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The Law's Clock, Frederic Bloom

Publications

Time is everywhere in law. It shapes doctrines as disparate as ripeness and retroactivity, and it impacts litigants of every status and type--the eager plaintiff who brings her case too early, the death-row inmate who seeks his stay too late. Yet legal time is still scarcely studied, and it remains poorly understood. This Article makes new and better sense of that time. It begins with an original account of time as a tool of institutional power, tracking the relocation of that power from the first western cathedrals to the earliest Supreme Court. It then links time's revealing past to our …