Law Commons^™

Defending The Innocent, Abbe Smith

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Of the legal scholarship examining the representation of the innocent accused, most has to do with guilty pleas, not trial or post-trial advocacy. Most of this literature is concerned with the pressure put on innocent defendants to plead guilty in order to receive a more lenient sentence than what they would get if found guilty at trial. This problem is compounded by the inability of poor defendants to make bail. Unfortunately, there are other, equally insidious ways to pressure innocent defendants to plead guilty. When addressing the question of defending the innocent at trial or in a post-conviction challenge, most …

Is The Rule Of Law Cosmopolitan?, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

What I will argue in the bulk of the paper is that whether or not the rule of law implies ethical cosmopolitanism depends: it depends on how we understand or interpret the legalistic sense of justice that law and the rule of law seemingly require. The virtue that we sometimes call legal justice, and the correlative meaning of the rule of law to which it is yoked, can plausibly be subjected to a range of different interpretations, each resting on quite different understandings of the point of law and of what the individual law is meant to protect. Some of …

Adjudication Is Not Interpretation: Some Reservations About The Law-As-Literature Movement, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Among other achievements, the modern law-as-literature movement has prompted increasing numbers of legal scholars to embrace the claim that adjudication is interpretation, and more specifically, that constitutional adjudication is interpretation of the Constitution. That adjudication is interpretation -- that an adjudicative act is an interpretive act -- more than any other central commitment, unifies the otherwise diverse strands of the legal and constitutional theory of the late twentieth century.

In this article, I will argue in this article against both modern forms of interpretivism. The analogue of law to literature, on which much of modern interpretivism is based, although fruitful, …