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Full-Text Articles in Law
Separation Of Powers Doctrine On The Modern Supreme Court And Four Doctrinal Approaches To Judicial Decision-Making, R. Randall Kelso
Separation Of Powers Doctrine On The Modern Supreme Court And Four Doctrinal Approaches To Judicial Decision-Making, R. Randall Kelso
Pepperdine Law Review
No abstract provided.
Thinking Like Thinkers: Is The Art And Discipline Of An "Attitude Of Suspended Conclusion" Lost On Lawyers?, Donald J. Kochan
Thinking Like Thinkers: Is The Art And Discipline Of An "Attitude Of Suspended Conclusion" Lost On Lawyers?, Donald J. Kochan
Donald J. Kochan
In his 1910 book, How We Think, John Dewey proclaimed that “the most important factor in the training of good mental habits consists in acquainting the attitude of suspended conclusion. . .” This Article explores that insight and describes its meaning and significance in the enterprise of thinking generally and its importance in law school education specifically. It posits that the law would be best served if lawyers think like thinkers and adopt an attitude of suspended conclusion in their problem solving affairs. Only when conclusion is suspended is there space for the exploration of the subject at hand. The …
The Logic Of Reciprocity: Trust, Collective Action, And Law, Dan M. Kahan
The Logic Of Reciprocity: Trust, Collective Action, And Law, Dan M. Kahan
Michigan Law Review
The Logic of Collective Action has for decades supplied the logic of public-policy analysis. In this pioneering application of public choice theory, Mancur Olson elegantly punctured the premise - shared by a variety of political theories - that individuals can be expected to act consistently with the interest of the groups to which they belong. Absent externally imposed incentives, wealth-maximizing individuals, he argued, will rarely find it in their interest to contribute to goods that benefit the group as a whole, but rather will "free ride" on the contributions that other group members make. As a result, too few individuals …
Logic And Elements. (Premises And Conclusions: Symbolic Logic For Legal Analysis)." , Richard D. Friedman
Logic And Elements. (Premises And Conclusions: Symbolic Logic For Legal Analysis)." , Richard D. Friedman
Articles
We may happily agree with Holmes that logic is not the life of the law' and yet contend that logic should play a significant role in legal discourse. Logic cannot demonstrate the truth of premises, and so by itself it cannot demonstrate the merits of a legal argument. Moreover, even given the premises, it may be that a leap of faith, or intuition, has an irreducible role at least in some good legal arguments.2 But at least a sound legal argument will not be an illogical one. An argument will not be persuasive if it appears to violate basic principles …
Some Lesson About The Law From Self-Referential Problems In Mathematics, John M. Rogers, Robert E. Molzon
Some Lesson About The Law From Self-Referential Problems In Mathematics, John M. Rogers, Robert E. Molzon
Michigan Law Review
We first describe briefly mathematician Kurt Gödel's brilliant Incompleteness Theorem of 1931, and explore some of its general implications. We then attempt to draw a parallel between axiomatic systems of number theory (or of logic in general) and systems of law, and defend the analogy against anticipated objections. Finally, we reach two types of conclusions. First, failure to distinguish between language and metalanguage in mathematical self-referential problems leads to fallacies that are highly analogous to certain legal fallacies. Second, and perhaps more significantly, Gödel's theorem strongly suggests that it is impossible to create a legal system that is "complete" in …
Infinite Strands, Infinitesimally Thin: Storytelling, Bayesianism, Hearsay And Other Evidence, Richard D. Friedman
Infinite Strands, Infinitesimally Thin: Storytelling, Bayesianism, Hearsay And Other Evidence, Richard D. Friedman
Articles
David Schum has long been one of our keenest commentators on questions of inference and proof. He has been particularly interested in, and illuminating on, the subject of "cascaded," or multi-step, inference.' This is a subject of importance to lawyers, because most evidence at trial can be analyzed in terms of cascaded inference. Usually, the proposition that the fact finder2 might immediately infer from the evidence is not itself an element of a crime, claim, or defense. Most often, an extra inference would be required to jump from that proposition to a proposition that the law deems material. Thus, inference …
The Jurisprudence Of Skepticism, Richard A. Posner
The Jurisprudence Of Skepticism, Richard A. Posner
Michigan Law Review
The skeptical vein in American thinking about law runs from Holmes to the legal realists to the critical legal studies movement, while behind Holmes stretches a European skeptical legal tradition that runs from Thrasymachus (in Plato's Republic) to Hobbes and Bentham and beyond. Against the skeptics can be arrayed a vast number of natural lawyers, legal conventionalists, and formalists, including Cicero, Coke, Blackstone, and Langdell, not to mention the majority of contemporary lawyers, judges, and law professors. This article will set forth and defend a moderately skeptical approach to law and judging, one not so far-reaching as that of …
Language, Law, And Logic: Plain Legal Drafting For The Electronic Age, Layman E. Allen
Language, Law, And Logic: Plain Legal Drafting For The Electronic Age, Layman E. Allen
Book Chapters
The achievement of current demands for clearer legal drafting in the United States (New York, 1973 and President's Executive Order, 1978) and Great Britain (Renton Report, 1975) can be aided by applying modern logic to improve the language of the law. In considering how the expression of legal norms can be clarified by using some formal language techniques, particular attention will be given to alternatives for dealing with problems of inadvertent imprecision in current legal drafting, alternatives that facilitate human understanding as well as enhance the possibilities for analysis by computer. A brief sketch of the imprecision of the expression …