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Articles 1 - 4 of 4
Full-Text Articles in Legal History
A Call To Combine Rhetorical Theory And Practice In The Legal Writing Classroom, Kristen Konrad Robbins-Tiscione
A Call To Combine Rhetorical Theory And Practice In The Legal Writing Classroom, Kristen Konrad Robbins-Tiscione
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
The theory and practice of law have been separated in legal education to their detriment since the turn of the twentieth century. As history teaches us and even the 2007 Carnegie Report perhaps suggests, teaching practice without theory is as inadequate as teaching theory without practice. Just as law students should learn how to draft a simple contract from taking Contracts, they should learn the theory of persuasion from taking a legal writing course. In an economy where law apprenticeship has reverted from employer to educator, legal writing courses should do more than teach analysis, conventional documents, and the social …
Narrative, Normativity, And Causation, Lawrence B. Solum
Narrative, Normativity, And Causation, Lawrence B. Solum
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
This essay examines the relationship between constitutional narratives, causation, and normativity in the context of Barry Friedman’s book, The Will of the People: How Public Opinion Has Influenced the Supreme Court and Shaped the Meaning of the Constitution. In his book, Friedman provides a grand narrative of American constitutional history that emphasizes the role of public opinion in the development of American constitutional law. That narrative involves both implicit and explicit claims about the causal forces that shape constitutional doctrine and about normative constitutional theory. The aim of this essay is to identify those claims, excavate their theoretical assumptions, …
Rethinking Crime Legislation: History And Harshness, Victoria Nourse
Rethinking Crime Legislation: History And Harshness, Victoria Nourse
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
There is a truth about the criminal law that scholars evade as much as they criticize: the criminal law is produced by legislators (rather than the experts). The author states she does not know of any way to make law in a democracy other than through the voters' representatives. And, yet, it is the standard pose of the criminal law scholar to denigrate legislatures and politicians as vindictive, hysterical, or stupid. All of these things may be true but name-calling is a poor substitute for analysis. As in constitutional law, so too in criminal law, it is time to put …
Reconceptualizing Criminal Law Defenses, Victoria Nourse
Reconceptualizing Criminal Law Defenses, Victoria Nourse
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
In 1933, one of the leading theorists of the criminal law, Jerome Michael, wrote openly of the criminal law "as an instrument of the state." Today, criminal law is largely allergic to claims of political theory; commentators obsess about theories of deterrence and retribution, and the technical details of model codes and sentencing grids, but rarely speak of institutional effects or political commitments. In this article, the author aims to change that emphasis and to examine the criminal law as a tool for governance. Her approach is explicitly constructive: it accepts the criminal law that we have, places it in …