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Full-Text Articles in Legal History
The Normativity Of Copying In Copyright Law, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
The Normativity Of Copying In Copyright Law, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
All Faculty Scholarship
Not all copying constitutes copyright infringement. Quite independent of fair use, copyright law requires that an act of copying be qualitatively and quantitatively significant enough or “substantially similar” for it to be actionable. Originating in the nineteenth century, and entirely the creation of courts, copyright’s requirement of “substantial similarity” has thus far received little attention as an independently meaningful normative dimension of the copyright entitlement. This Article offers a novel theory for copyright’s substantial-similarity requirement by placing it firmly at the center of the institution and its various goals and purposes. As a common-law-style device that mirrors the functioning of …
On The Connection Between Law And Justice, Anthony D'Amato
On The Connection Between Law And Justice, Anthony D'Amato
Faculty Working Papers
What does it mean to assert that judges should decide cases according to justice and not according to the law? Is there something incoherent in the question itself? That question will serve as our springboard in examining what is—or should be—the connection between justice and law. Legal and political theorists since the time of Plato have wrestled with the problem of whether justice is part of law or is simply a moral judgment about law. Nearly every writer on the subject has either concluded that justice is only a judgment about law or has offered no reason to support a …
The Effect Of Legal Theories On Judicial Decisions, Anthony D'Amato
The Effect Of Legal Theories On Judicial Decisions, Anthony D'Amato
Faculty Working Papers
I draw a distinction in the beginning of this essay between judicial decision-making and a judge's decision-making. To persuade a judge, we should try to discover what her theories are. Across a range of theories, I offered well-known case examples typically cited as examples of each theory. Then I showed that the exact same theory used to justify or explain those case results could be used to justify or explain the opposite result in each of those cases.
Pragmatic Indeterminacy, Anthony D'Amato
Pragmatic Indeterminacy, Anthony D'Amato
Faculty Working Papers
If, as a result of taking Indeterminacy seriously, we revolutionize the way we teach law and the way we select judges, then we will also revolutionize the way cases are litigated (because the new judges will expect to hear a different kind of argumentation) and the way people order their lives in anticipation of the way their disputes will be decided by these new judges.
Legal Realism Explains Nothing, Anthony D'Amato
Legal Realism Explains Nothing, Anthony D'Amato
Faculty Working Papers
I argue that American legal realism as derived from Oliver Wendell Holmes's prediction theory of law was misinterpreted, and that a deeper examination of law-as-prediction might help to reduce the pathology of judicial lawmaking that has been the unfortunate consequence of legal realism.
The Speluncean Explorers--Further Proceedings, Anthony D'Amato
The Speluncean Explorers--Further Proceedings, Anthony D'Amato
Faculty Working Papers
Lon L. Fuller's The Case of the Speluncean Explorers is a classic in jurisprudence. The case presents five judicial opinions which clash with each other and produce for the reader an exhilarating excursion into fundamental theories of law and the state and the role of courts vis-i-vis legislatures and executives. Though the issues articulated by Fuller are timeless, the past thirty years in jurisprudential scholarship have produced at least one major new vantage point—the "rights thesis".
Is Equality A Totally Empty Idea?, Anthony D'Amato
Is Equality A Totally Empty Idea?, Anthony D'Amato
Faculty Working Papers
Comments on Westen article The Empty Idea of Equality. The only way we know what direction to move in making reductions and increases in burdens is to have a concept of equality in mind. The only way we can know that one burden is 'great' and another burden is 'considerably lesser,' to use the words in Westen's standard, is to compare the burdens. But comparison presupposes a measure of equality, for we cannot know that one burden is greater than another unless we first have a concept of when the two burdens are equal. Westen's standard, therefore, is logically posterior …
The Virtues Of Uncertainty In Law: An Experimental Approach, Tom Baker, Alon Harel, Tamar Kugler
The Virtues Of Uncertainty In Law: An Experimental Approach, Tom Baker, Alon Harel, Tamar Kugler
All Faculty Scholarship
Predictability in civil and criminal sanctions is generally understood as desirable. Conversely, unpredictability is condemned as a violation of the rule of law. This paper explores predictability in sanctioning from the point of view of efficiency. It is argued that, given a constant expected sanction, deterrence is increased when either the size of the sanction or the probability that it will be imposed is uncertain. This conclusion follows from earlier findings in behavioral decision research and the results of an experiment conducted specifically to examine this hypothesis. The findings suggest that, within an efficiency framework, there are virtues to uncertainty …
What Do We Mean By "Judicial Independence"?, Stephen B. Burbank
What Do We Mean By "Judicial Independence"?, Stephen B. Burbank
All Faculty Scholarship
In this article, the author argues that the concept of "judicial independence" has served more as an object of rhetoric than it has of sustained study. He views the scholarly literatures that treat it as ships passing in the night, each subject to weaknesses that reflect the needs and fashions of the discipline, but all tending to ignore courts other than the Supreme Court of the United States. Seeking both greater rigor and greater flexibility than one usually finds in public policy debates about, and in the legal and political science literatures on, judicial independence, the author attributes much of …
Method And Principle In Legal Theory, Stephen R. Perry
Method And Principle In Legal Theory, Stephen R. Perry
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
The Architecture Of Judicial Independence, Stephen B. Burbank
The Architecture Of Judicial Independence, Stephen B. Burbank
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Retroactivity And Legal Change: An Equilibrium Approach, Jill E. Fisch
Retroactivity And Legal Change: An Equilibrium Approach, Jill E. Fisch
All Faculty Scholarship
In this Article, Professor Fisch assesses currrent retroactivity doctrine and proposes a new framework for retroactivity analysis. Current law has failed to reflect the complexity of defining retroactivity and to harmonize the conflicting concerns of efficiency and fairness that animate retroactivity doctrine. By drawing a sharp distinction between adjudication and legislation, the law has also overlooked the similarity of the issues that retroactivity raises in both contexts. Professor Fisch's analysis, influenced by the legal process school, uses an equilibrium approach to connect retroactivity analysis to theories of legal change. Instead of focusing on the nature of the new legal rule, …
The Limits Of Preference-Based Legal Policy, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
The Limits Of Preference-Based Legal Policy, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
America's political institutions are built on the principle that individual preferences are central to the formation of policy. The two most important institutions in our system, democracy and the market, make individual preference decisive in the formation of policy and the allocation of resources. American legal traditions have always reflected the centrality of preference in policy determination. In private law, the importance of preference is reflected mainly in the development and persistence of common-law rules, which are intended to facilitate private transactions over legal entitlements. In constitutional law, the centrality of preference is reflected in the high position we assign …
Tort Law As A Comparative Institution, Claire Oakes Finkelstein
Tort Law As A Comparative Institution, Claire Oakes Finkelstein
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
The Moral Dilemma Of Positivism, Anthony D'Amato
The Moral Dilemma Of Positivism, Anthony D'Amato
Faculty Working Papers
I think there has been an advance in positivist thinking, and that advance consists of the recognition by MacCormick, a positivist, that positivism needs to be justified morally (and not just as an apparent scientific and objective fact about legal systems). But the justification that is required cannot consist in labelling "sovereignty of conscience" as a moral principle, nor in compounding the confusion by claiming that positivism minimally and hence necessarily promotes sovereignty of conscience. We need, from the positivists, a more logical and coherent argument than that. Until one comes along, I continue to believe that positivists inherently have …
Evolutionary Models In Jurisprudence, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
Evolutionary Models In Jurisprudence, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
Few ideas in intellectual history have been so captivating that they have overflowed the discipline from which they came and spilled over into everything else. The theory of evolution is unquestionably one of these. Evolution was an idea so powerful that it seemed obvious when Charles Darwin offered it. After all, there were prominent evolutionists a century before Darwin. Charles Darwin merely presented a model that made the theory plausible. It was a model, though, that infected everything, and one that appeared to answer every question worth asking, no matter what the subject. The model had the potential to lead …
What 'Counts' As Law?, Anthony D'Amato
What 'Counts' As Law?, Anthony D'Amato
Faculty Working Papers
A reader of jurisprudence might conclude that only philosophers raise the question whether international law may be said to exist or is really law. But in terms of frequency, the question is probably raised more often by governments and states that are not trying to be philosophical. The increasing attention being paid to the need for, and the procedures for, objective validation of rules of international law in a burgeoning literature of international law evidences the seriousness of the problem, the responsibility of scholars for careful scholarship in this area of legal theory, and ultimately the good possibility of generally …
Reason And Reality In Jurisprudence, Jerome Hall
Reason And Reality In Jurisprudence, Jerome Hall
Articles by Maurer Faculty
No abstract provided.