Law Commons^™

Somerset’S Case And Its Antecedents In Imperial Perspective, George Van Cleve

Faculty Articles

The article offers a look on the Somerset's Case that served as a milestone in the campaign to abolish slavery in Great Britain. The case become famous in the Anglo-American law of slavery, with its proceedings widely circulated in periodicals. However, historians have argued about what the ruling was and its effects. It has been known in English slavery law that courts prior to the case generally agreed that English law governed status, but also limited slavery, for slaves who came to England.

An Appreciation Of Professor Herbert Johnson: Introduction To Symposium Introduction, Andrew Siegel

Faculty Articles

On October 29, 2004, the American Society for Legal History (ASLH) held a panel at its annual scholarly conference in Austin, Texas, entitled “Herbert Johnson and the Writing of American Constitutional History." The Herbert Johnson of that title is Herbert Alan Johnson, for twenty-five years a Professor of Law and History at the University of South Carolina and, since 2002, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Law. That ASLH panel and the papers that flowed from it are the inspiration for—and in large part, the substance of—the Symposium that follows. To write a tribute to the life's work of a living individual …

Article 9 Of The Constitution Of Japan And Procedural And Substantive Heuristics For Consensus, Mark A. Chinen

Faculty Articles

Japan is considering changes to its constitution, including Article 9, which prohibits it from maintaining a military force. If amendments are made, it would mark the first time the Japanese constitution has been amended since its establishment in 1947. Professor Chinen examines the debates on Article 9 using scholarship on constitutions as providing heuristics for decision-making. Constitutions help overcome the problems of emotion and time-inconsistency. They also enable societies of different deliberative groups to avoid the pitfalls of deliberation by requiring groups to interact with one another and by providing opportunities for compromise through what Cass Sunstein refers to as …

Trade Liberalization, Food Security And The Environment: The Neoliberal Threat To Sustainable Rural Development, Carmen G. Gonzalez

Faculty Articles

This article examines the historic and contemporary roots of chronic malnutrition and environmental degradation in the developing world. It chronicles the patterns of trade and production that contribute to this problem from the colonial period until the present, and analyzes the role of contemporary trade, aid and development practices in ameliorating or exacerbating the problem. The article argues that the neoliberal economic reforms imposed on developing countries through the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (WTO) exacerbate hunger and environmental degradation by reinforcing pre-existing inequities in the global trading system that relegate many developing …

After Intersectionality, Robert S. Chang, Jerome Culp

Faculty Articles

This essay is part of a symposium that looks at what Peter Kwan has described as post-intersectionality theory. It responds to the principal article in the symposium by Nancy Ehrenreich, Subordination and Symbiosis: Mechanisms of Mutual Support Between Subordinating Systems. While the authors applaud the effort by Ehrenreich to advance identity theory to account for multiple oppression, they suggest that Ehrenreich and other post-intersectionality scholars work to make these theories speak more directly to legal doctrine and legal actors.

Seekin’ The Cause: Social Justice Movements And Latcrit Community, Steven W. Bender, Keith Aoki

Faculty Articles

LatCrit VII, held May 2-5, 2002, in Portland, Oregon, adopted the theme Coalitional Theory and Praxis: Social Justice Movements and LatCrit Community. The conference's opening roundtable set an activist tone by centering within LatCrit discourse several progressive movements for sociopolitical transformation existing in academia and beyond. This article embraces the conference theme as an opportunity to examine and compare the LatCrit scholarly movement with those beyond academia, particularly current and past sociopolitical movements originating in Latina/o communities.

Imperatives, Normativity, And The Law, Gregory Silverman

Faculty Articles

In this article Professor Silverman sets out to resolve the problem of legal normativity. Professor Silverman argues that legal scholars have been prevented from transcending the limited conception of law engendered by a key dogma of nineteenth century jurisprudence: the dogma that laws are a species of commands, orders, or imperatives. As a result, even as we enter the twenty-first century, legal scholars have yet to articulate a legal architectonic that properly situates the normative commitments of a society within a post-modern legal system. An adequate theory of law must offer an account of the normativity of law: an account …

Full Faith And Credit And The Equity Conflict, Polly J. Price

Faculty Articles

As this Article relates, the current problem with interstate en­forcement of injunctions and other equitable decrees is illustrated by the Court's confusion in Baker. The Court reached the correct result in the case before it, but the basic problems of "equity con­flict" remain unresolved. Both the Court's opinion and the two con­currences were unsatisfactory because the Court failed to address the key underlying issue of whether or to what extent courts may rely on state law to enjoin extraterritorial conduct. Had the Court focused on this issue, I argue, it could have based its decision upon a more appealing rationale. …

Term Limits On Original Intent--An Essay On Legal Debate And Historical Understanding, Polly J. Price

Faculty Articles

This Essay is divided into five Parts. Part I sets the stage for the historical debate by evaluating the text of the Qualifications Clauses as well as the limited evidence of what the Framers and the ratifiers thought about these provisions. Part II shows that many states, immediately after the federal Constitution was ratified, behaved as though the Qualifications Clauses did not prevent them from adding qualifications for congressional office-holding. Part III compares this early evidence of state behavior with a debate in Congress after the Civil War concerning the meaning of the Qualifications Clauses. Part IV returns to the …

Passion And The Asian American Legal Scholar, Robert S. Chang

Faculty Articles

Professor Chang discusses what it means to be Asian American, and the strength and vibrancy of the various Asian immigrant groups as they struggled to make a home in the United States. He examines this ongoing struggle, and explores how it is through this struggle that they have become and are becoming Asian Americans.

A Short History Of Hearsay Reform, With Particular Reference To Hoffman V. Palmer, Eddie Morgan And Jerry Frank, Michael S. Ariens

Faculty Articles

Much of the history of the American law of evidence, including its most contentious issue, hearsay, is the story of stasis and reform. The case of Hoffman v. Palmer represents one of few cases concerning hearsay known by name, and illustrates that “false” evidence has often been used to caution against efforts proclaiming “radical reform” of the law of evidence.

In this case involving a collision between a car and a train, the critical question was: Is the defendant railroad permitted to introduce into evidence the transcript of a question and answer session made two days after the accident between …

Progress Is Our Only Product: Legal Reform And The Codification Of Evidence, Michael S. Ariens

Faculty Articles

Twentieth century reform of the American law of evidence was initially premised on the ideals of legal progressivism, ideals splintered by American legal realism. In preparing the American Law Institute's Model Code of Evidence from 1939 to 1942, Harvard Law School professor Edmund M. Morgan attempted to reconstitute the framework of reform in light of the challenge of legal realism. The Model Code was based on granting greater discretion to the trial judge and changing the goals of the trial from a search for truth to a "rational" resolution of disputes.

Morgan’s decision to emphasize the rational resolution of disputes …

The Law Of Evidence And The Idea Of Progress, Michael S. Ariens

Faculty Articles

To ask the question, “Does evidence law matter?,” is often to assume that some sets or groups of people believe it is important while others are challenging that view. However, another assumption regarding the nature of this question is possible—that the question is asked because legal academics believe that evidence law both does and does not matter, and that those academics also believe that these are irreconcilable beliefs. What is of particular interest is how legal academics reached this point and why they believe that evidence law both does and does not matter.

Consideration of these aspects of evidence law …

Speaking Of Rights, Janet Ainsworth

Faculty Articles

Professor Janet Ainsworth reviews Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse, by Mary Ann Glendon. The thesis of Mary Ann Glendon's book is a provocative one: that the way in which Americans talk about rights is dangerous to our political and social well-being as a nation. Professor Ainsworth explores the specifics of rights discourse that Glendon describes, and provides a thorough critique of Rights Talk.

On The Road Of Good Intentions: Justice Brennan And The Religion Clauses, Michael S. Ariens

Faculty Articles

Associate Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan took the oath of office on October 16, 1956. At the time of Justice Brennan’s appointment to the Supreme Court, the Court had decided only a few cases involving the religion clauses of the first amendment, and judicial interpretation of the religion clauses had been sparing.

In the thirty-four years of Justice Brennan’s tenure, the Court worked several revolutions in religion clause jurisprudence—revolutions guided by a sense of the needs of a changing society. Justice Brennan was one of several architects of a new order in establishment clause interpretation, and was the architect …

How To Govern A City On A Hill: The Early Puritan Contribution To American Constitutionalism, John Witte Jr.

Faculty Articles

This Article explores briefly the constitutional ideas and institutions of seventeenth-century Puritan New England. It analyzes the constitutional ideas that the Puritans derived from their theological doctrines of covenant, church and state, and sin, and it examines the forms and functions of political and ecclesiastical government they devised in implementation of these ideas.

Farewell To The Sea Of Doubt: Jettisoning The Constitutional Sherman Act, Thomas C. Arthur

Faculty Articles

This Article proceeds as follows. Part I examines the legislative history of the Sherman Act to discover the policy choices actually made by the 1890 Congress. Part II sketches the development, operation and social costs of the conventional "constitutional" approach which now dominates section 1 adjudication. This Part demonstrates how the Supreme Court's failure to establish a workable methodology for resolving hard cases in the first Sherman Act decisions enabled it later to create the myth that the 1890 Congress made no hard policy choices. It then shows that the lack of a recognized statutory standard inevitably leads to doctrinal …

Dualistic Legal Phenomena And The Limitations Of Positivism, Gregory Silverman

Faculty Articles

Often, in a case of first instance, a judge will reach a decision by an appeal to legal principles. For example, in the 1889 case of Riggs v. Palmer a New York court had to decide whether a grandson who had murdered his grandfather could inherit under the will in which his grandfather had named him an heir. The statutes and rules of testamentary law did not prohibit the inheritance. The court, however, invoked the legal principle that no one should be permitted to profit by his own wrong and denied the claim to inheritance. The use of such principles …