Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Keyword
-
- Morality (44)
- Book reviews (19)
- Justice (16)
- Constitution (12)
- Equality (11)
-
- Liberalism (11)
- Decision-making (10)
- Political philosophy (10)
- Realism (10)
- Utilitarianism (10)
- History (9)
- Ethics (8)
- Language (8)
- Positivism (8)
- Punishment (8)
- Authority (7)
- Democracy (7)
- Legal theory (7)
- Hart (H.L.A.) (6)
- Legal systems (6)
- Libertarianism (6)
- Liberty (6)
- Philosophy (6)
- Rules (6)
- Autonomy (5)
- Dworkin (Ronald) (5)
- Formalism (5)
- Judicial review (5)
- Legal philosophy (5)
- Legal realism (5)
Articles 1 - 30 of 225
Full-Text Articles in Law
An Order, Most Fixed, Alexandra D. Lahav
An Order, Most Fixed, Alexandra D. Lahav
Michigan Law Review
A Review of Rules: A Short History of What We Live By. By Lorraine Daston.
The Limits Of Deliberation About The Public's Values, Mark Seidenfeld
The Limits Of Deliberation About The Public's Values, Mark Seidenfeld
Michigan Law Review
A Review of The Public's Law: Origins and Architecture of Progressive Democracy by Blake Emerson.
Two Visions Of Contract, Hanoch Dagan
Two Visions Of Contract, Hanoch Dagan
Michigan Law Review
A Review of Justice in Transactions: A Theory of Contract Law. by Peter Benson.
Equality's Understudies, Aziz Z. Huq
Equality's Understudies, Aziz Z. Huq
Michigan Law Review
Review of Robert L. Tsai's Practical Equality: Forging Justice in a Divided Nation.
Gossip And Gore: A Ghoulish Journey Into A Philosophical Thicket, Sean Hannon Williams
Gossip And Gore: A Ghoulish Journey Into A Philosophical Thicket, Sean Hannon Williams
Michigan Law Review
A review of Don Herzog, Defaming the Dead.
Private Rights And Private Wrongs, Andrew S. Gold
Private Rights And Private Wrongs, Andrew S. Gold
Michigan Law Review
Review of Private Wrongs by Arthur Ripstein.
Property, Duress, And Consensual Relationships, David Blankfein-Tabachnick
Property, Duress, And Consensual Relationships, David Blankfein-Tabachnick
Michigan Law Review
Professor Seana Valentine Shiffrin has produced an exciting new book, Speech Matters: On Lying, Morality, and the Law. Shiffrin’s previous rigorous, careful, and morally sensitive work spans contract law, intellectual property, and the freedoms of association and expression. Speech Matters is in line with Shiffrin’s signature move: we ought to reform our social practices and legal and political institutions to, in various ways, address or accommodate moral values—here, a stringent moral prohibition against lying, a strident principle of promissory fidelity, that is, the principle that one ought to keep one’s promises, and the general value of veracity. The book …
Rank Among Equals, Ben A. Mcjunkin
Rank Among Equals, Ben A. Mcjunkin
Michigan Law Review
Dignity is on the march. Once regarded as a subject exclusively within the province of antiquated moral philosophy, dignity—that “shibboleth of all perplexed and empty-headed moralists”—has recently developed into a cornerstone of contemporary legal discourse. Internationally, the concept of human dignity has been central to the emergence and acceptance of universal human rights. Dignity, in some form, is guaranteed by such seminal documents as the Preamble to the Charter of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the German Basic Law, and the South African Constitution. Domestically, appeals to dignity undergird popular legal arguments for social and political …
Jury Voting Paradoxes, Jason Iuliano
Jury Voting Paradoxes, Jason Iuliano
Michigan Law Review
The special verdict is plagued by two philosophical paradoxes: the discursive dilemma and the lottery paradox. Although widely discussed in the philosophical literature, these paradoxes have never been applied to jury decision making. In this Essay, I use the paradoxes to show that the special verdict’s vote-reporting procedures can lead judges to render verdicts that the jurors themselves would reject. This outcome constitutes a systemic breakdown that should not be tolerated in a legal system that prides itself on the fairness of its jury decision-making process. Ultimately, I argue that, because the general verdict with answers to written questions does …
The Scope Of Precedent, Randy J. Kozel
The Scope Of Precedent, Randy J. Kozel
Michigan Law Review
The scope of Supreme Court precedent is capacious. Justices of the Court commonly defer to sweeping rationales and elaborate doctrinal frameworks articulated by their predecessors. This practice infuses judicial precedent with the prescriptive power of enacted constitutional and statutory text. The lower federal courts follow suit, regularly abiding by the Supreme Court’s broad pronouncements. These phenomena cannot be explained by—and, indeed, oftentimes subvert—the classic distinction between binding holdings and dispensable dicta. This Article connects the scope of precedent with recurring and foundational debates about the proper ends of judicial interpretation. A precedent’s forward- looking effect should not depend on the …
Taking States (And Metaphysics) Seriously, Sanford Levinson
Taking States (And Metaphysics) Seriously, Sanford Levinson
Michigan Law Review
Sotirios A. Barber has written many incisive and important books, in addition to coediting an especially interesting casebook on constitutional law and interpretation. He is also a political theorist. An important part of his overall approach to constitutional theory is his philosophical commitment to “moral realism.” He believes in the metaphysical reality of moral and political truths, the most important of which, for any constitutional theorist, involve the meanings of justice and the common good. He not only believes in the ontological reality of such truths — that is, that these truths are more than mere human conventions or social …
Theorizing American Freedom, Anthony O'Rourke
Theorizing American Freedom, Anthony O'Rourke
Michigan Law Review
Some intellectual concepts once central to America's constitutional discourse are, for better and worse, no longer part of our political language. These concepts may be so alien to us that they would remain invisible without carefully reexamining the past to challenge the received narratives of America's constitutional development. Should constitutional theorists undertake this kind of historical reexamination? If so, to what extent should they be willing to stray from the disciplinary norms that govern intellectual history? And what normative aims can they reasonably expect to achieve by exploring ideas in our past that are no longer reflected in the Constitution's …
On Strict Liability Crimes: Preserving A Moral Framework For Criminal Intent In An Intent-Free Moral World, W. Robert Thomas
On Strict Liability Crimes: Preserving A Moral Framework For Criminal Intent In An Intent-Free Moral World, W. Robert Thomas
Michigan Law Review
The law has long recognized a presumption against criminal strict liability. This Note situates that presumption in terms of moral intuitions about the role of intention and the unique nature of criminal punishment. Two sources-recent laws from state legislatures and recent advances in moral philosophy-pose distinct challenges to the presumption against strict liability crimes. This Note offers a solution to the philosophical problem that informs how courts could address the legislative problem. First, it argues that the purported problem from philosophy stems from a mistaken relationship drawn between criminal law and morality. Second, it outlines a slightly more nuanced moral …
Visionary Pragmatism And The Value Of Privacy In The Twenty-First Century, Danielle Keats Citron, Leslie Meltzer Henry
Visionary Pragmatism And The Value Of Privacy In The Twenty-First Century, Danielle Keats Citron, Leslie Meltzer Henry
Michigan Law Review
Part I of our Review discusses the central premises of Understanding Privacy, with particular attention paid to Solove's pragmatic methodology and his taxonomy of privacy. We introduce his pluralistic approach to conceptualizing privacy, which urges decision makers to assess privacy problems in context, and we explore his view that meaningful choices about privacy depend on an appreciation of how privacy benefits society as a whole. We also describe how Solove's taxonomy aims to account for the variety of activities that threaten privacy. In Part II, we analyze the strengths of Solove's pragmatism by demonstrating its functionality and flexibility in …
Taking Text Too Seriously: Modern Textualism, Original Meaning, And The Case Of Amar's Bill Of Rights, William Michael Treanor
Taking Text Too Seriously: Modern Textualism, Original Meaning, And The Case Of Amar's Bill Of Rights, William Michael Treanor
Michigan Law Review
Championed on the Supreme Court by Justice Scalia and Justice Thomas and in academia most prominently by Professor Akhil Amar textualism has emerged within the past twenty years as a leading school of constitutional interpretation. Textualists argue that the Constitution should be interpreted in accordance with its original public meaning, and in seeking that meaning, they closely parse the Constitution's words and grammar and the placement of clauses in the document. They have assumed that this close parsing recaptures original meaning, but, perhaps because it seems obviously correct, that assumption has neither been defended nor challenged. This Article uses Professor …
Science, Humanity, And Atrocity: A Lawyerly Examination, Steven D. Smith
Science, Humanity, And Atrocity: A Lawyerly Examination, Steven D. Smith
Michigan Law Review
Joseph Vining's reflection on (as the subtitle indicates) the claims of science and humanity begins with a terse but disturbing recitation of these and similar scientific experiments conducted on human beings during the twentieth century in Manchuria, Nazi Germany, and Pol Pot's Cambodia. The incidents are conveyed through quotations, sometimes of the coldly clinical prose that the researchers themselves chose as most suitable for their purposes. These quotations are juxtaposed against others from an array of distinguished scientists and philosophers explaining the naturalistic cosmology that, in the view of these thinkers, modern science has given us: it is a stark, …
Herbert Hart Elucidated, A. W. Brian Simpson
Herbert Hart Elucidated, A. W. Brian Simpson
Michigan Law Review
There are a number of good biographies of judges, but very few of individual legal academics; indeed, so far as American legal academics are concerned, the only one of note that comes to mind is William Twining's life of Karl Llewellyn. Llewellyn was, of course, a major figure in the evolution of American law, and his unusual life was a further advantage for his biographer. In this biography, Nicola Lace has taken as her subject an English academic who also had an unusual career, one whose contribution was principally not to the evolution of the English legal system but to …
What Nobody Knows, John C. P. Goldberg
What Nobody Knows, John C. P. Goldberg
Michigan Law Review
By meditating on displays of cunning in literature, history, and current events, Don Herzog in his new book isolates and probes difficult puzzles concerning how to understand and evaluate human conduct. The point of the exercise is not to offer a system or framework for resolving these puzzles. Quite the opposite, Cunning aims to discomfit its academic audience in two ways. First, it sets out to show that some of the central dichotomies of modem thought-those between means and ends, reason and desire, self-interest and morality, fact and value, virtue and vice, knowledge and politics, authenticity and artifice, and appearance …
Should Coercive Interrogation Be Legal?, Eric A. Posner, Adrian Vermeule
Should Coercive Interrogation Be Legal?, Eric A. Posner, Adrian Vermeule
Michigan Law Review
Most academics who have written on coercive interrogation believe that its use is justified in extreme or catastrophic scenarios but that nonetheless it should be illegal. They argue that formal illegality will not prevent justified use of coercive interrogation because government agents will be willing to risk criminal liability and are likely to be pardoned, acquitted, or otherwise forgiven if their behavior is morally justified. This outlaw and forgive approach to coercive interrogation is supposed to prevent coercive interrogation from being applied in inappropriate settings, to be symbolically important, and nonetheless to permit justified coercive interrogation. We argue that the …
The Limits Of Courage And Principle, Jedediah Purdy
The Limits Of Courage And Principle, Jedediah Purdy
Michigan Law Review
Michael Ignatieff, the director of the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, is not a lawyer. His work, however, treats issues of core concern to lawyers: nation-building, human rights, the ethics of warfare, and now, in his latest book, the proper relationship between liberty and security. The Lesser Evil is, in part, a book a legal scholar might have written: a normative framework for lawmaking in the face of the terror threat. It is also something more unusual: an exercise in an older type of jurisprudence. Ignatieff discusses law in the light of moral psychology …
Was The Frog Prince Sexually Molested?: A Review Of Peter Westen's The Logic Of Consent, Heidi M. Hurd
Was The Frog Prince Sexually Molested?: A Review Of Peter Westen's The Logic Of Consent, Heidi M. Hurd
Michigan Law Review
Peter Westen's The Logic of Consent is nothing short of a tour de force. In the tradition of the very best and most significant contributions to legal theory, Professor Westen demonstrates that we do not know what we think we know about a capacity that on a daily basis turns trespasses into dinner parties, brutal batteries into football games, rape into lovemaking, and the commercial appropriation of name and likeness into biography. While we all employ claims of consent in everyday moral gossip to absolve some and withhold sympathy from others, and while courts of law across the nation commonly …
The Illusion Of Law: The Legitimating Schemas Of Modern Policy And Corporate Law, Ronald Chen, Jon Hanson
The Illusion Of Law: The Legitimating Schemas Of Modern Policy And Corporate Law, Ronald Chen, Jon Hanson
Michigan Law Review
This Article is about some of the schemas and scripts that form and define our lives. It is about the knowledge structures that shape how we view the world and how we understand the limitless information with which we are always confronted. This Article is also about the "evolution of ideas" underlying corporate law and all of modern policymaking. It is about the ways in which schemas and scripts have influenced how policy theorists, policymakers, lawyers, and many others (particularly in the West) understand and approach policymaking generally and corporate law specifically. It is about both the invisibility and blinding …
Satirical Legal Studies: From The Legists To The Lizard, Peter Goodrich
Satirical Legal Studies: From The Legists To The Lizard, Peter Goodrich
Michigan Law Review
In Part I, I expand on the distinction between the Horatian and the Menippean forms of satire and then suggest that a similarly bold division can be used to map satirical legal studies. In support of that argument, I use the example of the earliest surviving satirical legal poem within the Western tradition. My analysis of this exemplary satirical legal artifact delineates four principal modes of legal satire that will organize the ensuing discussion of more contemporary examples of the genre. In Part II, I will address the currently popular and yet somewhat novel mode of ad hominem or nominate …
The Unruliness Of Rules, Peter A. Alces
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 …
Meaning's Edge, Love's Priority, Patrick Mckinley Brennan
Meaning's Edge, Love's Priority, Patrick Mckinley Brennan
Michigan Law Review
The story is told of an American wending his way through the British Museum. Reaching the Rosetta Stone, he reached right over the railing, touched the scarred slab, and lamented: "It doesn't feel meaningful." Whereupon an old Briton was heard to mumble: "The poor American's got this old thing confused with the Blarney Stone." A bully presses his case, but meaning is much more modest. Powerless to insist upon itself, meaning lies in wait of discovery. What distinguishes the Rosetta Stone from other rocks of the same kind and size is that it was someone's - or rather a group's …
The New Leviathan, Dennis Patterson
The New Leviathan, Dennis Patterson
Michigan Law Review
Reputation in any field is an elusive phenomenon: part notoriety, part honor, part fame, part critical assessment. Even in legal scholarship it has an uneven, unpredictable quality. It is hard to imagine a book by a law professor that has had more immediate impact on world leaders than Philip Bobbitt's The Shield of Achilles. Much of the national-security strategy devised by the U.S. administration after the September 11 attacks expresses ideas Bobbitt conceived long before; and from a different point on the political spectrum is the Archbishop of Canterbury, whose televised nationwide address in January explicitly took the book as …
The Case Against Assisted Suicide Reexamined, Ani B. Satz
The Case Against Assisted Suicide Reexamined, Ani B. Satz
Michigan Law Review
In Toni Morrison's acclaimed novel Beloved, Sethe, a runaway slave woman on the brink of capture, gruesomely murders one of her infant children and is halted seconds before killing the second. Cognizant of the approaching men, Sethe's actions are deliberate, swift, confident, and unflinching. Afterwards, she sits erect in the Sheriff's wagon. The reader is left to struggle, situating the horror of the event within the context of the reality of slavery. Was this an act of mercy tQ prevent the suffering Sethe's child would know as a slave? Is loss of autonomy, even rising to the condition of slavery, …
Pragmatism Regained, Christopher Kutz
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 …
Horrible Holmes, Mathias Reimann
Horrible Holmes, Mathias Reimann
Michigan Law Review
Holmes has kept scholars busy for most of a century, and the resulting volume of literature about him is staggering. In that last twenty years along, we have been blessed with four biographies, four symposia, three new collections of his works, two volumes of essays, and various monographs, not to mention a multitude of free-standing law review articles. Since life is short, everyone who adds to the deluge, including Albert Alschuler with his new book, bears a heavy responsibility to make the expenditure of trees, library space, and reading time worthwhile. Does Law Without Values fulfill that responsibility? Despite the …
Democratic Justice In Transition, Marion Smiley
Democratic Justice In Transition, Marion Smiley
Michigan Law Review
Ruti Teitel's Transitional Justice and Ian Shapiro's Democratic Justice come out of very different academic traditions. But they both develop a view of justice that might loosely be called pragmatic by virtue of its treatment of justice as a value that is simultaneously grounded in practice and powerful in bringing about social and political change. Moreover, they both use this shared pragmatic view of justice to provide us with two things that are of great importance to the study of transitional justice and democracy in general. The first is an explanatory framework for understanding how legal institutions and claims about …