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Full-Text Articles in Law
Posner’S Pragmatism And The Turn Toward Fidelity, Edward Cantu
Posner’S Pragmatism And The Turn Toward Fidelity, Edward Cantu
Faculty Works
It is no secret that formalist methodologies like originalism are not nearly as scientific as they pretend to be. Banking on this fact, pragmatism offers a prescriptive alternative: instead of expending intellectual energy attempting “fidelity” to antecedent “authority” (precedent, Framers’ intent, etc.) judges should embrace their inevitable roles as de facto policy makers, and focus on producing the best social results they can through the cases they decide. This article discusses the current state of legal pragmatism, with a focus on the archetypal species espoused by Judge Richard Posner, and asks whether it has proven itself capable of contributing anything …
Cute Prickly Critter With Presbyopia, Don Herzog
Cute Prickly Critter With Presbyopia, Don Herzog
Reviews
Ronald Dworkin's' latest, long-awaited, and most ambitious book is a puzzle. Truth in advertising first: despite the title, this isn't centrally a book about justice. It's a book about the realm of value-all of that realm. Dworkin is most interested here in morality, but really touches on all of it, as a matter of the application of the abstract argument and sometimes in black and white right on the page, from aesthetics to prudence to morality to politics to law to . . . . It's fun to read, also frustrating. It stretches out lazily in handling some issues but …
Economic Development And The Problem With The Problem-Solving Approach, Justin Desautels-Stein
Economic Development And The Problem With The Problem-Solving Approach, Justin Desautels-Stein
Publications
Scholars and practitioners alike have recently pointed to the idea of a "new moment" in the field of law and economic development, as well as a hope for a fruitful rethinking of political economy. The idea is that we have passed out of the period of high "neoliberalism," associated at one time with Reagan, Thatcher, and the so-called Washington Consensus and now eclipsed by the ascendance of the Obama Administration. The hope attending the new consensus is that, in the wake of neoliberal law and policy, the field of law and development might be on the verge of a new …
Experimental Pragmatism In The Third Globalization, Justin Desautels-Stein
Experimental Pragmatism In The Third Globalization, Justin Desautels-Stein
Publications
Pragmatism dominates contemporary legal thought, but knowing this isn’t knowing so much. Legal pragmatism means different things to different people, and as this essay argues, minimalist and experimentalist forms of regulation both share a broadly pragmatic sensibility about law and democracy. As a consequence, we need to tease out the various threads of legal pragmatism in the hope of distinguishing the pragmatisms that work from the ones that don’t, or less pragmatically, the ones that are just from the ones that are not. This knowledge will come from an ongoing assessment of the political stakes immanent in the pragmatisms, and …