Law Commons^™

Out Of The Ordinary: Law, Power, Culture, And The Commonplace, Naomi Mezey

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Review of The Common Place of Law: Stories From Everyday Life by Patricia Ewick & Susan S. Silbey (1998).

Sometimes a work's intellectual influences reveal both its strengths and its shortcomings. This is certainly the case with Patricia Ewick and Susan Silbey's The Common Place of Law: Stories From Everyday Life, and its indebtedness to the thinking of Michel Foucault and Michel de Certeau. Taken together, Foucault and de Certeau's work suggests that investigations of law's power are most fruitful not at the level of legal institutions and the state but at the level of lived experience, where we …

Reconstructing The Rule Of Law, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The action taken in Bush v. Gore by the five conservative Justices on the United States Supreme Court, Bugliosi argued, was not just wrong as a matter of law, but criminal: It was a malem in se, fully intended, premeditated theft of a national election for the Presidency of the United States. Now, as Balkan and Levinson would argue, this seventh, "prosecutorial" response -- that the Court's action was not just wrong but criminal -- is also not available to a devotee of either radical or moderate indeterminacy. Even assuming both criminal intent and severe harm-a wrongful, specific intent to …

Middle-Class Black Suburbs And The State Of Integration: A Post-Integrationist Vision For Metropolitan America, Sheryll Cashin

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Despite the gradual move towards integration in the United States, segregated communities, divided along socio-economic and racial lines, continue to exist, and indeed have taken on new forms. Given the choice between racial segregation and integration as minority members of a community, some middle-class African Americans have chosen to create their own communities, thus forming the modern day middle-class black suburb. Now, majority African-American suburbs rest adjacent to majority-white suburbs, but the segregated communities share little but the town line.

In this Article, Professor Cashin addresses the timely and difficult question of whether the middle-class black suburb is a new …

Joseph In Lawyerland, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

As Alice wanders through Wonderland in an unreal space in real time-a dream-learning backward truths from illogical creatures who speak in paradoxes, so Joseph figuratively wanders through lawyerland in an unreal time, but in a very real space-Manhattan-conversing with his thinly fictionalized friends, all of whom happen to be lawyers, about their lives and practices in law. As Joseph's lawyers talk with him about the law they practice, they uncover, through White Rabbit and Cheshire Cat-like illogical precision, a chaotic, unkempt, unconscionably reckless, often cruel, and sometimes pathological legal wilderness. The legal terrain these lawyers occupy is not an inviting …

The Right To Liberty In A Good Society, Randy E. Barnett, Douglas B. Rasmussen

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

We have been asked to consider how a "Constitution of Civic Virtue" might contribute to a "good society." To answer this question, we need to have some idea of what a good society might be, and we need to be able to articulate that idea. Certainly, we think we know a good movie when we see it, a good book when we read it, a good argument when we hear it, and a good idea when we have one, but we are not sure we have a handle on what a good society is. Even what we think we know …

Law As Culture, Naomi Mezey

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This Essay is an attempt to theorize the relationship of law to culture and culture to law beyond the intuitive, commonplace sense that law partakes of culture - by reflecting it as well as by reacting against it - and that culture refracts law. It proposes a theory of law as culture that, in detailing the mutually constitutive nature of the relationship, distinguishes itself from the way law and culture have been conceived by realist and critical legal scholars, as well as by social norms writers. The Essay concludes by speculating about one possible method by which this theorizing might …