Law Commons^™

Social Justice And Liberation, Robert E. Rodes

Journal Articles

Justice is the virtue we practice by giving people what is due them. Therefore, there is a problem of assignability when we consider an unjust social order: What is due from an individual beneficiary of that order to an individual victim? That question is answered by the concept of social justice: What all of us individually owe to each individual victim of the institutions now in place is our best efforts to reform those institutions. The first half of this paper analyzes the traditional arguments for and the conservative arguments against social justice as the answer to this problem of …

On Teaching Legal Ethics In The Law Office, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

Edward J. Murphy, my teacher, colleague, and friend, was as devoted as anyone at Notre Dame could be, to a Christian law school on this campus. He announced a personal and institutional claim, and he expressed his hope as well, when he told our graduating law class, in 1994, that this is "a school which publicly and without apology proclaims its religious roots."

And he was as interested as anyone could be in identifying those religious roots, and exploring the implications of them for the practice of law at the end of the twentieth century in the United States of …

Corporate Initiatives: A Second Human Rights Revolution?, Douglass Cassel

Journal Articles

This Essay examines the role of multinational corporations in protecting human rights around the globe. Part I analyzes the conduct of corporations, describes examples of corporations' involvement in human rights violations, and discusses the merits of greater responsibility of corporations. Part II suggests that the level of responsibility for a multinational corporation depends on the proximity of the corporation's operations to human rights violations, in combination with the seriousness of the violations, and proposes five gradations of responsibility. This Essay concludes that the evolving nature of the global economy is producing a shift in responsibilities from government to the private …

Why Informed Consent? Human Experimentation And The Ethics Of Autonomy, Richard W. Garnett

Journal Articles

Not long ago, the welfare reform debate took a provocative turn. New Jersey welfare recipients challenged the state's Family Cap rule, which denied additional cash aid to parents who conceive children while on welfare. Welfare rights activists argued that the rule "with[held] benefits to see if [this would] alter human behavior." They insisted that the innovative, but stern, Family Cap rules were effectively experiments on welfare recipients without their consent.

This is a powerful argument. After all, consent enjoys talismanic—if not sacramental—status in modem life and thought; it is our "master concept." But why? Why should consenting mean so much …

On Lying For Clients, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

For all of his occasional resort to deceit and falsehood, Faulkner's county-seat, Southern-gentleman lawyer, Gavin Stevens, was a virtuous person, a good person, and a truthful person. He and other moral worthies in good stories-many of them lawyers-have something to contribute to discussions, in legal ethics, on the issue of lying for clients.