Law Commons^™

Glorious Revolution To American Revolution: The English Origin Of The Right To Keep And Bear Arms, Diarmuid F. O'Scannlain

Notre Dame Law Review

It is definitively not my intention to wade into such debates about the wisdom of the Second Amendment or to deal with pending or recent court interpretations. Rather, I want to explore how it came to be and what role British history had in its genesis. For Americans like myself, such history helps us to understand the meaning of our own Constitution. For the Britons, it is a powerful example of how your own constitutional principles shaped the legal landscape of far-flung countries once within the British Empire. And for those simply interested in law as a discipline, irrespective of …

Why Didn't The Common Law Follow The Flag?, Christian Burset

Journal Articles

This Article considers a puzzle about how different kinds of law came to be distributed around the world. The legal systems of some European colonies largely reflected the laws of the colonizer. Other colonies exhibited a greater degree of legal pluralism, in which the state administered a mix of different legal systems. Conventional explanations for this variation look to the extent of European settlement: where colonizers settled in large numbers, they chose to bring their own laws; otherwise, they preferred to retain preexisting ones. This Article challenges that assumption by offering a new account of how and why the British …

The Depravity Of The 1930s And The Modern Administrative State, Steven G. Calabresi, Gary Lawson

Notre Dame Law Review

Gillian Metzger’s 2017 Harvard Law Review foreword, entitled 1930s Redux: The Administrative State Under Siege, is a paean to the modern administrative state, with its massive subdelegations of legislative and judicial power to so-called “expert” bureaucrats, who are layered well out of reach of electoral accountability yet do not have the constitutional status of Article III judges. We disagree with this celebration of technocratic government on just about every level, but this Article focuses on two relatively narrow points.

First, responding more to implicit assumptions that pervade modern discourse than specifically to Professor Metzger’s analysis, we challenge the normally …

Equity, Samuel L. Bray

Book Chapters

How has equity been received in the United States? Two themes stand out. One is that of ‘nice adjustment’: the case-specific adjustment of legal rules to avoid the harsh results of applying rules to unforeseen circumstances. The second is the idea of judicial command: ordering the particular defendant in the circumstances to do equity without contradicting the common law. While the former has waned in the US, the latter has overly strengthened. The reasons of legal culture are discussed.