Law Commons^™

Why The Demands Of Formalism Will Prevent New Originalism From Furthering Conservative Political Goals, Daniel James Hornal

Daniel Hornal

Proponents of New Originalism propose that their modifications solve the indeterminacy and predictability problems inherent in early conceptions of originalism. This paper argues that excluding extrinsic evidence and relying only on the formal implications of the text merely switches one indeterminacy and predictability problem for another. Rules inherently carry implications unknown to rule writers. In the case of open-textured rules such as those in the Constitution, a broad reading can occupy whole fields of law, whereas a narrow reading can have almost no real-world effects. Because they must ignore extrinsic evidence, new originalists are almost unbound in their choice of …

Innocent Until Presumed Guilty: Verdicts, Habeas Corpus Law, And Newly Discovered Evidence, Richard A. Burton Jr

Richard A Burton Jr

It may seem uncontroversial that our law should prevent the execution of an innocent person. There are ‘constitutional safeguards’ in place that maintain this principle, but these safeguards apply to pre-convicted persons – those presumed innocent – through the avoidance of wrongful conviction. Once the conviction is handed down, the safeguards fundamentally change. This is equally true for the most troubling cases in which newly discovered evidence demonstrably proves the factual innocence of a defendant but is discovered post-conviction. Despite the available evidence, such persons do not enjoy constitutional safeguards that prohibit their execution based on their factual innocence. In …

Renegotiating The Social Contract, Jennifer S. Hendricks

College of Law Faculty Scholarship

This essay reviews Maxine Eichner's new book, "The Supportive State: Families, Government, and America's Political Ideals." It highlights Eichner's important theoretical contributions to both liberal political theory and feminist theory, applauding her success in reforming liberalism to account for dependency, vulnerability, and families. The essay then considers some implications of Eichner's proposals and their likely reception among feminists. It concludes that "The Supportive State" is a sound and inspiring response to recent calls that feminist theory move from being strictly a school of criticism to developing a theory of governance.

Variable Multipolarity And Un Security Council Reform, Bart M.J. Szewczyk

Bart M.J. Szewczyk

One of the fundamental international law questions over the past two decades, and an integral issue for US policy, has been the structure of the United Nations Security Council. In a world of variable multipolarity, whereby changing crises demand different combinations of actors with relevant resources and shared interests, the Council’s reform should be based not on expanded permanent membership—as mistakenly held by conventional wisdom—but on inclusive contextual participation in decision-making. The Council’s five permanent members continue to have collective resources relative to the rest of the world that are not significantly different than at the founding of the UN. …

Hermeneutics And Judicial Interpretation, Fernando Armando Ribeiro

fernando armando ribeiro

Modern hermeneutics teaches us that everything which is perceived and represented by human beings refers to a process of interpretation, and that the world comes to mind through language. Therefore, Law depends on the hermeneutic mediation. Without hermeneutics there is no law, only normative texts. This paper makes use of the philosophical hermeneutics by Gadamer to investigate the limits and possibilities of judicial interpretation. The paper explores the contribution of philosophical hermeneutics to a new model of rationality and how it can influence the application of Law, and not only legal theory. Therefore, we will examine some of the most …

Towards Classical Legal Positivism, Dan Priel

Dan Priel

Open almost any textbook or jurisprudence and you will find it beginning with a discussion of natural law and legal positivism. What sets them apart, we are told, is a difference on the conceptual question of the relationship between law and morality. Natural lawyers believe that law or legality are necessarily connected to morality, whereas legal positivists deny that. In this essay I challenge this fundamental understanding of the debate. The difference between legal positivism and natural law has to do with a way inquiries about law should be conducted: natural lawyers seek to understand law by relating it to …

The Distorted Reality Of Civil Recourse Theory, Alan Calnan

Alan Calnan

In their recent article Torts as Wrongs, Professors John C.P. Goldberg and Benjamin C. Zipursky offer their most complete and accessible explanation of the civil recourse theory (CRT) of tort law. A purely descriptive account, CRT holds that tort law is exclusively a scheme of private rights for the redress of legal wrongs and is not a pragmatic mechanism for imposing strict liability or implementing public policy. The present paper challenges this view by revealing critical errors in its perspective, methodology, and analysis. It shows that Goldberg and Zipursky do not objectively observe tort law and uncritically report what they …

Results-Oriented Jurisprudence: A Second Circuit Panel Meets J. D. Salinger Coming Through The Rye, Kathleen (Kate) M. O'Neill

Kathleen M. O'Neill

ABSTRACT The Second Circuit’s 2010 decision in Salinger v. Colting has been widely noticed for vacating a preliminary injunction J. D. Salinger obtained against distribution in the U.S. of Fredrik Colting’s novel, 60 YEARS LATER – COMING THROUGH THE RYE. In an opinion by Judge Guido Calabresi, the panel adopted the standard for equitable relief from eBay, Inc. v. MercExchange (U.S. 2006), overruled circuit precedent, and held that henceforth district courts must find, not presume, that irreparable harm is in fact likely before enjoining a copyright defendant’s activities. This is the first article to observe that what the Second Circuit …

Localizing Religion In A Jewish State, Yishai Blank Prof.

Yishai Blank

Cities in Israel are regulating religion and controlling religious liberty. They decide whether to close down roads during the Sabbath, whether to limit the selling of pork meat within their jurisdiction, whether to prohibit sex stores from opening, and whether to allocate budgets and lands to religious activities. They do all that by using their regular local powers as well as special enablement laws which the Israeli parliament enacts from time to time. The immediacy of these issues, the fact that the traditional powers—business licensing, traffic and road control, spending and more—of local authorities touch upon many of them, and …

Safeguarding The Safeguards: The Extension Of Structural Protection To Non-Fundamental Liberties, Abigail R. Moncrieff

Abigail R. Moncrieff

As the lawsuits challenging the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) have evolved, one feature of the litigation has proven especially rankling to the legal academy: the incorporation of substantive libertarian concerns into the structural federalism analysis. The breadth and depth of scholarly criticism is surprising, however, given that judges frequently choose indirect methods, including structural and process-based methods of the kinds at issue in the ACA litigation, for protecting substantive constitutional values. Indeed, indirection in the protection of constitutional liberties is a well-known and well-theorized strategy, which one scholar recently termed “semisubstantive review” and another recently theorized as …

Does 'Sorry' Incriminate? Evidence, Harm And The Meaning Of Apologies, Jeffrey S. Helmreich

Jeffrey S. Helmreich

Apology has proven a dramatically effective means of resolving conflict and preventing litigation. Still, many injurers, particularly physicians, withhold apologies because they have long been used as evidence of liability. Recently, a majority of states in the U.S. have passed “Apology Laws” designed to lift this disincentive, by shielding apologies from evidentiary use. However, most of the new laws protect only expressions of benevolence and sympathy (such as “I feel bad about what happened to you”). They exclude full apologies, which express regret, remorse or self-criticism (“I should have prevented it,” for example). The state measures thereby reinforce a prevailing …

(Dis)Owning Religious Speech, Jessie Hill

Jessie Hill

To claims of a right to equal citizenship, one of the primary responses has long been to assert the right of private property. It is therefore somewhat troubling that, in two recent cases involving public displays of religious symbolism, the Supreme Court embraced property law and rhetoric when faced with the claims of minority religious speakers for inclusion and equality. The first, Pleasant Grove City v. Summum, is a free speech case in which the defendant evaded a finding that it was discriminating against the plaintiff’s religious speech by claiming a government speech defense. In the process, it claimed as …

Popular Originalism? The Tea Party And Constitutional Theory, Rebecca Zietlow

Rebecca E Zietlow

The United States Constitution is currently the subject of a heated political debate. Tea Party activists have invoked the constitution as the foundation of their conservative political philosophy. These activists are engaged in “popular originalism,” using popular constitutionalism, constitutional interpretation outside of the courts, to invoke originalism as constitutional method. The Tea Party movement thus provides an excellent heuristic to explore the relationship between originalism and popular constitutionalism, two prominent trends in constitutional theory. Both originalists and popular constitutionalists study legal history to illuminate constitutional meaning, but the two schools of thought draw diverging lessons from that history. Originalists look …

New Custom: Customary Law As A Progressive Force In Contemporary International Law, Elizabeth Campbell

Elizabeth Campbell

This paper examines the emergence of a new form of customary international law and its use as a progressive law making tool in the field of international law. It discusses the definitional problems with the orthodox tests of customary law, state practice and opinio juris, and how these ambiguities have been exploited by States wishing support for a particular norm they feel should get customary law status. It is argued that through this laxity, customary international law has inadvertently provided a new forum for the development of progressive law. The paper begins with an examination of the difficulties in defining …

Safeguarding The Safeguards: The Aca Litigation And The Extension Of Structural Protection To Non-Fundamental Liberties, Abigail R. Moncrieff

Abigail R. Moncrieff

This article confronts and challenges an emerging scholarly consensus that criticizes the hybridization of substantive and structural arguments in the litigation over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA). Although there is no doubt that the ACA plaintiffs have requested and the ACA judges have provided a hybrid substantive-structural holding, there is nothing at all unusual about this indirect strategy for protecting constitutional liberty interests; it is a well-known and well-theorized strategy, which one scholar recently termed “semisubstantive review.” The article considers three possible distinctions between the ACA case and the ordinary case of semisubstantive review, and concludes that …

The Reality Of Eu-Conformity Review In France, Juscelino F. Colares

Juscelino F. Colares

French High Courts embraced review of national legislation for conformity with EU law in different stages and following distinct approaches to EU law supremacy. This article tests whether adherence to different views on EU law supremacy has resulted in different levels of EU directive enforcement by the French High Courts. After introducing the complex French systems of statutory, treaty and constitutional review, this study explains how EU-conformity review emerged among these systems and provides an empirical analysis refuting the anecdotal view that different EU supremacy theories produce substantial differences in conformity adjudication outcomes. These Courts' uniformly high rates of EU …

Using John Dewey's Pragmatist Epistemology To Teach Legal Analysis And Communication, David T. Ritchie

David T. Ritchie

In this article I discuss the epistemology of the American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, who maintained that there is a “common pattern or structure” of human reasoning. According to Dewey, we naturally employ pragmatic problem-solving. In his epistemological works Dewey frequently discussed legal reasoning as a paradigm example of this sort of problem-solving. I develop and explain Dewey’s pragmatist epistemology, and then relate it to how novices can benefit from understanding his account. I end the article by explaining how I use this account of human reasoning in my law school classes.

Chevron As A Doctrine Of Hard Cases, Frederick Liu

Frederick Liu

The conventional wisdom holds that the Chevron doctrine rests on a presumption about congressional intent—a presumption that when a statute is ambiguous, Congress intended the gap to be filled by the agency charged with administering the statute. But the presumption is a mere fiction; Congress generally has no view on whether ambiguities in a statute should be resolved by the agency or the court. This Article proposes a new theory of Chevron, one that rests on a simple reality: No matter how determinate the law may seem, there will inevitably be hard cases—cases in which the law runs out before …

Popular Originalism? The Tea Party And Constitutional Theory, Rebecca Zietlow

Rebecca E Zietlow

The United States Constitution is currently the subject of a heated political debate. Tea Party activists have invoked the constitution as the foundation of their conservative political philosophy. These activists are engaged in “popular originalism,” using popular constitutionalism, constitutional interpretation outside of the courts, to invoke originalism as constitutional method. The Tea Party movement thus provides an excellent heuristic to explore the relationship between originalism and popular constitutionalism, two prominent trends in constitutional theory. Both originalists and popular constitutionalists study legal history to illuminate constitutional meaning, but the two schools of thought draw diverging lessons from that history. Originalists look …

How Do Roles Generate Reasons? On The Methods Of Legal Ethics, Stephen Galoob

Stephen Galoob

Debates about legal ethics should be oriented around the generative problem, which asks two fundamental questions. First, how does the lawyer’s role generate normatively compelling reasons for action? Second, what kinds of reasons can this role generate?

Every substantive theory of legal ethics is based on a solution to the generative problem. On the generative problem method, we should evaluate these theories based on their implicit solutions to the generative problem. None of the main theories of legal ethics is based on a solution to the generative problem that is both structurally valid and empirically verified.

The generative problem method …

Puritanism, Godliness, And Political Development In Boston & The General Court (1630-1640), Peter Mazzacano

Peter Mazzacano

The goal of this article is to examine the degree to which Puritanism influenced early American political culture. That is, how did Puritan values and practices facilitate the development of an exceptional political culture during the formative years of Massachusetts Bay? Utilizing a case-study method of analysis, this article examines the political developments in the General Court and the town of Boston during the decade 1630 to 1640. The research methods used are primarily the writings of leading Puritans, and concomitant town, church, and colonial records. The main finding is that the Puritans paid little heed to notions of democracy, …

Rights-Based Theories Of Accident Law, Gregory J. Hall

All Faculty Scholarship

This article shows that extant rights-based theories of accident law contain a gaping hole. They inadequately address the following question: What justifies using community standards to assign accident costs in tort law?

In the United States, the jury determines negligence for accidental harm by asking whether the defendant met the objective reasonable person standard. However, what determines the content of the reasonable person standard is enigmatic. Some tort theorists say that the content is filled out by juries using cost benefit analysis while others say that juries apply community norms and conventions. I demonstrate that what is missing from this …

Originalism And The Aristotelian Tradition: Virtue’S Home In Originalism, Lee Strang

Lee J Strang

A concept fundamental to philosophy—virtue—is, with a few notable exceptions, absent from scholarship on constitutional interpretation generally, and originalism in particular. Furthermore, common perceptions of both virtue ethics and originalism have prevented exploration of how incorporating virtue ethics’ insights may make originalism a better theory of constitutional interpretation. This Article fills that void by explaining the many ways in which concepts from virtue ethics are compatible with an originalist theory of constitutional interpretation. More importantly, I show that originalism is more normatively attractive and descriptively accurate when it takes on board virtue ethics’ insights.

Originalism must articulate virtue’s role in …

Judicial Intervention As Risk Reduction, Juliet P. Kostritsky

Juliet P Kostritsky

JUDICIAL INTERVENTION AS RISK REDUCTION J. P. Kostritsky Employing an economics-based consequentialist approach to contract interpretation (focusing on the prospective effect and the factors that might justify intervention) this Article attempts to identify the precise parameters of an optimal framework for contract interpretation. Such a framework would seek to maximize gains from trade. The issue in such cases is always, given the words the parties used, what is the best (surplus maximizing) interpretation of the bargain. Courts can achieve that interpretation by, in part, minimizing the interpretive risk that parties face when they draft an express contract but fail to …

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Does Three Do The Trick In The Ninth? The Liberal Ninth Circuit – Myth Or Fact: How The Three Judge Panel, And A System Of Published And Unpublished Opinions Interact With Political Appointments In The Ninth Circuit, Rachel N. Agress

Rachel N. Agress

This article examines the persistent view that the Ninth Circuit is “overly liberal,” and attempts to evaluate this outlook in light of data collected regarding two variables. The first variable is the composition of individual political orientations of judges on the Ninth Circuit as compared to the political composition of other circuit courts. To achieve this comparison, this paper looks at political appointments and classified judges as “liberal” or “conservative,” based on political appointment by a Democratic or Republican president. Further, this article delineates the current percentage of “liberal” versus “conservative” judges in each circuit, comparing the average circuit court …

Public Wrongs And The ‘Criminal Law’S Business’: When Victims Won’T Share, Michelle Madden Dempsey

Working Paper Series

Amongst the many valuable contributions that Professor Antony Duff has made to criminal law theory is his account of what it means for a wrong to be public in character. In this chapter, I sketch an alternative way of thinking about criminalization, one which attempts to remain true to the important insights that illuminate Duff’s account, while providing (it is hoped) a more satisfying explanation of cases involving victims who reject the criminal law’s intervention.

Who Are Refugees?, Matthew Lister

Matthew J. Lister

Hundreds of millions of people around the world are unable to meet their needs on their own, and do not receive adequate protection or support from their home states. These people, if they are to be provided for, need assistance from the international community. If we are to meet our duties to these people, we must have ways of knowing who should be eligible for different forms of relief. One prominent proposal from scholars and activists has been to classify all who are unable to meet their basic needs on their own as "refugees," and to extend to them the …

The Second-Class Class Action: How Courts Thwart Wage Rights By Misapplying Class Action Rules, Scott A. Moss, Nantiya Ruan

Scott A Moss

Courts apply to wage rights cases an aggressive scrutiny that not only disadvantages low-wage workers, but is fundamentally incorrect on the law. Rule 23 class actions automatically cover all potential members if the court grants plaintiffs’ class certification motion. But for certain employment rights cases – mainly wage claims but also age discrimination and gender equal pay claims – 29 U.S.C. § 216(b) allows not class actions but “collective actions” covering just those opting in affirmatively. Courts in collective actions assume a gatekeeper role as they do in Rule 23 class action, disallowing many actions by requiring a certification motion …

Applying Constitutional Decision Rules Versus Invalidating Statutes In Toto: An Alternative To Rosenkranz’S Approach To Facial, As-Applied, And Overbreadth Adjudication, Misha Tseytlin, Scott Keller

Misha Tseytlin

Nicholas Rosenkranz has recently proposed a model of judicial review for dealing with facial and as-applied challenges. This model argues that “facial” challenges necessarily apply to suits against legislative actions and, where successful, lead to total invalidation of the statutory provision at issue; whereas “as-applied” challenges are as-executed challenges to executive conduct and can only lead to vindication of the litigant’s rights in the case at issue. This Article explains that there is a fundamental flaw in Rosenkranz’s approach—a flaw often repeated by other scholars and that has caused serious confusion among judges: the failure to differentiate between the object …