the intention of putting philosophic thought and contemporary formal theory of reason at the service of hermeutics and juridical argumentation. Law is no more—no less—than an social-adaptive strategy, evermore complex, but always noticeably deficient, used to articulate argumentatively—in fact, not always with justice—through the virtue of prudence, elementary relational social ties through which men construct approved styles of interaction and social structure, i.e., to organize and …

Book Review: Madam Secretary, Dru Stevenson

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Review of Madeline Albright's Memoirs

Has The Law Made Liars Of Us All?, Don Castleman

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The premise of this article is that in the law and in the practice of law there are numerous occasions when there appears to be little regard for the truth; that as television has devoted more and more time to programming about law and courts, the public has been exposed to and infected by this attitude toward truth; that society may have abandoned morality in favor of legality and that this may have contributed to the epidemic of corporate and accounting frauds of the past decade.

The article examines cases which demonstrate the lack of regard for the truth in …

The Right To Trial By Jury In Environmental Cost-Recovery And Contribution Actions: United States V. England, Jonathan L. Mayes

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No abstract provided.

Developing Internationally Uniform Liability Principles For Harms From Genetically Modified Organisms , Ryan C. Hansen

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This paper analyzes the current legal principles regarding liabillity for harms from genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in the U.S. and E.U., as well as the various international policies and mechanisms affecting GMOs