Law Commons^™

Ostracism And Democracy, Alex Zhang

Faculty Articles

The 2020 Presidential Election featured an unprecedented attempt to undermine our democratic institutions: allegations of voter fraud and litigation about mail-in ballots culminated in a mob storming of the Capitol as Congress certified President Biden’s victory. Former President Trump now faces social-media bans and potential disqualification from future federal office, but his allies have criticized those efforts as the witch-hunt of a cancel culture that is symptomatic of the unique ills of contemporary liberal politics.

This Article defends recent efforts to remove Trump from the public eye, with reference to an ancient Greek electoral mechanism: ostracism. In the world’s first …

Agency Problems And Organizational Costs In Slave-Run Business, Barbara Abatino, Giuseppe Dari-Mattiacci

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter examines the internal economic organization of the peculium servi communis — that is, of separate business assets assigned to a slave — and its (external) relationships with creditors. Literary, legal, and epigraphic evidence points predominantly to businesses of small or medium size, suggesting that there must have been some constraints to growth. We identify both agency problems arising within the business organization (governance problems) and agency problems arising between the business organization and its creditors (limited access to credit). We suggest that, although the praetorian remedies had a remarkable mitigating effect, agency problems operated as a constraint to …

The Dual Origin Of The Duty To Disclose In Roman Law, Barbara Abatino, Giuseppe Dari-Mattiacci

Faculty Scholarship

The Roman law remedies for failure to disclose in sales contracts were developed by two different institutions: that of the aediles, with jurisdiction on market transactions effected through auctions, and that of the praetor, with general jurisdiction including private transactions. The aedilician remedies — the actiones redhibitoria and quanti minoris — allowed for rapid transactions and inexpensive litigation but generated some allocative losses ex post, as they did not incentivize the parties to exchange information about idiosyncratic characteristics of the goods for sale. In contrast, the remedy developed by the praetor — the actio ex empto — implied …

The Reliable Revisionist, Caitlyn Schaffer

Philosophy: Student Scholarship & Creative Works

The present text explores how the topic of head and heart is much more complicated than one would expect, according to Paul Henne and Walter Sinnot-Armstrong, contributors of Neuroexistentialism. “Does Neuroscience Undermine Morality” aims at figuring out the problem of which moral judgments we can trust, judgments from one’s head (revisionism) or judgments from one’s heart (conservatism). My hypothesis suggests the opposite of the authors, I believe that if you are a revisionist, your first order intuitions are reliable. After setting the framework, I make three main arguments. (A.) If you are able to self-correct then you can identify errors …

Melville's Billy Budd And Plato's Republic: Sea Captains And Philosopher-Kings, Rob Atkinson

Scholarly Publications

This article shows how Melville's Billy Budd, rightly one of law and literature's most widely studied canonical texts, answers Plato's challenge in Book X of the Republic: Show how "poets" create better citizens, especially better rulers, or banish them from the commonwealth of reasoned law. Captain Vere is a flawed but instructive version of the Republic's philosopher-king, even as his story is precisely the sort of "poetry" that Plato should willingly allow, by his own republican principles, into the ideal polity. Not surprisingly, the novella shows how law's agents must be wise, even as their law must be philosophical, if …

Law, Philosophy, And Civil Disobedience: The Laws' Speech In Plato's 'Crito', Steven Thomason

Articles

Plato's 'Crito' is an examination of the tension between political science, a life devoted to the rational discourse and the critique of politics, and the demands of allegiance and service to the city. The argument Socrates makes in the name of the laws is not just meant to persuade Crito. Rather, it is a philosophic defense of the city itself, the philosophic response to Socrates' own speech in the Apology defending philosophy. This speech reveals the dangers and problems of a life devoted to philosophy when reason is directed to politics and calls into question the values and way of …

Law, Philosophy, And Civil Theodicy: An Interpretation Of Plato's Epinomis, Steven Thomason

Presentations and Lectures

Scholars have mostly neglected Plato’s Epinomis. To my knowledge no one has attempted an interpretation of the dialogue as a whole in recent memory. In part this is because some scholars have argued that the Epinomis was not written by Plato. However, this is not the opinion of many prominent Plato scholars of the last century and a half. For example, George Grote, Paul Friedlander, A.E. Taylor, and Paul Shorey all considered it an authentic Platonic dialogue. Additionally, its authenticity was hardly doubted by ancient commentators. The main argument made for its not being authentic is not interpretational but alleged …

"The Urban Praetor's Tribunal" In Spaces Of Justice In The Roman World, Eric Kondratieff

History Faculty Publications

"Book abstract: Despite the crucial role played by both law and architecture in Roman culture, the Romans never developed a type of building that was specifically and exclusively reserved for the administration of justice: courthouses did not exist in Roman antiquity. The present volume addresses this paradox by investigating the spatial settings of Roman judicial practices from a variety of perspectives. Scholars of law, topography, architecture, political history, and literature concur in putting Roman judicature back into its concrete physical context, exploring how the exercise of law interacted with the environment in which it took place, and how the spaces …

Book Review. Roman Law After The Fall Of Rome, David V. Snyder

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Review of: Stein, Peter, Roman Law in European History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Hobbes, Formalism, And Corrective Justice, Anita L. Allen, Maria H. Morales

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Symposium Draft For Tragic Choices In Everyday Life - 1990, Wendy J. Gordon

Scholarship Chronologically

In the age of high technology, ordinary life situations often demand tragic choices: kidney dialysis, new pesticides, and even simple legal contracts can pose excruciating choices for people from all walks of life and inescapable dangers for innocent victims. This human dilemma-facing a world in which some innocents will die- is paralleled by the central Christian mythos of a willing crucifixion. Law and myth help us clarify the human situation.

Roman Law In Modern Life And Education, Joseph H. Drake

Articles

"This discussion might be entitled, an experiment in classical education and how it failed... It is in a way an Apologia pro Mea Vita Paedagogica. The excess of ego dixi et meus filius respondit in it may, therefore, perhaps be pardoned by a confession at the outset that it is an account of failure on the part of the speaker to solve a troublesome pedagogical question and a very satisfactory solution of the same problem by one of his colleagues in the Latin Department."