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Full-Text Articles in Law
Microwaving Dreams? Why There Is No Point In Reheating The Hart-Dworkin Debate For International Law, Jason A. Beckett
Microwaving Dreams? Why There Is No Point In Reheating The Hart-Dworkin Debate For International Law, Jason A. Beckett
Faculty Book Chapters
A critique of attempts to transpose Hart and Dworkin's legal theories to international law. I demonstrate why neither approach can provide insights into international law. Hart and Dworkin are institutional theorists, their methodologies are anchored by the need to justify the exercise of socially centralised violence. International law lacks both institutions and centralised violence, and the stabilising force these bring; it is radically indeterminate. Attempts to suppress this indeterminacy have resulted in international lawyers fragmenting into communities of practice, united by their eschatological faith in the international community. I challenge this faith.
Complicity And Lesser Evils: A Tale Of Two Lawyers, David Luban
Complicity And Lesser Evils: A Tale Of Two Lawyers, David Luban
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Government lawyers and other public officials sometimes face an excruciating moral dilemma: to stay on the job or to quit, when the government is one they find morally abhorrent. Staying may make them complicit in evil policies; it also runs the danger of inuring them to wrongdoing, just as their presence on the job helps inure others. At the same time, staying may be their only opportunity to mitigate those policies – to make evils into lesser evils – and to uphold the rule of law when it is under assault. This Article explores that dilemma in a stark form: …
Reevaluating Legal Theory, Jeffrey Pojanowski
Reevaluating Legal Theory, Jeffrey Pojanowski
Journal Articles
Must a good general theory of law incorporate what is good for persons in general? This question has been at the center of methodological debates in general jurisprudence for decades. Answering “no,” Julie Dickson’s book Evaluation and Legal Theory offered both a clear and concise conspectus of positivist methodology, as well as a response to the longstanding objection that such an approach has to evaluate the data it studies rather than simply describe facts about legal systems. She agreed that legal positivism must evaluate. At the same time, she argued, it is possible to offer an evaluative theory of the …