Legal History Commons^™

Finding Lost & Found: Designer’S Notes From The Process Of Creating A Jewish Game For Learning, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

This article provides context for and examines aspects of the design process of a game for learning. Lost & Found (2017a, 2017b) is a tabletop-to-mobile game series designed to teach medieval religious legal systems, beginning with Moses Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah (1180), a cornerstone work of Jewish legal rabbinic literature. Through design narratives, the article demonstrates the complex design decisions faced by the team as they balance the needs of player engagement with learning goals. In the process the designers confront challenges in developing winstates and in working with complex resource management. The article provides insight into the pathways the team …

Towards A Jurisprudence Of Public Law Bankruptcy Judging, Edward J. Janger

Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law

In this essay Professor Janger considers the role of bankruptcy judges in Chapter 9 cases in light of the scholarly literature on public law judging. He explores the extent to which bankruptcy judges engaged in the fiscal restructuring of a municipality use tools, and face constraints, similar to those utilized by federal district court judges in structural reform cases, where constitutional norms are at issue.

A New Deal Approach To Statutory Interpretation: Selected Cases Authored By Justice Robert Jackson, Charles Patrick Thomas

Journal of Legislation

No abstract provided.

The Rejection Of Horizontal Judicial Review During America's Colonial Period, Robert J. Steinfeld

Robert Steinfeld

No abstract provided.

Ideal Theory And The Limits Of Historical Narrative, Anthony O'Rourke

Anthony O'Rourke

Some intellectual concepts that once played a central role in America’s constitutional history are, for both better and worse, no longer part of our political language.[1] These concepts may be so alien to us that they would remain invisible without carefully reexamining the past in order to challenge the received narratives of America’s constitutional development.[2] Should constitutional theorists undertake this kind of historical reexamination? If so, to what extent should they be willing to stray from the disciplinary norms that govern intellectual history? And what normative aims can they reasonably expect to achieve by exploring ideas in our …

Textualism And The Problem Of Scrivener's Error, John David Ohlendorf

Maine Law Review

Scrivener’s errors make easy prey for the gentle comedy of the bench and bar, much in the way that typographical errors in billboards, newspaper headlines, and church bulletins form an endless source of humor for late night talk show hosts. But theorists of legal interpretation have long seen that scrivener’s errors pose a more serious problem. The doctrine surrounding scrivener’s error stands considered as something of a cousin to the absurdity doctrine, which has roots extending to the earliest days of the American Republic. More recently, the post-legal-process revival of formalist approaches to statutory interpretation on the bench, and their …

Justice Blackmun And Individual Rights, Diane P. Wood

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

Of the many contributions Justice Blackmun has made to American jurisprudence, surely his record in the area of individual rights stands out for its importance. Throughout his career on the Supreme Court, he has displayed concern for a wide variety of individual and civil rights. He has rendered decisions on matters ranging from the most personal interests in autonomy and freedom from interference from government in life’s private realms, to the increasingly complex problems posed by discrimination based upon race, sex, national origin, alienage, illegitimacy, sexual orientation, and other characteristics. As his views have become well known to the public, …

Bringing Compassion Into The Province Of Judging: Justice Blackmun And The Outsiders, Pamela S. Karlan

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

No abstract provided.

Justice Blackmun And Preclusion In The State-Federal Context, Karen Nelson Moore

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

No abstract provided.

Pleading, For The Future: Conversations After Iqbal, Lee H. Rosenthal

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

No abstract provided.

Philosophical Legal Ethics: An Affectionate History, David Luban, W. Bradley Wendel

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The modern subject of theoretical legal ethics began in the 1970s. This brief history distinguishes two waves of theoretical writing on legal ethics. The “First Wave” connects the subject to moral philosophy and focuses on conflicts between ordinary morality and lawyers’ role morality, while the “Second Wave” focuses instead on the role legal representation plays in maintaining and fostering a pluralist democracy. We trace the emergence of the First Wave to the larger social movements of the 1960s and 1970s; in the conclusion, we speculate about possible directions for a Third Wave of theoretical legal ethics, based in behavioral ethics, …

From Parliamentary To Judicial Supremacy: Reflections In Honour Of The Constitutionalism Of Justice Moseneke, Peter G. Danchin

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Blackstone, Expositor And Censor Of Law Both Made And Found, Jessie Allen

Book Chapters

Jeremy Bentham famously insisted on the separation of law as it is and law as it should be, and criticized his contemporary William Blackstone for mixing up the two. According to Bentham, Blackstone costumes judicial invention as discovery, obscuring the way judges make new law while pretending to uncover preexisting legal meaning. Bentham’s critique of judicial phoniness persists to this day in claims that judges are “politicians in robes” who pick the outcome they desire and rationalize it with doctrinal sophistry. Such skeptical attacks are usually met with attempts to defend doctrinal interpretation as a partial or occasional limit on …

Lost & Found: Order In The Court -- The Party Game, Owen Gottlieb, Ian Schreiber

Presentations and other scholarship

Lost & Found is a strategy card-to-mobile game series that teaches medieval religious legal systems with attention to period accuracy and cultural and historical context.

The Lost & Found games project seeks to expand the discourse around religious legal systems, to enrich public conversations in a variety of communities, and to promote greater understanding of the religious traditions that build the fabric of the United States. Comparative religious literacy can build bridges between and within communities and prepare learners to be responsible citizens in our pluralist democracy.

The second game in the series, Lost & Found: Order in the Court …

Lost & Found, Owen Gottlieb, Ian Schreiber, Kelly Murdoch-Kitt

Presentations and other scholarship

Lost & Found is a strategy card-to-mobile game series that teaches medieval religious legal systems with attention to period accuracy and cultural and historical context.

The Lost & Found games project seeks to expand the discourse around religious legal systems, to enrich public conversations in a variety of communities, and to promote greater understanding of the religious traditions that build the fabric of the United States. Comparative religious literacy can build bridges between and within communities and prepare learners to be responsible citizens in our pluralist democracy.

The first game in the series is a strategy game called Lost & …

Render Unto Caesar: How Misunderstanding A Century Of Free Exercise Jurisprudence Forged And Then Fractured The Rfra Coalition, John S. Blattner

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis provides a comprehensive history of Supreme Court Free Exercise Clause jurisprudence from 1879 until the present day. It describes how a jurisdictional approach to free exercise dominated the Court’s rulings from its first Free Exercise Clause case in 1879 until Sherbert v. Verner in 1963, and how Sherbert introduced an accommodationist precedent which was ineffectively, incompletely, and inconsistently defined by the Court. This thesis shows how proponents of accommodationism furthered a false narrative overstating the scope and consistency of Sherbert’s precedent following the Court’s repudiation of accommodationism and return to full jurisdictionalism with Employment Division v. Smith …

The Original Theory Of Constitutionalism, David Singh Grewal, Jedediah S. Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

The conflict between various versions of “originalism” and “living constitutionalism” has defined the landscape of constitutional theory and practice for more than a generation, and it shows no sign of abating. Although each camp has developed a variety of methodological approaches and substantive distinctions, each one also returns to a core concern: the democratic authority of constitutional review. The late Justice Scalia crystallized the originalist concern in his dissent in Obergefell v. Hodges: “It is of overwhelming importance … who it is that rules me. Today’s decree says that my Ruler, and the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, …

Mainstreaming Gender: The Influence Of Women's Networks On Prosecuting Sexual Violence At The International Criminal Court, Jessica Maryanne Zaccagnino

Senior Projects Spring 2017

The fall of the Soviet Union in combination with the failures of the international community to intervene in the genocides of the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda spurred a new enthusiasm for human rights as a wholly independent movement, termed the human rights wave. This paradigm shift, identified by Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, was an embrace of human rights rooted in the redemption of past wrongs. This project is structured as a jurisprudential genealogy that will explore the human rights wave in the context of the Women’s Caucus for Gender Justice, a facet of the transnational women’s network, and their quest to mainstream …

James Dewitt Andrews: Classifying The Law In The Early Twentieth Century*, Richard A. Danner

Faculty Scholarship

This paper examines the efforts of New York lawyer James DeWitt Andrews and others to create a new classification system for American law in the early years of the twentieth century. Inspired by fragments left by founding father James Wilson, Andrews worked though the American Bar Association and organized independent projects to classify the law. A controversial figure, whose motives were often questioned, Andrews engaged the support and at times the antagonism of prominent legal figures such as John H. Wigmore, Roscoe Pound, and William Howard Taft before his plans ended with the founding of the American Law Institute in …

The Ozark National Scenic Riverways And The Sagebrush Rebellion In Missouri, John W. Ragsdale Jr

Faculty Works

This article focuses on the back country-the Ozark National Scenic Riverways (ONSR) and the community around and with the rivers. It begins historically, tracing the origins and courses of stable-state, subsistence agricultural societies in the rugged hills overlooking the Current and Jacks Fork Rivers. It shows that such societies, though autonomous, are vulnerable to outside aggression. War, raiders, in­dustrial timbermen, and modern technology can shatter the environ­mental balance. Dam builders, government land managers, and tour­ism can erode internal sovereignty, custom, and self-esteem. These forces befell the Ozark highlands around the ONSR.

Out of the breakdown of land and economy, and …

The Jewel In The Crown: Can India’S Strict Liability Doctrine Deepen Our Understanding Of Tort Law Theory?, Deepa Badrinarayana

Deepa Badrinarayana