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Articles 1 - 12 of 12

Full-Text Articles in Law

Recovering The Original Fourth Amendment, Thomas Y. Davies Dec 1999

Recovering The Original Fourth Amendment, Thomas Y. Davies

Michigan Law Review

Claims regarding the original or intended meaning of constitutional texts are commonplace in constitutional argument and analysis. All such claims are subject to an implicit validity criterion - only historically authentic assertions should matter. The rub is that the original meaning commonly attributed to a constitutional text may not be authentic. The historical Fourth Amendment is a case in point. If American judges, lawyers, or law teachers were asked what the Framers intended when they adopted the Fourth Amendment, they would likely answer that the Framers intended that all searches and seizures conducted by government officers must be reasonable given …


The Influence Of Race In School Finance Reform, James E. Ryan Nov 1999

The Influence Of Race In School Finance Reform, James E. Ryan

Michigan Law Review

It would be an exaggeration to say that school finance reform is all about race, but largely in the same way that it is an exaggeration to say that welfare reform is all about race. Like welfare reform, the controversy generated by school finance litigation and reform has, on the surface, little to do with race. Battles over school funding, which have been waged in nearly forty state supreme courts and at least as many state legislatures, instead appear to be over such issues as the redistribution of resources, retaining local control over education, and the efficacy of increased expenditures. …


Positivism, Emergent And Triumphant, Vincent A. Wellman May 1999

Positivism, Emergent And Triumphant, Vincent A. Wellman

Michigan Law Review

Positivism is one of those words that triggers passionate and often contradictory responses. For some, positivism is a pejorative. Lon Fuller, perhaps more than anyone, charged that positivism was confused about the nature of law, blind to law's inherent morality, and morally corrupting to boot. He even suggested, in different ways, that positivism helped promote the rise of fascism in Europe. Others, in contrast, have treated positivism as a modest and undeniable truth about law. Law, they argued, is morally fallible, and accordingly, the existence and validity of law is a matter of social fact rather than moral necessity. H.L.A. …


The Qualities Of Completeness: More? Or Less?, Mark R. Killenbeck May 1999

The Qualities Of Completeness: More? Or Less?, Mark R. Killenbeck

Michigan Law Review

On January 14, 1983, Chief Judge W. Brevard Hand announced what he knew would be widely regarded as a rather startling proposition. Believing that "[t]he first amendment in large part was a guarantee to the states which insured that the states would be able to continue whatever church-state relationship existed in 1791," Judge Hand held that the people of Alabama were perfectly free to "establish[] a religion," in this instance by allowing public school teachers to begin the school day with prayer. The ruling reversed an earlier decision in the same case, which characterized the statutory provision at issue as …


Forgotten Constitutional History: The Production And Migration Of Meaning Within Constitutional Cultures, Gregory A. Mark May 1999

Forgotten Constitutional History: The Production And Migration Of Meaning Within Constitutional Cultures, Gregory A. Mark

Michigan Law Review

When was the last time you read a serious, recently published work of constitutional history that did not deal mainly with the work of the Supreme Court? When, even among those works, did the author look beyond the immediate litigants to give the reader a sense of an evolving constitutional culture - a culture in symbiosis with the larger political and social culture - its eddies and byways, as well as its mainstream? My strong hunch is that anyone who can triumphantly respond to the implicit condemnation of narrowness in these questions will do so in large measure having read …


The Assault That Failed: The Progressive Critique Of Laissez Faire, Richard A. Epstein May 1999

The Assault That Failed: The Progressive Critique Of Laissez Faire, Richard A. Epstein

Michigan Law Review

Robert Lee Hale has long been an intellectual thorn in the side of the defenders of laissez faire, among whom I am quite happy to count myself. As Barbara Fried notes in her meticulous study of Hale's work, his name is hardly a household word. But both directly and indirectly, his influence continues to be great. His best known work is perhaps Coercion and Distribution in a Supposedly Non-Coercive State, published in 1923 as a review of Thomas Nixon Carver's Principles of National Economy, itself a defense of the classical principles of laissez faire, remembered today only for the drubbing …


From Renaissance Poland To Poland's Renaissance, Daniel H. Cole May 1999

From Renaissance Poland To Poland's Renaissance, Daniel H. Cole

Michigan Law Review

Poland is located in Eastern Europe - the "other Europe" - which shares a continent, but seemingly little else, with Western Europe. Most histories of Europe, legal histories included, are actually histories of Western Europe only. The "euro-centrism" some scholars complain about is, more accurately, a "western eurocentrism." The eastern half of the continent is ignored like the embarrassing black sheep of the European family. Economic historians have described Eastern Europe as a "backward" place, where feudal and mercantilist economies persisted as Western European economies modernized and industrialized. In geopolitical terms, Eastern Europe has been characterized as a region of …


Reconceiving The Right To Present Witnesses, Richard A. Nagareda Mar 1999

Reconceiving The Right To Present Witnesses, Richard A. Nagareda

Michigan Law Review

Modem American law is, in a sense, a system of compartments. For understandable curricular reasons, legal education sharply distinguishes the law of evidence from both constitutional law and criminal procedure. In fact, the lines of demarcation between these three subjects extend well beyond law school to the organization of the leading treatises and case headnotes to which practicing lawyers routinely refer in their trade. Many of the most interesting questions in the law, however, do not rest squarely within a single compartment; instead, they concern the content and legitimacy of the lines of demarcation themselves. This article explores a significant, …


Law's Territory (A History Of Jurisdiction), Richard T. Ford Jan 1999

Law's Territory (A History Of Jurisdiction), Richard T. Ford

Michigan Law Review

Pop quiz: New York City. The United Kingdom. The East Bay Area Municipal Utilities District. Kwazulu, South Africa. The Cathedral of Notre Dame. The State of California. Vatican City. Switzerland. The American Embassy in the U.S.S.R. What do the foregoing items have in common? Answer: they are, or were, all territorial jurisdictions. A thesis of this Article is that territorial jurisdictions - the rigidly mapped territories within which formally defined legal powers are exercised by formally organized governmental institutions - are relatively new and intuitively surprising technological developments. New, because until the development of modern cartography, legal authority generally followed …


Civics 2000: Process Constitutionalism At Yale, Daniel J. Hulsebosch Jan 1999

Civics 2000: Process Constitutionalism At Yale, Daniel J. Hulsebosch

Michigan Law Review

One or another form of historical fidelity has long been in the repetoire of constitutional interpretation, and during the last two decades conservative jurists have searched for the "original intent" of various clauses. Increasingly, however, it is liberal law professors who are turning to history to make sense of American constitutionalism. What they find there is not a document listing eternal rights or duties but rather a multidimensional structure of government, captured as much in practice as on paper, that has metamorphosed over time. It seems we have, in that familiar phrase, a living Constitution. But interest is shifting from …


Caste, Class, And Equal Citizenship, William E. Forbath Jan 1999

Caste, Class, And Equal Citizenship, William E. Forbath

Michigan Law Review

There is a familiar egalitarian constitutional tradition and another we have largely forgotten. The familiar one springs from Brown v. Board of Education; its roots lie in the Reconstruction era. Court-centered and countermajoritarian, it takes aim at caste and racial subordination. The forgotten one also originated with Reconstruction, but it was a majoritarian tradition, addressing its arguments to lawmakers and citizens, not to courts. Aimed against harsh class inequalities, it centered on decent work and livelihoods, social provision, and a measure of economic independence and democracy. Borrowing a phrase from its Progressive Era proponents, I will call it the social …


Private Ordering At The World's First Futures Exchange, Mark D. West Jan 1999

Private Ordering At The World's First Futures Exchange, Mark D. West

Michigan Law Review

Modern derivative securities - financial instruments whose value is linked to or "derived" from some other asset - are often sophisticated, complex, and subject to a variety of rules and regulations. The same is true of the derivative instruments traded at the world's first organized futures exchange, the Dojima Rice Exchange in Osaka, Japan, where trade flourished for nearly 300 years, from the late seventeenth century until shortly before World War II. This Article analyzes Dojima's organization, efficiency, and amalgam of legal and extralegal rules. In doing so, it contributes to a growing body of literature on commercial self-regulation while …