Law Commons^™

The Fitness Of Law: Using Complexity Theory To Describe The Evolution Of Law And Society And Its Practical Meaning For Democracy, J. B. Ruhl

Vanderbilt Law Review

Why does law change, and how does that process unfold? In this Article, Professor Ruhl examines those questions using tools from the emerging field of Complexity Theory. Complexity Theory involves the study of change in dynamical systems. Its findings of unpredictable change in a variety of natural and social settings have profoundly effected the theoretical foundations of many fields of study. In particular, Complexity Theory has revisited the Darwinist theory of biological evolution and used it as a platform for developing a general theory of system evolution that focuses on the concept of fitness landscapes. The fitness, or sustainability, of …

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 …