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Full-Text Articles in Law
(Anti)Canonizing Courts, Jamal Greene
(Anti)Canonizing Courts, Jamal Greene
Faculty Scholarship
Within U.S. constitutional culture, courts stand curiously apart from the society in which they sit. Among the many purposes this process of alienation serves is to “neutralize” the cognitive dissonance produced by Americans’ current self-conception and the role our forebears’ social and political culture played in producing historic injustice. The legal culture establishes such dissonance in part by structuring American constitutional argument around anticanonical cases: most especially “Dred Scott v. Sandford,” “Plessy v. Ferguson,” and “Lochner v. New York.” The widely held view that these decisions were “wrong the day they were decided” emphasizes the role of independent courts in …
The Age Of Consent, Philip Chase Bobbitt
The Age Of Consent, Philip Chase Bobbitt
Faculty Scholarship
On three October afternoons in the fall of 1974, Grant Gilmore, a Sterling Professor of Law at Yale, delivered his Storrs Lectures, the lecture series at Yale Law School whose speakers had included Roscoe Pound, Lon Fuller, and Benjamin Cardozo. Gilmore was a magisterial scholar: the author of a prize-winning treatise, Security Interests in Personal Property, and what remains the leading treatise on admiralty law; he was the Chief Reporter and draftsman for Article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code; and his PhD on French poet and critic Stéphane Mallarmé had led to an appointment at Yale College before …
The Administrative Origins Of Modern Civil Liberties Law, Jeremy K. Kessler
The Administrative Origins Of Modern Civil Liberties Law, Jeremy K. Kessler
Faculty Scholarship
This Article offers a new explanation for the puzzling origin of modern civil liberties law. Legal scholars have long sought to explain how Progressive lawyers and intellectuals skeptical of individual rights and committed to a strong, activist state came to advocate for robust First Amendment protections after World War I. Most attempts to solve this puzzle focus on the executive branch's suppression of dissent during World War I and the Red Scare. Once Progressives realized that a powerful administrative state risked stifling debate and deliberation within civil society, the story goes, they turned to civil liberties law in order to …