Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Keyword
-
- Jurisprudence (2)
- Pluralism (2)
- Administrative Law (1)
- Analytic jurisprudence (1)
- Analytic philosophy (1)
-
- Argumentative (1)
- Constitutional Law (1)
- Constructive (1)
- Contemporary Anglophone jurisprudence (1)
- Content governance (1)
- Content moderation (1)
- Contracts (1)
- Environmental Law (1)
- Evaluative (1)
- Experimental jurisprudence (1)
- Fiduciary obligations (1)
- Gay Rights Coalition (1)
- Gay rights (1)
- Global justice (1)
- Integrative (1)
- International law (1)
- International political morality (1)
- Interpretive (1)
- Judges (1)
- Jurisdiction (1)
- Law and Philosophy (1)
- Law and Society (1)
- Legal ethics (1)
- Legal interpretation (1)
- Legal theory and methodology (1)
Articles 1 - 11 of 11
Full-Text Articles in Jurisprudence
Jazz Improvisation And The Law: Constrained Choice, Sequence, And Strategic Movement Within Rules, William W. Buzbee
Jazz Improvisation And The Law: Constrained Choice, Sequence, And Strategic Movement Within Rules, William W. Buzbee
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
This Article argues that a richer understanding of the nature of law is possible through comparative, analogical examination of legal work and the art of jazz improvisation. This exploration illuminates a middle ground between rule of law aspirations emphasizing stability and determinate meanings and contrasting claims that the untenable alternative is pervasive discretionary or politicized law. In both the law and jazz improvisation settings, the work involves constraining rules, others’ unpredictable actions, and strategic choosing with attention to where a collective creation is going. One expects change and creativity in improvisation, but the many analogous characteristics of law illuminate why …
Ordinary Meaning And Ordinary People, Kevin Tobia, Brian G. Slocum, Victoria Frances Nourse
Ordinary Meaning And Ordinary People, Kevin Tobia, Brian G. Slocum, Victoria Frances Nourse
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
This Article considers the relationship between ordinary meaning and ordinary people in legal interpretation. Many jurists give interpretive weight to the law's ordinary meaning (i.e., general, nontechnical meaning). Modern textualists adopt a strong commitment to ordinary meaning and justify it by alluding to ordinary people: people understand law to communicate ordinary meanings. This Article begins from this textualist premise and empirically examines the meaning that legal texts communicate to the public. Five original empirical studies reveal that ordinary people consider genre carefully, and regularly take phrases in law to communicate technical legal meanings, not only ordinary ones. Building on the …
Infrastructuring The Digital Public Sphere, Julie E. Cohen
Infrastructuring The Digital Public Sphere, Julie E. Cohen
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
The idea of a "public sphere"--a shared, ideologically neutral domain where ideas and arguments may be shared, encountered, and contested--serves as a powerful imaginary in legal and policy discourse, informing both assumptions about how public communication works and ideals to which inevitably imperfect realities are compared. In debates about feasible and legally permissible content governance mechanisms for digital platforms, the public sphere ideal has counseled attention to questions of ownership and control rather than to other, arguably more pressing questions about systemic configuration. This essay interrogates such debates through the lens of infrastructure, with particular reference to the ways that …
International Law And Theories Of Global Justice, Steven Ratner, David Luban, Carmen Pavel, Jiewuh Song, James Stewart
International Law And Theories Of Global Justice, Steven Ratner, David Luban, Carmen Pavel, Jiewuh Song, James Stewart
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
International law informs, and is informed by, concerns for global justice. Yet the two fields that engage most with prescribing the normative structure of the world order – international law and the philosophy of global justice – have tended to work on parallel tracks. Many international lawyers, with their commitment to formal sources, regard considerations of substantive (and not merely procedural) justice as ultra vires for much of their work. Philosophers of global justice, in turn, tend to explore the moral commitments of international actors without grappling with the international legal doctrine or institutions. In recent years, however, both disciplines …
Philosophical Legal Ethics: An Affectionate History, David Luban, W. Bradley Wendel
Philosophical Legal Ethics: An Affectionate History, David Luban, W. Bradley Wendel
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
The modern subject of theoretical legal ethics began in the 1970s. This brief history distinguishes two waves of theoretical writing on legal ethics. The “First Wave” connects the subject to moral philosophy and focuses on conflicts between ordinary morality and lawyers’ role morality, while the “Second Wave” focuses instead on the role legal representation plays in maintaining and fostering a pluralist democracy. We trace the emergence of the First Wave to the larger social movements of the 1960s and 1970s; in the conclusion, we speculate about possible directions for a Third Wave of theoretical legal ethics, based in behavioral ethics, …
Law's Emotions, Robin West
Law's Emotions, Robin West
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
The emerging interdisciplinary field of “Law and Emotions” brings together scholars from law, psychology, classics, economics, literature and philosophy all of whom have a defining interest in law’s various relations to our emotions and to emotional life: they share a passion for law’s passions. They also share the critical premise, or assumption, that most legal scholars of at least the last half century, with a few exceptions, have mistakenly accorded too great of a role to reason, rationality, and the cool calculations of self interest, and have accorded too small a role to emotion, to the creation, the imagining, the …
What If Fiduciary Obligations Are Like Contractual Ones?, Gregory Klass
What If Fiduciary Obligations Are Like Contractual Ones?, Gregory Klass
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
This essay, to appear in Contract, Status, and Fiduciary Law (Miller & Gold, 2016), explores three ways fiduciary obligations might be like contractual ones: in the methods lawmakers use or should use to determine the content of the obligation; in the private voluntary acts that generate the obligation; and in the fact that the obligation is a default that parties have the power to alter. The thesis is that to the extent that these similarities exist, they are not especially revealing. Theorists who emphasize the similarities commonly treat contract law as a private power-conferring rule, then analogize the law of …
Pluralism And Its Perils: Navigating The Tension Between Gay Rights And Religious Expression, Nan D. Hunter
Pluralism And Its Perils: Navigating The Tension Between Gay Rights And Religious Expression, Nan D. Hunter
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
The conflict between gay equality claims and religious liberty claims permeates debates over marriage equality and LGBT civil rights. Using as its centerpiece a decision that forced Georgetown University to provide benefits for a gay student organization, this article examines both the doctrinal underpinnings of how courts resolve the tension between gay rights and religion and the principles of pluralism that are at stake.
The Georgetown case is rightly understood as an exemplar of judicial minimalism. This article argues that the values of learning things undecided, while real, may be outweighed by lost opportunities for advancing principles that also foster …
Time-Mindedness And Jurisprudence, David Luban
Time-Mindedness And Jurisprudence, David Luban
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Analytic jurisprudence often strikes outsiders as a discipline unto itself, unconnected with the problems that other legal scholarship investigates. Gerald Postema, in the article to which this paper responds, traces this “unsociability” to two narrowing defects in the project of analytic jurisprudence: (1) from Austin on, it has concerned itself largely with the analysis of professional concepts, without connecting that analysis with other disciplines that study law, nor with the history of jurisprudence itself, nor with general philosophy; (2) analytic jurisprudence studies only time-‐slice legal systems, rather than legal systems unfolding in history. He argues that a time-‐slice legal system …
The Legacy Of Ronald Dworkin (1931-2013): A Legal Theory And Methodology For Hedgehogs, Hercules, And One Right Answers, Imer Flores
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
In this paper the author addresses Ronald Dworkin’s work and assesses his legacy to legal, moral and political philosophy. And so, considers among its merits having developed an original legal theory with its distinctive methodology, which not only has transcended the Natural Law and Legal Positivism dichotomy, but also has reintegrated law into a branch of political morality and defended as a corollary the one right answer thesis. Hence, commences by identifying the dworkininan challenge; continues by introducing some basic definitions and distinctions between jurisprudence, legal philosophy (or philosophy of law) and legal theory (or theory of law), on the …
Virtues And Voices, Lawrence B. Solum
Virtues And Voices, Lawrence B. Solum
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
This essay explores two ideas that have recently played an important role in discourse about the American constitutional order. The first idea has emerged from the revival of civic republicanism. The republican revival has focused our attention on the classical conception of civic virtue. Our basic social arrangements ought to nourish a citizenry with the characteristics of mind and will that promote human flourishing. The second idea, expressed in critical race theory and feminist jurisprudence, is that we have an obligation as a society and as scholars to attend to excluded voices. The juxtaposition of these two themes offers an …