Legal History Commons^™

The Internationalism Of Justice Harry Blackmun, Margaret E. Mcguinness

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Throughout the symposium we have heard a host of adjectives to describe Justice Harry Blackmun and his jurisprudence, among them "willful," "liberal," "conservative," and "humble." Added to this list is what Professor Ruger calls "the ultimate compound taxonomy" for Justice Blackmun, a "'White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Republican Rotarian Harvard Man from the Suburbs.'" One adjective that is conspicuously missing is "internationalist," a term that describes an important, though less discussed, dimension of Justice Blackmun and his jurisprudence. Internationalism is, in part, reflected in Justice Blackmun's "preference change" or shift from "relatively conservative to relatively liberal." At the same time, internationalism …

Rediscovering Williston, Mark L. Movsesian

Faculty Publications

This Article is an intellectual history of classical contracts scholar Samuel Williston. Professor Movsesian argues that the conventional account of Williston's jurisprudence presents an incomplete and distorted picture. While much of Williston's work can strike a contemporary reader as arid and conceptual, there are strong elements of pragmatism as well. Williston insists that doctrine be justified in terms of real-world consequences, maintains that rules can have only presumptive force, and offers institutional explanations for judicial restraint. As a result, his scholarship shares more in common with today's new formalism than commonly supposed. Even the under-theorized quality of Williston's scholarship—to contemporary …