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Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Is The Use Of Calling Emerson A Pragmatist: A Brief And Belated Response To Stanley Cavell, Allen P. Mendenhall
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Is The Use Of Calling Emerson A Pragmatist: A Brief And Belated Response To Stanley Cavell, Allen P. Mendenhall
Allen Mendenhall
This essay investigates the relationship between Ralph Waldo Emerson and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. in the context of the common law. Holmes’s Emersonian writings, in particular his dissents, fall within the theoretical framework of agonism, which Harold Bloom refers to as a revisionary and Emersonian “program.” Agonism as a political and aesthetic theory maintains that sites of contestation can be productive rather than destructive; it suggests that confrontational relationships can be at once mutually offsetting and generative. Drawing from the Greek word for an athletic competition, agonism applied to rhetoric underscores the importance of mutuality to conflict: writers struggling against …
An All Of The Above Theory Of Legal Development, Larry A. Dimatteo
An All Of The Above Theory Of Legal Development, Larry A. Dimatteo
Larry A DiMatteo
This paper reviews different theories of legal development in order to highlight their similarities and differences. In the end, as in contract theories, no monist view of legal development possesses the explanatory power needed to understand how law has come to be and where it may take us in the future. What we do have is a foundation built on at least two millennia of legal history. The intellectual starting point for this project is Nathan Isaacs’ unfinished work on a cycle theory of legal development. His view of legal development takes issue with Henry Sumner Maine’s thesis that development …
From Libertarianism To Egalitarianism, Justin Schwartz
From Libertarianism To Egalitarianism, Justin Schwartz
Justin Schwartz
A standard natural rights argument for libertarianism is based on the labor theory of property: the idea that I own my self and my labor, and so if I "mix" my own labor with something previously unowned or to which I have a have a right, I come to own the thing with which I have mixed by labor. This initially intuitively attractive idea is at the basis of the theories of property and the role of government of John Locke and Robert Nozick. Locke saw and Nozick agreed that fairness to others requires a proviso: that I leave "enough …