Law Commons^™

Why Aim Law Toward Human Survival, John William Draper

Librarian Scholarship at Penn Law

Our legal system is contributing to humanity’s demise by failing to take account of our species’ situation. For example, in some cases law works against life and supports interests such as liberty or profit maximization.

If we do not act, science tells us that humanity bears a significant (and growing) risk of catastrophic failure. The significant risk inherent in the status quo is unacceptable and requires a response. We must act. It is getting hotter. When we decide to act, we need to make the right choice.

There is no better choice. You and all your relatives have rights. The …

Rules, Tricks And Emancipation, Jessie Allen

Book Chapters

Rules and tricks are generally seen as different things. Rules produce order and control; tricks produce chaos. Rules help us predict how things will work out. Tricks are deceptive and transgressive, built to surprise us and confound our expectations in ways that can be entertaining or devastating. But rules can be tricky. General prohibitions and prescriptions generate surprising results in particular contexts. In some situations, a rule produces results that seem far from what the rule makers expected and antagonistic to the interests the rule is understood to promote. This contradictory aspect of rules is usually framed as a downside …

Preserving Life By Ranking Rights, John William Draper

Librarian Scholarship at Penn Law

Border walls, abortion, and the death penalty are the current battlegrounds of the right to life. We will visit each topic and more in this paper, as we consider ranking groups of constitutional rights.

The enumerated rights of the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments—life, liberty, and property—merit special treatment. They have a deeper and richer history that involves ranking. Ranking life in lexical priority over liberty and property rights protects life first and maximizes safe liberty and property rights in the absence of a significant risk to life. This is not new law; aspects of it …

R2h And The Prospects For Peace: An Essay On Sovereign Responsibilities, David Luban

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay examines novel threats to peace – social and political threats as well as military and technological. It worries that familiar conceptions of state sovereignty cannot sustain a legal order capable of meeting those threats, not even if we understand sovereignty as responsibility to protect human rights. The essay tentatively proposes that recent efforts to reformulate state sovereignty as responsibility to humanity – ‘R2H’ for short – offer a better hope. Under this reformulation, states must take into account the interests of those outside their sovereign territory as well as those of the of their own people – in …

The End Of Jurisprudence, Scott Hershovitz

Articles

For more than forty years, jurisprudence has been dominated by the HartDworkin debate. The debate starts from the premise that our legal practices generate rights and obligations that are distinctively legal, and the question at issue is how the content of these rights and obligations is determined. Positivists say that their content is determined ultimately or exclusively by social facts. Anti-positivists say that moral facts must play a part in determining their content. In this Essay, I argue that the debate rests on a mistake. Our legal practices do not generate rights and obligations that are distinctively legal. At best, …

Reflections On Freedom And Criminal Responsibility In Late Twentieth Century American Legal Thought, Thomas A. Green, Merrill Catharine Hodnefield

Articles

It is now a commonplace among historians that American criminal jurisprudence underwent a dramatic change something like two-thirds to three-quarters into the last century. Roughly, this development is understood as a shift (or drift) from a more-or-less pure consequentialism to a "mixed theory" wherein retributivism played a major-at times, dominant-role. As the new paradigm remains intact, now approaching a half-century, the development qualifies as a significant historical fact. The fact applies not only to the history of justification for punishment but also to conceptions of the underlying principle of (basis for) responsibility. The two are rightly distinguished: for many scholars …

Unfriendly Unilateralism, Monica Hakimi

Articles

This Article examines a category of conduct that I call “unfriendly unilateralism.” One state deprives another of a benefit (unfriendly) and, in some cases, strays from its own obligations (noncompliant), outside any structured international process (unilateral). Such conduct troubles many international lawyers because it looks more like the nastiness of power politics than like the order and stability of law. Worse, states can abuse the conduct to undercut the law. Nevertheless, international law tolerates unfriendly unilateralism for enforcement. A victim state may use unfriendly unilateralism against a scofflaw in order to restore the legal arrangement that existed before the breach. …

A Planet By Any Other Name . . ., Kimberly Kessler Ferzan

All Faculty Scholarship

Scientific discoveries about Pluto and the rest of the universe led scientists to question Pluto’s status and ultimately to strip Pluto of its standing among planets. Neil deGrasse Tyson’s The Pluto Files masterfully weaves together the empirical, conceptual, and cultural questions surrounding Pluto’s demotion. The problem, for scientists and spectators alike, was this: there was no scientific definition of planet. This review systematizes the Pluto puzzle presented in the book and reveals its relevance for law. The questions presented by The Pluto Files – how man relates to the world, how man understands its conceptual categories, and how man …

Credible Coercion, Oren Bar-Gill, Omri Ben-Shahar

Articles

The ideal of individual freedom and autonomy requires that society provide relief against coercion. In the law, this requirement is often translated into rules that operate "postcoercion" to undo the legal consequences of acts and promises extracted under duress. This Article argues that these ex post antiduress measures, rather than helping the coerced party, might in fact hurt her. When coercion is credible-when a credible threat to inflict an even worse outcome underlies the surrender of the coerced party-ex post relief will only induce the strong party to execute the threatened outcome ex ante, without offering the choice to surrender, …

Book Review: Postmodern Legal Movements: Law And Jurisprudence At Century's End By Gary Minda, Chris Sagers

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Postmodem Legal Movements does two things. First, the bulk of the book provides an overview of American jurisprudence, from Christopher Columbus Langdell to the present. This overview is necessary because, in order to understand "postmodem forms of jurisprudence, we must first explore what came before postmodernism, that is, modernism" (p. 5). Second, the relatively short latter portion of the book presents an argument about the current state of American legal scholarship and its future. Minda's picture of contemporary legal thought is that of a paradigm shift in the making.

Postmodern Legal Movements will prove useful to those in search of …

Constitutional Law And The Myth Of The Great Judge, Michael S. Ariens

Faculty Articles

One of the enduring myths of American history, including constitutional history, is that of the “Great Man” or “Great Woman.” The idea is that, to understand the history of America, one needs to understand the impact made by Great Men and Women whose actions affected the course of history. In political history, one assays the development of the United States through the lives of great Americans, from the “Founders” to Abraham Lincoln to John F. Kennedy. Similarly, in constitutional history, the story is told through key figures, the “Great Judges,” from John Marshall to Oliver Wendell Holmes to Earl Warren. …

Whose Loyalties?, Christina B. Whitman

Reviews

It is disconcerting to open a book subtitled An Essay on the Morality of Relationships and find that the two case studies that most interest the author are reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools and the criminalization of flag burning. Although George Fletcher begins to make his case for giving moral priority to loyalties by referring to the impulse to save one's mother from a burning house (p. 12), he is more concerned with the ties that bind individuals to groups than with the ethics of relationships between individuals. The loyalties to which Fletcher would give "moral importance" …

Hegelian Vanity, Common Law Humility: On Legal Theory, Its Expression And Its Criticism, Thomas D. Eisele

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Commentary on Arthur Jacobson, Hegel's Legal Plenum, 10 Cardozo L. Rev. 877 (1989).

Justifications For Paternalism, Donald H. Regan

Book Chapters

One of the most troublesome problems concerning the appropriate extent of government interference with individuals' activity is the problem of paternalism-that is, the problem of when, if ever, the state may compel an individual to do or to refrain from some act or activity "for his own good." One would hardly know this was a troublesome problem just from looking at the literature on political and legal philosophy. It is hard to think of an influential philosophical discussion of the matter more recent than John Stuart Mill's. But paternalism is a problem which keeps coming up in discussions among philosophers …

"Is" And "Ought" In Legal Philosophy, Robert S. Summers

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Book Review. Law And Morality By Leon Petrazycki, Wencelas J. Wagner

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Review Of Jurisprudence: Men And Ideas Of The Law, By E. W. Patterson, John W. Reed

Reviews

Jurisprudence: Men and Ideas of the Law was written as a textbook for students enrolled in Columbia's jurisprudence course. It appeared first inmimeograph in 1940, and has gone through three revisions before emerging in its present printed form. Thirteen years is not a record incubation period, but it typifies the care and thoroughness with which Professor Patterson works and with which he has prepared the present volume. Each sentence, each paragraph, each section is, to me, a clear statement of his meaning and serves his purpose well.

Some Implications Of Juristic Pragmatism, Fowler Vincent Harper

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.