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Articles 1 - 6 of 6
Full-Text Articles in Jurisprudence
Problems With Authority, Amy J. Griffin
Problems With Authority, Amy J. Griffin
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Judicial decisionmaking rests on a foundation of unwritten rules—those that govern the weight of authority. Such rules, including the cornerstone principle of stare decisis, are created informally through the internal social practices of the judiciary. Despite the central role of such rules in judicial decisionmaking, we lack a good account of how they are created, revised, and enforced. There is something paradoxical and troubling about the notion that the rules of the game are determined by the players as they play the game according to those rules. Because weight-of-authority rules are largely informal and almost entirely unwritten, we don’t even …
“If Rules They Can Be Called”, Amy J. Griffin
“If Rules They Can Be Called”, Amy J. Griffin
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Who gets to decide what counts as law? The weight of authority in the U.S. legal system is governed almost entirely by unwritten rules—social norms that establish which sources have weight (and how much weight they have). In 2016, Bryan A. Garner and twelve judges published a treatise essentially codifying unwritten rules related to the operation of precedent. That book, The Law of Judicial Precedent, has itself become a source of authority (on legal authority), cited by judges across jurisdictions. In this essay, I question whether the judicial norms governing the operation of precedent are appropriately presented as definitive blackletter …
Cicero And Barack Obama: How To Unite The Republic Without Losing Your Head, Michael J. Cedrone
Cicero And Barack Obama: How To Unite The Republic Without Losing Your Head, Michael J. Cedrone
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
By turning to the works of Cicero and Barack Obama, we can find models of how to speak into crises in ways that foster unity. Cicero’s Catilinarian orations were delivered in 63 BCE, during his one-year term as consul—the highest elected official in the Roman Republic. Facing a conspiracy by certain noble Romans, Cicero delivered a series of four speeches that drove the chief conspirator out of Rome, turned public opinion against the conspirators, and convinced the Roman Senate to support the death penalty for conspirators who remained and were captured in Rome. The Fourth Catilinarian, in which Cicero advocates …
Toward A Jurisprudence Of The Civil Rights Acts, Robin West
Toward A Jurisprudence Of The Civil Rights Acts, Robin West
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
What is the nature of the “rights,” jurisprudentially, that the 1964 Civil Rights Act legally prescribed? And, more generally, what is a “civil right”? Today, lawyers tend to think of civil rights and particularly those that originated in the 1964 Act, as antidiscrimination rights: our “civil rights,” on this understanding, are our rights not to be discriminated against, by employers, schools, landlords, property vendors, hoteliers, restaurant owners, and providers of public transportation, no less than by states and state actors, on the basis of race, gender, ethnicity, age, sexuality or disability. Contemporary civil rights scholarship overwhelmingly reflects the same conception: …
Toward The Study Of The Legislated Constitution, Robin West
Toward The Study Of The Legislated Constitution, Robin West
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Law schools, both innovative and traditional, cutting edge and hidebound, demand and therefore teach tolerance, civil respect for those whose views and dreams differ from our own, a commitment to the equal dignity of all persons, an awareness of the individuality of each of us, and the challenges that those differences and that equality pose to the generalizing impulse in law. Likewise, law schools, virtually everywhere, convey or should convey a sensitivity to bare or naked human vulnerability, mortality, weakness, and need, and therefore a sense in students of the moral need of all of us for law’s protection, as …
A Critical Legal Studies Perspective On Contract Law And Practice, Girardeau A. Spann
A Critical Legal Studies Perspective On Contract Law And Practice, Girardeau A. Spann
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
The critical legal studies movement is often viewed as highly theoretical, characterized by impenetrable scholarship that makes frequent reference to the work of"famous dead Europeans." Indeed, the theoretical detachment of critical legal studies from real-world concerns has led some to speculate that the methodologies of the movement are so abstract and stylized that they could be used to deny the validity of distinctions that we commonly rely upon in everyday life-even something as basic as the distinction between up and down. Given the level of abstraction at which most critical legal studies analysis occurs, one might wonder why a critical …