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Full-Text Articles in Jurisprudence
The Means Principle, Larry Alexander
The Means Principle, Larry Alexander
Faculty Scholarship
Michael Moore believes there are deontological constraints on actors’ pursuit of good consequences. He believes these constraints are best conceived of as agent-relative prohibitions such as “you must not intentionally kill, batter, rape, steal, etc.” I, joined in recent years by Kimberly Ferzan, believe that the best interpretation of deontological constraints — the interpretation that best accounts for our intuitions about certain stock cases — is that they are constraints on the causal means by which good consequences may be achieved. We believe those constraints can be unified under a single deontological principle, what we call the “means principle.” It …
"Is That English You're Speaking?" Why Intention Free Interpretation Is An Impossibility, Larry Alexander, Saikrishna Prakash
"Is That English You're Speaking?" Why Intention Free Interpretation Is An Impossibility, Larry Alexander, Saikrishna Prakash
San Diego Law Review
"Textualism" is a very general and abstract term that represents a variety of views about the interpretation of legal texts. One strand of textualism is conceptual and descriptive; this strand makes claims about what texts actually mean. Another strand of textualism is normative; this strand makes claims about how judges ought to proceed when they interpret particular kinds of legal texts, such as constitutions and statutes. In the first part of this paper, we are particularly concerned with an especially strong form of conceptual textualism - the position that texts can be interpreted without any reference, express or implied, to …