Digital Commons Network^™

The Natural Duty To Obey The Law, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

In this Article, Professor Greenawalt examines the strengths and weaknesses of arguments asserting the existence of a natural duty to obey the law. He begins by defining "natural duty," and then investigates this concept in the theories of John Finnis, John Rawls, Tony Honore, Philip Soper, and John Mackie. Drawing upon the similarities of these theories, Professor Greenawalt questions the nature, reach, and force of the natural duty to obey, considering, among other things, whether the duty extends to laws that are unjust or to laws with which few others comply, and examining more generally when duties should be understood …

Constitutional Fact Review, Henry Paul Monaghan

Faculty Scholarship

Bose Corp. v. Consumers Union of United States held that the clearly erroneous standard of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 52(a) does not prescribe the scope of appellate review of a finding of actual malice in defamation cases governed by New York Times Co. v. Sullivan. Rather, as a matter of "federal constitutional law," appellate courts "must exercise independent judgment and determine whether the record establishes actual malice with convincing clarity." Thus, in addition to the familiar judicial duty to "say what the law is," the first amendment imposes a special duty with respect to law application: both …

The Invention And Reinvention Of Welfare Rights, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

This essay contrasts the jurisprudence of welfare entitlement developed by social workers during and after the New Deal with the lawyers' welfare jurisprudence of the past two decades.

I find this contrast interesting for two reasons. First, it brings to light an episode in the intellectual history of the American welfare state that lawyers have ignored – the development of an understanding of welfare as a legal right by another profession long before Charles Reich's The New Property and the literature that followed it made such a notion current among lawyers. Second, the contrast between the social workers' and the …

Babbitt V. Brandeis: The Decline Of The Professional Ideal, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

The vision of professionalism that entranced the liberal legal elite for a century now strikes most lawyers and law students as implausible or uninteresting or both. The papers in this symposium by Robert Nelson and by Ronald Gilson and Robert Mnookin are outstanding examples of two of the current modes of repudiation of this vision: the mode of skepticism and the mode of indifference. Nelson takes the claims of the professional vision seriously, and, using a methodology responsive to them, sets out to refute them. Gilson and Mnookin ignore the vision, and, using a methodology that assumes the vision's invalidity, …

A Symposium Of Critical Legal Studies: Introduction, James Boyle

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Limits To Attorney-Client Confidentiality: A Philosophically Informed And Comparative Approach To Medical And Legal Ethics, Nancy J. Moore

Faculty Scholarship

The proper limits to attorney-client confidentiality are hotly debated by lawyers and legal scholars. Various drafts of the proposed Model Rules of Professional Conduct have included controversial provisions which call for the disclosure of adverse evidence and client perury, as well as more liberal disclosure of completed and intended client wrongdoing than is currently permitted under the Model Code of Professional Responsibility. This Article takes a comparative approach to the problem, utilizing a body of philosophical literature which explores the principle of confidentiality in the physician-patient context This "philosophically informed" approach sets out an analytical framework in which the controversies …

The Transformation Of The Fourteenth Amendment: Reflections From The Admission Of Maryland's First Black Lawyers, David S. Bogen

Faculty Scholarship

October 10, 1985, was the one hundredth anniversary of the admission to the bar of the Supreme Bench of Baltimore City of Everett J. Waring, the first black lawyer admitted to practice before the state courts in Maryland. This article explores the efforts of African-American lawyers to establish the right to practice law in Maryland and their role in the larger struggle for political and civil rights.

Psychosocial, Legal, And Ethical Dimensions Of Ultrasound Imaging In Pregnancy, Karen H. Rothenberg

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Appropriateness And Design Of Categorical Decision-Making Systems, John J. Capowski

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Thinking Like A Statistician: The Report Of The American Statistical Association Committee On Training In Statistics In Selected Professions, David H. Kaye

Faculty Scholarship

In 1983, a subcommittee of the American Statistical Association composed of legal educators and one judge issued a report describing existing programs for educating law students in statistics and offering recommendations for improving these programs. This article summarizes that report.

Litigation And Corporate Governance: An Essay On Steering Between Scylla And Charybdis, John C. Coffee Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

Criticism of the ALI's Corporate Governance Project has had two very different strains. Most vocal have been those critics who exhibit what one sympathetic observer has aptly termed "a neurotic fear of articulation." Although their expressed concern – namely, that courts will be encouraged to second guess boards and impose liability for arm's length business decisions that turned sour – would be a legitimate cause for anxiety if this indeed were the intent or likely effect of the Project, the underlying fear of these critics is more basic and instinctive. It is best revealed in the title of one critique …

Criminal Coercion And Freedom Of Speech, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

This essay about constitutional limits on criminal coercion concerns a piece of a larger puzzle; how freedom of expression impinges on crimes that involve communication. The essay has two interrelated purposes. One is to reach some rather specific conclusions about the kinds of coercive threats that enjoy constitutional protection and to suggest how legislative formulations of criminal coercion can minimize coverage of such threats. The second purpose, more general and theoretical, is to show how the boundaries of freedom of expression can be understood and how courts can employ those boundaries to arrive at specific tests of constitutional protection. The …

Lawyers, Politics, And The "Lawyers' Interest": An Historical Inquiry, James W. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

The assumption that the occupational identification of "lawyer" is the salient feature in evaluating political motivation is interesting, if questionable, according to the Author. Does occupational identity overwhelm other identities? Are politically active lawyers really a homogeneous group? Are they less affected by competing identities associated with wealth, geography, familial and constituency concerns, political ideology, party considerations, or any of the myriad other sources of public and private motivation of behavior? Surely the hypothesis that politically active lawyers behave differently from nonlawyers is worth investigating. This Article offers some preliminary responses to these questions posed, which are grounded in empirical …

Religion As A Concept In Constitutional Law, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

Because federal and state constitutions forbid government from infringing upon religious liberty or supporting religion, courts must sometimes decide whether a claim, activity, organization, purpose, or classification is religious. In most cases arising under these religion clauses, the religiousness of an activity or organization will be obvious. However; when the presence of religion is seriously controverted, the threshold question, "defining religion," becomes important. Most courts have prudently eschewed theoretical generalizations in approaching that question. Academic commentators have struggled to startlingly diverse proposals.

This Article suggests that in both free exercise and establishment cases, courts should decide whether something is religious …

Value Creation By Business Lawyers: Legal Skills And Asset Pricing, Ronald J. Gilson

Faculty Scholarship

What do business lawyers really do? Embarrassingly enough, at a time when lawyers are criticized with increasing frequency as nonproductive actors in the economy, there seems to be no coherent answer. That is not, of course, to say that answers have not been offered; there are a number of familiar responses that we have all heard or, what is worse, that we have all offered at one time or another without really thinking very hard about them. The problem is that, for surprisingly similar reasons, none of them is very helpful.

Rethinking Joint Custody, Elizabeth S. Scott, Andre Derdeyn

Faculty Scholarship

A small revolution has begun in child custody law, and as yet its dimensions and ultimate direction are uncertain. Joint custody, the sharing of legal authority by divorced or separated parents over their children, is gaining acceptance as the best arrangement for most children when their parents divorce. The legal system is embracing this arrangement with remarkable enthusiasm, although until recently it was viewed as being of questionable legality and antithetical to the best interest of the child. Today, thirty states have joint custody laws, most of which have been enacted since 1980. A growing number of the more recent …

Visions Of Practice In Legal Thought, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

This essay contrasts the vision of law practice expressed in the established professional culture with a vision derived from recent Critical legal writing.

The Consumer's Emerging Right To Boycott: Naacp V. Claiborne Hardware And Its Implications For American Labor Law, Michael C. Harper

Faculty Scholarship

Hard cases do not always make bad law. Sometimes, when confronted with records that will yield neither to the direct application of established legal principles nor to factual manipulation, courts articulate, or at least suggest, a new principle which should and often does refine a body of old law. The Supreme Court's decision in NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware Co." should become a prominent and salutary example of such hard cases. Before Claiborne Hardware, the Court had indicated that legislatures, for rational economic policy reasons, could make peaceful consumer boycotts illegal.' Confronted with compelling facts in the Claiborne Hardware …

Biological Monitoring: The Employer's Dilemma, Frances H. Miller

Faculty Scholarship

The industrial workplace contains many potential health hazards that not only can cause great harm to workers, but also can destroy the employers’ economic stability. Often these hazards are documented and dealt with, but frequently they are unknown. When health-conscious employers monitor the physical well-being of their employees in an effort to avoid the terrible personal and economic costs these hazards can produce, they may be supplying their employees with the documentation necessary to recover financially for their industrial illnesses.

This Article analyzes this dilemma confronting employers. It describes the many factors employers must consider when deciding whether to institute …

Competence To Refuse Medical Treatment: Autonomy Vs. Paternalism, George J. Annas, Joan E. Densberger

Faculty Scholarship

The right to refuse medical treatment is universally recognized as a fundamental principle of liberty. Nonetheless, the right is often infringed upon by paternalistic physicians who either use too narrow a definition of competence, or misunderstand or ignore the patient's liberty interest in freedom from coerced medical interventions. A careful consideration of competence in the medical care setting leads to a conclusion that it can best be assessed by determining the patient's ability to understand the information necessary to provide informed consent to treatment. If a patient has this capacity, both his consent and refusal must be honored. Placing competence …

Dillon V. Legg Revisited: Toward A Unified Theory Of Compensating Bystanders And Relatives For Intangible Injuries, John L. Diamond

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Depublication Practice Of The California Supreme Court, Joseph R. Grodin

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

On The Outside Looking In: The Legal Historian's Perspective On Rare Book Collections, Jenni Parrish

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Preclusion As To Issues Of Law: The Legal System's Interest, Geoffrey C. Hazard Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Children Of The Night: The Adequacy Of Statutory Treatment Of Juvenile Prostitution, D. Kelly Weisberg

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

From Risk-Utility To Consumer Expectations: Enhancing The Role Of Judicial Screening In Product Liability Litigation, Aaron Twerski

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Clinical Education In The Seventies: An Appraisal Of The Decade, Robert J. Condlin

Faculty Scholarship

Presentation to the Clinical Section of the Association of American Law Schools.

The Moral Failure Of Clinical Legal Education, Robert J. Condlin

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Accuracy And Consistency In Categorical Decision-Making: A Study Of Social Security's Medical-Vocational Guidelines ─ Two Birds With One Stone Or Pigeon-Holing Claimants, John J. Capowski

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Why Terminate Parental Rights, Marsha Garrison

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.