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Full-Text Articles in Jurisprudence
Finding Law, Stephen E. Sachs
Finding Law, Stephen E. Sachs
Faculty Scholarship
That the judge's task is to find the law, not to make it, was once a commonplace of our legal culture. Today, decades after Erie, the idea of a common law discovered by judges is commonly dismissed -- as a "fallacy," an "illusion," a "brooding omnipresence in the sky." That dismissive view is wrong. Expecting judges to find unwritten law is no childish fiction of the benighted past, but a real and plausible option for a modern legal system.
This Essay seeks to restore the respectability of finding law, in part by responding to two criticisms made by Erie and …
The Law Of Interpretation, William Baude, Stephen E. Sachs
The Law Of Interpretation, William Baude, Stephen E. Sachs
Faculty Scholarship
How should we interpret legal instruments? How do we identify the law they create? Current approaches largely fall into two broad camps. The standard picture of interpretation is focused on language, using various linguistic conventions to discover a document's meaning or a drafter's intent. Those who see language as less determinate take a more skeptical view, urging judges to make interpretive choices on policy grounds. Yet both approaches neglect the most important resource available: the already applicable rules of law.
Legal interpretation is neither a subfield of linguistics nor an exercise in policymaking. Rather, it is deeply shaped by preexisting …
Book Review, Michael E. Tigar