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Constituting Communities Through Words That Bind: Reflections On Loyalty Oaths, Sanford Levinson
Constituting Communities Through Words That Bind: Reflections On Loyalty Oaths, Sanford Levinson
Michigan Law Review
Preparation of this essay has not served to resolve my own ambivalences about what, after all, Duncan Kennedy once named the "fundamental contradiction" of all social life, the tension between "individual freedom" and the coercive communal life with "[o]thers (family, friends, bureaucrats, cultural figures, the state)" that is "necessary if we are to become persons at all - they provide us the stuff of our selves and protect us ,in crucial ways against destruction." It should not be surprising if something so fundamental does not prove amenable to resolution. In any case, the reader should not expect to find a …
Community, Citizenship, And The Search For National Identity, Frederick Schauer
Community, Citizenship, And The Search For National Identity, Frederick Schauer
Michigan Law Review
As a test of this proposition, I want to explore the issue of alienage restrictions. Under what circumstances is it justifiable to draw lines based on whether a person is a citizen? Lines drawn on the basis of citizenship are a useful test of how seriously we take the idea of the nation as a relevant community and, more tangentially, of how seriously we take the idea of community itself. To the extent that we are skeptical of such lines, our concerns are to that extent individual-oriented, primarily focused on the adverse consequences of excluding some people from benefits or …