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University of Michigan Law School

Jurisprudence

Morality

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Full-Text Articles in Law

Cute Prickly Critter With Presbyopia, Don Herzog Jan 2012

Cute Prickly Critter With Presbyopia, Don Herzog

Reviews

Ronald Dworkin's' latest, long-awaited, and most ambitious book is a puzzle. Truth in advertising first: despite the title, this isn't centrally a book about justice. It's a book about the realm of value-all of that realm. Dworkin is most interested here in morality, but really touches on all of it, as a matter of the application of the abstract argument and sometimes in black and white right on the page, from aesthetics to prudence to morality to politics to law to . . . . It's fun to read, also frustrating. It stretches out lazily in handling some issues but …


Unity And Pluralism In Contract Law, Nathan Oman May 2005

Unity And Pluralism In Contract Law, Nathan Oman

Michigan Law Review

It is a cliché of contemporary legal scholarship that, in the last few decades, the study of law has witnessed a vast proliferation of competing theoretical approaches. The old faith in the careful honing of doctrinal concepts and the essential usefulness of legal analysis has given way to a cacophony of competing theoretical sects. Economists, moral philosophers, sociologists, historians, and others have stepped forward to offer the insights of this or that discipline as a new and superior path to legal enlightenment. Perhaps nowhere has this cliché been truer than in the realm of contracts scholarship, where, for a generation, …


The Unruliness Of Rules, Peter A. Alces May 2003

The Unruliness Of Rules, Peter A. Alces

Michigan Law Review

Analytical jurisprudence depends on a posited relation between rules and morality. Before we may answer persistent and important questions of legal theory - indeed, before we can even know what those questions are - we must understand not just the operation of rules but their operation in relation to morality. Once that relationship is formulated, we may then come to terms with the likes of inductive reasoning in Law, the role of precedent, and the fit, such as it is, between Natural Law and Positivism as well as even the coincidence (or lack thereof) between inclusive and exclusive positivism. That …


How To Be A Moorean, Donald H. Regan Jan 2003

How To Be A Moorean, Donald H. Regan

Articles

G. E. Moore’s position in the moral philosophy canon is paradoxical. On the one hand, he is widely regarded as the most influential moral philosopher of the twentieth century. On the other hand, his most characteristic doctrines are now more often ridiculed than defended or even discussed seriously. I shall discuss briefly a number of Moorean topics—the nonnaturalness of “good,” the open question argument, the relation of the right and the good, whether fundamental value is intrinsic, and the role of beauty—hoping to explain how a philosophically informed person could actually be a Moorean even today.1


Pragmatism Regained, Christopher Kutz Jan 2002

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 …


Jurisprudence: A Descriptive And Normative Analysis Of Law, Christopher P. Portman Apr 1986

Jurisprudence: A Descriptive And Normative Analysis Of Law, Christopher P. Portman

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Jurisprudence: A Descriptive and Normative Analysis of Law by Anthony D'Amato


Law's Halo, Donald H. Regan Jan 1986

Law's Halo, Donald H. Regan

Articles

Like many people these days, I believe there is no general moral obligation to obey the law. I shall explain why there is no such moral obligation - and I shall clarify what I mean when I say there is no moral obligation to obey the law - as we proceed. But also like many people, I am unhappy with a position that would say there was no moral obligation to obey the law and then say no more about the law's moral significance. In our thinking about law in a reasonably just society, we have a strong inclination to …


On Preferences And Promises: A Response To Harsanyi, Donald H. Regan Jan 1985

On Preferences And Promises: A Response To Harsanyi, Donald H. Regan

Articles

John C. Harsanyi sketches an entire normative and metaethical theory in under twenty pages. Combining breadth and brevity, his essay is useful and interesting. It reveals the interrelations between Harsanyi's positions on various issues as no longer work or series of articles could do. But by virtue of its programmatic nature, the essay creates a dilemma for a commentator, at least for one who finds many things to disagree with. If I responded to Harsanyi in the same sweeping terms in which he argues, we would end up with little more than opposing assertions. At the other extreme, I could …


Petrazycki: Law And Morality, William R. Jentes S.Ed. Nov 1955

Petrazycki: Law And Morality, William R. Jentes S.Ed.

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Law and Mortality. By Leon Petrazycki


Hall: Living Law Of Democratic Society, Michigan Law Review Apr 1950

Hall: Living Law Of Democratic Society, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A Review of LIVING LAW OF DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY. By Jerome Hall.