Law Commons^™

The Behavioral Sciences, Stability, And Change, Donald Young

Vanderbilt Law Review

Estimation of the potential contribution of behavioral research to social stability and social change may be attempted only in over-simplified terms. The necessary simplification here will be accomplished by considering the core behavioral sciences alone, by taking the position that social stability and change are two aspects of a single social process, by assuming that the problem is not whether behavioral research can contribute to understanding of that process but how the contribution best may be made, and by limiting illustrative references mainly to the medical and legal fields.

The Creative Power And Function Of Law In Historical Perspective, Harry W. Jones

Vanderbilt Law Review

The creative work of legislators, administrators, judges, and practicing lawyers is far more than a "response" to social change. Through-out recorded history, law itself has been one of the greatest of the forces of social change. Change and stabilization are, as Donald Young has reminded us, part of the same social process, and law is at the heart of that process. Let us concede, and readily, that the command theories of law embodied in the writings of Bodin, Hobbes, and Austin exalted unduly the pervasiveness of law's imperatives as the controlling influence on the behavior of men in society. At …

Law And The Dilemma Of Stability And Change In The Modernization Process, Lucian W. Pye

Vanderbilt Law Review

Even as a student of comparative politics my interests have led me more to analyzing the newly developing countries, countries which often appear to be impervious to principles about the rule of law. Out of this awareness of my limitations for this occasion, I have chosen as my theme what I feel to be a significant paradox about the role of law in the modernization process which is now engrossing the energies of the underdeveloped countries of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Boldly stated, this paradox is that historically, when Western law was introduced into traditional societies with the …

Legal Institutions And Social Controls, Philip Selznick

Vanderbilt Law Review

When the architects of this program asked me to discuss non-legal social controls, I assume they had in mind the need for greater humility within the legal profession. So proud an occasion as this calls for sober reflection on the limits of the distinctively legal-on the contingent, derivative, and partial place of formal adjudication and control within the larger ordering of human society. I have no objection to communicating such a perspective, there by adding an appropriate note of piety to these proceedings. Nevertheless, I think it may be more important for us to consider some of the great social …

The Lawyer's Response To The Demand For Both Stability And Change Through Law, Orison S. Marden

Vanderbilt Law Review

We need not worry about the lawyer's response to the need for stability in the law. The average lawyer is a conservative chap who does not favor change unless the need for it has been proved to the hilt.Nor need we tender full apologies for this hardheaded attitude, for,as Judge Cardozo once said, "certainty and uniformity are gains not lightly to be sacrificed. Above all is this true when honest men have shaped their conduct upon the faith of the pronouncement." At times, however, we have allowed these considerations, important as they are, to outweigh even more compelling reasons for …

The Educated Citizen's Responsibility In An Age Of Change, John F. Kennedy

Vanderbilt Law Review

Many things bring us together today. We are saluting the ninetieth anniversary of Vanderbilt University, which has grown from a small Tennessee university and institution to one of our nation's greatest, with seven different colleges, and with more than half of its 4,200 students from outside of the State of Tennessee. And we are saluting the thirtieth anniversary of the Tennessee Valley Authority, which transformed a parched, depressed, and flood-ravaged region into a fertile, productive center of industry, science,and agriculture. We are saluting-by initiating construction of a dam in his name--a great Tennessee statesman, Cordell Hull, the father of reciprocal …

On Legal Stability And Change, Edwin W. Patterson

Vanderbilt Law Review

The paradox, "law must be stable and yet it cannot stand still,"expresses one of the basic metaphysical aspects of law. Is law a Being or a Becoming? Some would answer this question by saying that the law is always a Becoming, a part of the eternal flux of human actions and conditions. It is impossible, they may say, to enclose the law in a logical system of norms, however well sanctioned. The important things, then, are the motivations of the persons who effectuate legal change (assuming these persons can be pointed out, which is not always the case) or their …

Stability And Change In Constitutional Law, Robert B. Mckay

Vanderbilt Law Review

Constitutional law, like other law, is rooted in the conservative tradition of the legal system as a whole and thus more willingly pays court to the muse of history and the force of precedent than to the muse of sociology and the demand for revision. It is therefore not surprising that lawyers read constitutions as law, in the ordinary meaning of that word, and that judges apply constitutional provisions as they do other law...

The Constitution of the United States was not cast in legal mold by accident, but by design that was itself the product of ineluctable history. A …