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Full-Text Articles in Legal History

Reconsidering Judicial Independence: Forty-Five Years In The Trenches And In The Tower, Stephen B. Burbank Jan 2019

Reconsidering Judicial Independence: Forty-Five Years In The Trenches And In The Tower, Stephen B. Burbank

All Faculty Scholarship

Trusting in the integrity of our institutions when they are not under stress, we focus attention on them both when they are under stress or when we need them to protect us against other institutions. In the case of the federal judiciary, the two conditions often coincide. In this essay, I use personal experience to provide practical context for some of the important lessons about judicial independence to be learned from the periods of stress for the federal judiciary I have observed as a lawyer and concerned citizen, and to provide theoretical context for lessons I have deemed significant as …


Justice Scalia’S Originalism And Formalism: The Rule Of Criminal Law As A Law Of Rules, Stephanos Bibas Aug 2016

Justice Scalia’S Originalism And Formalism: The Rule Of Criminal Law As A Law Of Rules, Stephanos Bibas

All Faculty Scholarship

Far too many reporters and pundits collapse law into politics, assuming that the left–right divide between Democratic and Republican appointees neatly explains politically liberal versus politically conservative outcomes at the Supreme Court. The late Justice Antonin Scalia defied such caricatures. His consistent judicial philosophy made him the leading exponent of originalism, textualism, and formalism in American law, and over the course of his three decades on the Court, he changed the terms of judicial debate. Now, as a result, supporters and critics alike start with the plain meaning of the statutory or constitutional text rather than loose appeals to legislative …


University Of Baltimore Symposium Report: Debut Of “The Matthew Fogg Symposia On The Vitality Of Stare Decisis In America”, Zena D. Crenshaw-Logal Jan 2012

University Of Baltimore Symposium Report: Debut Of “The Matthew Fogg Symposia On The Vitality Of Stare Decisis In America”, Zena D. Crenshaw-Logal

Zena Denise Crenshaw-Logal

On the first of each two day symposium of the Fogg symposia, lawyers representing NGOs in the civil rights, judicial reform, and whistleblower advocacy fields are to share relevant work of featured legal scholars in lay terms; relate the underlying principles to real life cases; and propose appropriate reform efforts. Four (4) of the scholars spend the next day relating their featured articles to views on the vitality of stare decisis. Specifically, the combined panels of public interest attorneys and law professors consider whether compliance with the doctrine is reasonably assured in America given the: 1. considerable discretion vested in …


The (Re-) Constitution Of The Public, Gianluigi Palombella Jan 2012

The (Re-) Constitution Of The Public, Gianluigi Palombella

Gianluigi Palombella

This article deals with the prospect of public law in global governance. It analyses firstly the foundations of modern public law and considers what is left of them in the global setting. Are they still holding through States’ de-centering practices, detached from the legitimating grounds of the modern ‘idea of publicness’? What is called here the duality of public law (in its State-related political and juridical strands) fades and decouples in the sphere where inherently ‘global’ legalities originate of a deracinated type: the distinctively global ‘public’ only provides a ‘suspended public law’ and politically unsaturated. The Constitution of the Public …


Sealand, Havenco, And The Rule Of Law, James Grimmelmann Dec 2011

Sealand, Havenco, And The Rule Of Law, James Grimmelmann

James Grimmelmann

In 2000, a group of American entrepreneurs moved to a former World War II anti-aircraft platform in the North Sea, seven miles off the British coast, and launched HavenCo, one of the strangest start-ups in Internet history. A former pirate radio broadcaster, Roy Bates, had occupied the platform in the 1960s, moved his family aboard, and declared it to be the sovereign Principality of Sealand. HavenCo's founders were opposed to governmental censorship and control of the Internet; by putting computer servers on Sealand, they planned to create a "data haven" for unpopular speech, safely beyond the reach of any other …


The Rule Of Law In Global Governance: Its Normative Construction, Function And Import, Gianluigi Palombella Jan 2011

The Rule Of Law In Global Governance: Its Normative Construction, Function And Import, Gianluigi Palombella

Gianluigi Palombella

What does the Rule of law contribute in the frame of global governance? While addressing metamorphoses of law and the multiple legalities in the global context, this paper shows that the rule of law can consistently be extended externally being cherished internally. It takes seriously the concurrence of different legalities in their diverse ‘formats’, and the challenge of the “global administrative law” theoretical and empirical model. At the meta-level of the relations among legalities, the Rule of law has an essential role to play: it affects interactions and interdependence,and can cause content-dependent assessments to develop, without supporting self-closure or monistic …


The Rule Of Law As An Institutional Ideal, Gianluigi Palombella Jan 2010

The Rule Of Law As An Institutional Ideal, Gianluigi Palombella

Gianluigi Palombella

This article aims at offering an innovative interpretation of the potentialities of the "rule of law" for the XXI Century. It goes beyond current uses and the dispute between formal and substantive conceptions, by reaching the roots of the institutional ideal. Also through historical reconstruction and comparative analysis, the core of the rule of law appears to be a peculiar notion, showing a special objective that the law is asked to achieve, on a legal plane, largely independent of political instrumentalism. The normative meaning is elaborated on and construed around the notions of institutional equilibrium, non domination and "duality" of …


Deliberative Democracy And Weak Courts: Constitutional Design In Nascent Democracies, Edsel F. Tupaz Jan 2009

Deliberative Democracy And Weak Courts: Constitutional Design In Nascent Democracies, Edsel F. Tupaz

Edsel F Tupaz

This Article addresses the question of constitutional design in young and transitional democracies. It argues for the adoption of a “weak” form of judicial review, as opposed to “strong” review which typifies much of contemporary adjudication. It briefly describes how the dialogical strain of deliberative democratic theory might well constitute the normative predicate for systems of weak review. In doing so, the Article draws from various judicial practices, from European supranational tribunals to Canadian courts and even Indian jurisprudence. The Article concludes with the suggestion that no judicial apparatus other than the weak structure of judicial review can better incite …


Rule Of Law Conference: Global Issues And The Rule Of Law, Lord Chief Justice Nicholas Phillips Of Worth Matravers Sep 2007

Rule Of Law Conference: Global Issues And The Rule Of Law, Lord Chief Justice Nicholas Phillips Of Worth Matravers

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.


The Abuse Of Rights And The Rule Of Law, Gianluigi Palombella Jan 2006

The Abuse Of Rights And The Rule Of Law, Gianluigi Palombella

Gianluigi Palombella

This article deals with the abuse that can be committed in the name of rights and of the rule of law, not against them. It explains the general characteristics of the concept of abuse from a legal point of view, on the part of the holder of a public power or of a right. Moreover, it addresses the way to identify the abuse itself by the means of legal arguments, and principles. Finally, it shows how resorting to the problem of abuse of power has been used as a tool for recognizing the habeas corpus to detainees in Guantanamo by …


Race Nuisance: The Politics Of Law In The Jim Crow Era, Rachel D. Godsil Jan 2006

Race Nuisance: The Politics Of Law In The Jim Crow Era, Rachel D. Godsil

Michigan Law Review

This Article explores a startling and previously unnoticed line of cases in which state courts in the Jim Crow era ruled against white plaintiffs trying to use common law nuisance doctrine to achieve residential segregation. These "race-nuisance" cases complicate the view of most legal scholarship that state courts during the Jim Crow era openly eschewed the rule of law in service of white supremacy. Instead, the cases provide rich social historical detail showing southern judges wrestling with their competing allegiances to both precedent and the pursuit of racial exclusivity. Surprisingly, the allegiance to precedent generally prevailed. The cases confound prevailing …


Rule Of Law And The Limits Of Sovereignty: The Private Prison In Jurisprudential Perspective, Ahmed A. White Jan 2001

Rule Of Law And The Limits Of Sovereignty: The Private Prison In Jurisprudential Perspective, Ahmed A. White

Publications

No abstract provided.


Victims' Rights, Rule Of Law, And The Threat To Liberal Jurisprudence, Ahmed A. White Jan 1999

Victims' Rights, Rule Of Law, And The Threat To Liberal Jurisprudence, Ahmed A. White

Publications

No abstract provided.


Rethinking The Rule Of Law: A Demonstration That The Obvious Is Plausible, Francis J. Mootz Iii Jan 1993

Rethinking The Rule Of Law: A Demonstration That The Obvious Is Plausible, Francis J. Mootz Iii

Scholarly Works

In this Article, I defend the Rule of Law from its detractors in the academy by uncovering and criticizing the unsound presuppositions driving their critiques. I acknowledge that these critiques raise two different problems for those who defend the plausibility of the Rule of Law: The problem of ensuring legal innovation and the problem of supplying effective constraint. In response to these problems, I locate our faith in the Rule of Law in the hermeneutical practice in which we are engaged as lawyers. Jurisprudential characterizations of the problems of constraint and innovation are misguided reactions to the narrow Enlightenment conception …


Is The Rule Of Law Possible In A Postmodern World?, Francis J. Mootz Iii Jan 1993

Is The Rule Of Law Possible In A Postmodern World?, Francis J. Mootz Iii

Scholarly Works

The Rule of Law is the core of our political and legal ideology, but the Rule of Law increasingly is attacked as an unattainable goal. Postmodern theorists challenge whether it makes sense to believe that rules can be formulated for general application and then later neutrally applied by decision makers. Postmodern theorists reject the Enlightenment world view and its political corollary, classical liberalism. The author agrees with the spirit of the postmodern critique, but argues that we can understand the Rule of Law in a manner consonant with postmodern thought. Drawing on the Continental tradition of hermeneutics, or the philosophy …


Law, Literature, And The Celebration Of Authority, Robin West Jan 1989

Law, Literature, And The Celebration Of Authority, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Richard Posner's new book, Law and Literature: A Misunderstood Relation, is a defense of “liberal legalism” against a group of modern critics who have only one thing in common: their use of either particular pieces of literature or literary theory to mount legal critiques. Perhaps for that reason, it is very hard to discern a unified thesis within Posner's book regarding the relationship between law and literature. In part, Posner is complaining about a pollution of literature by its use and abuse in political and legal argument; thus, the “misunderstood relation” to which the title refers. At times, Posner suggests …