Jurisprudence Commons^™

Fourth Amendment Accommodations: (Un)Compelling Public Needs, Balancing Acts, And The Fiction Of Consent, Guy-Uriel Charles

Faculty Scholarship

The problems of public housing-including crime, drugs, and gun violence- have received an enormous amount of national attention. Much attention has also focused on warrantless searches and consent searches as solutions to these problems. This Note addresses the constitutionality of these proposals and asserts that if the Supreme Court's current Fourth Amendment jurisprudence is taken to its logical extremes, warrantless searches in public housing can be found constitutional. The author argues, however, that such an interpretation fails to strike the proper balance between public need and privacy in the public housing context. The Note concludes by proposing alternative consent-based regimes …

Holmes's Path, David J. Seipp

Faculty Scholarship

The most important event in American legal history to have taken place at Boston University School of Law was the delivery, by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., of a speech entitled The Path of the Law.' He was an Associate Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court at the time. The occasion was the dedication of a new building for the School of Law, a building the school would occupy for sixty-seven years. Holmes delivered the speech on January 8, 1897, one hundred years ago.

What Law Is Like, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

It is not easy to do philosophy in the tradition of Wittgenstein and Malcolm. The human mind gravitates toward authority – the Bible, great teachers, poets, gurus, even judges. Lawyers, in particular, are captives of authoritive constitutions, statutes, cases, and ruling doctrines. We cannot make a move without citing a source as a backup.

Perhaps this is the way it should be, for as lawyers or legal theorists, we speak in a particular legal culture and tradition. We cultivate that tradition, even as we dissent and subject it to criticism. The tradition is defined by the authorities that have shaped …

"Prescriptive Equality": Two Steps Forward, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

In this Response to Professor Peters, Professor Greenawalt argues that prescriptive equality does have meaningful normative force. Prescriptive equality plays a reinforcing role when it agrees with nonegalitarian justice and is not incoherent when it pulls against nonegalitarian justice. Specifically, when one individual has been treated better than is required by nonegalitarian justice, a similarly situated and significantly related individual who is aware of that treatment may merit equivalent treatment because of widespread and deep-seated feelings about equality.