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Articles 1 - 9 of 9
Full-Text Articles in Law
Secularization, Legal Indeterminacy, And Habermas's Discourse Theory Of Law, Mark C. Modak-Truran
Secularization, Legal Indeterminacy, And Habermas's Discourse Theory Of Law, Mark C. Modak-Truran
Mark C Modak-Truran
The unexpected vitality of religion has motivated scholars in many fields like anthropology, sociology, political science, international relations, and philosophy to revisit their assumptions about the supposed secularization of their disciplines. Despite this robust re-examination in other disciplines, the secularization of law arguably constitutes the most widely-held but least-examined assumption in contemporary legal theory. Legal scholars and philosophers have surprisingly ignored one exception—Jürgen Habermas’s discourse theory of law. Accordingly, this article focuses on Habermas’s sophisticated awareness of the tension between the secularization of law and legal indeterminacy and treats his discourse theory of law as a significant test of the …
Motivational Law, Arnold S. Rosenberg
Motivational Law, Arnold S. Rosenberg
Arnold S Rosenberg
This article introduces a new concept of law’s motivational functions and the laws that serve those functions, which I call “motivational law.” Motivational law consists of those rules and principles, a purpose or function of which is to motivate people to comply with laws that regulate their conduct toward each other or their environment. Motivational laws include obscenity and censorship laws, religious laws on diet, dress, liturgy and ritual, military disciplinary rules, “soft law,” the doctrine of consideration in contract law, and even procedural due process.
Drawing on cognitive dissonance theory and other behavioral research, I conclude that motivational law …
Emerging Applications Of Jewish Law In American Legal Scholarship: An Introduction, Samuel J. Levine
Emerging Applications Of Jewish Law In American Legal Scholarship: An Introduction, Samuel J. Levine
Scholarly Works
In recent years, the field of Jewish law has gained increasing prominence in American law schools and legal scholarship. At the same time, in the realm of scholarship, a substantial body of literature has developed considering the relevance of Jewish legal thought to a variety of issues in the American legal system. As the substance, scope, and volume of this scholarship demonstrate, an analysis of Jewish law may prove helpful in providing comparisons and contrasts to both controversial and seemingly settled areas of American law. At the 2007 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Law Schools, the Section on …
Secularization, Legal Indeterminacy, And Habermas's Discourse Theory Of Law, Mark C. Modak-Truran
Secularization, Legal Indeterminacy, And Habermas's Discourse Theory Of Law, Mark C. Modak-Truran
Journal Articles
This Article focuses on Habermas’s sophisticated awareness of the tension between secularization of law and legal indeterminacy and treats his discourse theory of law as a significant test of the feasibility of reconciling these claims. In an earlier article, I criticized Habermas’s discourse of justification and his claim that it legitimated the law independently of a religious or metaphysical worldview. Even assuming I was misguided in that critique, this Article argues that Habermas’s discourse of application is incoherent and fails to maintain the secularization of the law in the face of legal indeterminacy. Given Habermas’s failure, contemporary legal theory needs …
Beyond Theocracy And Secularism (Part I): Toward A New Paradigm For Law And Religion, Mark C. Modak-Truran
Beyond Theocracy And Secularism (Part I): Toward A New Paradigm For Law And Religion, Mark C. Modak-Truran
Journal Articles
As part of a larger project challenging and moving beyond the premodern and modern paradigms, this article focuses on the modern paradigm and its notion of secularization. Section II will discuss the origin of the modern paradigm as a reaction to the religious pluralism and the religious wars in the sixteenth and seventeenth century such as the Thirty Years War in Europe (1618-48) and the English Civil War (1642-51) resulting from the Protestant Reformation. The Reformation divided the Western part of the Christian tradition into separate confessional institutions based on different theological interpretations of Christianity such as Lutheran, Calvinist, and …
Symposium Introduction, Mark C. Modak-Truran
Symposium Introduction, Mark C. Modak-Truran
Journal Articles
The articles and essays in this Symposium should greatly aid disclosing key presuppositions of religionists and secularists by thinking about the law (rather than through the law) and by employing other disciplinary perspectives and methods to provide a more sophisticated understanding of law and religion. I will provide a brief summary of each article and essay and indicate the methods or disciplinary perspectives employed by them in their analysis.
Deep Purple: Religious Shades Of Family Law, Naomi R. Cahn, June Carbone
Deep Purple: Religious Shades Of Family Law, Naomi R. Cahn, June Carbone
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
"Deep Purple" examines the impact of religion on the politics and jurisprudence of abstinence education. Abstinence education is one of the many locations (issues) in the contemporary culture wars between red and blue state values. Families who live in red and blue states are experiencing divergent life patterns, and religion affects the development of these patterns. Frequency of church attendance has been tied to likelihood of marriage, and, as this paper shows, has been profoundly influential in approaches to teen sexuality. Religion decreases the opportunity for dialogue and compromise on these issues because people use underlying values - such as …
Epilogue, Randy Lee
Found Law, Made Law And Creation: Reconsidering Blackstone's Declaratory Theory, William Brewbaker
Found Law, Made Law And Creation: Reconsidering Blackstone's Declaratory Theory, William Brewbaker
William S. Brewbaker III
The subject of this paper is Blackstone's famous declaratory theory of law - the claim that judges find the law, rather than make it. Blackstone's claim is widely rejected in the legal academy, often because Blackstone is (wrongly) associated with the brooding omnipresence view of law rejected in cases like Erie, Guaranty Trust and Southern Pacific Co. v. Jensen. I argue that Blackstone's theory fails for other reasons - namely, because his account does not square well with law practice as it exists and because his distinction between legislative lawmaking and judicial declaration is ultimately unsustainable. Despite its faults, Blackstone's …