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University of Michigan Law School

Discrimination

Jurisprudence

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Speaking Law: Towards A Nuanced Analysis Of 'Cases', Susanne Baer Mar 2017

Speaking Law: Towards A Nuanced Analysis Of 'Cases', Susanne Baer

Articles

“The headscarf case” is more than just a case. Talking law is often talking cases, but we need to understand law more specifically as a powerful practice of regulation. Law is also not only another discourse, or just text, or politics, with fundamental rights as “an issue,” or a promise, or just an idea. Instead, to protect fundamental rights, it is necessary to understand how in reacting to a conflict, we in fact speak rights today—Rechtsprechung—as a form of practice. The German Federal Constitutional Court’s decision in the conflict about female teachers wearing headscarves in German public schools may be …


Formalism And Employer Liability Under Title Vii, Samuel R. Bagenstos Jan 2014

Formalism And Employer Liability Under Title Vii, Samuel R. Bagenstos

Articles

Most lawyers, law professors, and judges are familiar with two standard critiques of formalism in legal reasoning. One is the unacknowledged-policymaking critique. This critique argues that formalist reasoning purports to be above judicial policymaking but instead simply hides the policy decisions offstage. The other is the false-determinacy critique. This critique observes that formalist reasoning purports to reduce decision costs in the run of cases by sorting cases into defined categories, but argues that instead of going away the difficult questions of application migrate to the choice of the category in which to place a particular case.