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Articles 1 - 4 of 4
Full-Text Articles in Judges
Blackstone, Expositor And Censor Of Law Both Made And Found, Jessie Allen
Blackstone, Expositor And Censor Of Law Both Made And Found, Jessie Allen
Book Chapters
Jeremy Bentham famously insisted on the separation of law as it is and law as it should be, and criticized his contemporary William Blackstone for mixing up the two. According to Bentham, Blackstone costumes judicial invention as discovery, obscuring the way judges make new law while pretending to uncover preexisting legal meaning. Bentham’s critique of judicial phoniness persists to this day in claims that judges are “politicians in robes” who pick the outcome they desire and rationalize it with doctrinal sophistry. Such skeptical attacks are usually met with attempts to defend doctrinal interpretation as a partial or occasional limit on …
Lights Hidden Under Bushel's Case, Thomas A. Green
Lights Hidden Under Bushel's Case, Thomas A. Green
Book Chapters
Some forty years ago, Charlie Donahue created a course which he titled "Law, Morals and Society." Designed for undergraduates, and situated among the offerings of the University of Michigan's interdisciplinary Medieval and Renaissance Collegium, the course reflected the approach to doing history that, as this volume recognizes, Charlie has followed throughout his long and enormously influential career as scholar, teacher, lecturer, and inepressible master of well-timed interventions during conference-panel discussion periods. "LMS" was composed of four units. Charlie, who taught two of them, led off with the legal basis for the deposition of Richard II; I followed with the law …
Reading Blackstone In The Twenty-First Century And The Twenty-First Century Through Blackstone, Jessie Allen
Reading Blackstone In The Twenty-First Century And The Twenty-First Century Through Blackstone, Jessie Allen
Book Chapters
If the Supreme Court mythologizes Blackstone, it is equally true that Blackstone himself was engaged in something of a mythmaking project. Far from a neutral reporter, Blackstone has some stories to tell, in particular the story of the hero law. The problems associated with using the Commentaries as a transparent window on eighteenth-century American legal norms, however, do not make Blackstone’s text irrelevant today. The chapter concludes with my brief reading of the Commentaries as a critical mirror of some twenty-first-century legal and social structures. That analysis draws on a long-term project, in which I am making my way through …
Reining In The Supreme Court: Are Term Limits The Answer?, Arthur D. Hellman
Reining In The Supreme Court: Are Term Limits The Answer?, Arthur D. Hellman
Book Chapters
Once again, life tenure for Supreme Court Justices is under attack. The most prominent proposal for reform is to adopt a system of staggered non-renewable terms of 18 years, designed so that each President would have the opportunity to fill two vacancies during a four-year term. This book chapter, based on a presentation at a conference at Duke Law School, addresses the criticisms of life tenure and analyzes the likely consequences of moving to a system of 18-year staggered terms for Supreme Court Justices.
One of the main arguments for term limits is, in essence, that the Supreme Court should …