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Public Law and Legal Theory

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University of Michigan Law School

Legal analysis

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Drawing (Gad)Flies: Thoughts On The Uses (Or Uselessness) Of Legal Scholarship, Sherman J. Clark Oct 2015

Drawing (Gad)Flies: Thoughts On The Uses (Or Uselessness) Of Legal Scholarship, Sherman J. Clark

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform Caveat

In this essay, I argue that law schools should continue to encourage and support wide-ranging legal scholarship, even if much of it does not seem to be of immediate use to the legal profession. I do not emphasize the relatively obvious point that scholarship is a process through which we study the law so that we can ultimately make useful contributions. Here, rather, I make two more-subtle points. First, legal academics ought to question the priorities of the legal profession, rather than merely take those priorities as given. We ought to serve as Socratic gadflies—challenging rather than merely mirroring regnant …


The Gift Of Language, Joseph Vining Jan 1998

The Gift Of Language, Joseph Vining

Articles

Style and substance cross-are genetically related as we now might want to say. Each draws on and is implied by the other. One point at which they cross is our sense of the nature of human language, what language is and can be, what it is not and can never be. The language of law is part of human language. Law is a distinctive form of thought, but it lives in human language. "Rule" might be thought synonymous with "law," but for all its talk of rules, the practice of law does not begin with a descriptive statement, or a …


Generalization In Interpretive Theory, Joseph Vining Jan 1990

Generalization In Interpretive Theory, Joseph Vining

Articles

There are arguments at large about the nature of legal interpretation, proceeding from an implicit proposition that interpretation is the same phenomenon or experience whatever its setting. An assumption that there is one phenomenon can be found in discussions among lawyers of interpretation and in discussions among nonlawyers of legal interpretation-and as often in the work of those who would deny there is any significance to theorizing about interpretation, as of those who think persuasion to a particular theory will have the utmost consequence for law and society. Proceeding from such a proposition, rather than toward it, raises the risk …