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Full-Text Articles in Law

Feminist Legal History And Legal Pedagogy, Paula A. Monopoli Jan 2022

Feminist Legal History And Legal Pedagogy, Paula A. Monopoli

Faculty Scholarship

Women are mere trace elements in the traditional law school curriculum. They exist only on the margins of the canonical cases. Built on masculine norms, traditional modes of legal pedagogy involve appellate cases that overwhelmingly involve men as judges and advocates. The resulting silence signals that women are not makers of law—especially constitutional law. Teaching students critical modes of analysis like feminist legal theory and critical race feminism matters. But unmoored from feminist legal history, such critical theory is incomplete and far less persuasive. This Essay focuses on feminist legal history as foundational if students are to understand the implications …


Afterword: Kindling The Programmatic Production Of Critical And Outsider Legal Scholarship, 1996-2016, Sarudzayi M. Matambanadzo, Francisco Valdes, Sheila I, Velez Martinez Jan 2016

Afterword: Kindling The Programmatic Production Of Critical And Outsider Legal Scholarship, 1996-2016, Sarudzayi M. Matambanadzo, Francisco Valdes, Sheila I, Velez Martinez

Articles

This afterword to a conference-based symposium represents not only an inter-generational reflection on LatCrit theory @ XX, but also an aspirational reminder of our foundational propositions and values as we look and venture ahead. Beginning with an introduction to the foundational theoretical principles of LatCrit knowledge production - as embodied principally by LatCrit values and the related functions, guidelines, and postulates - we discuss in detail and depth how these theoretical principles underpin the various projects in the LatCrit "portfolio" and provide a historical sketch of the development of these projects as programmatic knowledge production. In particular, we aim …


A Whale Of A Tale: Post-Colonialism, Critical Theory, And Deconstruction: Revisiting The International Convention For The Regulation Of Whaling Through A Socio-Legal Persepctive, Nick J. Sciullo Jan 2008

A Whale Of A Tale: Post-Colonialism, Critical Theory, And Deconstruction: Revisiting The International Convention For The Regulation Of Whaling Through A Socio-Legal Persepctive, Nick J. Sciullo

Nick J. Sciullo

This article is a critical interpretation of the indigenous whaling debate, which, although often discussed in legal academia, has received only passing critical attention. As a scholar in the critical theory/critical legal studies model, I am primarily concerned with the impact that law and debates about law have on divergent groups (racial, ethnic, gender, etc.). This article develops a criticism of the United States's postcolonial opposition to whaling, arguing, instead, for cultural relativism. The article indicts U.S. imperialism, and treatment of indigenous peoples, arguing for interdisciplinary analysis and a more keen appreciation for the voice of indigenous peoples. As I …


Epinomia: Plato And The First Legal Theory, Eric Heinze Jan 2007

Epinomia: Plato And The First Legal Theory, Eric Heinze

Prof. Eric Heinze, Queen Mary University of London

In comparison to Aristotle, Plato’s general understanding of law receives little attention in legal theory, due in part to ongoing perceptions of him as a mystic or a totalitarian. However, some of the critical or communitarian themes that have guided theorists since Aristotle already find strong expression in Plato’s work. More than any thinker until the 19th and 20th centuries, Plato rejects the rank individualism and self-interest which, in his view, emerge within democratic legal culture. He rejects schisms between legal norms and community values, institutional separation of law from morals, intricate regimes of legislation and adjudication, and a culture …


Responding To Nietzsche: The Constructive Power Of Destruktion, Francis J. Mootz Iii Jan 2007

Responding To Nietzsche: The Constructive Power Of Destruktion, Francis J. Mootz Iii

Scholarly Works

As a student of Hans-Georg Gadamer, and later a translator and important commentator on Gadamer’s philosophy, P. Christopher Smith is widely acknowledged to be a leading hermeneutical philosopher. In a series of works, Smith has argued that Gadamer provides an important corrective to Nietzsche’s caustic critical challenges, but that Gadamer’s hermeneutics has no relevance for legal theory because law is just the manifestation of will to power. In this paper I argue that Smith misunderstands the nature of legal practice. Starting with a re-reading of the debate between Gadamer and Jacques Derrida about the legacy of Nietzsche’s philosophy, I argue …


Ricoeur’S Critical Hermeneutics And The Psychotherapeutic Model Of Critical Theory, Francis J. Mootz Iii Jan 2006

Ricoeur’S Critical Hermeneutics And The Psychotherapeutic Model Of Critical Theory, Francis J. Mootz Iii

Scholarly Works

This paper seeks to extend Ricoeur’s acclaimed mediation of the Gadamer-Habermas debate. Freud’s psychoanalytic practice was an important touchstone for the debate, and Ricoeur’s reading of Freud provides a key to his critical intervention in the debate. The emerging postmodern account of psychotherapeutic practice provides a model of the critical hermeneutics that Ricoeur championed. Bringing Ricoeur’s insights to bear on this model, we can advance the questioning spurred by the Gadamer-Habermas debate without pretending to bring closure to the unending conversation of thinking.


The Quest To Reprogram Cultural Software: A Hermeneutical Response To Jack Balkin's Theory Of Ideology And Critique, Francis J. Mootz Iii Jan 2000

The Quest To Reprogram Cultural Software: A Hermeneutical Response To Jack Balkin's Theory Of Ideology And Critique, Francis J. Mootz Iii

Scholarly Works

Critical theory has lost the self-assurance that defined the heady days of Marxist economics and Freudian psychoanalysis. In his famous debate with Hans-Georg Gadamer thirty years ago, Jürgen Habermas argued that critical theory was a necessary corrective to the quiescence and conventionalism that followed from Gadamer's hermeneutic perspective. As the 1960s unfolded, the second generation of the Frankfurt School appeared poised to bring sophisticated techniques of social criticism to bear on the emerging postindustrialist system of global capitalism. But the promise of critical theory failed to materialize. Today, Habermas plays the role of the aging lion who refuses to accept …


Foreward, Symposium: Philosophical Hermeneutics And Critical Legal Theory, Francis J. Mootz Iii Jan 2000

Foreward, Symposium: Philosophical Hermeneutics And Critical Legal Theory, Francis J. Mootz Iii

Scholarly Works

This Symposium brings the considerable talents of a diverse group of scholars to bear on a pressing problem in legal theory: Whether critical theory is possible after the hermeneutical turn. All too often, this problem is framed to invite an “either-or” response. Either we reject the hermeneutical turn and hew to a traditional account of critique anchored by an unimpeachable standard (whether economic, historical, conceptual, cognitive, or otherwise), or we take the hermeneutical turn by embracing radical historical contingency and fluidity, thereby forsaking the possibility of critique and surrendering to conservative conventionalism or inviting postmodern chaos. This Symposium challenges this …