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Full-Text Articles in Law
Majestic Law And The Subjective Stop, Kyron J. Huigens
Majestic Law And The Subjective Stop, Kyron J. Huigens
Articles
Justice John Paul Stevens subscribed to "a majestic conception" of the Constitution. This Article articulates and defends that vision. Majestic law and legal reasoning characteristically involve frank moral reasoning, such as one finds in the Eighth Amendment's "evolving standards of decency" test for proportionate punishment, or in Due Process formulations such as an appeal to "immutable principles of justice, which inhere in the very idea of free government." Majestic law employs moral values, norms, and judgments in legal reasoning, taking them on their own terms. Majestic legal reasoning does not weigh revealed preferences for decency, for example. It asks whether …
Doctrinal Reasoning As A Disruptive Practice, Jessie Allen
Doctrinal Reasoning As A Disruptive Practice, Jessie Allen
Articles
Legal doctrine is generally thought to contribute to legal decision making only to the extent it determines substantive results. Yet in many cases, the available authorities are indeterminate. I propose a different model for how doctrinal reasoning might contribute to judicial decisions. Drawing on performance theory and psychological studies of readers, I argue that judges’ engagement with formal legal doctrine might have self-disrupting effects like those performers experience when they adopt uncharacteristic behaviors. Such disruptive effects would not explain how judges ultimately select, or should select, legal results. But they might help legal decision makers to set aside subjective biases.
Empirical Doctrine, Jessie Allen
Empirical Doctrine, Jessie Allen
Articles
We can observe and measure how legal decision makers use formal legal authorities, but there is no way to empirically test the determinative capacity of legal doctrine itself. Yet, discussions of empirical studies of judicial behavior sometimes conflate judges’ attention to legal rules with legal rules determining outcomes. Doctrinal determinacy is not the same thing as legal predictability. The extent to which legal outcomes are predictable in given contexts is surely testable empirically. But the idea that doctrine’s capacity to produce or limit those outcomes can be measured empirically is fundamentally misguided. The problem is that to measure doctrinal determinacy, …
The Persistence Of Proximate Cause: How Legal Doctrine Thrives On Skepticism, Jessie Allen
The Persistence Of Proximate Cause: How Legal Doctrine Thrives On Skepticism, Jessie Allen
Articles
This Article starts with a puzzle: Why is the doctrinal approach to “proximate cause” so resilient despite longstanding criticism? Proximate cause is a particularly extreme example of doctrine that limps along despite near universal consensus that it cannot actually determine legal outcomes. Why doesn’t that widely recognized indeterminacy disable proximate cause as a decision-making device? To address this puzzle, I pick up a cue from the legal realists, a group of skeptical lawyers, law professors, and judges, who, in the 1920s and 1930s, compared legal doctrine to ritual magic. I take that comparison seriously, perhaps more seriously, and definitely in …