Law Commons^™

Shooting Fish, Michael L. Smith

Faculty Articles

Many academic legal articles begin with sweeping statements concerning the majesty of law, often noting that "the life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience" and that "the law embodies the story of a nation's development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics." This is not one of those articles, as it gets straight to the point, asking the question that's on everyone's mind: if you're walking next to a stream, river, lake, or pond, and you happen to see …

John The Theologian: Towards Integrating Law And Religion, Gordon T. Butler

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

A Jewish Law View Of World Law, Michael J. Broyde

Faculty Articles

This paper will explore two basic Jewish law questions which reflect on the technical issues related to Professor Berman's world law proposal. The first question asks how Jewish law views public international law and whether public international law can be incorporated into the corpus of Jewish law. The second question asks how Jewish law generally incorporates domestic (municipal) law into Jewish law and if this classical paradigm of integration assists in formulating a Jewish law view of world law. To the best of my knowledge, the first matter is a question of nearly first impression in the Jewish law literature.

The Morality Of Human Rights: A Nonreligious Ground?, Michael J. Perry

Faculty Articles

In the midst of the countless, grotesque inhumanities of the twentieth century, however, there is a heartening story, amply recounted elsewhere: the emergence, in international law, of the morality of human rights. The morality of human rights is not new; in one or another version, the morality is very old. But the emergence of morality in international law, in the period since the end of World War II, is a profoundly important development.

The twentieth century, therefore, was not only the dark and bloody time; the second half of the twentieth century was also the time in which a growing …

Imperatives, Normativity, And The Law, Gregory Silverman

Faculty Articles

In this article Professor Silverman sets out to resolve the problem of legal normativity. Professor Silverman argues that legal scholars have been prevented from transcending the limited conception of law engendered by a key dogma of nineteenth century jurisprudence: the dogma that laws are a species of commands, orders, or imperatives. As a result, even as we enter the twenty-first century, legal scholars have yet to articulate a legal architectonic that properly situates the normative commitments of a society within a post-modern legal system. An adequate theory of law must offer an account of the normativity of law: an account …

Constitutional Law And The Myth Of The Great Judge, Michael S. Ariens

Faculty Articles

One of the enduring myths of American history, including constitutional history, is that of the “Great Man” or “Great Woman.” The idea is that, to understand the history of America, one needs to understand the impact made by Great Men and Women whose actions affected the course of history. In political history, one assays the development of the United States through the lives of great Americans, from the “Founders” to Abraham Lincoln to John F. Kennedy. Similarly, in constitutional history, the story is told through key figures, the “Great Judges,” from John Marshall to Oliver Wendell Holmes to Earl Warren. …

Dualistic Legal Phenomena And The Limitations Of Positivism, Gregory Silverman

Faculty Articles

Often, in a case of first instance, a judge will reach a decision by an appeal to legal principles. For example, in the 1889 case of Riggs v. Palmer a New York court had to decide whether a grandson who had murdered his grandfather could inherit under the will in which his grandfather had named him an heir. The statutes and rules of testamentary law did not prohibit the inheritance. The court, however, invoked the legal principle that no one should be permitted to profit by his own wrong and denied the claim to inheritance. The use of such principles …