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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 …
Law, Legalism, And Community Before The American Revolution, Bruce H. Mann
Law, Legalism, And Community Before The American Revolution, Bruce H. Mann
Michigan Law Review
The connections between law and community are difficult to identify, let alone explain. It may be best to begin by seeing how law and the ways people used it changed, and then attempt to relate those changes to the surrounding economy and society. One must, of course, be wary of finding what one looks for. Nonetheless, as with objects against a dark background, it is sometimes easier to see things when they move than when they remain still. To illustrate the interactive nature of legal change and community, I will draw on examples from Connecticut before the Revolution - not …
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 …
Introduction: Is Cultural Criticism Possible?, James Boyd White
Introduction: Is Cultural Criticism Possible?, James Boyd White
Michigan Law Review
It is by now something of a truism that the abstract and conceptual modes of discourse that have dominated our intellectual life in the past century have led to a rather reduced and schematic view of law. Moved by the desire to talk about social institutions in a neutral and scientific way, scholars beginning at least with John Austin have sought to define law as a set of rules, promulgated by a sovereign and addressed to the behavior of subject individuals, all in an attempt to isolate legal phenomena from their context for scientific study. Rules, on this view, are …