Legal History Commons^™

No Civilized System Of Justice, Book Review: The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, The Supreme Court, And The Betrayal Of Reconstruction, Sonja R. West

Scholarly Works

A book review of The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, The Supreme Court, and The Betrayal of Reconstruction by Charles Lane (Henry Holt 2008).

A Picture Of The New York Court Of Appeals At The Time Of Wood V. Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon, Meredith R. Miller

Scholarly Works

Wood v. Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon is an enduring part of the Contracts canon. A symposium addressing the legacy of the case would be incomplete without a picture of the New York Court of Appeals at the time the case was decided and a discussion of the oft-neglected role that court rules and administration play in the development of the law. Thus, it is the aim of this short essay to place Wood in the context of the Court's history, and to explore how structural and jurisdictional changes to the Court could have had an impact on how the case was …

Perelman In Legal Education: Recalling The Rhetorical Tradition Of Isocrates And Vico, Francis J. Mootz Iii

Scholarly Works

This paper was presented on October 14, 2008 as part of a panel addressing "The Influence of Perelman in Legal Philosophy" at a conference hosted by the Perelman Center for the Philosophy of Law, Free University of Brussels.

I argue that Perelman's philosophy is connected with legal practice, but that he never made the connections between his philosophy and legal education explicit. I refer to the work of Isocrates and Vico, and conclude that Perelman's philosophy can teach us much about contemporary legal education as we strive to address the questions raised by the Carnegie Report.

Interpretation, Francis J. Mootz Iii

Scholarly Works

In this chapter from "Law and the Humanities: An Introduction," published by Cambridge University Press, I first survey various theoretical approaches to interpretation, including natural law, analytical legal positivism, law as communication (originalism, intentionalism, and new textualism), and the hermeneutical turn. I then discuss the role of interpretation in contract law, statutory law and constitutional law, to situate the theories in practice.

The Irrelevance Of Contemporary Academic Philosophy For Law: Recovering The Rhetorical Tradition, Francis J. Mootz Iii

Scholarly Works

This short paper appears in a volume of original essays, On Philosophy in American Law (Francis J. Mootz III ed., Cambridge Univ. Press 2009). I argue that the undeniable rift between philosophy and law is more than a simple dichotomy of theory and practice. Instead, the sharp distinction between philosophy and law occurred when both disciplines built insular guilds that employed distinctive vocabularies to distinguish themselves from rhetoric, and it is by returning to their roots in rhetoric that philosophy and law might find their common ground in the elucidation of rhetorical knowledge.