Law Commons^™

Moral Discourse And Family Law, Lee E. Teitelbaum

Michigan Law Review

It seems appropriate in the early stages of an experiment in legal publishing to say something about it, if only because few forms have been as resistant to innovation as the law review. The creation of a section for correspondence regarding recent articles provides a medium for conducting just the national discourse which scholarship aspires to provoke and which does occur in private conversations or letters and, occasionally, in panels at professional meetings. To talk in print about a colleague's work - to praise it, qualify it, pursue suggested or alternate lines of thought - is not only an enjoyable …

The Moral Value Of Law, Philip Soper

Michigan Law Review

Suppose you have correctly concluded that it is your legal obligation to act or refrain from acting in a certain way. Can you, from that conclusion alone, say anything at all about what you ought to do morally?

An affirmative answer to this question implies that law has moral value regardless of content or circumstance: without knowing what the act is that the law commands or even what legal system has enacted the law, one would, on this view, be able to link the conclusion about legal obligation with some conclusion about moral responsibility. Such a view seems quite far-reaching …

The Natural Duty To Obey The Law, Kent Greenawalt

Michigan Law Review

Though scholarly skepticism has been expressed during the past two decades, lawyers and others have often supposed that people have a moral obligation or duty to obey the law. This article is about one possible basis for that moral constraint, a natural duty. The article has a number of interrelated objectives. In it, I try to show briefly why theories of natural duty are so important in this context, how these theories differ from other moral bases for obedience, what the strengths and weaknesses are of particular arguments about a natural duty, what features unify apparently disparate approaches, what assumptions …

Moral Discourse And The Transformation Of American Family Law, Carl E. Schneider

Michigan Law Review

Family law has undergone momentous change in recent decades. In this Article, Professor Schneider proposes that the transformation in family law can be understood as a diminution in the law's discourse in moral terms about the relations between family members and as a transfer of moral decisions from the law to the people the law once regulated. Professor Schneider identifies countertrends and limits to the changes he describes, and then investigates the reasons for the changes. He hypothesizes that four forces helped change family law and moral discourse within family law: the legal tradition of noninterference in family affairs; the …

The Morality Of Obedience, Joseph Raz

Michigan Law Review

A Review of A Theory of Law by Philip Soper

Law, Morality, And The Relations Of States, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Law, Morality, and the Relations of States by Terry Nardin