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Full-Text Articles in Law
Describing Law, Raff Donelson
Describing Law, Raff Donelson
Journal Articles
Legal philosophers make a number of bold, contentious claims about the nature of law. For instance, some claim that law necessarily involves coercion, while others disagree. Some claim that all law enjoys presumptive moral validity, while others disagree. We can see these claims in at least three, mutually exclusive ways: (1) We can see them as descriptions of law's nature (descriptivism), (2) we can see them as expressing non-descriptive attitudes of the legal philosophers in question (expressivism), or (3) we can see them as practical claims about how we should view law or order our society (pragmatism). This paper argues …
The Poetics Of The Pragmatic: What Literary Criticisms Of Law Offers Posner, Guyora Binder
The Poetics Of The Pragmatic: What Literary Criticisms Of Law Offers Posner, Guyora Binder
Journal Articles
The process by which we represent our society's will and welfare in the medium of law is an imaginative and expressive one, narrating the path from a virtuous past to a decent future, informed by aesthetic judgment. In Literary Criticisms of Law, Guyora Binder and Robert Weisberg argued that, because law is literary in this sense, scholars can use the methods of literary criticism to "read" the law and to subject it to critical evaluation and reflective aesthetic judgment. In reviewing that book, Judge Richard Posner reasserted his long-held position that it is most useful to evaluate law economically rather …
A Pragmatic Justification Of The Judicial Hunch, Mark C. Modak-Truran
A Pragmatic Justification Of The Judicial Hunch, Mark C. Modak-Truran
Journal Articles
Judges currently face a daunting task. On the one hand, they are increasingly aware of the indeterminacy of the law, while on the other hand, they face an explosion of fact. Judges are floating on shaky legal timbers in a sea of documents, deposition transcripts, affidavits, oral courtroom testimony, and expert opinions. The explosion of fact alone presents monumental problems for deciding cases without unduly simplifying or reducing this factual complexity. For example, both federal and state judges are implementing case management systems to deal with their crushing case loads and the increasing complexity of their cases. In addition, there …