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Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Is The Use Of Calling Emerson A Pragmatist: A Brief And Belated Response To Stanley Cavell, Allen P. Mendenhall Dec 2013

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Is The Use Of Calling Emerson A Pragmatist: A Brief And Belated Response To Stanley Cavell, Allen P. Mendenhall

Allen Mendenhall

This essay investigates the relationship between Ralph Waldo Emerson and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. in the context of the common law. Holmes’s Emersonian writings, in particular his dissents, fall within the theoretical framework of agonism, which Harold Bloom refers to as a revisionary and Emersonian “program.” Agonism as a political and aesthetic theory maintains that sites of contestation can be productive rather than destructive; it suggests that confrontational relationships can be at once mutually offsetting and generative. Drawing from the Greek word for an athletic competition, agonism applied to rhetoric underscores the importance of mutuality to conflict: writers struggling against …


Bypassing Bias: How Law Reviews Circumvent Favoritism, Allen P. Mendenhall Dec 2012

Bypassing Bias: How Law Reviews Circumvent Favoritism, Allen P. Mendenhall

Allen Mendenhall

Could peer-reviewed humanities journals benefit by having student editors, as is the practice for law reviews? Are student editors valuable because they are less likely than peer reviewers to be biased against certain contributors and viewpoints? Student editors of and contributors to law reviews may seem to be the notable exception, but legal scholarship is different from humanities scholarship in ways I address here, and law reviews suffer from biases similar to those endemic to peer-reviewed journals. Nevertheless, law review submission and editing probably have less systemic bias than peer-reviewed journals, but not because students edit them. Rather, law review …


America Giveth, And America Taketh Away: The Fate Of Article 9 After The Futenma Base Dispute, Allen P. Mendenhall Dec 2010

America Giveth, And America Taketh Away: The Fate Of Article 9 After The Futenma Base Dispute, Allen P. Mendenhall

Allen Mendenhall

This Article considers how the Obama administration’s policies toward Japan implicate Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution. More specifically, it argues that the Futenma base dispute (as it has come to be known) jeopardizes the very existence of Article 9 by threatening to render it moot and by expanding the already expansive interpretations of Article 9. Part I provides a brief history of the Futenma base dispute during the Obama years, and Part II explains the effects of the Futenma base dispute on Article 9. More specifically, Part II contextualizes the Futenma issue by way of the legislative and judicial …


The Oft-Ignored Mr. Turton: The Role Of District Collector In A Passage To India, Allen P. Mendenhall Dec 2009

The Oft-Ignored Mr. Turton: The Role Of District Collector In A Passage To India, Allen P. Mendenhall

Allen Mendenhall

E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India presents Brahman Hindu jurisprudence as an alternative to British rule of law, a utilitarian jurisprudence that hinges on mercantilism, central planning, and imperialism. Building on John Hasnas’s critiques of rule of law and Murray Rothbard’s critiques of Benthamite utilitarianism, this essay argues that Forster’s depictions of Brahman Hindu in the novel endorse polycentric legal systems. Mr. Turton is the local district collector whose job is to pander to both British and Indian interests; positioned as such, Turton is a site for critique and comparison. Forster uses Turton to show that Brahman Hindu jurisprudence is …