Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Keyword
-
- Power (4)
- History (3)
- Language (3)
- Morality (3)
- Book review (2)
-
- Choices (2)
- Culture (2)
- Decision making (2)
- Democracy (2)
- Discrimination (2)
- Dworkin (Ronald) (2)
- Equality (2)
- Fairness (2)
- Injuries (2)
- Justice (2)
- Lawyers (2)
- Race and law (2)
- Skepticism (2)
- Values (2)
- Accuracy (1)
- Admissibility (1)
- Admissions (1)
- Affirmative action (1)
- African Americans (1)
- American Bar Association Special Committee to Survey Legal Needs (1)
- Bankruptcy (1)
- Change (1)
- Chapter 11 (1)
- Citizens (1)
- Classifications (1)
Articles 1 - 16 of 16
Full-Text Articles in Law
Facts, Values, Justification, Democracy, Don Herzog
Facts, Values, Justification, Democracy, Don Herzog
Reviews
Equality, you might think, is the more or less universally shared value of the modern world, or the West, or anyway these United States. “We strive to ensure that the values upon which our country was built, including our belief that all people are created equal, are reflected in everything our nation does.” That’s from the 2016 Democratic Party platform. And look! “We continue to encourage equality for all citizens and access to the American Dream.” That’s from the 2016 GOP Platform. Of course, the parties disagree deeply on the demands of equality. If they share an abstract concept, as …
Cute Prickly Critter With Presbyopia, Don Herzog
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 …
Our Broken Misdemeanor Justice System: Its Problems And Some Potential Solutions, Eve Brensike Primus
Our Broken Misdemeanor Justice System: Its Problems And Some Potential Solutions, Eve Brensike Primus
Reviews
Although misdemeanors comprise an overwhelming majority of state criminal court cases, little judicial and scholarly attention has been focused on how misdemeanor courts actually operate. In her article, Misdemeanors, Alexandra Natapoff rights this wrong and explains how the low-visibility, highly discretionary decisions made by actors at the misdemeanor level often result in rampant discrimination, incredible inefficiency, and vast miscarriages of justice. Misdemeanors makes a significant contribution to the literature by refocusing attention on the importance of misdemeanor offenses and beginning an important dialogue about what steps should be taken going forward to fix our broken misdemeanor justice system.
Forum, Donald J. Herzog
Forum, Donald J. Herzog
Reviews
Psst: here’s my secret wry suspicion. Political theorists are allergic to facts. They feel entitled to firm beliefs—about state-building, modernization, the rise of the bourgeoisie, you name it—because they’ve read some fancy theory books. So a lot of theory reads like a conceptual shell game, with various intoxicating abstractions shuffled about. I’m enough of a vulgar pragmatist to think that theory isn’t what you get when you leave out the facts. So I found Wahrman’s Making of the Modern Self sheer joy, from start to finish. The bottom line first: this is a mustread across the humanities and humanistic social …
"Dragonslaying." Review Of Democracy Defended, By G. Mackie, Donald J. Herzog
"Dragonslaying." Review Of Democracy Defended, By G. Mackie, Donald J. Herzog
Reviews
Early in the Iliad, the Achaians convene an assembly. There are a lot of them and they're unruly, too. "[Tihe place of their assembly was shaken, and the earth groaned / as the people took their positions and there was tumult. Nine heralds / shouting set about putting them in order, to make them cease their / clamour and listen to the kings beloved of Zeus."' Clutching the scepter that has come to him ultimately from Zeus, the very symbol of his right to speak and be heard, Agamemnon bitterly proposes that the Achaians give up. Nine years of struggle …
"How To Think About Equality." Review Of Sovereign Virtue: The Theory And Practice Of Equality, By R. Dworkin, Don Herzog
Reviews
Ronald Dworkin's' latest might well seem sharply discontinuous with his other work. The formal theoretical apparatus that kicks off the book is a forbiddingly abstract - some will say arcane - hypothetical auction, coupled with a hypothetical insurance market. There is simply nothing like it in Taking Rights Seriously, or A Matter of Principle, or Law's Empire, or Life's Dominion, or Freedom's Law. Then again, Dworkin first published the key papers on the auction some twenty years. ago and has never flagged, as far as I know, in his commitment to the basic project.2 Theorists have been waiting for the …
Minority Preferences Reconsidered, Terrance Sandalow
Minority Preferences Reconsidered, Terrance Sandalow
Reviews
During the academic year 1965-66, at the height of the civil rights movement, the University of Michigan Law School faculty looked around and saw not a single African-American student. The absence of any black students was not, it should hardly need saying, attributable to a policy of purposeful exclusion. A black student graduated from the Law School as early as 1870, and in the intervening years a continuous flow of African-American students, though not a large number, had been admitted and graduated. Some went on to distinguished careers in the law.
Failure And Forgiveness: A Review, James J. White
Failure And Forgiveness: A Review, James J. White
Reviews
In Failure and Forgiveness, Professor Karen Gross has written two books about bankruptcy. The first book, found in the first nine chapters, describes the bankruptcy law, the bankruptcy system, its operation, and the policies that support that law and system. This first book is written for a lay audience, and it is an admirable exposition of the law and policy. The second book, chapters ten to fifteen, contains several proposals for change in the bankruptcy law and states arguments to justify those proposals. The second book shows Professor Gross to be a kindly socialist, deeply suspicious of free markets and …
Review Of The Repeal Of Reticence: A History Of America's Cultural And Legal Struggles Over Free Speech, Obscenity, Sexual Liberation, And Modern Art, Donald J. Herzog
Review Of The Repeal Of Reticence: A History Of America's Cultural And Legal Struggles Over Free Speech, Obscenity, Sexual Liberation, And Modern Art, Donald J. Herzog
Reviews
Our public sphere, which should have displayed and preserved the grandeur and beauty of our civic ideals and moral excellences, is instead inane and vacuous when it is not utterly mean, ugly, or indecent (p. 4). Troubled by the tawdry nonsense circulating in the public sphere-and she wrote before learned enquiries into whether the President's genitals had any distinguishing characteristics- Rochelle Gurstein turns to history to understand how we arrived at such a sorry destination. Hers is a tale of decline: The Victorians "we moderns" so routinelyd eridef or theirP uritanicalr epressivenessu nderstoodf ull well that certain things have to …
25 Divorce Attorneys And 40 Clients In Two Not So Big But Not So Small Cities In Massachusetts And California: An Appreciation, David L. Chambers
25 Divorce Attorneys And 40 Clients In Two Not So Big But Not So Small Cities In Massachusetts And California: An Appreciation, David L. Chambers
Reviews
Jane is meeting with her lawyer Peter. She has been complaining bitterly about a restraining order obtained ex parte by the lawyer for her husband Norb. The order bars her from entering the home that she still owns jointly with Norb and that Norb has continued to live in. She moved out voluntarily, as a gesture of good will, a short while before only to have her husband's lawyer run to court and secure the order she abhors. Readers first met Jane back in 1986 when Austin Sarat and William Felstiner published the first article growing out of their massive …
Talking About Rights, Carl E. Schneider
Talking About Rights, Carl E. Schneider
Reviews
In recent years, a growing recognition of the power of rights talk in American law and life has surfaced in the writing of legal academics, along with a gnawing doubt about that power. In Rights Talk The lmpaverishrnent of Political Discaurse, Mary Ann Glendon, a professor of law at Harvard University, gives those doubts systematic, thoughtful, and lucid expression. Glendon has long been one of our most penetrating students of family law and one of our most enlightening students of comparative law. In this book (as in its predecessor and forebear, Abartion and Divorce in We5tem Law), she brings this …
I Hear A Rhapsody: A Reading Of The Republic Of Choice, Donald J. Herzog
I Hear A Rhapsody: A Reading Of The Republic Of Choice, Donald J. Herzog
Reviews
Readers coming to another volume by Lawrence Friedman might well expect a tightly crafted legal history. But this book is quite different. It offers a sweeping account of the transformation of modern law, a synoptic overview of what is finally distinctive about our legal culture, even a broadbrushed portrait of Western individualism. It does so breathlessly, in prose style and velocity. It's sometimes an engaging read, sometimes a distressing one, but-and here's what really matters-never a persuasive one. Or, worse yet, when it is persuasive it's because of its poetic and ideological features, not any kind of rigorous analysis.
Law And Sex, Christina B. Whitman
Law And Sex, Christina B. Whitman
Reviews
In Feminism Unmodified, a collection of speeches given between 1981 and 1986, Catharine MacKinnon talks of law from the perspective of feminism. MacKinnon does not approach her topic as a lawyer with a uniquely legal perspective on feminism; she brings, instead, a distinctively feminist approach to law. Nor is the feminism from which she speaks grounded in the standard political theories: MacKinnon disclaims and attacks the Marxist approach to feminism, the socialist approach to feminism, and, most emphatically and repeatedly, the liberal approach to feminism that has been embraced by many lawyers in their effort to use law to eliminate …
A "Humanitarian" Approach To Individual Injury, Christina B. Whitman
A "Humanitarian" Approach To Individual Injury, Christina B. Whitman
Reviews
Individual injury law was once an important arena for the definition of shared values. It has increasingly become the domain of various species of systems analysts who measure legal results against external norms defined by such disciplines as economics. Although legal scholars continue to use the expectations and beliefs of ordinary men and women in fashioning rules for the redress of constitutional injuries, common-law scholars have become less willing to ground legal principles in moral consensus. There are notable exceptions. Among these is Professor Marshall Shapo, who, in two recent works, attempts to develop a legal analysis of injury that …
Review Of The Legal Needs Of The Public, , Richard Lempert
Review Of The Legal Needs Of The Public, , Richard Lempert
Reviews
Both the title, The Legal, Needs of the Public, and the subtitle, The Final, Report of a National, Survey, of this volume are, quite fortunately, inapt. The report does not seek to quantify the legal needs of the public or to determine whether "needs" are being "met," and we are told by both Barbara Curran in her preface and Spencer Kimball in his foreword that this "final report" signifies the beginning and not the end of data analysis. This study (which I shall call the ABF study) is a joint undertaking of the American Bar Association Special Committee to Survey …
Review Of Law In A Changing America, Richard O. Lempert
Review Of Law In A Changing America, Richard O. Lempert
Reviews
This collection of essays, prepared as background reading for a conference sponsored by the American Assembly and the American Bar Foundation on the goals of the legal profession in the years ahead, begins and ends with a bow toward changing America. The first chapter is an attempt by sociologist Wilbert Moore, the only non-lawyer among the essayists, to sketch generally the patterns of social and political structure likely to pertain in the near future.