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Full-Text Articles in Legal History
The Anti-Empathic Turn, Robin West
The Anti-Empathic Turn, Robin West
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Justice, according to a broad consensus of our greatest twentieth century judges, requires a particular kind of moral judgment, and that moral judgment requires, among much else, empathy–the ability to understand not just the situation but also the perspective of litigants on warring sides of a lawsuit.
Excellent judging requires empathic excellence. Empathic understanding is, in some measure, an acquired skill as well as, in part, a natural ability. Some people do it well; some, not so well. Again, this has long been understood, and has been long argued, particularly, although not exclusively, by some of our most admired judges …
Adjudication Is Not Interpretation: Some Reservations About The Law-As-Literature Movement, Robin West
Adjudication Is Not Interpretation: Some Reservations About The Law-As-Literature Movement, Robin West
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Among other achievements, the modern law-as-literature movement has prompted increasing numbers of legal scholars to embrace the claim that adjudication is interpretation, and more specifically, that constitutional adjudication is interpretation of the Constitution. That adjudication is interpretation -- that an adjudicative act is an interpretive act -- more than any other central commitment, unifies the otherwise diverse strands of the legal and constitutional theory of the late twentieth century.
In this article, I will argue in this article against both modern forms of interpretivism. The analogue of law to literature, on which much of modern interpretivism is based, although fruitful, …