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Articles 1 - 30 of 95
Full-Text Articles in Philosophy
How Practices Make Principles, And How Principles Make Rules, Mitchell N. Berman
How Practices Make Principles, And How Principles Make Rules, Mitchell N. Berman
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The most fundamental question in general jurisprudence concerns what makes it the case that the law has the content that it does. This article offers a novel answer. According to the theory it christens “principled positivism,” legal practices ground legal principles, and legal principles determine legal rules. This two-level account of the determination of legal content differs from Hart’s celebrated theory in two essential respects: in relaxing Hart’s requirement that fundamental legal notions depend for their existence on judicial consensus; and in assigning weighted contributory legal norms—“principles”—an essential role in the determination of legal rights, duties, powers, and permissions. Drawing …
The Criminogenic Effects Of Damaging Criminal Law’S Moral Credibility, Paul H. Robinson, Lindsay Holcomb
The Criminogenic Effects Of Damaging Criminal Law’S Moral Credibility, Paul H. Robinson, Lindsay Holcomb
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The criminal justice system’s reputation with the community can have a significant effect on the extent to which people are willing to comply with its demands and internalize its norms. In the context of criminal law, the empirical studies suggest that ordinary people expect the criminal justice system to do justice and avoid injustice, as they perceive it – what has been called “empirical desert” to distinguish it from the “deontological desert” of moral philosophers. The empirical studies and many real-world natural experiments suggest that a criminal justice system that regularly deviates from empirical desert loses moral credibility and thereby …
Against The Received Wisdom: Why The Criminal Justice System Should Give Kids A Break, Stephen J. Morse
Against The Received Wisdom: Why The Criminal Justice System Should Give Kids A Break, Stephen J. Morse
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Professor Gideon Yaffe’s recent, intricately argued book, The Age of Culpability: Children and the Nature of Criminal Responsibility, argues against the nearly uniform position in both law and scholarship that the criminal justice system should give juveniles a break not because on average they have different capacities relevant to responsibility than adults, but because juveniles have little say about the criminal law, primarily because they do not have a vote. For Professor Yaffe, age has political rather than behavioral significance. The book has many excellent general analyses about responsibility, but all are in aid of the central thesis about …
Rethinking Copyright And Personhood, Christopher S. Yoo
Rethinking Copyright And Personhood, Christopher S. Yoo
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One of the primary theoretical justifications for copyright is the role that creative works play in helping develop an individual’s sense of personhood and self-actualization. Typically ascribed to the writings of Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, personhood-based theories of copyright serve as the foundation for the moral rights prominent in European copyright law and mandated by the leading intellectual property treaty, which give authors inalienable control over aspects of their works after they have been created. The conventional wisdom about the relationship between personhood and copyright suffers from two fatal flaws that have gone largely unappreciated. First, in …
Findlay Stark, Culpable Carelessness: Recklessness And Negligence In The Criminal Law, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016, Kimberly Kessler Ferzan
Findlay Stark, Culpable Carelessness: Recklessness And Negligence In The Criminal Law, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016, Kimberly Kessler Ferzan
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Culpable Carelessness by Findlay Stark is a careful and considered contribution to the 'punishment for negligence' debate. As well as providing a comprehensive overview of the doctrinal and theoretical aspects of recklessness and negligence in the criminal law, it also offers novel insights for scholars already steeped in these debates. An additional methodological strength is that Stark takes seriously the connection between theory and law, offering useful potential jury instructions on recklessness and negligence.
Arguing With Friends, William Baude, Ryan D. Doerfler
Arguing With Friends, William Baude, Ryan D. Doerfler
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It is a fact of life that judges sometimes disagree about the best outcome in appealed cases. The question is what they should make of this. The two purest possibilities are to shut out all other views, or else to let them all in, leading one to concede ambiguity and uncertainty in most if not all contested cases.
Drawing on the philosophical concepts of “peer disagreement” and “epistemic peerhood,” we argue that there is a better way. Judges ought to give significant weight to the views of others, but only when those others share the judge’s basic methodology or interpretive …
The Inevitability And Ubiquity Of Cycling In All Feasible Legal Regimes: A Formal Proof, Leo Katz, Alvaro Sandroni
The Inevitability And Ubiquity Of Cycling In All Feasible Legal Regimes: A Formal Proof, Leo Katz, Alvaro Sandroni
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Intransitive choices, or cycling, are generally held to be the mark of irrationality. When a set of rules engenders such choices, it is usually held to be irrational and in need of reform. In this article, we prove a series of theorems, demonstrating that all feasible legal regimes are going to be rife with cycling. Our first result, the legal cycling theorem, shows that unless a legal system meets some extremely restrictive conditions, it will lead to cycling. The discussion that follows, along with our second result, the combination theorem, shows exactly why these conditions are almost impossible to meet. …
Modest Retributivism, Mitchell N. Berman
Modest Retributivism, Mitchell N. Berman
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No abstract provided.
Judge Posner’S Simple Law, Mitchell N. Berman
Judge Posner’S Simple Law, Mitchell N. Berman
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The world is complex, Richard Posner observes in his most recent book, Reflections on Judging. It follows that, to resolve real-world disputes sensibly, judges must be astute students of the world’s complexity. The problem, he says, is that, thanks to disposition, training, and professional incentives, they aren’t. Worse than that, the legal system generates its own complexity precisely to enable judges “to avoid rather than meet and overcome the challenge of complexity” that the world delivers. Reflections concerns how judges needlessly complexify inherently simple law, and how this complexification can be corrected.
Posner’s diagnoses and prescriptions range widely—from the Bluebook …
Abuse Of Property Right Without Political Foundations: A Response To Katz, Mitchell N. Berman
Abuse Of Property Right Without Political Foundations: A Response To Katz, Mitchell N. Berman
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In an article recently published in the Yale Law Journal, Larissa Katz defends a heterodox principle of abuse of property right pursuant to which an owner abuses her rights with respect to a thing she owns if she makes an otherwise permitted decision about how to use that thing just in order to harm others, either out of spite, or for leverage. Katz grounds that principle in a novel theory of the political foundations of the institution of property ownership. This essay argues that Katz’s political theory is implausible, but that this should not doom her preferred principle of …
Conditional Spending And The Conditional Offer Puzzle, Mitchell N. Berman
Conditional Spending And The Conditional Offer Puzzle, Mitchell N. Berman
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No abstract provided.
Privacy Law: Positive Theory And Normative Practice, Anita L. Allen
Privacy Law: Positive Theory And Normative Practice, Anita L. Allen
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No abstract provided.
Pluralistic Nonoriginalism And The Combinability Problem, Mitchell N. Berman, Kevin Toh
Pluralistic Nonoriginalism And The Combinability Problem, Mitchell N. Berman, Kevin Toh
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No abstract provided.
Alexander's Genius, Mitchell N. Berman
On What Distinguishes New Originalism From Old: A Jurisprudential Take, Mitchell N. Berman
On What Distinguishes New Originalism From Old: A Jurisprudential Take, Mitchell N. Berman
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No abstract provided.
The Normativity Of Copying In Copyright Law, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
The Normativity Of Copying In Copyright Law, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
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Not all copying constitutes copyright infringement. Quite independent of fair use, copyright law requires that an act of copying be qualitatively and quantitatively significant enough or “substantially similar” for it to be actionable. Originating in the nineteenth century, and entirely the creation of courts, copyright’s requirement of “substantial similarity” has thus far received little attention as an independently meaningful normative dimension of the copyright entitlement. This Article offers a novel theory for copyright’s substantial-similarity requirement by placing it firmly at the center of the institution and its various goals and purposes. As a common-law-style device that mirrors the functioning of …
What Must We Hide: The Ethics Of Privacy And The Ethos Of Disclosure, Anita L. Allen
What Must We Hide: The Ethics Of Privacy And The Ethos Of Disclosure, Anita L. Allen
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No abstract provided.
Danger: The Ethics Of Preemptive Action, Larry Alexander, Kimberly Kessler Ferzan
Danger: The Ethics Of Preemptive Action, Larry Alexander, Kimberly Kessler Ferzan
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The law has developed principles for dealing with morally and legally responsible actors who act in ways that endanger others, the principles governing crime and punishment. And it has developed principles for dealing with the morally and legally nonresponsible but dangerous actors, the principles governing civil commitments. It has failed, however, to develop a cogent and justifiable set of principles for dealing with responsible actors who have not yet acted in ways that endanger, others but who are likely to do so in the future, those whom we label "responsible but dangerous" actors (RBDs). Indeed, as we argue, the criminal …
Culpable Aggression: The Basis For Moral Liability To Defensive Killing, Kimberly Kessler Ferzan
Culpable Aggression: The Basis For Moral Liability To Defensive Killing, Kimberly Kessler Ferzan
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The use of the term, "self-defense, " covers a wide array of defensive behaviors, and different actions that repel attacks may be permissible for different reasons. One important justificatory feature of some defensive behaviors is that the aggressor has rendered himself liable to defensive force by his own conduct. That is, when a culpable aggressor points a gun at a defender, and says, "I am going to kill you," the aggressor's behavior forfeits the aggressor's right against the defender's infliction of harm that is intended to repel the aggressor's attack. Because the right is forfeited, numbers do not count (the …
Provocation Manslaughter As Partial Justification And Partial Excuse, Mitchell N. Berman, Ian Farrell
Provocation Manslaughter As Partial Justification And Partial Excuse, Mitchell N. Berman, Ian Farrell
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The partial defense of provocation provides that a person who kills in the heat of passion brought on by legally adequate provocation is guilty of manslaughter rather than murder. It traces back to the twelfth century, and exists today, in some form, in almost every U.S. state and other common law jurisdictions. But long history and wide application have not produced agreement on the rationale for the doctrine. To the contrary, the search for a coherent and satisfying rationale remains among the main occupations of criminal law theorists. The dominant scholarly view holds that provocation is best explained and defended …
"Let 'Em Play" A Study In The Jurisprudence Of Sport, Mitchell N. Berman
"Let 'Em Play" A Study In The Jurisprudence Of Sport, Mitchell N. Berman
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No abstract provided.
Blackmail, Mitchell N. Berman
Blackmail, Mitchell N. Berman
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Blackmail - the wrongful conditional threat to do what would be permissible - presents one of the great puzzles of the criminal law, and perhaps all of law, for it forces us to explain how it can be impermissible to threaten what it would be permissible to do. This essay, a contribution to forthcoming collection of papers on the philosophy of the criminal law, seeks to resolve the puzzle by building on, and refining, an account of blackmail that I first proposed over a decade ago, what I termed the "evidentiary theory of blackmail." In doing so, it also critically …
Punishment As Contract, Claire Oakes Finkelstein
Punishment As Contract, Claire Oakes Finkelstein
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This paper provides a sketch of a contractarian approach to punishment, according to a version of contractarianism one might call “rational contractarianism,” by contrast with the normative contractarianism of John Rawls. Rational contractarianism suggests a model according to which rational agents, with maximal, rather than minimal, knowledge of their life circumstances, would agree to the outlines of a particular social institution or set of social institutions because they view themselves as faring best in such a society governed by such institutions, as compared with a society governed by different institutional schemes available for adoption. Applied to the institution of punishment, …
Originalism Is Bunk, Mitchell N. Berman
Law Across Borders: What Can The United States Learn From Japan?, Eric Feldman
Law Across Borders: What Can The United States Learn From Japan?, Eric Feldman
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No abstract provided.
Symposium: Supreme Court Review, Symposium Foreword, Mitchell N. Berman
Symposium: Supreme Court Review, Symposium Foreword, Mitchell N. Berman
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No abstract provided.
Law, Society, And Medical Malpractice Litigation In Japan, Eric Feldman
Law, Society, And Medical Malpractice Litigation In Japan, Eric Feldman
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No abstract provided.
The Perils Of Forgetting Fairness, Michael B. Dorff, Kimberly Kessler Ferzan
The Perils Of Forgetting Fairness, Michael B. Dorff, Kimberly Kessler Ferzan
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No abstract provided.
Guest Workers And Justice In A Second-Best World, Howard F. Chang
Guest Workers And Justice In A Second-Best World, Howard F. Chang
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This essay offers a defense of guest-worker programs and a critique of the objections raised by Michael Walzer and by other critics of such programs. Although critics commonly complain that guest workers are vulnerable to exploitation by employers, we can design guest-worker programs that minimize the risk of such exploitation. Ready access for relatively unskilled guest workers to citizenship and to public benefits, however, generates a fiscal burden for the public treasury. A right to equal treatment for aliens yields perverse results unless aliens are also entitled to equal concern when the host country decides whether to admit the alien …
The Disadvantages Of Immigration Restriction As A Policy To Improve Income Distribution, Howard F. Chang
The Disadvantages Of Immigration Restriction As A Policy To Improve Income Distribution, Howard F. Chang
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In this Article, I argue that tax and transfer policies are more efficient than immigration restrictions as instruments for raising the after tax incomes of the least skilled native workers. Policies to protect these native workers frol1'l immigrant competition in the labor market do no better at promoting distributive justice and are likely to impose a greater economic burden on natives in the country of immigration than the tax alternative. These immigration restrictions are especially costly given the disproportionate burden that they place on households with working women, which discourages fel1'wle participation in the labor force. This burden runs contrary …