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Full-Text Articles in Law

Francis A. Allen, Terrance Sandalow Dec 1986

Francis A. Allen, Terrance Sandalow

Articles

Writing a brief tribute to Frank Allen, a man I admire as much as any I have known, should have been easy and pleasurable. It has proved to be very difficult. The initial difficulty is the occasion for the tribute. Frank's decision to take early retirement from the University and to resettle in a warmer climate deprives the Sandalows of frequent contact with two of our favorite people. The act of writing requires an acceptance of that loss that I have not yet achieved. A second difficulty is that Frank has been an important influence in my life for thirty …


Francis A. Allen: 'Confront[Ing] The Most Explosive Problems' And 'Plumbing All Issues To Their Full Depth Without Fear Or Prejudice', Yale Kamisar Dec 1986

Francis A. Allen: 'Confront[Ing] The Most Explosive Problems' And 'Plumbing All Issues To Their Full Depth Without Fear Or Prejudice', Yale Kamisar

Articles

Frank Allen began his distinguished teaching career more than thirty-five years ago - at a time when, at more law schools than we like to remember, "the basic criminal law course was routinely assigned to the youngest and most vulnerable member of the faculty or to that colleague suspected of mild brain damage and hence incompetent to deal with courses that really matter."' That those of us who taught criminal law years later were warmly received by our colleagues is in no small measure a tribute to the quality of mind and character and intellectual energy of people like Allen, …


Government Responsibility For Constitutional Torts, Christina B. Whitman Nov 1986

Government Responsibility For Constitutional Torts, Christina B. Whitman

Articles

This essay is about the language used to decide when governments should be held responsible for constitutional torts.' Debate about what is required of government officials, and what is required of government itself, is scarcely new. What is new, at least to American jurisprudence, is litigation against government units (rather than government officials) for constitutional injuries. 2 The extension of liability to institutional defendants introduces special problems for the language of responsibility. In a suit against an individual official it is easy to describe the wrong as the consequence of individual behavior that is inconsistent with community norms; the language …


Free Speech And Corporate Freedom: A Comment On First National Bank Of Boston V. Bellotti, Carl E. Schneider Sep 1986

Free Speech And Corporate Freedom: A Comment On First National Bank Of Boston V. Bellotti, Carl E. Schneider

Articles

The corporation was born in chains but is everywhere free. That freedom was recently affirmed by the United States Supreme Court in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti. In Bellotti, the Court overturned a Massachusetts criminal statute forbidding banks and business corporations to make expenditures intended to influence referenda concerning issues not "materially affecting" the corporation's "property, business, or assets." In doing so, the Court confirmed its discovery that commercial speech is not unprotected by the first amendment and announced a novel doctrine that corporate speech is not unprotected by the first amendment. Although several years have …


Some Questions For Republicans, Don Herzog Aug 1986

Some Questions For Republicans, Don Herzog

Articles

Even a sleepy historiographer of political theory of some future day will notice the most dramatic revision of the last 25 years or so. I refer of course to the discovery-and celebration-of civic humanism. The devilish Machiavelli of Elizabethan times has been gently set aside for "the divine Machiavel," the one who writes, "I love my native city more than my soul." And historians of political thought have lovingly traced the transmission of civic humanism from Florence to England and America, giving us a brand new past. America, we now know, was not the unthinkingly Lockean land served up by …


The New Evidence Scholarship: Analyzing The Process Of Proof, Richard O. Lempert May 1986

The New Evidence Scholarship: Analyzing The Process Of Proof, Richard O. Lempert

Articles

When I began teaching evidence seventeen years ago, the field was moribund. The great systematizers of the common law-Wigmore, Maguire, McCormick, Morgan and their ilk-had come and, if they had not all already gone, their work was largely finished. Not only was most of what passed for evidence scholarship barely worth the reading-the same, after all, could be said of many fields of law at most times-but disregarding student work, few scholars were writing regularly on evidentiary matters.


Integrity And Circumspection: The Labor Law Vision Of Bernard D. Meltzer, Theodore J. St. Antoine Jan 1986

Integrity And Circumspection: The Labor Law Vision Of Bernard D. Meltzer, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Articles

Bernard Meltzer has testified under oath that he "rarely take[s] absolute positions." The record bears him out. While his colleagues among labor law scholars often strain to demonstrate that the labor relations statutes and even the Constitution support their hearts' desires, the typical Meltzer stance is one of cool detachment, pragmatic assessment, and cautious, balanced judgment. The "itch to do good," Meltzer has remarked wryly, "is a doubtful basis for jurisdiction" -or, he would likely add, for any other legal conclusion. In this brief commentary I propose to examine the Meltzer approach to four broad areas of labor law: (1) …


The Twelve-Person, Unanimous Jury: Does It Have More Than History To Recommend It?, Richard O. Lempert Jan 1986

The Twelve-Person, Unanimous Jury: Does It Have More Than History To Recommend It?, Richard O. Lempert

Articles

My focus today will be on the twelve-person unanimous jury and on the contrasts between such juries and six-person juries or twelve-person juries than can return verdicts by ten-two or nine-three votes. Until about fifteen years ago, it appeared that the sixth and seventh amendments required all federal juries to have twelve members who reached unanimous verdicts, and it appeared possible that the Supreme Court would force the states to conform to the federal standards. Instead, the court did almost the opposite. It sanctioned juries as small as size six in state criminal cases and federal civil cases, and it …


Doctrine In A Vacuum: Reflections On What A Law School Ought (And Ought Not) To Be, James Boyd White Jan 1986

Doctrine In A Vacuum: Reflections On What A Law School Ought (And Ought Not) To Be, James Boyd White

Articles

I have written earlier in these pages about the expectations-the fears and hopes-that one can appropriately bring to law school. In this paper I speak to those who are immersed in the process of legal education, on one side of the podium or the other, and wish to say something of what I think it is, and can be, all about.


Error Behind The Plate And In The Law, Richard O. Lempert Jan 1986

Error Behind The Plate And In The Law, Richard O. Lempert

Articles

Casey Stengel, the great manager of the New York Yankees, and later the New York Mets, once dreamed, or so he said, that he had died and gone to heaven. The Lord greeted him personally as he walked through the Pearly Gates. "Casey," he said, "I'm so glad you're here. I want you to form a baseball team." Casey looked around him. He saw Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Ty Cobb, Tris Speaker, Christy Mathewson, Walter Johnson, Grover Cleveland Alexander, and others-all of baseball's immortals-and he said, "I'll see what I can do." Obviously, one can do a lot with such …


Alternative Methodologies In Contemporary Jurisprudence: Comments On Dworkin, Philip E. Soper Jan 1986

Alternative Methodologies In Contemporary Jurisprudence: Comments On Dworkin, Philip E. Soper

Articles

I have two brief points to make. Both involve recent developments in jurisprudence, by which I mean by and large the subject that Ronald Dworkin has just been discussing. Indeed, the first point is little more than an acknowledgement of the debt that is owed to Dworkin, not only for his specific contributions to this field, but for the implications of his work for law teaching generally.


Dreams, Prophecy And Sorcery: Blaming The Secret Offender In Medieval Iceland, William I. Miller Jan 1986

Dreams, Prophecy And Sorcery: Blaming The Secret Offender In Medieval Iceland, William I. Miller

Articles

An eminent legal historian once noted that the fundamental problem of law enforcement in primitive societies is that of the secret offender. The Icelandic legal and dispute processing systems depended on a wrongdoer publishing his deed, or at least committing it in an open and notorious manner. No state agencies existed to investigate and discover the non-publishing wrongdoer. But there were strong normative inducements to wrong openly; one's name was at stake. There was absolutely no honor in thievery, only the darkest shame; the ransmadr, on the other hand, suffered no shame for his successful raids, even if he did …


Judicial Criticism, James Boyd White Jan 1986

Judicial Criticism, James Boyd White

Articles

Today I shall talk about the criticism of judicial opinions, especially of constitutional opinions. This may at first seem to have rather little to do with our larger topic, "The Constitution and Human Values," but I hope that by the end I will be seen to be talking about that subject too. In fact I hope to show that in what I call our "criticism" our "values" are defined and made actual in most important ways.


General Principles Of Civil Law Of The People's Republic Of China (Translation), Whitmore Gray, Henry R. Zheng Jan 1986

General Principles Of Civil Law Of The People's Republic Of China (Translation), Whitmore Gray, Henry R. Zheng

Articles

(Adopted April 12, 1986, at the Fourth Session of the Sixth National People's Congress, to take effect on January 1, 1987.)'


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 …


The Uniform Statutory Rule Against Perpetuities, Lawrence W. Waggoner Jan 1986

The Uniform Statutory Rule Against Perpetuities, Lawrence W. Waggoner

Articles

When the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws recently approved the Uniform Statutory Rule Against Perpetuities, it may at long last have made perpetuity reform achievable in this country. Coming, as it does, on the heels of the 1981 promulgation of the Restatement (Second) of Property (Donative Transfers), which adopts the same general type of perpetuity reform, and having been unanimously endorsed by the House of Delegates of the American Bar Association, the Board of Regents of the American College of Probate Counsel, and the Board of Governors of the American College of Real Estate Lawyers, the Uniform …


A Tribute To Professor Leroy S. Merrifield, Theodore J. St. Antoine Jan 1986

A Tribute To Professor Leroy S. Merrifield, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Articles

Although I have collaborated with Leroy Merrifield on four editions of a labor law casebook over the past twenty years, and although we have each taught as a visitor at the other's law school, I did not fully appreciate the hidden dimensions of this quiet, unassuming scholar until we spent a day together in early 1986 at EPCOT. To begin with, Leroy had to use all his patient, persistent cajolery to entice me and another academic colleague (who is almost as staid and unbending as I am) to join him, along with our respective spouses, on an expedition to Disney …


What A Sensible Natural Lawyer And A Sensible Utilitarian Agree About And Disagree About: Comments On Finnis, Donald H. Regan Jan 1986

What A Sensible Natural Lawyer And A Sensible Utilitarian Agree About And Disagree About: Comments On Finnis, Donald H. Regan

Articles

Before I start, let me say two things. First of all, to the extent that John Finnis is entering a plea for more attention to what is a relatively neglected tradition (in the narrow his message a hundred percent. And you courd learning about the natural law tradition than by reading his book, Natural Law and Natural Rights. My second introductory observation is that Finnis and I agree about many more things than you might expect if you just think of him as a natural law theorist and me as a utilitarian. I am very eccentric as a utilitarian. He …


The Supreme Court And State Protectionism: Making Sense Of The Dormant Commerce Clause, Donald H. Regan Jan 1986

The Supreme Court And State Protectionism: Making Sense Of The Dormant Commerce Clause, Donald H. Regan

Articles

For almost fifty years, scholars have urged the Court to "balance" in dormant commerce clause cases; and the scholars have imagined that the Court was following their advice. The Court has indeed claimed to balance, winning scholarly approval. But the Court knows better than the scholars. Despite what the Court has said, it has not been balancing. It has been following a simpler and better-justified course. In the central area of dormant commerce clause jurisprudence, comprising what I shall call "movement-of-goods" cases), the Court has been concerned exclusively with preventing states from engaging in purposeful economic protectionism. Not only is …


Gift, Sale, Payment, Raid: Case Studies In The Negotiation And Classification Of Exchange In Medieval Iceland, William I. Miller Jan 1986

Gift, Sale, Payment, Raid: Case Studies In The Negotiation And Classification Of Exchange In Medieval Iceland, William I. Miller

Articles

Near the end of Eyrbyggja saga Porir asks Ospak and his men where they had gotten the goods they were carrying. Ospak said that they had gotten them at Pambardal. "How did you come by them?" said Porir. Ospak answered, "They were not given, they were not paid to me, nor were they sold either." Ospak had earlier that evening raided the house of a farmer called Alf and made away with enough to burden four horses. And this was exactly what he told Porir when he wittily eliminated the other modes of transfer by which he could have acquired …


Dancing On The Edge Of Article 9, James J. White Jan 1986

Dancing On The Edge Of Article 9, James J. White

Articles

Despite the fact that Article 9 is a much more comprehensive personal property security statute than was ever found in American law prior to its enactment, cases continue to present issues on the scope of the Article. Gone are the cases in which a court was called upon to determine whether a "conditional sales contract" could be dealt with under the "factor's lien" law; it is now clear that all such personal property security devices are governed by Article 9. Yet many problems remain for the unwary lawyer. I will identify several and deal in detail with three of these …