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Full-Text Articles in Legal History
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.
Comments On The Comments, Robert S. Summers
Comments On The Comments, Robert S. Summers
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
The paper replies to Bix and Soper (Bix 2007; Soper 2007). Bix’s paper raises methodological questions, especially whether a form-theorist merely needs to reflect on form from the arm-chair so to speak. A variety of methods is called for, including conceptual analysis, study of usage, “education in the obvious,” general reflection on the nature of specific functional legal units, empirical research on their operation and effects, and still more. Further methodological remarks are made in response to Soper’s paper. Soper suggests the possibility of substituting “form v. substance” of a unit as the central contrast here rather than form v. …
The Incompatibility Principle, Harold H. Bruff
Formalism In American Contract Law: Classical And Contemporary, Mark L. Movsesian
Formalism In American Contract Law: Classical And Contemporary, Mark L. Movsesian
Faculty Publications
It is a universally acknowledged truth that we live in a formalist era—at least when it comes to American contract law. Much more than the jurisprudence of a generation ago, today's cutting-edge work in American contract scholarship values the formalist virtues of bright-line rules, objective interpretation, and party autonomy. Policing bargains for substantive fairness seems more and more an outdated notion. Courts, it is thought, should refrain from interfering with market exchanges. Private arbitration has displaced courts in the context of many traditional contract disputes. Even adhesion contracts find their defenders, much to the chagrin of communitarian scholars.
This is …
Redefining Radicalism: A Historical Perspective, Walter J. Walsh
Redefining Radicalism: A Historical Perspective, Walter J. Walsh
Articles
This Essay suggests that Unger's attack on formalism and objectivism is not so new. After noting the early contributions of Thomas Hobbes and Jeremy Bentham, it does so by particular reference to the critique of William Sampson (1764-1836), the banished Irish civil rights lawyer and political activist, who led an intellectual charge upon the American common law more than a century and a half ago. It also suggests that by depicting the common law as incompatible with the egalitarian ideal of a democratic republic, Sampson sowed the seeds of a distinct radical tradition of which the critical legal studies movement …