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Full-Text Articles in Fourteenth Amendment
Constitution Day Lecture: Constitutional Law And Tort Law: Injury, Race, Gender, And Equal Protection, Jennifer B. Wriggins
Constitution Day Lecture: Constitutional Law And Tort Law: Injury, Race, Gender, And Equal Protection, Jennifer B. Wriggins
Maine Law Review
The focus of today’s annual Constitution Day lecture at the University of Maine School of Law is on the Fourteenth Amendment and specifically how the Equal Protection Clause relates to tort law. First, I will talk about the Equal Protection Clause in general—what it says, and some of what it has been held to mean—particularly where government makes distinctions based on race and gender. Second, I will discuss two historical tort cases that violate equal protection on the basis of race. In doing so, I uncover the racial history of tort law that has been hidden in plain sight. I …
Reason And Reasonableness: The Necessary Diversity Of The Common Law, Frederic G. Sourgens
Reason And Reasonableness: The Necessary Diversity Of The Common Law, Frederic G. Sourgens
Maine Law Review
This Article addresses the central concept of “reasonableness” in the common law and constitutional jurisprudence. On the basis of three examples, the common law of torts, the common law of contracts, and Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, the Article notes that different areas of the law follow fundamentally inconsistent utilitarian, pragmatic, and formalist reasonableness paradigms. The significance of this diversity of reasonableness paradigms remains largely under-theorized. This Article submits that the diversity of reasonableness paradigms is a necessary feature of the common law. It theorizes that the utilitarian, pragmatic and formalistic paradigms are structural elements driving the common law norm-generation process. This …