Jurisprudence Commons^™

Reconceptualizing The Eighth Amendment: Slaves, Prisoners, And Cruel And Unusual Punishment, Alexander A. Reinert

Faculty Articles

The meaning of the Eighth Amendment’s Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause has long been hotly contested. For scholars and jurists who look to original meaning or intent, there is little direct contemporaneous evidence on which to rest any conclusion. For those who adopt a dynamic interpretive framework, the Supreme Court’s “evolving standards of decency” paradigm has surface appeal, but deep conflicts have arisen in application. This Article offers a contextual account of the Eighth Amendment’s meaning that addresses both of these interpretive frames by situating the Amendment in eighteenth and nineteenth-century legal standards governing relationships of subordination.

In particular, I …

Strategic And Tactical Totalization In The Totalitarian Epoch, Adam J. Macleod

Faculty Articles

This article examines the totalization of private law by public authorities. It compares and contrasts the fate of private law in totalitarian regimes with the role of private law in contemporary, non-totalitarian liberal democracies. It briefly examines the Socialist jurisprudence of the former Soviet Union and its treatment of private law. It offers an explanation why private law might be inimical to the jurisprudence of the Soviet Union and totalitarian regimes more generally. It next examines the totalization of law accomplished by segregationist regimes in the mid-twentieth century, comparing and contrasting those regimes with totalitarian regimes. Then it turns to …