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Full-Text Articles in Jurisprudence
The Priority Of Respect: How Our Common Humanity Can Ground Our Individual Dignity, Richard Stith
The Priority Of Respect: How Our Common Humanity Can Ground Our Individual Dignity, Richard Stith
Law Faculty Publications
In this essay, we notice that the priority of persons, the unbridgeable political gap between persons and mere things, corresponds to a special sort of moral and legal treatment for persons, namely, as irreplaceable individuals. Normative language that conflates the category of person with fungible kinds of being can thus appear to justify destroying and replacing human beings, just as we do with things. Lethal consequences may result, for example, from a common but improper extension of the word “value” to persons. The attitude and act called “respect” brings forth much more adequately than “value” the distinctively individual priority of …
Will There Be A Science Of Law In The Twenty-First Century?, Richard Stith
Will There Be A Science Of Law In The Twenty-First Century?, Richard Stith
Law Faculty Publications
The skepticism of the American Legal Realists and their heirs threatens to make a politically neutral science of law impossible and thus to undermine the liberal polity which needs such a science. Ronald Dworkin attempts to refute the skeptics and defend both legal theory and liberalism. However, the author points out, Dworkin and liberalism are themselves skeptics when it comes to moral principles, and, therefore, they cannot wholly escape from similar skepticism with regard to legal principles. Both Anglo-American and Continental legal history are examined in the course of these arguments.