Jurisprudence Commons^™

Reading Poets, Joseph P. Tomain

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Lawrence Joseph, the poet, has been the subject of a symposium published by the University of Cincinnati Law Review. Lawrence Joseph, the nonfiction novelist, has been similarly honored by the Columbia Law Review. With the publication of The Game Changed, his work should be so recognized and he should be given scholarly attention as a critic/essayist. Joseph the lawyer/poet/scholar has developed a jurisprudence of his own. Joseph’s jurisprudence, however (and to the good), cannot be reduced to a single word like originalism, or even a label like liberal democratic (though he may be in fact). Rather, the resultant jurisprudence refracts …

Statutory Proximate Cause, Sandra F. Sperino

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Federal statutes often use general causal language to describe how an actor’s conduct must be connected to harm for liability to attach. For example, a statute might state that harm must be “because of” certain conduct. Federal courts have recently relied on this general causal language and other arguments to apply the common law idea of proximate cause to several federal statutes.

While legal scholarship has explored the relationship between statutes and the common law generally, it has not considered whether particular common law doctrines are especially problematic in the statutory context. This Article argues that using proximate cause in …