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Full-Text Articles in Rule of Law

The Foundations Of Liberty, Lawrence B. Solum May 1999

The Foundations Of Liberty, Lawrence B. Solum

Michigan Law Review

Randy Barnett's The Structure of Liberty is an ambitious book. The task that Barnett sets himself is to offer an original and persuasive argument for a libertarian political theory, a theory that challenges the legitimacy of the central institutions of the modern regulatory-welfare state. The Structure of Liberty is that rare creature, a book that delivers on most of the promises it makes. Already the book is on its way to becoming a contemporary classic, the successor in interest to Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia as a source of ideas and arguments for the revitalization of an important intellectual …


Subversive Thoughts On Freedom And The Common Good, Larry Alexander, Maimon Schwarzschild May 1999

Subversive Thoughts On Freedom And The Common Good, Larry Alexander, Maimon Schwarzschild

Michigan Law Review

Richard Epstein is a rare and forceful voice against the conventional academic wisdom of our time. Legal scholarship of the past few decades overwhelmingly supports more government regulation and more power for the courts, partly in order to control businesses for environmental and other reasons, but more broadly in hopes of achieving egalitarian outcomes along the famous lines of race, gender, and class. Epstein is deeply skeptical that any of this is the shining path to a better world. Epstein's moral criterion for evaluating social policy is to look at how fully it allows individual human beings to satisfy their …


Rights And Wrongs, John C.P. Goldberg May 1999

Rights And Wrongs, John C.P. Goldberg

Michigan Law Review

If one were to ask an American lawyer or legal scholar for a definition of liberalism, her explanation would likely include mention of constitutional provisions such as the First and Fourth Amendments. This is because liberalism is today understood primarily as a theory of what government officials may not do to citizens. Its most immediate expression in law is thus taken to be those parts of the Bill of Rights that set limits on state action. This tendency to conceive of liberalism exclusively as a theory of rights against government is a twentieth century phenomenon. To be sure, liberalism has …


Making The Law Safe For Democracy: A Review Of "The Law Of Democracy Etc.", Burt Neuborne Jan 1999

Making The Law Safe For Democracy: A Review Of "The Law Of Democracy Etc.", Burt Neuborne

Michigan Law Review

Henry Hart began his 1964 Holmes Lectures by asking what a "single" would be without baseball. We rolled our eyes at that one, reveling in the maestro's penchant for the occult. As usual, though, Professor Hart was trying to tell us groundlings something precious. He was warning us that conventional legal thinking, by stressing rigorous deconstructive analysis, can obscure an important unity in favor of components that should be analyzed, not solely as freestanding phenomena, but as part of the unity. Without recognition of the unity, analysis of the components risks being carried on in a normative vacuum that will …