Law Commons^™

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, …

Re Enumerated Constitutional Rights The Only Rights We Have? The Case Of Associational Freedom, Randy E. Barnett

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Much of contemporary constitutional thought assumes that the only rights individuals have are either those that they are given by the legislature or those that are explicitly specified in the Constitution of the United States (or in a state constitution). Such a view of rights is based on the jurisprudential philosophy known as legal positivism, a view that has dominated academic discussions about legal rights for at least fifty years and that has begun to wane only in the last fifteen years.' In this Paper, I will try to explain how adherence to this legal positivism taints and distorts constitutional …