Jurisprudence Commons^™

Why Paretians Can’T Prescribe: Preferences, Principles, And Imperatives In Law And Policy, Robert C. Hockett

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Recent years have witnessed two linked revivals in the legal academy. The first is renewed interest in articulating a normative “master principle” by which legal rules might be evaluated. The second is renewed interest in the prospect that a variant of Benthamite “utility” might serve as the requisite touchstone. One influential such variant now in circulation is what the Article calls “Paretian welfarism.”

This Article rejects Paretian welfarism and advocates an alternative it calls “fair welfare.” It does so because Paretian welfarism is inconsistent with ethical, social, and legal prescription, while fair welfare is what we have been groping for …

The Impossibility Of A Prescriptive Paretian, Robert C. Hockett

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Most normatively oriented economists appear to be “welfarist” and Paretian to one degree or another: They deem responsiveness to individual preferences, and satisfaction of one or more of the Pareto criteria, to be a desirable attribute of any social welfare function. I show that no strictly “welfarist” or Paretian social welfare function can be normatively prescriptive. Economists who prescribe must embrace at least one value apart from or additional to “welfarism” and Paretianism, and in fact will do best to dispense with Pareto entirely.

Education And Interrogation: Comparing Brown And Miranda, John H. Blume, Sheri Lynn Johnson, Ross Feldmann

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Although the Warren Court had its share of grand decisions, perhaps it should be known instead for its grand goals--particularly the goals of ending America's shameful history of segregation and of providing a broad array of constitutional rights to persons accused of committing crimes. Brown v. Board of Education and Miranda v. Arizona, the two most well-known decisions of the Warren Court (and possibly the two most well-known decisions in the history of the Supreme Court), best capture the Court's labor in the rocky fields of our nation's legal, political, and cultural life. In this Article, we explore certain parallels …

Natural Law Demythologized: A Functional Theory Of Norms For A Revolutionary Epoch, E. F. Roberts

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Jurisprudence can afford us some insight into whether a particular system is functioning effectively. To do this jurisprudes must extrapolate the aims of the society and then evaluate how effectively its legal system functions to structure social activity so that those aims are realized in an orderly fashion. Jurisprudence is seen, therefore, to be a form of time and motion study on a grand scale. Judgments about the ultimate worth of a given society’s aims are excluded from jurisprudence, however, on the ground that such emotionally charged and ethically relative conclusions cannot be proved by any empirically verifiable scale of …

Professor H.L.A. Hart's Concept Of Law, Robert S. Summers

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Law And Literature: The Contemporary Image Of The Lawyer, Henry B. Cushing, E. F. Roberts

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.