Law Commons^™

Law And Neighborhood Names, Nestor M. Davidson, David Fagundes

Vanderbilt Law Review

This Article provides a novel investigation of how law both enables and constrains the ability of city residents to claim, name, and often rename their neighborhoods. A rich interdisciplinary dialogue in fields such as geography and sociology has emerged on the significance of place names, but this literature has largely ignored the legal dimensions of the phenomenon and its implications for urban governance, belonging, and community conflict. This Article's empirical exploration of the role of law in change and conflict regarding neighborhood identity thus advances the discourse both for legal scholars focused on urban dynamics and across disciplines.

From gentrification …

Deepwater Drilling: Law, Policy, And Economics Of Firm Organization And Safety, Mark A. Cohen

Vanderbilt Law Review

Nathan Richardson 64 Vand. L. Rev. 1853 (2011) Although the causes of the Deepwater Horizon spill are not yet conclusively identified, significant attention has focused on the safety-related policies and practices-often referred to as the safety culture-of BP and other firms involved in drilling the well. This Article defines and characterizes the economic and policy forces that affect safety culture and identifies reasons why those forces may or may not be adequate or effective from the public's perspective. Two potential justifications for policy intervention are that: (1) not all of the social costs of a spill may be internalized by …

Law As Craft, Brett G. Scharffs

Vanderbilt Law Review

This Article explores the similarities between the law and other craft traditions, such as carpentry, pottery, and quilting. Its thesis is that law--and in particular adjudiction---combine elements of what Aristotle described as practical wisdom, or phronesis, and craft, or techne. Craft knowledge is learned practically through experience and demonstrated through practice, and is contrasted with other concepts, including art, science, mass production, craftiness, and hobby. Crafts are characterized by four simutaneous identities. First, crafts are made by hand-one at a time-and require not only talent and skill, but also experience and what Karl Llewellyn called "situation sense." Second, crafts are …

Theories Of Poetry, Theories Of Law, Lawrence Joseph

Vanderbilt Law Review

I write poetry." Also, since 1976, when I was admitted to practice before a state bar, I have served as a law clerk for a justice of a state supreme court, practiced, and mostly taught law. About the time that I began law school, while I was writing poems that would appear in my first book, an extraordinary change in jurisprudence began to occur, one which focused on legal language as something more than a medium for conveying singular meaning. This legal theory has become as important as any since legal realism. Because I also have written essays and re- …

Law, Literature, And Social Change: Foreword, Sharon A. Mattingly

Vanderbilt Law Review

FOREWORD: Interpreting the meaning of words, whether those words compose a precedent-setting case or a newly enacted statute, is an integral part of the law. Furthermore, the impact of legal texts clearly extends beyond the legal discipline and permeates all layers of society. But from where do we derive the meaning of words and texts? Is the text itself the source of meaning, or is the text an embodiment of a meaning, the source of which is society? What determines textual interpretations-the historical roots of the text itself, the historical gloss of prior interpretations, the private experiences that each new …

Words And The Door To The Land Of Change: Law, Language, And Family Violence, Martha Minow

Vanderbilt Law Review

Can words stem violence? More specifically, can anything anyone says halt the physical devastation inflicted daily behind the closed doors of family dwellings? Some people strike, beat, or burn their children. Some people assault their lovers, some their spouses; usually, men batter women.' Can words, uttered by anyone else, stop this violence?

Words of journalists expose family violence to public view. Words of legislatures and judges forbid and punish family abuse. Words of historians, novelists, television scriptwriters, social workers, feminist theorists, and songwriters depict and decry domestic violence against a backdrop of societal silence about it. But are there words …

Afterword: Voices And Violence--A Dialogue, Ellen W. Clayton, Jay Clayton

Vanderbilt Law Review

WE: When organizing this Symposium on the topic of "Law, Literature,and Social Change," we asked whether current trends in literature and in literary, social, and legal theory actually could play a role in bringing about social change. The authors gathered at this Symposium responded to this question in very different ways. As we read their articles and comments, however, and as we talked about their various approaches, some common themes began to emerge. Narrative seemed important. The way people split public life off from private experience came up frequently. But violence seemed to be on everyone's mind.

IT: Why violence? …

Book Reviews, Henry N. Wieman, Jerome Hall

Vanderbilt Law Review

The problem discussed by Professor Stumpf in his book Morality and the Law can be summarized by these questions: Do we have two kinds of prescribed conduct, one prescribed by morality independent of the government, the other prescribed by government independent of morality? Or is prescription by government necessarily moral because government is necessarily moral by reason of being the government? If not, under what conditions, if any, does prescription by government become a moral prescription? Under what conditions, if any, is government, by law, a matter of expedience, not to be confused with morality?

reviewer: Henry Nelson Wieman

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Book Reviews, Robert H. Birkby, Elliot E. Cheatham

Vanderbilt Law Review

Law and Politics in the Supreme Court By Martin Shapiro New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1964. Pp. 333. $6.95.

reviewer: Robert H. Birkby

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Lives of the Lord Chancellors, 1885-1940 By R. F. V. Heuston Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964, Pp. xxiii, 632.

reviewer: Elliot E. Cheatham

Law And Literature--A Comment, Harvey Couch, Iii

Vanderbilt Law Review

The author here examines the ways in which law and literature complement each other; legal settings providing dramatic backdrops to fine literature and literature serving to familiarize lawyers with writing style as well as the moral sentiments of the people expressed in literature. Yet law and literature need not remain distinct entities, but blend together in certain works of such authors as Hand, Camus, and Prettyman, providing, perhaps, the lawyers most enjoyable reading.

The Dedication, Harvie Branscomb Chancellor Emeritus

Vanderbilt Law Review

This is a day of rejoicing for all of those who love this University, for those who know the quality of this School, and for those who are aware of the role which a great school of law can play in the progress of this southern region. We are grateful to all of you for coming to help us celebrate this accomplishment, especially grateful to those of you who bring greetings from other schools of law, and for those of you who have had a part in this program and will have a part in it this morning. This day …

Legal Education And The Demands For Stability And Change Through Law, John W. Wade

Vanderbilt Law Review

Our theme for this dedication program is "Stability and Change Through Law." The general plan has been to give consideration, first, to the demands made upon law and legal institutions to meet the basic social needs for security and order and to reach out toward the fuller realization of national ideals, while adapting to the stresses brought on by science, technology, and changing political, economic,and social patterns; and second, to the responses of law and legal institutions to these demands. The treatments of the law's response considered not only what has been done in the past and what is being …

Law And Liberal Education, Jacob Weissman

Vanderbilt Law Review

Law, says the author, can be a useful tool in the building of a liberal education. Uniquely combining the study of past experience with the solving of present day problems, law study could very well supplement or replace traditional undergraduate courses in humanities and history of Western civilization. Nothing that thus far such changes have been made primarily at a few schools of business, the author discusses the advantages of similar use of law for liberal education in any undergraduate curriculum and, eventually, in the law schools.

Book Reviews, Robert J. Harris, Wallace Mcclure

Vanderbilt Law Review

Freedom and the Law By Bruno Leoni Princeton, New Jersey D. Van Nostrand Co., 1961. Pp. vii, 204. $6.00.

reviewer: Robert J. Harris

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The Rule of Law Edited by Arthur L. Harding Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1961. Pp. xi, 89. $3.00.

reviewer: Wallace McClure

Book Reviews, Donald P. Kommers, I. C. Rand

Vanderbilt Law Review

Law and Social Process in United States History:

The excellence of Law and Social Process in United States History in every respect matches the high honor accorded Professor Hurst when invited to deliver the ninth series of the Thomas M. Cooley Lectures under the sponsorship of the University of Michigan Law School. This volume, following upon the heels of his Growth of American Law and Law and the Conditions of Freedom, the latter having won the James Barr Ames prize granted quadrennially by the Harvard Law School, merely affirms his stature as an eminent legal historian. Like the earlier volumes, …

Law And History, C. J. Friedrich

Vanderbilt Law Review

Law is frozen history. In an elementary sense, everything we study when we study law is the report of an event in history, and all history consists of such records or reports. It therefore cannot be my task to develop a sermon on the importance of historical records for the understanding of the law; the tie is too intimate and too obvious to need laboring." The work of Professor Maine on 'Ancient Law,'" wrote Professor T. W. Dwight in his Introduction to that book in the sixties of the last century, "is almost the only one in the English language …

Four Eighteenth Century Theories Of Justice, Clarence Morris

Vanderbilt Law Review

This paper is about an important facet of the justice theories of four eighteenth century European philosophers. The earliest of the four, Hume, thought justice and law were purely human inventions. The next, Montesquieu, said that justice preceded laws because possible relations of justice existed before human ordinances were enacted, and that man, who lives peacefully in the state of nature, invents unjust exploitation after he enters a state of society. Then followed Rousseau who pronounced that contemporary governments had enchained freedom and subverted justice, and whenever a just government did come to power its excellence was doomed to fade. …

A Bibliography On Christian Faith And The Law, Law Review Staff

Vanderbilt Law Review

Church and State SCM Press, London, 1939

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Christian Ethics and Social Policy Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, N.Y., 1946

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The Destiny of Man Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, N.Y., 1937

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The Divine Imperative Lutterworth Press, London, 1937

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The Theology of Religious Vocation Herder, St. Louis, Mo., 1951.

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Moberly, Responsibility (Riddle Memorial Lectures at the University of Durham, 1951). Oxford University Press, New York, N.Y., 1951

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The Nature and Destiny of Man Charles Scribner's Sons, New York,N.Y., 1943

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Christian Philosophy in the Common Law Blackfriars, Oxford,1947.