Law Commons^™

Justice For Hedgehogs, Robert E. Rodes

Journal Articles

Professor Dworkin begins this complex and ambitious book with a chapter called "Baedeker" after the nineteenth century guidebooks. In it, he gives an overview of his project, which is to show "the unity of value." The "title refers to a line by an ancient Greek poet, Archilochus, that Isaiah Berlin made famous for us. The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. Value is one big thing" (1).

He articulates his overarching value in terms of human dignity: "[W]e each have a sovereign ethical responsibility to make something of value of our own lives, as a …

Memory And Punishment, O. Carter Snead

Journal Articles

This article is the first scholarly exploration of the implications of neurobiological memory modification for criminal law. Its point of entry is the fertile context of criminal punishment, in which memory plays a crucial role. Specifically, this article will argue that there is a deep relationship between memory and the foundational principles justifying how punishment should be distributed, including retributive justice, deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation, moral education, and restorative justice. For all such theoretical justifications, the questions of who and how much to punish are inextricably intertwined with how a crime is remembered - by the offender, by the sentencing authority, …

Equality And Differences, John M. Finnis

Journal Articles

This revised and annotated version of the H.L.A. Hart Memorial lecture in the University of Oxford in June 2011 has some significant differences in coverage from the essay of the same title published in the American Journal of Jurisprudence 56 (2011) 17-44, including a brief discussion of Waldron’s treatment of basic equality and Cohen’s “luck-egalitarianism”. The object of the lecture is to establish the grounds of basic human equality, and to indicate how neglect of non-basic inequalities and of preconditions for sustainable common good tends to ensure that legal measures promoting equality rights and condemning ‘discrimination’ yield serious injustices (violations …