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Full-Text Articles in Law
Picking At Morals: Analytical Jurisprudence In The Age Of Naturalized Ethics, Alina Ng Boyte
Picking At Morals: Analytical Jurisprudence In The Age Of Naturalized Ethics, Alina Ng Boyte
Journal Articles
No abstract provided.
The Conceits Of Our Legal Imagination: Legal Fictions And The Concept Of Deemed Authorship, Alina Ng Boyte
The Conceits Of Our Legal Imagination: Legal Fictions And The Concept Of Deemed Authorship, Alina Ng Boyte
Journal Articles
Legal fictions contain embedded nuggets of information about social reality and reveal important aspects of human society. However, the use of legal fictions may also obscure important information or fundamental questions about law and its role in shaping society. These fictions become institutionalized without a clear understanding of their function. When that happens, fallacious assumptions about human behavior and social relationships transform into binding principles that set the course for future legal development, potentially resulting in legal rules that are completely dissociated from social, historical, or cultural reality. This article explores the concept of deemed authorship as a legal fiction …
A Process Theory Of Natural Law And The Rule Of Law In China, Mark C. Modak-Truran
A Process Theory Of Natural Law And The Rule Of Law In China, Mark C. Modak-Truran
Journal Articles
This Article analyzes China's efforts to implement the rule of law and proposes a constructive, post-modern normative theory of law based on the Process Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and the Radical Empiricism of William James. This "process theory of natural law" provides a novel theory of natural law that eliminates the perceived illegitimacy arising from legal indeterminacy and closes the ontological gap between legal theory and practice. Process natural law also mediates many of the cultural differences between the East and the West through the telos of beauty (unity-in-diversity), which entails maximizing both an Eastern aesthetic sense of order …
Secularization, Legal Indeterminacy, And Habermas's Discourse Theory Of Law, Mark C. Modak-Truran
Secularization, Legal Indeterminacy, And Habermas's Discourse Theory Of Law, Mark C. Modak-Truran
Journal Articles
This Article focuses on Habermas’s sophisticated awareness of the tension between secularization of law and legal indeterminacy and treats his discourse theory of law as a significant test of the feasibility of reconciling these claims. In an earlier article, I criticized Habermas’s discourse of justification and his claim that it legitimated the law independently of a religious or metaphysical worldview. Even assuming I was misguided in that critique, this Article argues that Habermas’s discourse of application is incoherent and fails to maintain the secularization of the law in the face of legal indeterminacy. Given Habermas’s failure, contemporary legal theory needs …
Book Review, Mark C. Modak-Truran
Book Review, Mark C. Modak-Truran
Journal Articles
While Bauman provides persuasive rebuttals to many of the CLS criticisms of liberalism, contemporary liberalism suffers from some of the same shortcomings Bauman observes about CLS. For example, Bauman criticizes CLS for not having a conceptual foundation (an external standard of truth) to demystify the liberal legal consciousness claimed to be inherent in the law. Bauman also argues that contemporary liberal theorists, like John Rawls, avoid the “comprehensive metaphysical or ontological framework” (p.30), held to be incoherent by CLS. However, Bauman fails to realize that Rawls similarly lacks a conceptual foundation to justify his “political not metaphysical” form of political …
A Pragmatic Justification Of The Judicial Hunch, Mark C. Modak-Truran
A Pragmatic Justification Of The Judicial Hunch, Mark C. Modak-Truran
Journal Articles
Judges currently face a daunting task. On the one hand, they are increasingly aware of the indeterminacy of the law, while on the other hand, they face an explosion of fact. Judges are floating on shaky legal timbers in a sea of documents, deposition transcripts, affidavits, oral courtroom testimony, and expert opinions. The explosion of fact alone presents monumental problems for deciding cases without unduly simplifying or reducing this factual complexity. For example, both federal and state judges are implementing case management systems to deal with their crushing case loads and the increasing complexity of their cases. In addition, there …
Corrective Justice And The Revival Of Judicial Virtue, Mark C. Modak-Truran
Corrective Justice And The Revival Of Judicial Virtue, Mark C. Modak-Truran
Journal Articles
Judges must be wise. Sound judicial reasoning requires moral virtue. These sentiments about judging have been lost. They apparently belong to a bygone era. While many advocate self-restraint or prudence as judicial virtues, moral virtue has been conspicuously absent from the list. Except for avoiding obvious vices such as bribery, favoritism, prejudice, sloth, and arbitrariness, conventional wisdom maintains that being a good judge does not require being a good person. Even theorists sympathetic to a relationship between law and morality balk at making moral virtue a prerequisite of judicial decision making. Rather, many contend that judicial decision making is a …
Habermas’S Discourse Theory Of Law And The Relationship Between Law And Religion, Mark C. Modak-Truran
Habermas’S Discourse Theory Of Law And The Relationship Between Law And Religion, Mark C. Modak-Truran
Journal Articles
The relationship between law and religion has become the subject of a sustained and robust debate. However, unlike earlier theological attempts to ground law in religion or the Divine, participants in the modem debate rarely, if ever, argue for a theological or religious legitimation of law. Either implicitly or explicitly, there appears to be a modem consensus among legal scholars and philosophers that the world has been disenchanted. The world can no longer be viewed as an integrated, meaningful whole under a comprehensive religious or metaphysical worldview, and law can no longer be legitimized by its religious or metaphysical foundations. …