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Columbia Law School

1989

Determinancy of law

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Reflections On Holding And Dictum, Kent Greenawalt Jan 1989

Reflections On Holding And Dictum, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

The aim of these reflections, which adopt the perspectives of ordinary judges and lawyers, is to try to help clarify what is uncontroversial about the distinction between holding and dictum, to explain what is troublesome about it, to provide – in fairly sketchy form – a way of understanding the authority of various legal formulations that do not fit indisputably or wholly comfortably in the category of holding or that of dictum, and to suggest a conceptual vocabulary for expressing the practical realities I consider.

In the autumn of 1986, I taught a course in Legal Method for beginning students …