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Full-Text Articles in Law

Positivism, Emergent And Triumphant, Vincent A. Wellman May 1999

Positivism, Emergent And Triumphant, Vincent A. Wellman

Michigan Law Review

Positivism is one of those words that triggers passionate and often contradictory responses. For some, positivism is a pejorative. Lon Fuller, perhaps more than anyone, charged that positivism was confused about the nature of law, blind to law's inherent morality, and morally corrupting to boot. He even suggested, in different ways, that positivism helped promote the rise of fascism in Europe. Others, in contrast, have treated positivism as a modest and undeniable truth about law. Law, they argued, is morally fallible, and accordingly, the existence and validity of law is a matter of social fact rather than moral necessity. H.L.A. …


Subversive Thoughts On Freedom And The Common Good, Larry Alexander, Maimon Schwarzschild May 1999

Subversive Thoughts On Freedom And The Common Good, Larry Alexander, Maimon Schwarzschild

Michigan Law Review

Richard Epstein is a rare and forceful voice against the conventional academic wisdom of our time. Legal scholarship of the past few decades overwhelmingly supports more government regulation and more power for the courts, partly in order to control businesses for environmental and other reasons, but more broadly in hopes of achieving egalitarian outcomes along the famous lines of race, gender, and class. Epstein is deeply skeptical that any of this is the shining path to a better world. Epstein's moral criterion for evaluating social policy is to look at how fully it allows individual human beings to satisfy their …


In Defense Of The Good Samaritan, Hanoch Dagan Mar 1999

In Defense Of The Good Samaritan, Hanoch Dagan

Michigan Law Review

In the year 1880, in Dalles City, Oregon, a large and valuable load of lumber fell into the Columbia River and was about to be carried away by the river's waters. Since Savage, the owner of this lumber, was absent from the scene, Glenn - who, at that time, was doing construction work for Savage - "furnished help and did service" in saving the lumber "from being washed away and lost." Seven years later, the Supreme Court of Oregon rejected Glenn's claim that Savage owed him "the reasonable value" of his services as well as of the services of the …


Aborting The Pros And Cons Of Abortion: No Escaping The Killing Fields, Ibpp Editor Feb 1999

Aborting The Pros And Cons Of Abortion: No Escaping The Killing Fields, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

This article critiques rationales of both opponents and supporters of intentionally aborting a human fetus. The critique has implications for arriving at legal, ethical, and moral judgments.


Apparently Substantial, Oddly Hollow: The Enigmatic Practice Of Justice, Heidi Li Feldman Jan 1999

Apparently Substantial, Oddly Hollow: The Enigmatic Practice Of Justice, Heidi Li Feldman

Michigan Law Review

The Practice of Justice: A Theory of Lawyers' Ethics, by William H. Simon, is one of the most thoughtful and important books in legal theory - not just legal ethics - published in the past ten years. Like David Luban's seminal contribution to legal ethics, Lawyers and Justice: An Ethical Study, published a decade ago, Simon's book is a deliberate rival to accounts of lawyers' professional responsibility that begin with a command to zealous advocacy, end with a prohibition on outright illegal conduct, and offer nothing in between. Authors and commentators have grown increasingly dissatisfied with this as the basic …


The Distributive Foundation Of Corrective Justice, Hanoch Dagan Jan 1999

The Distributive Foundation Of Corrective Justice, Hanoch Dagan

Michigan Law Review

There are two, apparently conflicting, approaches to private law theorizing. One approach - by now, dare I say, the prevailing approach - analyzes private law through the lens of its social, economic, cultural, or political meanings and ramifications. For the purposes of this Article, we may call the proponents of this approach the "social values school." Other theorists, those who take a corrective justice approach, insist that the adjective "private" is significant and should be the starting point for any understanding of "private law." They claim that this starting point inevitably generates a radically different understanding of private law. Organized …


Farewell To An Idea? Ideology In Legal Theory, David Charny Jan 1999

Farewell To An Idea? Ideology In Legal Theory, David Charny

Michigan Law Review

In 1956, Morocco inaugurated a constitutional democratic polity on the Western model. Elections were to be held, and political parties formed, with voters to be registered by party. The Berbers, however, did not join the parties as individual voters. Each Berber clan joined their chosen party as a unit. To consecrate (or, perhaps, to accomplish) the clan's choice, a bullock was sacrificed. These sacrificial rites offer a useful parable about the relationship between law and culture. The social order imposed by law depends crucially on the "culture" of the participants in the system - their habits, dispositions, views of the …


The Myth Of Choice Of Law: Rethinking Conflicts, Kermit Roosevelt Iii Jan 1999

The Myth Of Choice Of Law: Rethinking Conflicts, Kermit Roosevelt Iii

Michigan Law Review

Choice of law is a mess. That much has become a truism. It is a "dismal swamp," a morass of confusion, a body of doctrine "killed by a realism intended to save it," and now "universally said to be a disaster." One way to demonstrate its tribulations would be to look at the academic dissensus and the hopelessly underdeterminative Restatement (Second) of Conflict of Laws. Another would be to examine the Supreme Court's abdication of the task of articulating constitutional constraints on state choice-of-law rules. This article will do both. At the outset, though, I want to suggest that one …