Law Commons^™

Approaching The Constitution, Don Herzog

Reviews

These are sumptuously produced, oversized volumes: one pictures them, as I suspect some shrewd accountant at the press did, decorating the shelves of lawyers' offices. Their pages are crammed full of primary texts, two columns on each page, in an alarmingly small but somehow readable typeface. Some texts are bare snippets; others wind on luxuriantly for many pages. The editors have set a cutoff point: no text from after 1835 appears. Like much else about these volumes, that decision reflects a set of theoretical commitments about the Constitution that I want to question. Not that these volumes are explicitly cast …

Unpleasant Facts: The Supreme Court's Response To Empirical Research On Capital Punishment, Phoebe C. Ellsworth

Book Chapters

Slowly at first, and then with accelerating frequency, the courts have begun to examine, consider, and sometimes even require empirical data. From 1960 to 1981, for example, use of the terms "statistics" and "statistical" in Federal District and Circuit Court opinions increased by almost 15 times.1 Of course, citation rates indicate only that a topic is considered worthy of mention, not that it is taken seriously, or even understood. Nonetheless, in a number of areas, such as jury composition and employment discrimination, the courts have come to rely on empirical data as a matter of course.

In the last 25 …

Making Sense Of Modern Jurisprudence: The Paradox Of Positivism And The Challenge For Natural Law, Philip E. Soper

Articles

Karl Llewellyn once said, referring to Roscoe Pound's work m jurisprudence, that it was difficult to tell on what level the writing proceeded: sometimes it seemed to be little more than bedtime stones for a tired bar; at other tunes it appeared to be on the level of the after-dinner speech or a thought provoking essay, neither of which were quite the "considered and buttressed scholarly discussion" that one expected to find. Llewellyn's complaint serves as a warning, though a somewhat ambiguous one, to those who give lectures on jurisprudence.

On the one hand, I do not plan to present …