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Full-Text Articles in Law

Trolley Problems, Private Necessity, And The Duty To Rescue, Laura A. Heymann Feb 2023

Trolley Problems, Private Necessity, And The Duty To Rescue, Laura A. Heymann

Faculty Publications

Laidlaw v. Sage is generally, at best, an oddity in Torts casebooks today. A case that captured the imagination of New York newspaper readers at the time, Laidlaw involved an explosion that, William Laidlaw argued, the wealthy Russell Sage survived only because, at the last moment, he pulled Laidlaw in front of him to absorb the brunt of the blast. As taught in Torts classrooms, Laidlaw is either a case about the intent requirement for battery or a case about causation. But the case, assuming the plaintiff’s story was true, also provides an interesting window into what would seem to …


The Temptation Of Cosmic Private Law Theory, Nathan B. Oman Dec 2021

The Temptation Of Cosmic Private Law Theory, Nathan B. Oman

Faculty Publications

It’s a heady time to be a theorist of private law. After decades of vague post-Realist functionalism or reductive economic theories, the latest generation of private law theorists have provided a proliferation of new philosophies of tort, contract, and property. The result has been a tremendous burst of intellectual creativity. While Kant and Hegel have been dragooned into debates over torts and contracts and even such supposedly wooly headed thinkers as Coke and Blackstone have been rehabilitated, there have been fewer efforts to generate natural law accounts of private law than one might expect, particularly in light of the revival …


Knowing How To Know: Secondary Liability For Speech In Copyright Law, Laura A. Heymann Jan 2020

Knowing How To Know: Secondary Liability For Speech In Copyright Law, Laura A. Heymann

Faculty Publications

Contributory copyright infringement has long been based on whether the defendant, "with knowledge of the infringing activity," induced, caused, or materially contributed to another's infringing conduct. But few court opinions or scholarly articles have given due consideration to what it means to "know" of someone else's infringing conduct, particularly when the unlawfulness at issue cannot truly exist until a legal judgment occurs. How can one "know," in other words, that a court or jury will deem a particular use infringement rather than de minimis or fair use? At best, contributory defendants engage in a predictive exercise--in some cases, a more …


Judicial Partisanship In A Partisan Era: A Reply To Professor Robertson, Dmitry Bam Jan 2019

Judicial Partisanship In A Partisan Era: A Reply To Professor Robertson, Dmitry Bam

Faculty Publications

Professor Cassandra Burke Robertson’s outstanding article, Judicial Impartiality in A Partisan Era, is timely given the increasing politicization of the judiciary. The political debate and controversy around the Judge Garland nomination and the Justice Kavanaugh confirmation to the United States Supreme Court, only served to reaffirm that the judiciary is not immune from the growing political polarization in America. And it is not just senate judicial confirmation battles that have become highly bitter and partisan. Scholars writing about the substantive work of the Court have argued that it is more akin to a political body than a judicial one, and …


'Neurophobia,' A Reply To Patterson, Peter A. Alces Aug 2018

'Neurophobia,' A Reply To Patterson, Peter A. Alces

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.


The Internal Morality Of International Law, Evan Fox-Decent, Evan J. Criddle Jun 2018

The Internal Morality Of International Law, Evan Fox-Decent, Evan J. Criddle

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.


Fiction In The Code: Reading Legislation As Literature, Thomas J. Mcsweeney Apr 2018

Fiction In The Code: Reading Legislation As Literature, Thomas J. Mcsweeney

Faculty Publications

One of the major branches of the field of law and literature is often described as "law as literature." Scholars of law as literature examine the law using the tools of literary analysis. The scholarship in this subfield is dominated by the discussion of narrative texts: confessions, victim-impact statements, and, above all, the judicial opinion. This article will argue that we can use some of the same tools to help us understand non-narrative texts, such as law codes and statutes. Genres create expectations. We do not expect a law code to be literary. Indeed, we tend to dissociate the law …


Markets And Morals: The Limits Of Doux Commerce, Mark L. Movsesian Jan 2018

Markets And Morals: The Limits Of Doux Commerce, Mark L. Movsesian

Faculty Publications

In this essay for a symposium on Professor Nathan Oman's new book, The Dignity of Commerce, I do three things. First, I describe what I take to be the central message of the book, namely, that markets promote liberal values of tolerance, pluralism, and cooperation among rival, even hostile groups. Second, I show how Oman's argument draws from a line of political and economic thought that dates to the Enlightenment, the so-called "doux commerce" thesis of thinkers like Montesquieu and Adam Smith. Finally, I discuss what I consider the most penetrating criticism of that thesis, Edmund Burke's critique from …


Patriarchy, Not Hierarchy: Rethinking The Effect Of Cultural Attitudes In Acquaintance Rape Cases, Eric R. Carpenter Jan 2017

Patriarchy, Not Hierarchy: Rethinking The Effect Of Cultural Attitudes In Acquaintance Rape Cases, Eric R. Carpenter

Faculty Publications

Do certain people view acquaintance rape cases in ways that favor the man? The answer to that question is important. If certain people do, and those people form a disproportionately large percentage of the people in the institutions that process these cases, then those institutions may process these cases in ways that favor the man. In 2010, Dan Kahan published Culture, Cognition, and Consent, a study on how people evaluate a dorm room rape scenario. He found that those who endorsed a stratified, hierarchical social order were more likely to find that the man should not be found guilty of …


Dangerous Diagnoses, Risky Assumptions, And The Failed Experiment Of "Sexually Violent Predator" Commitment, Deirdre M. Smith Jul 2015

Dangerous Diagnoses, Risky Assumptions, And The Failed Experiment Of "Sexually Violent Predator" Commitment, Deirdre M. Smith

Faculty Publications

In its 1997 opinion, Kansas v. Hendricks, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a law that reflected a new model of civil commitment. The targets of this new commitment law were dubbed “Sexually Violent Predators” (SVPs), and the Court upheld indefinite detention of these individuals on the assumption that there is a psychiatrically distinct class of individuals who, unlike typical recidivists, have a mental condition that impairs their ability to refrain from violent sexual behavior. And, more specifically, the Court assumed that the justice system could reliably identify the true “predators,” those for whom this unusual and extraordinary deprivation of liberty …


Prediction Theories Of Law And The Internal Point Of View, Michael S. Green Dec 2014

Prediction Theories Of Law And The Internal Point Of View, Michael S. Green

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.


On Hart's Category Mistake, Michael S. Green Sep 2013

On Hart's Category Mistake, Michael S. Green

Faculty Publications

This essay concerns Scott Shapiro’s criticism that H.L.A. Hart’s theory of law suffers from a “category mistake.” Although other philosophers of law have summarily dismissed Shapiro’s criticism, I argue that it identifies an important requirement for an adequate theory of law. Such a theory must explain why legal officials justify their actions by reference to abstract propositional entities, instead of pointing to the existence of social practices. A virtue of Shapiro’s planning theory of law is that it can explain this phenomenon. Despite these sympathies, however, I end with the suggestion that Shapiro’s criticism of Hart, as it stands, is …


Felix Cohen On Legislation, Michael S. Green Jun 2013

Felix Cohen On Legislation, Michael S. Green

Faculty Publications

Felix Cohen's and Walter Wheeler Cook's prediction theory of law was a fundamentally positivist theory, according to which the law of a jurisdiction is reducible to regularities of official behavior. Cohen used the prediction theory to argue for philosophical anarchism - that is, the view that the existence of law does not entail a duty, even a prima facie duty, of obedience. In particular, Cohen extended philosophical anarchism to adjudication. The fact that officials in a jurisdiction regularly behave in a certain way does not give a judge adjudicating a case a moral reason to do the same. In deciding …


Order In The Desert: Law Abiding Behavior At Burning Man, Manuel A. Gómez Jan 2013

Order In The Desert: Law Abiding Behavior At Burning Man, Manuel A. Gómez

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.


Leiter On The Legal Realists, Michael S. Green Jan 2011

Leiter On The Legal Realists, Michael S. Green

Faculty Publications

In this essay reviewing Brian Leiter’s recent book Naturalizing Jurisprudence, I focus on two positions that distinguish Leiter’s reading of the American legal realists from those offered in the past. The first is his claim that the realists thought the law is only locally indeterminate – primarily in cases that are appealed. The second is his claim that they did not offer a prediction theory of law, but were instead committed to a standard positivist theory. Leiter’s reading is vulnerable, because he fails to discuss in detail those passages from the realists that inspired past interpretations. My goal is to …


New Adventures Of Old Pauline Law, Tawia Baidoe Ansah Jan 2009

New Adventures Of Old Pauline Law, Tawia Baidoe Ansah

Faculty Publications

This article examines the idea of law within two recent philosophical approaches to a theological text. Giorgio Agamben and Alain Badiou, two postmodern philosophers on the political left, look to the letters of St. Paul for the definition and extraction of the political subject. They look to Paul’s messianism and his conversion to discover, within their own philosophical projects, what is truly political within the Western philosophical tradition, for which Paul’s theology is unconditional. The article focuses on the conception of law that, in turn, derives from these projects. The article suggests that within both, despite the objective rejection of …


Dworkin V. The Philosophers: A Review Essay On Justice In Robes, Michael S. Green Jan 2007

Dworkin V. The Philosophers: A Review Essay On Justice In Robes, Michael S. Green

Faculty Publications

In this review essay, Professor Michael Steven Green argues that Dworkin's reputation among his fellow philosophers has needlessly suffered because of his refusal to back down from his "semantic sting" argument against H. L. A. Hart. Philosophers of law have uniformly rejected the semantic sting argument as a fallacy. Nevertheless Dworkin reaffirms the argument in Justice in Robes, his most recent collection of essays, and devotes much of the book to stubbornly, and unsuccessfully, defending it. This is a pity, because the failure of the semantic sting argument in no way undermines Dworkin's other arguments against Hart.


Nietzsche’S Place In Nineteenth Century German Philosophy, Michael S. Green Jan 2004

Nietzsche’S Place In Nineteenth Century German Philosophy, Michael S. Green

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.


Copyrighting Facts, Michael S. Green Oct 2003

Copyrighting Facts, Michael S. Green

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.


Dworkin's Fallacy, Or What The Philosophy Of Language Can't Teach Us About The Law, Michael S. Green Jan 2003

Dworkin's Fallacy, Or What The Philosophy Of Language Can't Teach Us About The Law, Michael S. Green

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.


The Unruliness Of Rules, Peter A. Alces Jan 2003

The Unruliness Of Rules, Peter A. Alces

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.


Public Reason As A Public Good, Aaron-Andrew P. Bruhl Jan 2003

Public Reason As A Public Good, Aaron-Andrew P. Bruhl

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.


Whoever Fights Monsters Should See To It That In The Process He Does Not Become A Monster: Hunting The Sexual Predator With Silver Bullets -- Federal Rules Of Evidence 413-415 -- And A Stake Through The Heart -- Kansas V. Hendricks, Joelle A. Moreno Jan 1997

Whoever Fights Monsters Should See To It That In The Process He Does Not Become A Monster: Hunting The Sexual Predator With Silver Bullets -- Federal Rules Of Evidence 413-415 -- And A Stake Through The Heart -- Kansas V. Hendricks, Joelle A. Moreno

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.


Legal Realism, Lex Fori, And The Choice-Of-Law Revolution, Michael S. Green Jan 1995

Legal Realism, Lex Fori, And The Choice-Of-Law Revolution, Michael S. Green

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.


Killing Daddy: Developing A Self-Defense Strategy For The Abused Child, Joelle A. Moreno Jan 1989

Killing Daddy: Developing A Self-Defense Strategy For The Abused Child, Joelle A. Moreno

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.