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Full-Text Articles in Law

Dissenting From The Bench, Christine Venter Jan 2021

Dissenting From The Bench, Christine Venter

Journal Articles

This paper examines the oral dissents of Justices Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg from the year 2000 to the times of their respective deaths. It explores the concept and purpose of oral dissent and details the kinds of cases in which each justice was more likely to orally dissent. The paper analyzes the kinds of rhetoric that each justice used to refer to their subject matter, and argues that Scalia's rhetoric evinces a view of the law as "autonomous", operating independently of the facts of the case. In contrast, Ginsburg's view espouses a view of the law as responsive …


The Morality Of Fiduciary Law, Paul B. Miller Jan 2021

The Morality Of Fiduciary Law, Paul B. Miller

Journal Articles

Recent work of fiduciary theory has provided conceptual synthesis requisite to understanding core fiduciary principles and the structure of fiduciary liability. However, normative questions have received only sporadic attention. What values animate fiduciary law? How does, or ought, fiduciary law prove responsive to them?

Where in other areas of private law theory – notably, tort theory – pioneering scholars went directly at normative questions like these, fiduciary theory has been exceptional for the reticence shown toward them. The reticence is sensible. Fiduciary principles are the product of equity’s most extended and convoluted program of supplementing surrounding law. They span several …


Reevaluating Legal Theory, Jeffrey Pojanowski Jan 2021

Reevaluating Legal Theory, Jeffrey Pojanowski

Journal Articles

Must a good general theory of law incorporate what is good for persons in general? This question has been at the center of methodological debates in general jurisprudence for decades. Answering “no,” Julie Dickson’s book Evaluation and Legal Theory offered both a clear and concise conspectus of positivist methodology, as well as a response to the longstanding objection that such an approach has to evaluate the data it studies rather than simply describe facts about legal systems. She agreed that legal positivism must evaluate. At the same time, she argued, it is possible to offer an evaluative theory of the …


Irreconcilable Differences? Whole Woman’S Health, Gonzales, And Justice Kennedy’S Vision Of American Abortion Jurisprudence, O. Carter Snead, Laura Wolk Jan 2018

Irreconcilable Differences? Whole Woman’S Health, Gonzales, And Justice Kennedy’S Vision Of American Abortion Jurisprudence, O. Carter Snead, Laura Wolk

Journal Articles

A law is unconstitutional if it "has the purpose or effect of placing a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion of a nonviable fetus."' Twenty-five years have elapsed since a plurality of the Supreme Court articulated this undue burden standard in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, yet its contours remain elusive. Notably, two current members of the Court-Justice Breyer and Justice Kennedy-seem to fundamentally differ in their understanding of what Casey requires and permits. In Gonzales v. Carhart, Justice Kennedy emphasized a wide range of permissible state interests implicated by abortion and indicated …


There Are No Ordinary People: Christian Humanism And Christian Legal Thought, Richard W. Garnett Nov 2017

There Are No Ordinary People: Christian Humanism And Christian Legal Thought, Richard W. Garnett

Journal Articles

This short essay is a contribution to a volume celebrating a new casebook, "Christian Legal Thought: Materials and Cases", edited by Profs. Patrick McKinley Brennan and William S. Brewbaker.


A Humble Justice, Marah S. Mcleod Jan 2017

A Humble Justice, Marah S. Mcleod

Journal Articles

Media and scholarly critics often claim that Justice Thomas's criminal law opinions reflect intentional cruelty or callousness, and dismiss his opinions without engaging seriously with their substance.
This Essay contends that judicial humility is a far more plausible explanation for Justice Thomas's criminal case decisions. If observers recognize that his approach to the law is guided by humility, rather than his own cruel or callous views, they will be more likely to consider the substance of his opinions and will benefit from wrestling with his challenging jurisprudential and historical perspective - even if they do not agree with the conclusions …


Neoclassical Administrative Common Law, Jeffrey A. Pojanowski Sep 2016

Neoclassical Administrative Common Law, Jeffrey A. Pojanowski

Journal Articles

This essay reviews John Dickinson’s neglected classic, Administrative Justice and the Supremacy of Law in the United States. Writing on the cusp of the New Deal, Dickinson helped establish a mainstream, moderate stance about the shape and legitimacy of the administrative state. A closer reading of this work, which is rich in jurisprudential reflection and historical learning, offers a better idea about the structure, promise, and limits of the doctrinal world he helped create.


Realising The Promise Of Costs Budgets: An Economic Analysis, Jay Tidmarsh Jan 2016

Realising The Promise Of Costs Budgets: An Economic Analysis, Jay Tidmarsh

Journal Articles

The costs-budget system implemented in the Jackson reforms promises to keep litigation costs within socially appropriate bounds. To realise this promise fully however; the goal of this reform must be reoriented. Using real-options analysis, this article demonstrates that costs budgeting in its present form often fails to achieve a reduction of litigation costs to the socially appropriate level–defined to be the point at which the social benefits of litigation exceeds its costs–because parties may have a private incentive to invest socially excessive amounts on litigation. This result is true under both the English ("loser pays") and the American ("bear your …


Redrawing The Dividing Lines Between Natural Law And Positivism(S), Jeffrey Pojanowski May 2015

Redrawing The Dividing Lines Between Natural Law And Positivism(S), Jeffrey Pojanowski

Journal Articles

Anglo-American jurisprudence, before it insulated itself in conceptual analysis and defined itself in opposition to broader questions, was properly a “sociable science,” to use Professor Postema’s phrase from his symposium article. And, in part due to the exemplars of history, so it may become again. By drawing on Bentham and Hobbes, Professor Dan Priel’s Toward Classical Positivism points forward toward more fruitful methods of jurisprudence while illuminating the recent history and current state of inquiry. His article demonstrates the virtues and promise of a more catholic approach to jurisprudence. It also raises challenging questions about the direction to take this …


The Place Of Force In General Jurisprudence, Jeffrey A. Pojanowski Jan 2015

The Place Of Force In General Jurisprudence, Jeffrey A. Pojanowski

Journal Articles

This essay reviews Frederick Schauer’s book, The Force of Law (2015). Schauer argues that coercion is central to legal practice and should be no less important in legal theory. In doing so, Schauer presents formidable challenges to standard versions of legal positivism—and does so from within the positivist framework. Much of Schauer’s criticism on that score is sound. His analysis of the role coercion can play in accomplishing law’s moral tasks is also welcome and important. Nevertheless, Schauer’s jurisprudential framework comes up short in its inability to distinguish law from other social practices that also use force. The Force of …


Private Law In The Gaps, Jeffrey A. Pojanowski Jan 2014

Private Law In The Gaps, Jeffrey A. Pojanowski

Journal Articles

Private law subjects like tort, contract, and property are traditionally taken to be at the core of the common law tradition, yet statutes increasingly intersect with these bodies of doctrine. This Article draws on recent work in private law theory and statutory interpretation to consider afresh what courts should do with private law in statutory gaps. In particular, it focuses on statutes touching on tort law, a field at the leading edge of private law theory. This Article's analysis unsettles some conventional wisdom about the intersection of private law and statutes. Many leading tort scholars and jurists embrace a regulatory …


What Is The Philosophy Of Law?, John Finnis Jan 2014

What Is The Philosophy Of Law?, John Finnis

Journal Articles

The philosophy of law is not separate from but dependent upon ethics and political philosophy, which it extends by that attention to the past (of sources, constitutions, contracts, acquired rights, etc.) which is characteristic of juridical thought for reasons articulated by the philosophy of law. Positivism is legitimate only as a thesis of, or topic within, natural law theory, which adequately incorporates it but remains transparently engaged with the ethical and political issues and challenges both perennial and peculiar to this age. The paper concludes by proposing a task for legal philosophy, in light of the fact that legal systems …


Memory And Punishment, O. Carter Snead Jan 2011

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, …


Science, Public Bioethics, And The Problem Of Integration, O. Carter Snead Jan 2010

Science, Public Bioethics, And The Problem Of Integration, O. Carter Snead

Journal Articles

Public bioethics — the governance of science, medicine, and biotechnology in the name of ethical goods — is an emerging area of American law. The field uniquely combines scientific knowledge, moral reasoning, and prudential judgments about democratic decision making. It has captured the attention of officials in every branch of government, as well as the American public itself. Public questions (such as those relating to the law of abortion, the federal funding of embryonic stem cell research, and the regulation of end-of-life decision making) continue to roil the public square.

This Article examines the question of how scientific methods and …


Stare Decisis As Judicial Doctrine, Randy J. Kozel Jan 2010

Stare Decisis As Judicial Doctrine, Randy J. Kozel

Journal Articles

Stare decisis has been called many things, among them a principle of policy, a series of prudential and pragmatic considerations, and simply the preferred course. Often overlooked is the fact that stare decisis is also a judicial doctrine, an analytical system used to guide the rules of decision for resolving concrete disputes that come before the courts.

This Article examines stare decisis as applied by the U.S. Supreme Court, our nation’s highest doctrinal authority. A review of the Court’s jurisprudence yields two principal lessons about the modern doctrine of stare decisis. First, the doctrine is comprised largely of malleable factors …


The Evangelical Debate Over Climate Change, John Copeland Nagle Jan 2008

The Evangelical Debate Over Climate Change, John Copeland Nagle

Journal Articles

In 2006, a group of prominent evangelicals issued a statement calling for a greater response to climate change. Soon thereafter, another group of prominent evangelicals responded with their own statement urging caution before taking any action against climate change. This division among evangelicals concerning climate change may be surprising for a community that is usually portrayed as homogenous and as indifferent or hostile toward environmental regulation. Yet there is an ongoing debate among evangelicals regarding the severity of climate change, its causes, and the appropriate response. Why? The answer to this question is important because of the increasing prominence of …


Neuroimaging And The "Complexity" Of Capital Punishment, O. Carter Snead Jan 2007

Neuroimaging And The "Complexity" Of Capital Punishment, O. Carter Snead

Journal Articles

The growing use of brain imaging technology to explore the causes of morally, socially, and legally relevant behavior is the subject of much discussion and controversy in both scholarly and popular circles. From the efforts of cognitive neuroscientists in the courtroom and the public square, the contours of a project to transform capital sentencing both in principle and in practice have emerged. In the short term, these scientists seek to play a role in the process of capital sentencing by serving as mitigation experts for defendants, invoking neuroimaging research on the roots of criminal violence to support their arguments. Over …


On Professors And Poor People - A Jurisprudential Memoir, Robert E. Rodes Jan 2007

On Professors And Poor People - A Jurisprudential Memoir, Robert E. Rodes

Journal Articles

This article describes the origin and sources of the author's jurisprudential doctrine, and his adoption of liberation theology as a way of reconciling Sociological Jurisprudence with the philosophy of history. It argues that the pursuit of justice is eschatologically validated even though its historical fruition is problematical. It goes on to discuss the working out in legal practice of the liberationists' call for a preferential option for the poor.


On The Historical School Of Jurisprudence, Robert E. Rodes Jan 2004

On The Historical School Of Jurisprudence, Robert E. Rodes

Journal Articles

Legal theory has tended to treat the Historical School as a poor relation, but it has important contributions to make. Developed in opposition to the one-size-fits-all form of natural law that eventuated in the Code Napoleon, it attributes law to a Volksgeist, the spirit of a people, as developed in the peculiar historical experience of that people. The original German proponents of the school had trouble explaining the reception of Roman law in Germany, but despite the importation of technical elements from without, a people's laws are in fact part of their culture and of their spiritual heritage as these …


Lawyers As Prophets, Thomas L. Shaffer Jan 2003

Lawyers As Prophets, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

Legal ethics is about injustice. My effort here is part of the broad, modern academic enterprise, and of the broad, modern professional enterprise now usually called professional responsibility. Both date from the Watergate scandal in the administration of President Richard M. Nixon, and the rejection, by legal academics and practicing lawyers, of the behavior of the President and other lawyers in that affair. Our modern enterprise, like the biblical Exodus, was born in outrage at the abuse of legal power.

In university law schools such as this one, legal ethics is now a discipline characterized by schools of thought on …


Legal Ethics And Jurisprudence From Within Religious Congregations, Thomas L. Shaffer Jan 2001

Legal Ethics And Jurisprudence From Within Religious Congregations, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

The Rabbis of the Talmud were a community for moral discernment—a community commissioned by God to interpret the Word of God. Their story is theology. Michael Scanlon, a modem Roman Catholic thinker, assumes such a theology and adds anthropology.

The Rabbis assume and Scanlon describes a community for ethical discernment. It is a perception—somewhat empirical, somewhat theological—that is important and neglected for lawyers in academic jurisprudence and in religious legal ethics. My argument here is that what lawyers should do about "ethical dilemmas" in professional practice can be discerned in the sort of community the Talmud describes, and Scanlon describes, …


Formalism And Realism In Commerce Clause Jurisprudence, Barry Cushman Jan 2000

Formalism And Realism In Commerce Clause Jurisprudence, Barry Cushman

Journal Articles

This Article attempts a reconceptualization of developments in Commerce Clause jurisprudence between the Civil War and World War II by identifying ways in which that jurisprudence was structurally related to and accordingly deeply influenced by the categories of substantive due process and dormant Commerce Clause doctrine. Antecedent dormant Commerce Clause jurisprudence set the terms within which Commerce Clause doctrine was worked out; coordinate developments in substantive due process doctrine set limits upon the scope of Commerce Clause formulations and thus played a critical and underappreciated role in maintaining the federal equilibrium. The subsequent erosion of those due process limitations vastly …


Whitehead's Metaphysics And The Law: A Dialogue, Jay Tidmarsh Jan 1998

Whitehead's Metaphysics And The Law: A Dialogue, Jay Tidmarsh

Journal Articles

The purposes of this Article are to explore the relationship between Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy and the nature of law, and to develop from that exploration a theory of "process jurisprudence." To some extent, this Article is a process of interpretation and imagination. Whitehead himself devoted little attention to the nature of law. Therefore, rather than attempting to declare definitively the implications of Whitehead's thought for the nature of law, this Article is structured in the form of a dialogue between "Whitehead" and a lawyer whom I have called "Chris." In Part II, as he discusses his system of …


The Christian Jurisprudence Of Robert E. Rodes Jr., Thomas L. Shaffer Jan 1998

The Christian Jurisprudence Of Robert E. Rodes Jr., Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

When I had the chance to leave law practice and become a fulltime law teacher, I turned, in the time-honored fashion, for advice from my law teachers. The most memorable and persistent of these—the most cheerful, too, and therefore the most hopeful—was Robert E. Rodes, Jr., then a young (36), transplanted New Yorker, Harvard law graduate, and Boston lawyer. He had already come to flourish, in the Aristotelian sense, in the Midwest—in a Catholic university known more for its football players than for its lawyers.

Rodes told me he had come to teaching and to Notre Dame because he wanted …


The Jurisprudence Of John Howard Yoder, Thomas L. Shaffer Jan 1998

The Jurisprudence Of John Howard Yoder, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

John Howard Yoder, prophet and theologian, died in his office at Notre Dame on December 30, 1997, the day after his seventieth birthday. Peter Steinfels's obituary in the New York Times of January 7, 1998, described my friend and colleague Yoder as "a Mennonite theologian whose writings on Christianity and politics had a major impact on contemporary Christian thinking about the church and social ethics." Steinfels did not describe Yoder's thought as jurisprudence; neither, for that matter, did Yoder. But there was (and is), throughout Yoder's scholarship, an implicit theology of law, a jurisprudence. A jurisprudence that is particularly noticeable …


Non-Representational Jurisprudence: A Centennial Reading Of "The Path Of The Law", Robert E. Rodes Jan 1997

Non-Representational Jurisprudence: A Centennial Reading Of "The Path Of The Law", Robert E. Rodes

Journal Articles

This paper analyzes particular passages in Holmes's famous lecture, and notes important inconsistencies and failings in his approach. After arguing strongly that moral considerations should not enter into legal judgments, he criticizes legal judgments in the light of moral considerations. After defining law as a prediction of what the courts will do, he seems to criticize courts for getting the law wrong in their decisions. His advice to learn the legal profession by studying law from the standpoint of a bad man leaves out of account the numerous potential clients who wish to be law abiding citizens and to seal …


Pilgrim Law, Robert E. Rodes Jan 1994

Pilgrim Law, Robert E. Rodes

Journal Articles

A people's laws are deeply imbedded in its culture. They embody its collective moral reflection, its common understanding of the terms on which human beings are to live together, its customs, its historical experience, and its aspirations for the future. It is perhaps to be expected that Americans should enshrine their constitutional documents, build courthouses like temples, deploy their laws with ruthless practicality, and not take kindly to the suggestion that their laws are less practical than they think. Or that Italians should maintain a legal system like an old palazzo, with imposing staircases you can lose you. breath climbing, …


Allocating Risks And Suffering: Some Hidden Traps, John M. Finnis Jan 1990

Allocating Risks And Suffering: Some Hidden Traps, John M. Finnis

Journal Articles

The economic analysis of which Adam Smith is a principal founder is helpful in practical reasoning about problems of justice precisely insofar as it systematically calls attention to the side-effects of individual choices and actions and behavior. Still, it would be a mistake to conclude that we need only a more adequate account of the benefits and burdens up for distribution or allocation by those responsible for the common good or general fate. We need also to bear in mind what Smith did not forget and what economics does not comprehend, the requirements of commutative justice. To see this, we …


Some Reasons For A Restoration Of Natural Law Jurisprudence, Charles E. Rice Jan 1989

Some Reasons For A Restoration Of Natural Law Jurisprudence, Charles E. Rice

Journal Articles

The growing influence of utilitarianism and legal positivism in American jurisprudence today and the decline of natural law have produced an ominous shift in the foundation of our legal system. This shift is illustrated by various courts' approaches to momentous legal issues of the Twentieth Century such as abortion and euthanasia. Ultimately, legal positivism is unacceptable as a jurisprudential framework because it provides no inherent limits on the power of the state and no basis for determining what is just. In contrast, the natural law provides a jurisprudential framework that both guides and limits the civil law. It therefore is …


On Reason And Authority In Law's Empire, John M. Finnis Jan 1987

On Reason And Authority In Law's Empire, John M. Finnis

Journal Articles

Law's Empire will shape jurisprudence by its admirably resourceful attention to understanding a community's law "internally". It promotes reflective understanding of the practical argumentation constitutive of the attitude(s) in which that law subsists. But the book neglects some of practical understanding's resources of political and moral theory, and overestimates practical reasoning's power to identify options as the best and the right)