Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Keyword
-
- American legal history (1)
- Antitrust (1)
- Antonin Scalia (1)
- Classical legal thought (1)
- Complexity (1)
-
- Constitutional law (1)
- Constitutional theory (1)
- Corporate law (1)
- Courts (1)
- Determinants of legal content (1)
- Economic history (1)
- Holmes (1)
- Judging (1)
- Judicial role (1)
- Jurisprudence (1)
- Labor law (1)
- Legal realism (1)
- Originalism (1)
- Pragmatism (1)
- Progressive legal thought (1)
- Reading Law: Interpretation of Legal Texts (1)
- Reflections on Judging (1)
- Richard Posner (1)
- Textualism (1)
Articles 1 - 2 of 2
Full-Text Articles in Philosophy
Judge Posner’S Simple Law, Mitchell N. Berman
Judge Posner’S Simple Law, Mitchell N. Berman
All Faculty Scholarship
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 …
Progressive Legal Thought, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
Progressive Legal Thought, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
A widely accepted model of American legal history is that "classical" legal thought, which dominated much of the nineteenth century, was displaced by "progressive" legal thought, which survived through the New Deal and in some form to this day. Within its domain, this was a revolution nearly on a par with Copernicus or Newton. This paradigm has been adopted by both progressive liberals who defend this revolution and by classical liberals who lament it.
Classical legal thought is generally identified with efforts to systematize legal rules along lines that had become familiar in the natural sciences. This methodology involved not …