Law Commons^™

Contract Law, Default Rules, And The Philosophy Of Promising, Richard Craswell

Michigan Law Review

Among the topics addressed by moral philosophy is the obligation to keep one's promises. To many philosophers, there is something strange (or, at least, something calling for explanatie1n) in the idea that moral obligations can be created simply by an individual's saying so yet this is what seems to happen when a person makes a promise. Consequently, there is by now a large body of literature attempting to identify the exact source and nature of this moral obligation.

Part I of this article presents a more detailed survey of recent philosophical writings about promises, for the benefit of legal readers …

Dilemmas Of Group Autonomy: Residential Associations And Community, Gregory S. Alexander

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

We are a society of groups. De Tocqueville's observation that the principle of association shapes American society remains as valid today as it was in the mid-nineteenth century. For us, as for others, the vita activa is participation in a seemingly limitless variety of groups. The importance of group activity in our national character has strongly influenced the agenda of political questions that recur in American political and legal theory. One of the fundamental normative questions on this agenda concerns the proper relationship between groups and the polity. To what extent should the polity foster connections between associations and the …

Icac And The Community, Mark Findlay

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Recently the language of 'community' has been widely used in the official discourse of criminal justice administration in Australia, in an obvious effort to legitimate new developments away from more traditional crime control. Commentators are now asking, why all this 'community speak' about policing, mediation, and corrections? As regards the 'community' perspective of anti-corruption initiatives, it is an attempt to transfer to the new institutions and processes some of the more positive implications which are assumed to flow from community allegiance.

The Constitution's Accommodation Of Social Change, Philip A. Hamburger

Michigan Law Review

Did the framers and ratifiers of the United States Constitution think that changes in American society would require changes in the text or interpretation of the Constitution? If those who created the Constitution understood or even anticipated the possibility of major social alterations, how did they expect constitutional law - text and interpretation - to accommodate such developments?

The effect of social change upon constitutional law was an issue the framers and ratifiers frequently discussed. For example, when AntiFederalists complained of the Constitution's failure to protect the jury trial in civil cases, Federalists responded that a change of circumstances might, …

Show Trials In China: The Aftermath Of Tiananmen Square, Mark Findlay

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

After the military massacre in Tiananmen Square on 4 June it came as no surprise that the nominated 'rioters and counter revolutionaries' would soon be paraded before the courts. Even in the People's Republic of China, where a formal criminal court structure is a comparatively recent addition to the social control framework, the trial process is being employed as an immediate state response to community disjuncture and political challenge.

The Final Report: Harvard's Affirmative Action Allegory, Derrick Bell

Michigan Law Review

Harvard's affirmative action allegory written for this symposium.

The Obliging Shell: An Informal Essay On Formal Equal Opportunity, Patricia Williams

Michigan Law Review

I am struck by the Court's use of the word "equality" in the last line of its holding. It seems an extraordinarily narrow use of "equality," when it excludes from consideration so much clear inequality. It, again, resembles the process by which the Parol Evidence Rule limits the meaning of documents or words by placing beyond the bounds of reference anything that is inconsistent, or, depending on the circumstances, even that which is supplementary. It is this lawyerly language game of exclusion and omission that is the subject of the rest of this essay.

Storytelling For Oppositionists And Others: A Plea For Narrative, Richard Delgado

Michigan Law Review

This essay examines the use of stories in the struggle for racial reform. Part I shows how we construct social reality by devising and passing on stories - interpretive structures by which we impose order on experience and it on us. To illustrate how stories structure reality, I choose a single race-tinged event and tell it in the form of five stories or narratives. Each account is followed by analysis, showing what the story includes and leaves out and how it perpetuates one version of social reality rather than another. Part II deals with counterstories, competing versions that can be …

A Tale Of Two Clients: Thinking About Law As Language, Clark D. Cunningham

Michigan Law Review

This is a true story. It is actually three true stories. The article taken as a whole tells a story of my personal search for a new way of talking about the experience of being a lawyer, a quest which is leading me to think more and more about law as a kind of language and lawyering as a form of translation. Rather like a medieval romance, embedded within this story of a quest are two tales, about clients I have represented in the course of my clinical teaching.

As much as possible, both levels of narrative are presented in …

Foreword: Telling Stories, Kim Lane Schepple

Michigan Law Review

Why is there such a rush to storytelling? Why has narrative become such an important and recurring theme in legal scholarship these days?

This issue testifies to the attractiveness of, and limits to, storytelling as a force in law. But whose stories are told? Who listens? And who responds? This symposium explores these questions, challenging traditional practices and exploring new ones in the telling of stories in the law. One important lesson that can be learned from this issue is that narrative is a way of organizing, coping with, even acting on the world. Stories carry power because they have …

Empathy, Legal Storytelling, And The Rule Of Law: New Words, Old Wounds?, Toni M. Massaro

Michigan Law Review

The legal storytelling theme that is the focus of this symposium is part of a larger, ongoing intellectual movement. American legal scholarship of the past several decades has revealed deep dissatisfaction with the abstract and collective focus of law and legal discourse. The rebellion against abstraction has, of late, been characterized by a "call to context." One strand of this complex body of thought argues that law should concern itself more with the concrete lives of persons affected by it. One key word in the dialogue is the term "empathy," which appears frequently in the work of critical legal studies, …

The Cognitive Dimension Of The Agon Between Legal Power And Narrative Meaning, Steven L. Winter

Michigan Law Review

In Part II, I first provide a brief description of what we are learning about the grounded and imaginative nature of the cognitive process. I then elaborate the cognitive structure of the concept narrative and consider the manner in which we employ that concept in recognizing, understanding, and constructing narratives of all types - from folktales like the midrash to avant-garde literature like Waiting for Godot. In Part III, I employ this information about the cognitive and narrative processes to explore the secondary role of narrative in the institutionalization of legal and social meaning. I will identify the cognitive …

Public Response To Racist Speech: Considering The Victim's Story, Mari J. Matsuda

Michigan Law Review

The threat of hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the neo-Nazi skinheads goes beyond their repeated acts of illegal violence. Their presence and the active dissemination of racist propaganda means that citizens are denied personal security and liberty as they go about their daily lives. Professor Richard Delgado recognized the harm of racist speech in his breakthrough article, Words That Wound, in which he suggested a tort remedy for injury from racist words. This Article takes inspiration from Professor Delgado's position, and makes the further suggestion that formal criminal and administrative sanction - public as opposed to private …

Sugar Coated Bullets: Corruption And The New Economic Order In China, Mark Findlay, Thomas Chor-Wing Chiu

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The recent political debate concerning the influence of corruption on the “new economic order” in the People's Republic of China is unique not only for its detailed and public manifestations, but also because it works around the acceptance of some degree of corporate private ownership of the means of production within China. The concern for corruption in Chinese government and commerce is not, of itself, novel.We prefer in this paper briefly to focus on the economic and political environment from within which this concern has been generated, to comment on the significance for the Government of the PRC in associating …

Hardly The Trial Of The Century, Franklin E. Zimring

Michigan Law Review

A Review of A Crime of Self-Defense: Bernhard Goetz and the Law on Trial by George P. Fletcher

Contradiction And Denial, Pierre Schlag

Michigan Law Review

A Review of A Guide to Critical Legal Studies by Mark Kelman

Foundering On The Seas Of Hopelessness, Mary C. Dunlap

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Gays/Justice: A Study of Ethics, Society, and Law by Richard D. Mohn

Law And Disputing In Commercializing Early America, Cornelia Dayton

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Neighbors and Strangers: Law and Community in Early Connecticut by Bruce H. Mann

Trial By Ordeal, Robert C. Palmer

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Trial by Fire and Water: The Medieval Judicial Ordeal by Robert Bartlett

Transfers Of Property In Eleventh-Century Norman Law, William John Gallagher

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Transfers of Property in Eleventh-Century Norman Law by Emily Zack Tabuteau

The Politics Of Victimization Makes Strange Bedfellows, Jennifer L. Hochschild

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Civil Rights Society: The Social Construction of Victims by Kristin Bumiller, and Plural But Equal: Blacks and Minorities in America's Plural Society by Harold Cruse

Protection Of Civil Rights: A Constitutional Mandate For The Federal Government, Julius Chambers

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Federal Law and Southern Order: Racial Violence and Constitutional Conflict in the Post-Brown South by Michal Belknap

Privacy In A Public Society: Human Rights In Conflict, David Clark Esseks

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Privacy in a Public Society: Human Rights in Conflict by Richard F. Hixson

Review Of Families And The Gravely Ill: Roles, Rules, And Rights, Vanessa Merton

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Deconstructing Gender, Joan C. Williams

Michigan Law Review

I start out, as have many others, from the deep split among American feminists between "sameness" and "difference." The driving force behind the mid-twentieth-century resurgence of American feminism was an insistence on the fundamental similarity of men and women and, hence, their essential equality.

I begin in Part I by challenging the widely influential description of gender advocated by Carol Gilligan. While Part I challenges the description of gender differences offered by Gilligan feminists, it does not deny the existence of gender differences. The chief strength of the feminism of difference is its challenge to what have been called male …

Charles Guiteau And The Christian Nation, Carol Weisbrod

Faculty Articles and Papers

No abstract provided.

Equality And Private Choice, Anita L. Allen

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Cable Traffic And The First Amendment Must-Carry Under A Diversity Approach And Antitrust As Possible Alternative, Bruno Vandermeulen

LLM Theses and Essays

Recent technological progress in the field of telecommunications has greatly changed the competitive structure between broadcasters, cable operators, and telephone companies. The legal and economic environment for these media participants has shifted, and new problems have arisen. One major problem is the enhanced threat of concentration of media corporations, as corporate bigness becomes desirable and the number of diversified owners of media outlets continues to decrease. This paper analyzes broadcasting regulations and subsequent case law to show the concern by the legislature and regulatory agencies to preserve diversity in opinion and media-ownership through emphasis on “localism” and a “marketplace of …

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

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Introduction To The Food Stamp Program, David A. Super

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.