Law Commons^™

Terry Firma: Background Democracy And Constitutional Foundations, Frank I. Michelman

Michigan Law Review

Ages ago, I had the excellent luck to fall into a collaboration with Terrance Sandalow to produce a casebook now long forgotten. There could have been no more bracing or beneficial learning experience for a fledgling legal scholar (meaning me). What brought us together indeed was luck from my standpoint, but it was enterprise, too - the brokerage of an alert West Publishing Company editor picking up on a casual remark of mine as he made one of his regular sweeps through Harvard Law School. A novice law professor, I mentioned to him how much I admired a new essay …

Authorizing Interpretation, Pierre Schlag

Publications

No abstract provided.

Institutions And Linguistic Conventions: The Pragmatism Of Lieber's Legal Hermeneutics, Guyora Binder

Journal Articles

This article presents Francis Lieber’s 1839 treatise “Legal and Political Hermeneutics” as a surprisingly modern and pragmatic account of interpretation. It first explicates the two most important influences on Liber’s thought, the romantic philology of Friedrich Schleiermacher, and the institutional positivism of Whig jurists Story and Kent. It shows that both of these sources frankly acknowledged that interpretation is an institutional practice, organized by the evolving aims and customs of the institutions within which it took place. Both tended to view the writing and reading of texts as the deployment of linguistic conventions. Both movements thereby viewed meaning for all …

Judicial Conduct

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Right To Counsel

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Interaction Between State And Federal Right To Counsel: The Overruling Of Bartolomeounsel: The Overruling Of Bartolomeo, Joseph D. Sullivan

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Rehnquist Court, Statutory Interpretation, Inertial Burdens, And A Misleading Version Of Democracy, Jeffrey W. Stempel

Scholarly Works

No one theory or school of thought consistently dominates judicial application of statutes, but the basic methodology employed by courts seems well-established if not always well-defined. Most mainstream judges and lawyers faced with a statutory construction task will look at (although with varying emphasis) the text of the statute, the legislative history of the provision, the context of the enactment, evident congressional purpose, and applicable agency interpretations, often employing the canons of construction for assistance. Although orthodox judicial thought suggests that the judge's role is confined to discerning textual meaning or directives of the enacting legislature, courts also often examine …

The Meaning Of Equality And The Interpretive Turn, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The turn to hermeneutics and interpretation in contemporary legal theory has contributed at least two central ideas to modern jurisprudential thought: first, that the "meaning" of a text is invariably indeterminate -- what might be called the indeterminacy claim -- and second, that the unavoidably malleable essence of texts -- their essential inessentiality -- entails that interpreting a text is a necessary part of the process of creating the text's meaning. These insights have generated both considerable angst, and considerable excitement among traditional constitutional scholars, primarily because at least on first blush these two claims seem to inescapably imply a …

Adjudication Is Not Interpretation: Some Reservations About The Law-As-Literature Movement, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Among other achievements, the modern law-as-literature movement has prompted increasing numbers of legal scholars to embrace the claim that adjudication is interpretation, and more specifically, that constitutional adjudication is interpretation of the Constitution. That adjudication is interpretation -- that an adjudicative act is an interpretive act -- more than any other central commitment, unifies the otherwise diverse strands of the legal and constitutional theory of the late twentieth century.

In this article, I will argue in this article against both modern forms of interpretivism. The analogue of law to literature, on which much of modern interpretivism is based, although fruitful, …

The Uses Of Human Rights Norms To Inform Constitutional Interpretation, Gordon A. Christenson

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Recent federal court of appeals decisions have relied on fundamental human rights norms to inform constitutional interpretation. This comment reviews the reasoning in those cases to identify possible constitutional uses of fundamental human rights norms and to suggest some conceptual framework for their use. The need for such a framework is illustrated by the cases themselves, which seem disparate and disjointed, with no discernible coherent philosophy, though each makes good sense when considered alone.

Mr. Justice William Johnson And The Common Incidents Of Life: I, A. J. Levin

Michigan Law Review

When Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes filed his brief dissenting opinion in Lochner v. New York in 1905 he must have noticed something new on the American horizon. In this now famous opinion he initiated the first steps which were to usher in a new era in American jurisprudence. "General propositions do not decide concrete cases," he announced with axiomatic brevity and, thus, gave the first telling blow to what may well be termed "introspective jurisprudence." This generalization on the subject of generality was followed in the opinion by a more concrete application, the implementing assertion that a reasonable man might …