Law and Philosophy Commons^™

January 16, 2017: President Obama’S Accomplishments, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “President Obama’s Accomplishments“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

January 13, 2017: "The Way It Is Nowadays, Unless I See Positive Proof, It's All A Lie", Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, "The way it is nowadays, unless I see positive proof, it's all a lie" discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

January 10, 2017: The Public Trust Litigation, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “The Public Trust Litigation“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

January 5, 2017: Why Law Matters, The Presidential Transition, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “Why Law Matters, the presidential transition“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

January 4, 2017: Is Secularism A Nonnegotiable Aspect Of Liberal Constitutionalism?, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “Is Secularism A Nonnegotiable Aspect of Liberal Constitutionalism?“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

Democracy, Law, Compliance, Don Herzog

Articles

Professors Schauer and McAdams both seek a more or less sweepingly general theory of why we obey the law. But we should split, not lump. There are different reasons different actors in different social settings obey different laws–not only, but not least, out of regard for democratic decision making.

The Presumptions Of Classical Liberal Constitutionalism, Matthew J. Lindsay

All Faculty Scholarship

Richard A. Epstein’s The Classical Liberal Constitution is an imposing addition to the burgeoning body of legal scholarship that seeks to “restore” a robust conception of economic liberty and limited government to its rightful place at the center of American constitutionalism. Legislators and judges operating within a “classical liberal conception of government,” Epstein explains, would approach skeptically “[a]ll [regulatory] proposals that deviate from the basic common law protections of life, liberty, and property.” Classical liberal constitutional courts would thus renounce the toothless rational basis review of the post-New Deal “progressive mindset,” and instead subject to exacting scrutiny the government’s “purported …

Beyond Borders: Martin Luther King, Jr., Africa, And Pan Africanism, Jeremy I. Levitt

Journal Publications

This modest essay was a work of love in honor of Henry J. Richardson III, my dear brother, friend, mentor, and father in international law. Hank is universally recognized as the Dean of Black international law scholars and lawyers in the United States (U.S.), Africa, and beyond. He has single-handedly mentored three generations of international lawyers, influenced three generations of international legal scholarship, and established the Black International Tradition (BIT), which "stretches back to the very origins of our nation, preceding even the Constitution." His works on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s (King) leadership, authority, and ministry as a global …

Has Nihilism Politicized The Supreme Court Nomination Process?, Bruce Ledewitz

Ledewitz Papers

Published scholarship collected from academic journals, law reviews, newspaper publications & online periodicals

Afterword - Agape And Reframing, James Boyd White

Other Publications

In a provocative essay, philosopher Jeffrie Murphy asks: 'what would law be like if we organized it around the value of Christian love, and if we thought about and criticized law in terms of that value?'. This book brings together leading scholars from a variety of disciplines to address that question. Scholars have given surprisingly little attention to assessing how the central Christian ethical category of love - agape - might impact the way we understand law. This book aims to fill that gap by investigating the relationship between agape and law in Scripture, theology, and jurisprudence, as well as …

Bankruptcy Beyond Status Maintenance, Govind Persad

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines the tendency of current American bankruptcy law to maintain the social and economic status of middle- and upper-class debtors while doing much less to assist poorer debtors and non-debtors. In doing so, it examines and categorizes various aspects of statutory and case law that allow debtors to preserve their prior economic status. After reconstructing and rebutting the normative arguments offered in defense of these provisions, it suggests a proposal for reforming bankruptcy law to emphasize goals other than the maintenance of economic status. Part I of the Article begins by describing ways in which current bankruptcy law …

Emigres: Lost In A Sea Of Ignorance, Ronald C. Griffin

Faculty Books and Book Contributions

In EMIGRES: Lost in a Sea of Ignorance, Prof. Griffin states that austerity grips western nations, where governments spend paltry sums on welfare, refugees, and migrants. In his essay, Griffin parses a trove of knowledge about welfare and what's being done for needy people. There is a recounting of an Irish case, a report on spectacles in the US, and a narrative about the troubles in Europe stirred-up by Syrian refugees.

Abductive Reasoning In Wto Law, Chios Carmody

Law Publications

Law is about many things, but at base it is about rights and obligations. That jural correlation is established and sustained by means of reasoning. We hold that an actor has a right or obligation by virtue of reasoning that classically occurs in one of two forms. An obligation creates a right by means of inductive logic that rests on the conviction of similar instances in the past and the need for proof. It can also create an obligation by means of deductive logic, that is, the process of reasoning from one or more statements (premises) that are used to …

The Dignity Canon, Noah B. Lindell

Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy

Human dignity is not a freestanding constitutional right, but it is a strongly held constitutional value. To this point, however, human dignity has had no place in statutory interpretation. This Article argues that courts should create a dignity canon of interpretation, which would operate as a clear statement rule. If laws are to be construed to limit individual dignity, the legislature must expressly this plainly. By conducting re-dos of three Supreme Court cases in the areas of civil rights, criminal procedure, and personal health, the Article shows the promise of the dignity canon.

Introduction To Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Tax Opinions, Anthony C. Infanti, Bridget J. Crawford

Book Chapters

Could a feminist perspective change the shape of the tax law? Most people understand that feminist reasoning has tremendous potential to affect, for example, the law of employment discrimination, sexual harassment, and reproductive rights. Few people may be aware, however, that feminist analysis can likewise transform tax law (as well as other statutory or code-based areas of the law). By highlighting the importance of perspective, background, and preconceptions on the reading and interpretation of statutes, Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Tax Opinions shows what a difference feminist analysis can make to statutory interpretation. This volume, part of the Feminist Judgments Series, brings …

Jack, Steven L. Winter

Law Faculty Research Publications

No abstract provided.

Religious Freedom As A Technology Of Modern Secular Governance, Peter G. Danchin

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Sources In Legal Positivist Theories, David Lefkowitz

Philosophy Faculty Publications

The debate about positivism in general legal theory or in the international legal scholarship manifests so many different, if not conflicting, meanings of positivism—even among legal positivists themselves—that the debate about legal positivism has proved almost unfathomable and unintelligible.

No other approach to theorizing international law is more closely associated with and dependent upon the development of an account of its sources than is positivism. The explanation for this is a simple and familiar one: if there is any thesis regarding (p. 324) law that we can uncontroversially associate with the label ‘legal positivism’, it is the view that a …

On Hostility And Hospitality: Othering Pierre Legrand, Russell A. Miller

Scholarly Articles

Pierre Legrand's return to the pages of the American Journal of Comparative Law after nearly twenty years is cause for reflection on the reasons for this prolific comparatist's absence from one of the discipline's leading scholarly fora. One reason is the widespread disdain aimed at Legrand as a result of his persistent, sharply critical, and often pointedly personal crusade against the discipline's accepted approaches and their most prominent practitioners. This is partly the nature of the article he publishes in this collection, which features a no-holds-bared, uncomplimentary assessment of the work of James Gordley. In this Article I argue that …

Blackstone, Expositor And Censor Of Law Both Made And Found, Jessie Allen

Book Chapters

Jeremy Bentham famously insisted on the separation of law as it is and law as it should be, and criticized his contemporary William Blackstone for mixing up the two. According to Bentham, Blackstone costumes judicial invention as discovery, obscuring the way judges make new law while pretending to uncover preexisting legal meaning. Bentham’s critique of judicial phoniness persists to this day in claims that judges are “politicians in robes” who pick the outcome they desire and rationalize it with doctrinal sophistry. Such skeptical attacks are usually met with attempts to defend doctrinal interpretation as a partial or occasional limit on …