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Full-Text Articles in Jurisprudence
Court Review: Volume 39, Issue 3 - Trial By Metaphor: Rhetoric, Innovation, And The Juridical Text, Benjamin L. Berger
Court Review: Volume 39, Issue 3 - Trial By Metaphor: Rhetoric, Innovation, And The Juridical Text, Benjamin L. Berger
Benjamin L. Berger
The judicial decision-making process is not one for which resolution arises from counting, measuring, or weighing. Rather, the courtroom is a field for debate about the interpretation and application of values as embodied in or reflected by the law. Decisions reached in court are judgments and not mathematical conclusions in that the inherently contestable nature of the issues at stake precludes an outcome that is selfevident to all. As such, although there is an element of factfinding that emerges in a judicial opinion, there is also always a subjective valuation of the principles at stake; to draw on Socrates, there …
Law’S Religion: Religious Difference And The Claims Of Constitutionalism, Benjamin Berger
Law’S Religion: Religious Difference And The Claims Of Constitutionalism, Benjamin Berger
Benjamin L. Berger
Prevailing stories about law and religion place great faith in the capacity of legal multiculturalism, rights-based toleration, and conceptions of the secular to manage issues raised by religious difference. Yet the relationship between law and religion consistently proves more fraught than such accounts suggest. In Law’s Religion, Benjamin L. Berger knocks law from its perch above culture, arguing that liberal constitutionalism is an aspect of, not an answer to, the challenges of cultural pluralism. Berger urges an approach to the study of law and religion that focuses on the experience of law as a potent cultural force. Based on a …
Wrestling With Punishment: The Role Of The Bc Court Of Appeal In The Law Of Sentencing, Benjamin Berger, Gerry Ferguson
Wrestling With Punishment: The Role Of The Bc Court Of Appeal In The Law Of Sentencing, Benjamin Berger, Gerry Ferguson
Benjamin L. Berger
This article, one in a collection of articles on the history and jurisprudential contributions of the British Columbia Court of Appeal on the occasion of its 100th anniversary, looks at the role and the work of the court in the area of sentencing since the court was first given jurisdiction to hear sentence appeals in 1921. In the three broad periods that we canvass, we draw out the sometimes surprising, often unique, and frequently provocative ways in which the BCCA has, over its history, wrestled with the practice of criminal punishment and, with it, the basic assumptions of our system …