Jurisprudence Commons^™

Standing On The Edge: Standing Doctrine And The Injury Requirement At The Borders Of Establishment Clause Jurisprudence, Mary A. Myers

Vanderbilt Law Review

The very first line of the Bill of Rights provides that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." This line, the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, was motivated by the history of religious persecution that drove thousands of adherents of minority faiths in Europe to the New World to seek refuge to practice their own faith, free from the compulsion of state-established religion. The Establishment Clause remains relevant today, and the U.S. Supreme Court has been active in hearing cases involving it. For purposes of determining standing-that is, whether an individual or organization meets certain constitutional …

Damaged Goods: Why, In Light Of The Supreme Court's Recent Punitive Damages Jurisprudence, Congress Must Amend The Federal Rules Of Evidence, Michael S. Vitale

Vanderbilt Law Review

Since the 1980s, a wide range of courts and commentators have expressed concern over large punitive damages awards handed out by civil juries against a wide array of tortfeasors. A late 2001 study revealed that from 1985 to 2001, eight multi-billion dollar punitive damages awards were granted, with four of them being handed down in the years 1999 to 2001 alone.' Not surprisingly, all but one of these verdicts were handed down against large corporations. Among the current members of the U.S. Supreme Court, Justice John Paul Stevens in particular has regularly noted the especially dangerous tendency the current punitive …

Reciprocity, Utility, And The Law Of Aggression, Anita Bernstein

Vanderbilt Law Review

The themes of incursion and boundary-crossing unite disparate legal domains. Wherever human beings cross paths and share space, law or law-like traditions develop to regulate this terrain by distinguishing permitted from proscribed intrusion.' Crimes and torts, regulation and liability, claims and defenses to claims, private law and public law all use a variety of measures--punishments, administrative rules, equitable remedies, professional discipline, and informal or extralegal sanctions-to condemn undue aggression. Concern about aggression may be found in the law of every jurisdiction in the United States.

Within American law, an extra increment of aggression can amount to the only difference between …

Jural Districting: Selecting Impartial Juries Through Community Representation, Kim Forde-Mazrui

Vanderbilt Law Review

Court reformers continue to debate over efforts to select juries more diverse than are typically achieved through existing procedures. Controversial proposals advocate race-conscious methods for selecting diverse juries. Such efforts, however well-intentioned, face constitutional difficulties under the Equal Protection Clause, which appears to preclude any use of race in selecting juries. The challenge thus presented by the Court's equal protection jurisprudence is whether jury selection procedures can be designed that effectively enhance the representative character of juries without violating constitutional norms.

Professor Forde-Mazrui offers a novel insight for resolving this challenge. Analogizing juries to legislatures, he applies electoral districting principles …

Formal Neutrality In The Warren And Rehnquist Courts: Illusions Of Similarity, Rebecca L. Brown

Vanderbilt Law Review

I read recently that if one compares the genetic structure of humans to that of dogs, one finds that ninety-six percent of the DNA in the two species is identical. That is a lot of common ground. Yet it may not be enough to draw meaningful conclusions about the sameness of the two creatures. Without suggesting that either of the two Courts discussed in her Article is a "dog," I do think it is fair to say that Professor Sherry has perhaps underestimated the relative importance of the divergent four percent.

Professor Sherry argues that in the defining areas of …

Judgment, Philippe Nonet

Vanderbilt Law Review

To judge, in Latin judicare, is to say the law, jus dicere, whence juris-dictio.

The above sentence is a possible answer to the question: what is judging? It spells out what the word "to judge" says, by recalling the history from which the word originates. Why would anyone ask this question? How helpful is such an answer?

Everyone knows what it is to judge. Only on the ground of such self-evidence could there be that unabating debate on the ' justification" of particular judgments, which is the day to day business of lawyering. Only because the question can be passed …

Rereading "The Federal Courts": Revising The Domain Of Federal Courts Jurisprudence At The End Of The Twentieth Century, Judith Resnik

Vanderbilt Law Review

A first enterprise in understanding and reframing Federal Courts jurisprudence is to locate, descriptively, "the Federal Courts." This activity-identifying the topic-may seem too obvious for comment, but I hope to show its utility. One must start with a bit of history, going back to the "beginning" of this body of jurisprudence. The relevant date is 1928, when Felix Frankfurter and James Landis, who began this conversation, published their book, The Business of the Supreme Court: A Study in the Federal Judicial System. Three years later, in 1931, Felix Frankfurter, then joined by Wilber G. Katz (and later by Harry Shulman), …

The Jurisprudence Of Genetics, Rochelle C. Dreyfuss, Dorothy Nelkin

Vanderbilt Law Review

In recent years, genetic research has ascended the list of national research priorities. From among the many weighty claims on the fisc, Congress has chosen to provide significant federal support for the Human Genome Initiative, a project aimed at mapping the complete set of genetic instructions that form the structure of inherited attributes. Geneticists anticipate that the project will disclose important new in- formation on human development and disease. Some go further. One influential scientist remarked that this work is "the ultimate answer to the commandment 'Know thyself.' ""

The decision to fund this Initiative, the largest biology project in …

Not So Cold An Eye: Richard Posner's Pragmatism, Jason S. Johnston

Vanderbilt Law Review

Over the past twenty odd years, Judge Richard Posner has established himself as one of the most creative and influential thinkers in the history of American law. His work divides into two parts: the prejudicial corpus, which is devoted almost entirely to the comprehensive economic analysis of law,' and the postjudicial corpus, which treats issues involving what may be called the theory of judging and courts--that is, the normative theory of how judges should decide cases and how courts should be organized. This division is rough and wavering, for Posner's work prior to his appointment to the federal bench often …

Chief Justice Taft At The Helm, Alpheus T. Mason

Vanderbilt Law Review

The office of Chief Justice carries scant inherent powers. The Chief Justice manages the docket, presents the cases in conference, and guides the discussion. When in the majority, he assigns the writing of opinions. Whatever influence he exerts in the exercise of these prerogatives rests less on formal authority than on elusive personal characteristics. Charles Evans Hughes, who had served as Associate Justice from 1910 to 1916 and later had been able to observe Taft's role in the Court over a period of seven years, considered the Chief Justice "the most important judicial officer in the world." His actual power, …

Book Review, Allison L. Scafuri

Vanderbilt Law Review

The intellectual force in this scientifically and technologically oriented century, as Gatland and Dempster indicate, resides with men who have renaissance minds that can ably embrace scientific as well as societal propositions, reason anew and reach unique and far-reaching conclusions beyond the realm of current thought. To date, the intellectual strength of the lawyer has been his pervading understanding of problems from every societal view. This test can remain valid; however, the province of the legal "skill-elite group"must range far beyond his traditional social science touchstones into decidedly esoteric scientific subjects. The horizon of jurisprudence now embraces the mechanical universe …

Book Review, W. N. Ethridge, Jr. Honorable

Vanderbilt Law Review

The consummation of Llewellyn's particular interest in the craft of appellate judging was his classic The Common Law Tradition: Deciding Appeals, which he completed in 1960. After reading it,no appellate judge could decide a case or write an opinion without being affected to some extent by Llewellyn's method and criteria. He conceived of law as the product of a rational process. The traditional dichotomy of reason and experience are reconcilable by development of legal methods in a rational framework. This technique clarifies and supports the sociological jurisprudence of Holmes, Cardozo, and Brandeis.

Meaning And Structure Of Law In Islam, Salah-Eldin Abdel-Wahab

Vanderbilt Law Review

There are many other reasons to believe that consideration of Islamic jurisprudence should prove amply rewarding in the comparative study of law. A legal system which still underlies the legal life and social conduct of some 400 million people (one sixth of the world population) cannot be ignored. The original solutions which it provides for problems of high complexity and its very advanced normative structure which consists entirely of works by jurists, not of government codes and statutes, are worthy of consideration.

What's Wrong With Baker V. Carr?, Robert Lancaster

Vanderbilt Law Review

The decision of the majority of the Supreme Court in Baker v. Carr, the recently decided Tennessee Reapportionment Case, may well turn out to be one of the landmark decisions of American jurisprudence. If by reason of apathetic acquiescence such a judicial intrusion is permitted to go unchallenged and undebated, our federal system of limited and constitutional government may be further weakened. Although the balance of power as between the states and the national government has shifted and this shift has been reflected in and furthered by judicial interpretation of our Constitution, it seems questionable that such a far-reaching and …

Book Reviews, Edward S. Mason, Stanley D. Rose, Reber Boult, Robert N. Covington

Vanderbilt Law Review

This volume, which brings together, with one exception, all of Stocking's papers relating to workable competition, is more than a random collection of essays. As he indicates in the preface, the papers had been conceived from the beginning as segments of a book, and they proceed to cover systematically the relation of the concept of workable competition to the major areas of antitrust policy.

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Sir Frederick Pollock was born in 1845 and died in 1937. Throughout this long life, his industry was apparently unflagging. His mark is clearly discernible in wide areas of English law. Every student of the …

Ethical Theory And Legal Philosophy, Stanley D. Rose

Vanderbilt Law Review

Jurisprudence and ethics, the author believes, represent distinct efforts to achieve values in society. However, because of their similar method, bases in fact, and testing by consequences, each has something to give the other. With this in mind, the article examines the work of contemporary writers in ethics, both to determine what exactly are their positions and to see what they might offer the student of jurisprudence.

Law And History, C. J. Friedrich

Vanderbilt Law Review

Law is frozen history. In an elementary sense, everything we study when we study law is the report of an event in history, and all history consists of such records or reports. It therefore cannot be my task to develop a sermon on the importance of historical records for the understanding of the law; the tie is too intimate and too obvious to need laboring." The work of Professor Maine on 'Ancient Law,'" wrote Professor T. W. Dwight in his Introduction to that book in the sixties of the last century, "is almost the only one in the English language …

The Next Step: Uniform Rules For The Courts Of Appeals, Milton D. Green

Vanderbilt Law Review

The adoption of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in 1938 maybe regarded as one of the great landmarks of procedural reform in the United States. The many innovations and improvements over prior practice which were effected are well known. Not the least of these was the achievement of uniformity of procedure in all of the federal district courts of the United States, replacing the chaotic confusion which had existed under the Conformity Act.' Although the Federal Rules were addressed primarily to practice and procedure in the district courts, they also dealt with certain aspects of appellate practice. This was …

Hickman V. Jencks, Edward W. Cleary

Vanderbilt Law Review

In recent years the Supreme Court of the United States has decided two cases with fundamental impact upon the status of the legal profession in the litigatory process. Although the two cases are intimately related, the opinion in the second did not mention the first, and the two decisions have never really been laid side by side.' It is proposed here to explore their mutual implications.

Gustav Radbruch, Wolfgang Friedmann

Vanderbilt Law Review

As recently as the end of the last World War the name and work of Gustav Radbruch were virtually unknown in the Anglo-American legal world. In 1938 Roscoe Pound, in his encyclopedic survey, "Fifty Years of Jurisprudence," had given a concise account of Radbruch's legal philosophy in the context of his section on "neo-idealism." In 1944 Anton Hermann Chroust wrote a penetrating analysis of Radbruch's philosophy of law, and about the same time the first edition of the present writer's Legal Theory, published on the other side of the Atlantic, included Gustav Radbruch in the survey of major legal philosophers. …

Justice, Language And Communication, Julius Stone, G. Tarello

Vanderbilt Law Review

The present paper has been concerned to stress that jurisprudence, insofar as it is not limited to analytical jurisprudence, dare not overlook the distinctive qualities either of common language, or of the special language of lawyers. For what its authors deny above all is the utility of so defining a field--like the justice-field--which is a segment of common language, in terms of a special language or logical structuring similar to those used by lawyers. Nor do we think that the presence of considerations of justice (and therefore of common language statements) in the process of the operation of law, either …

Nietzsche, Thomas A. Cowan

Vanderbilt Law Review

I find that the attempt to assess Nietzsche's value to contemporary jurisprudence is fraught with extreme difficulty. Not only was Nietzsche perhaps the most controversial figure in the history of ideas:' this might have happened to one whose message was simple.But in Nietzsche's case the ideas themselves are highly controversial, paradoxical and even "immoral." Like every great thinker Nietzsche was more provocative to his enemies than to his friends. His enemies took their revenge by burying him under a deluge of refutation and abuse. Apparently Nietzsche was guilty of what might be called the crime of "universal treason." He gave …

Book Reviews, Edgar Bodenheimer, Robert S. Lancaster, Stanley D. Rose, Lloyd B. Urdahl

Vanderbilt Law Review

The Great Legal Philosophers: Selected Readings in Jurisprudence Edited by Clarence Morris. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 1959. Pp. 571. $10.00.

reviewer: Edgar Bodenheimer

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Law as Large as Life: A Natural Law for Today and the Supreme Court as its Prophet By Charles P. Curtis. New York: Simon & Schuster. 1959. $3.50.

reviewer: Robert S. Lancaster

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Cases and Materials on Juriprudence By John C. H. Wu. St.Paul: West Publishing Co. 1960. Pp. xliii, 719. $12.00.

reviewer: Stanley D. Rose

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The Law and Legal Theory of the Greeks: An Introduction By J.Walter Jones. New York: Oxford University Press, …

Studies In Legal Philosophy, William R. Anderson

Vanderbilt Law Review

The hazards of planning a symposium in the field of jurisprudence derive largely from the fact that the field is itself ill-defined; the legitimate "province of jurisprudence," to use Austin's phrase, has never been fully agreed upon. A historical approach seemed reasonably satisfactory, however, and what follows is a series of studies of some of the great figures in the history of legal philosophy. Happily, no one of our contributors was satisfied with simple exegesis or even with appraising matters of purely historical importance. Each study is an attempt to deal critically with a facet of its subject which is …

Jerome Frank's Contributions To The Philosophy Of American Legal Realism, Julius Paul

Vanderbilt Law Review

Justice Holmes' famous statement that "the life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience' has had a profound effect on contemporary American jurisprudence. Holmes' monumental influence, together with the impact of positivism, American pragmatism,and more recently, psychoanalysis, have all played important roles in shaping the development of the school of American legal realism.

One of the most controversial and provocative members of this school was Jerome Frank, who was not only a prolific writer on matters legal, but also an eminent corporation lawyer, a government counsel, an administrator (a Commissioner and later Chairman of the Securities …

The Christian Lawyer As A Public Servant, William S. Ellis

Vanderbilt Law Review

This paper is concerned with the general topic of the Christian lawyer as a public servant. The paper attempts to describe very briefly the lawyer in his practice of law and in his relation to the legal and political systems, and the relevance of the Church to the law in each of these areas. The topic is a difficult one, for the writer would suggest that the lawyer by his very trade is "a Pharisee" and rarely a Christian.

Yet the lawyer is one of the most important and influential groups in this country. From the days of the pioneer …

Theology And Jurisprudence, Samuel E. Stumpf

Vanderbilt Law Review

Our era is one in which the law plays a far more important role than at any other time in history, for the law has insinuated itself into the control of almost every facet of man's life. If it was true over a century ago, as Chief Justice Marshall said, that "the judicial department comes home in its effects to every man's fireside; it passes on his property, his reputation, his life, his all,"' it is even more true today as the law has continued to proliferate its influence over an ever-widening range of human conduct. But it is precisely …

Book Reviews, Law Review Staff

Vanderbilt Law Review

Readings in Jurisprudence and Legal Philosophy By Morris R. Cohen and Felix S. Cohen New York: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1951. Pp. viii, 944,$8.50

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Jurisprudence: Men and Ideas of the Law By Edwin W. Patterson Brooklyn: The Foundation Press, Inc., 1953. Pp. viii, 649.

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Jurisprudence--Its American Prophets By Harold Gill Reuschlein Introduction by Roscoe Pound Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1951. Pp. xii, 527, $7.50

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Law and Society in Evolution By Sidney Post Simpson and Julius Stone Introduction by Roscoe Pound St. Paul: West Publishing Co.,1948. Pp. xlvi, 692

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Law in Modern Democratic Society By Sidney Post Simpson …

Book Reviews, Irving Dilliard, Stanley D. Rose, Walter P. Armstrong Jr., Reginald Parker

Vanderbilt Law Review

The States and Subversion Walter Gellhorn, Ed. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1952. Pp. vii, 454. $5.00

reviewer: Irving Dilliard

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Freedom through Law

By Robert L. Hale New York: Columbia University Press, 1952. Pp. xvi, 591. $7.50

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The Group Basis of Politics--A Study in Basing-Point Legislation By Earl Latham New York: Cornell University Press, 1952. Pp. ix,244. $3.75

reviewer: Stanley D. Rose

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Richards on Insurance, Fifth Edition By Warren Freedman New York: Baker, Voorhis & Co., Inc. 1952. Pp. xxvii, 2692. $50.00

reviewer: Walter P. Armstrong, Jr.

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The Theodosian Code and Novels and the Sirmondian Constitutions: A …

The Interpretation Of Statutes In Modern British Law, W. Friedmann

Vanderbilt Law Review

Mr. Justice Frankfurter recently said that the number of cases coming before the Supreme Court of the United States which were not based on statutes was "reduced almost to zero." This growth of statutory as against pure case law is, of course, not confined to the United States. It inevitably accompanies the social welfare state and the increase in government which every modern industrial society has experienced and which two world wars, with their need for the total mobilization of resources, have further stimulated. Apart from these sociological factors which affect states with the most different legal systems, it is …