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Full-Text Articles in Law
May The State Punish What It May Not Prevent?, Gabriel S. Mendlow
May The State Punish What It May Not Prevent?, Gabriel S. Mendlow
Articles
In Why Is It Wrong To Punish Thought? I defended an overlooked principle of criminalization that I called the Enforceability Constraint. The Enforceability Constraint holds that the state may punish transgressions of a given type only if the state in principle may forcibly disrupt such transgressions on the ground that they are criminal wrongs. As I argued in the essay, the reason why the state is forbidden from punishing thought is that the state is forbidden from forcibly disrupting a person’s mental states on the ground that they are criminally wrongful (as opposed to, say, on the ground that they …
Democracy, Law, Compliance, Don Herzog
Democracy, Law, Compliance, Don Herzog
Articles
Professors Schauer and McAdams both seek a more or less sweepingly general theory of why we obey the law. But we should split, not lump. There are different reasons different actors in different social settings obey different laws–not only, but not least, out of regard for democratic decision making.
Reading John Noonan, Jospeh Vining
Reading John Noonan, Jospeh Vining
Articles
John Noonan is a giant in American law and legal practice -- a distinguished legal historian and a true judge. His reflections on the nature of law have a special importance. This essay is a comment on basic elements in his thought.
The Creation Of Authority In A Sermon By Saint Augustine, James Boyd White
The Creation Of Authority In A Sermon By Saint Augustine, James Boyd White
Book Chapters
My way of honoring Joe today will not be to describe or extol his achievements directly but to try to show something of what I have learned from him, particularly in the way I approach a new text and problem, in this case the creation of authority in one of Augustine's sermons.
The Role Of Authority, Scott A. Hershovitz
The Role Of Authority, Scott A. Hershovitz
Articles
The most influential account of authority – Joseph Raz's service conception – is an account of the role of authority, in that it is an account of its point or function. However, authority does not have a characteristic role to play, and even if it did, the ability to play a role is not, by itself, sufficient to establish authority. The aim of this essay is to shift our focus from roles that authority plays to roles that people play – which we can also call roles of authority – such as chef, teacher, and parent. To justify authority, we …
The Creation Of Authority In A Sermon By St. Augustine, James Boyd White
The Creation Of Authority In A Sermon By St. Augustine, James Boyd White
Articles
My way of honoring Joe today will not be to describe or extol his achievements directly but to try to show something of what I have learned from him, particularly in the way I approach a new text and problem, in this case the creation of authority in one of Augustine's sermons.
Authority And Reality, Joseph Vining
Authority And Reality, Joseph Vining
Book Chapters
Imagination has been introduced as a term of art in discussion of the social and political world. Some years ago James Boyd White turned to it in The Legal Imagination, his monumental work on the foundations of secular law and legal practice. A prominent example of its use today is Charles Taylor's Modern Social Imaginaries, tracing changes in the common mind leading to what we now call modernity. The term can have a large scope and at the same time a rather definite meaning. "Imagination" is at the center of Mark Massa's comments on the contrarian position of the Catholic …
Plato's 'Crito': The Authority Of Law And Philosophy (Symposium On Law, Literature, And The Humanities), James Boyd White
Plato's 'Crito': The Authority Of Law And Philosophy (Symposium On Law, Literature, And The Humanities), James Boyd White
Articles
My talk today will consist primarily of the interpretation of one of the dialogues of Plato, called the Crito. It will not have very much about law in it, and you may well wonder why such a lecture is being given in a law school. Let me begin by saying a word or two in response to that sensible question, as a way of framing the reading that follows.
Reasons, Authority, And The Meaning Of 'Obey': Further Thoughts On Raz And Obedience To Law, Donald H. Regan
Reasons, Authority, And The Meaning Of 'Obey': Further Thoughts On Raz And Obedience To Law, Donald H. Regan
Articles
I recently published a long article' discussing a variety of topics from Joseph Raz's The Morality of Freedom.2 The article was part of a symposium on Raz's work in the Southern California Law Review. Raz responded' to the articles in that symposium, including my own. From a perspective which surveys the whole range of views on political philosophy, Raz's view and mine look very similar. Even so, we find many things to disagree about, which neither of us would regard as merely matters of detail. For the most part, we at least share a common understanding of our disagreements. But …
Authority And Value: Reflections On Raz's Morality Of Freedom, Donald H. Regan
Authority And Value: Reflections On Raz's Morality Of Freedom, Donald H. Regan
Articles
Joseph Raz's The Morality of Freedom1 is full of subtle, original, and thought provoking arguments. It also manifests abundantly Raz's philosophical good sense and sensitivity to the complexities of the moral life. These are reasons enough to class it with the handful of genuinely important books whose appearance in the last two decades has constituted a renaissance in political philosophy. But in my opinion, Raz has another, and even stronger claim on our attention: He comes closer to the truth about political morality than anyone has for nearly a century. (Possibly much longer, but we need not attempt to decide …
Legal Affinities, Joseph Vining
Legal Affinities, Joseph Vining
Articles
Not long ago, any question of the kind "How may theology serve as a resource in understanding law?" would have been hardly conceivable among lawyers. When Lon Fuller brought out his first book in 1940, The Law in Quest of Itself, he could think of no better way of tagging his adversary the legal positivist than to note a "parallel between theoretical theology and analytical jurisprudence." Two decades later, in the name of realism, Thurman Arnold dismissed Henry Hart's non-positivist jurisprudence in harsh terms. A master of the cutting phrase, he confidently entitled his attack "Professor Hart's Theology." Two decades …
Law And Enchantment: The Place Of Belief, Joseph Vining
Law And Enchantment: The Place Of Belief, Joseph Vining
Articles
The question I wish to raise is whether one must believe what one says when one makes a statement of law. The language of belief that we know, and from which moral discourse and the moral never stray far: do judges, lawyers, law participate in it? Any such question is but an aspect of a larger question, indeed issue, of what we may call the objectivity of legal language. It is raised perhaps most acutely by the broad claims now being made for artificial intelligence and in particular for the computer programming of legal advice (as a species of what …