Law Commons^™

Retaining The Rule Of Law In A Chevron World, Michael A. Fitts

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Rules Of Conduct And Principles Of Adjudication, Paul H. Robinson

All Faculty Scholarship

In this article I will show why our legal system's rules of conduct are presently unclear, how the system arrived at its current state, and what can be done to make the rules of conduct clearer. My arguments and conclusions are, in brief, as follows: The criminal law fails to communicate clear rules of conduct because it fails to distinguish this communicative function from that of adjudicating violations of the rules, which requires primarily an assessment of the blameworthiness of the violator. These two functions - announcing public rules of conduct and assessing individual blame in adjudication of a violation …

The Virtues Of Redundancy In Legal Thought, Randy E. Barnett

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Redundancy has a bad reputation among legal intellectuals. When someone says, for example, that the ninth and tenth amendments are redundant, we can be pretty sure that this person attaches little importance to these constitutional provisions. Listen to one of the definitions of redundant provided by the Oxford English Dictionary: "superabundant, superfluous, excessive."' In this essay, the author proposes that legal theorists pay serious attention to the concept of redundancy used by engineers. He explains how redundancy--in this special sense--is essential to any intellectual enterprise in which we try to reach action-guiding conclusions, including the enterprise of law. The author …

The Internal And External Analysis Of Concepts, Randy E. Barnett

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In Abstract Right and the Possibility of a Nondistributive Conception of Contract: Hegel and Contemporary Contract Theory, Peter Benson criticizes the authors presentation of a consent theory of contract, in part, on the ground that it "refers only to the empirical facts of the requirements of human needs and fulfillment. Like [Charles] Fried's [account], his conception of the consensual basis of a contract does not preserve the required standpoint of abstraction. " On this basis Professor Benson concludes that the author's approach fails to "provide an adequate elucidation of a nondistributive conception of contract.

By explaining contractual obligation …