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Articles 1 - 30 of 49
Full-Text Articles in Law
How Practices Make Principles, And How Principles Make Rules, Mitchell N. Berman
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 …
The 'Authority' Of Law: Joseph Raz Reconsidered, Andrew Stumpff Morrison
The 'Authority' Of Law: Joseph Raz Reconsidered, Andrew Stumpff Morrison
Law & Economics Working Papers
The article presents a critical reassessment of the legal philosophical writings of Joseph Raz. The critique develops from the author’s previous argument that law is – contra recent near-consensus – best understood as “the command of the sovereign, backed by force.” Given that this is the distinctly defining feature of law, Raz’s extended preoccupation with “reasons for obeying law” is misplaced and even nonsensical.
Contre-/Counter-, Bernard E. Harcourt
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
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 …
Models Of Law, Christian Turner
Models Of Law, Christian Turner
Scholarly Works
The more we examine what is behind our most difficult legal questions, the more puzzling it can seem that we continue both to disagree strongly and, yet, to cooperate. If law is a reasoned enterprise, how is it that we are neither torn apart nor homogenized by our long social practice of it? I resolve this puzzle, and arrive at a richer understanding of law, using the idea of modeling familiar from the natural sciences and mathematics. I show (a) that theorists can model legal systems as abstract systems of institutions, information flows, and institutional processing or reasoning and (b) …
The Work Of International Law, Monica Hakimi
The Work Of International Law, Monica Hakimi
Articles
This Article crystallizes and then critiques a prominent view about the role of international law in the global order. The view - what I call the "cooperation thesis" - is that international law serves to help global actors cooperate, specifically by: (1) curbing their disputes, and (2) promoting their shared goals. The cooperation thesis often appears as a positive account of international law; it purports to explain or describe what international law does. But it also has normative force; international law is widely depicted as dysfunctional when it does not satisfy the thesis. In particular, heated or intractable conflict is …
Enduring Originalism, Jeffrey Pojanowski, Kevin C. Walsh
Enduring Originalism, Jeffrey Pojanowski, Kevin C. Walsh
Journal Articles
If our law requires originalism in constitutional interpretation, then that would be a good reason to be an originalist. This insight animates what many have begun to call the “positive turn” in originalism. Defenses of originalism in this vein are “positive” in that they are based on the status of the Constitution, and constitutional law, as positive law. This approach shifts focus away from abstract conceptual or normative arguments about interpretation and focuses instead on how we actually understand and apply the Constitution as law. On these grounds, originalism rests on a factual claim about the content of our law: …
Dividing Crime, Multiplying Punishments, John F. Stinneford
Dividing Crime, Multiplying Punishments, John F. Stinneford
UF Law Faculty Publications
When the government wants to impose exceptionally harsh punishment on a criminal defendant, one of the ways it accomplishes this goal is to divide the defendant’s single course of conduct into multiple offenses that give rise to multiple punishments. The Supreme Court has rendered the Double Jeopardy Clause, the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause, and the rule of lenity incapable of handling this problem by emptying them of substantive content and transforming them into mere instruments for effectuation of legislative will.
This Article demonstrates that all three doctrines originally reflected a substantive legal preference for life and liberty, and a …
Redrawing The Dividing Lines Between Natural Law And Positivism(S), Jeffrey Pojanowski
Redrawing The Dividing Lines Between Natural Law And Positivism(S), Jeffrey Pojanowski
Journal Articles
Anglo-American jurisprudence, before it insulated itself in conceptual analysis and defined itself in opposition to broader questions, was properly a “sociable science,” to use Professor Postema’s phrase from his symposium article. And, in part due to the exemplars of history, so it may become again. By drawing on Bentham and Hobbes, Professor Dan Priel’s Toward Classical Positivism points forward toward more fruitful methods of jurisprudence while illuminating the recent history and current state of inquiry. His article demonstrates the virtues and promise of a more catholic approach to jurisprudence. It also raises challenging questions about the direction to take this …
The End Of Jurisprudence, Scott Hershovitz
The End Of Jurisprudence, Scott Hershovitz
Articles
For more than forty years, jurisprudence has been dominated by the HartDworkin debate. The debate starts from the premise that our legal practices generate rights and obligations that are distinctively legal, and the question at issue is how the content of these rights and obligations is determined. Positivists say that their content is determined ultimately or exclusively by social facts. Anti-positivists say that moral facts must play a part in determining their content. In this Essay, I argue that the debate rests on a mistake. Our legal practices do not generate rights and obligations that are distinctively legal. At best, …
The Means Principle, Larry Alexander
The Means Principle, Larry Alexander
Faculty Scholarship
Michael Moore believes there are deontological constraints on actors’ pursuit of good consequences. He believes these constraints are best conceived of as agent-relative prohibitions such as “you must not intentionally kill, batter, rape, steal, etc.” I, joined in recent years by Kimberly Ferzan, believe that the best interpretation of deontological constraints — the interpretation that best accounts for our intuitions about certain stock cases — is that they are constraints on the causal means by which good consequences may be achieved. We believe those constraints can be unified under a single deontological principle, what we call the “means principle.” It …
A Prequel To Law And Revolution: A Long Lost Manuscript Of Harold J. Berman Comes To Light, John Witte Jr., Christopher J. Manzer
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 …
The Model Of Plans And The Prospects For Positivism, Scott Hershovitz
The Model Of Plans And The Prospects For Positivism, Scott Hershovitz
Reviews
In Legality, Scott Shapiro builds his case for legal positivism on a simple premise: laws are plans. Recognition of that fact leads to legal positivism, Shapiro says, because the content of a plan is fixed by social facts. In this essay, I argue that Shapiro’s case for legal positivism fails. Moreover, I argue that we can learn important lessons about the prospects for positivism by attending to the ways in the argument fails. As I show, the flaws in Shapiro’s argument reveal structural problems with a family of prominent positivist views, including the one defended by Joseph Raz.
Law And Artifice In Blackstone's Commentaries, Jessie Allen
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 …
What Is The Philosophy Of Law?, John Finnis
What Is The Philosophy Of Law?, John Finnis
Journal Articles
The philosophy of law is not separate from but dependent upon ethics and political philosophy, which it extends by that attention to the past (of sources, constitutions, contracts, acquired rights, etc.) which is characteristic of juridical thought for reasons articulated by the philosophy of law. Positivism is legitimate only as a thesis of, or topic within, natural law theory, which adequately incorporates it but remains transparently engaged with the ethical and political issues and challenges both perennial and peculiar to this age. The paper concludes by proposing a task for legal philosophy, in light of the fact that legal systems …
Reconciling Positivism And Realism: Kelsen And Habermas On Democracy And Human Rights, David Ingram
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 …
Legal Positivism And Russell's Paradox, David G. Carlson
Legal Positivism And Russell's Paradox, David G. Carlson
Faculty Articles
In this Article, I argue that legal positivism is subject to the same paradox as was engendered by Frege's set theory-a paradox that has come to be known as Russell's Paradox. Basically, Frege tried to define what a set is. Russell showed that, because of self-reference, any attempt to define the word "set" led to formal condition. I argue that Russell's analysis can be applied to legal positivism, if "legal positivism" is defined to mean that a complete and closed rule of recognition for law is a logical possibility. I also argue that, to the extent legal positivism claims that …
Natural Law, Slavery, And The Right To Privacy Tort, Anita L. Allen
Natural Law, Slavery, And The Right To Privacy Tort, Anita L. Allen
All Faculty Scholarship
In 1905 the Supreme Court of Georgia became the first state high court to recognize a freestanding “right to privacy” tort in the common law. The landmark case was Pavesich v. New England Life Insurance Co. Must it be a cause for deep jurisprudential concern that the common law right to privacy in wide currency today originated in Pavesich’s explicit judicial interpretation of the requirements of natural law? Must it be an additional worry that the court which originated the common law privacy right asserted that a free white man whose photograph is published without his consent in …
Four Conceptualizations Of The Relations Of Law To Economics (Tribulations Of A Positivist Social Science), Pierre Schlag
Four Conceptualizations Of The Relations Of Law To Economics (Tribulations Of A Positivist Social Science), Pierre Schlag
Publications
This brief essay sketches the ways in which four leading economic thinkers (Knight, Coase, Posner and Sunstein) have dealt with a vexing tension in the relations of economics to law, the state, and the social. The tension arises as microeconomists address (or fail to address) the relations of their theories to “soft factors” such as psychology, politics, social institutions, etc. These soft factors are at once clearly consequential for economic behavior (and thus arguably should be included in the theories). At the same time, these soft factors are not self-evidently subject to determination by any known economic laws (and thus …
Authoritarian Legal Ethics: Bradley Wendel And The Positivist Turn, William H. Simon
Authoritarian Legal Ethics: Bradley Wendel And The Positivist Turn, William H. Simon
Faculty Scholarship
In this Review, I respond to the authoritarian theme in Lawyers and Fidelity to Law. In essence, I argue: neither libertarianism nor authoritarianism is a plausible starting point for a general approach to legal ethics. It is a great virtue of Ronald Dworkin’s jurisprudence that it suggests a conception of law and legal ethics that does not depend on either perspective. Moreover, it suggests a conception of lawyer responsibility that is more plausible than either Emersonianism or moralistic positivism. By gesturing toward positivism and by surrendering to less reflective authoritarian impulses, Wendel’s argument underestimates the extent to which social …
Planning Positivism And Planning Natural Law, Martin J. Stone
Planning Positivism And Planning Natural Law, Martin J. Stone
Faculty Articles
Scott Shapiro offers an elaboration and defense of “legal positivism,” in which the official acceptance of a plan figures as the central explanatory notion. Rich in both ambition and insight, Legality casts an edifying new light on the structure of positive law and its officialdom. As a defense of positivism, however, it exhibits the odd feature that its main claims will prove quite acceptable to the natural lawyer. Perhaps this betokens – what many have begun to suspect anyway – that our usual tests for classifying legal theories (as positivist or not) are, in the present state of discussion, no …
Assessing Law’S Claim To Authority, Bas Van Der Vossen
Assessing Law’S Claim To Authority, Bas Van Der Vossen
Philosophy Faculty Articles and Research
The idea that law claims authority (LCA) has recently been forcefully criticized by a number of authors. These authors present a new and intriguing objection, arguing that law cannot be said to claim authority if such a claim is not justified. That is, these authors argue that the view that law does not have authority viciously conflicts with the view that law claims authority. I will call this the normative critique of LCA. In this article, I assess the normative critique of LCA, focusing predominantly on the arguments presented by its most incisive proponent Philip Soper. I defend a …
Legal Positivism As An Idea About Morality, Martin J. Stone
Legal Positivism As An Idea About Morality, Martin J. Stone
Faculty Articles
I ask what a proper critical target for 'legal positivism' might be. I argue that utilitarian moral theory, and more generally fully directive moral theories, are unacknowledged motivations for legal positivism. Contemporary debate about 'the nature of law' is, historically speaking, much more of a footnote to utilitarianism than has been recognized.
The Illegitimacy Of Preventing Ngo Participation, Steve Charnovitz
The Illegitimacy Of Preventing Ngo Participation, Steve Charnovitz
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
This article discusses whether non-governmental organizations (NGOs) may be excluded from the international governance system. The article describes three ideological viewpoints of NGOs: 1) state positivism, which views states as the ultimate decision-maker and finds that an international organization (IO) cannot grant any role to NGOs that is outside of the IO’s founding treaty, 2) functionalism, which finds the IO to be the decision-maker regarding the role played by an NGO, and 3) the community view, which views the IO as a compilation of decision-makers and places an individual, rather than a state, at the center. Although the majority view …
From Enlightened Positivism To Cosmopolitan Justice: Obstacles And Opportunities, Steven Ratner
From Enlightened Positivism To Cosmopolitan Justice: Obstacles And Opportunities, Steven Ratner
Book Chapters
This paper explores the possibilities for linkages between various forms of positivism accepted by many international lawyers and various forms of cosmopolitanism advocated by scholars of global justice. Building on Bruno Simma's conception of "enlightened positivism," it identifies areas in which cosmopolitan trends have already seeped into the fabric of international law and the key gaps between positivist and cosmopolitan visions of international law and the international community. Emphasizing the contributions that philosophical inquiry can add to international legal scholarship, and vice-versa, it concludes with some thoughts on further integration of cosmopolitan thinking into positivist methodologies.
The Limits Of Legal Realism, Anthony D'Amato
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.
Elmer's Rule: A Jurisprudential Dialogue, Anthony D'Amato
Elmer's Rule: A Jurisprudential Dialogue, Anthony D'Amato
Faculty Working Papers
Cardozo wrote of Riggs v. Palmer that this case that two analytical paths pointed in different directions and the judges selected the path that seemed better to lead to "justice". Dworkin has claimed that the case demonstrates the triumph of certain "principles" over what are called "rules of law". Taylor has argued that there was no "law" at all about murderers inheriting from testators before the actual decision in Riggs, and that consequently the decision itself was the only "law" that affected Elmer. All of these suggest that the decision in Riggs was largely unpredictable and therefore must have come …
Review Of Law At The Vanishing Point By Aaron Fichtelberg, Robert D. Sloane
Review Of Law At The Vanishing Point By Aaron Fichtelberg, Robert D. Sloane
Faculty Scholarship
This is a largely critical review of Professor Aaron Fichtelberg’s philosophical analysis of international law. The centerpiece of the book’s affirmative agenda, a “non-reductionist” definition of international law that purports to elide various forms of international law skepticism, strikes the reviewer as circular, misguided in general, and, in its application to substantive international legal issues, difficult to distinguish from a rote form of legal positivism. Law at the Vanishing Point’s avowed empirical methodology and critical agenda, while largely unobjectionable, offer little that has not been said before, often with equal if not greater force. I commend the author’s effort to …
The Fog Of Certainty, Robert B. Ahdieh
The Fog Of Certainty, Robert B. Ahdieh
Faculty Scholarship
In a recent essay in the Yale Law Journal, constitutional law scholar Michael Stokes Paulsen argues that “[t]he force of international law, as a body of law, upon the United States is . . . largely an illusion.” Rather than law, he suggests, international law is mere “policy and politics.”
For all the certainty with which this argument is advanced, it cannot survive close scrutiny. At its foundation, Professor Paulsen’s essay rests on a pair of fundamental misconceptions of the nature of law. Law is not reduced to mere policy, to begin, simply because it can be undone. Were that …
Constitutional Theory And The Rule Of Recognition: Toward A Fourth Theory Of Law, Mitchell N. Berman
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" …