Law Commons^™

Symbolic Politics For Disempowered Communities: State Environmental Justice Policies, Tonya Lewis, Jessica Owley

Articles

No abstract provided.

The Problem Of Risk In International Criminal Law, Mark A. Summers

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Constitutional Venue, Peter L. Markowitz, Lindsay C. Nash

Articles

A foundational concept of American jurisprudence is the principle that it is unfair to allow litigants to be haled into far away tribunals when the litigants and the litigation have little or nothing to do with the location of such courts. Historically, both personal jurisdiction and venue each served this purpose in related, but distinct ways. Personal jurisdiction is, at base, a limit on the authority of the sovereign. Venue, in contrast, aims to protect parties from being forced to litigate in a location where they would be unfairly disadvantaged. The constitutional boundaries of these early principles came to be …

What Jurors Want To Know: Motivating Juror Cognition To Increase Legal Knowledge & Improve Decisionmaking, Sara Gordon

Scholarly Works

What do jurors want to know? Jury research tells us that jurors want to understand the information they hear in a trial so they can reach the correct decision. But like all people, jurors who are asked to analyze information in a trial—even jurors who consciously want to reach a fair and accurate verdict—are unconsciously influenced by their internal goals and motivations. Some of these motives are specific to individual jurors; for instance, a potential juror with a financial interest in a case would be excluded from the jury pool. But other motivations, like the motive to understand the law …

Introduction To The Workplace Constitution From The New Deal To The New Right, Sophia Z. Lee

All Faculty Scholarship

Today, most American workers do not have constitutional rights on the job. As The Workplace Constitution shows, this outcome was far from inevitable. Instead, American workers have a long history of fighting for such rights. Beginning in the 1930s, civil rights advocates sought constitutional protections against racial discrimination by employers and unions. At the same time, a conservative right-to-work movement argued that the Constitution protected workers from having to join or support unions. Those two movements, with their shared aim of extending constitutional protections to American workers, were a potentially powerful combination. But they sought to use those protections to …

Abortion Distortions, Caroline Mala Corbin

Articles

No abstract provided.

Law And Artifice In Blackstone's Commentaries, Jessie Allen

Articles

William Blackstone is often identified as a natural law thinker for whom property rights were preeminent, but reading the Commentaries complicates that description. I propose that Blackstone’s concept of law is more concerned with human invention and artifice than with human nature. At the start of his treatise, Blackstone identifies security, liberty and property as “absolute” rights that form the foundation of English law. But while security and liberty are “inherent by nature in every individual” and “strictly natural,” Blackstone is only willing to say that “private property is probably founded in nature.” Moreover, Blackstone is clear that there is …

Saving Originalism’S Soul, Stephen E. Sachs

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Can The Law Meet The Demands Made On It?, George C. Christie

Faculty Scholarship

This is my contribution to a festscrift in honor of Professor Don Wallace on his retirement from the Georgetown University School of Law. My essay points out the problems and dangers of the increasing delegation to international and domestic courts, in broad and vague value-laden language, the responsibility of making basic moral and policy decisions for society. It saddles courts with a task that they are not particularly suited to perform and it is certainly not the way a democratic society should function.

D.H. Lawrence's Plural Jurisprudence: An Enquiry Into Desmond Manderson's Post-Positivist 'Law And Literature', Luis Gomez Romero

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

The border means more than a customs house, a passport officer, a man with a gun. Over there everything is going to be different; life is never going to be quite the same again after your passport has been stamped and you find yourself speechless among the money-changers.

Graham Greene, The Lawless Roads

This article draws on Desmond Manderson's theorisation of ‘law and literature’ in order to undertake a jurisprudential reading of the last two ‘leadership novels’ that D.H. Lawrence published in the 1920s: Kangaroo and The Plumed Serpent. This reading demonstrates the strengths and weaknesses in Manderson's methodology while …

Legality, Morality, Duality, Joshua P. Davis

Utah Law Review

This Article proposes legal dualism as a novel resolution to one of the central debates in jurisprudence—that between natural law and legal positivism. It holds that the nature of law varies with the purpose for which it is being interpreted. Natural law provides the best account of the law when it serves as a source of moral guidance and legal positivism provides the best account of the law when it does not.

What Is The Philosophy Of Law?, John Finnis

Journal Articles

The philosophy of law is not separate from but dependent upon ethics and political philosophy, which it extends by that attention to the past (of sources, constitutions, contracts, acquired rights, etc.) which is characteristic of juridical thought for reasons articulated by the philosophy of law. Positivism is legitimate only as a thesis of, or topic within, natural law theory, which adequately incorporates it but remains transparently engaged with the ethical and political issues and challenges both perennial and peculiar to this age. The paper concludes by proposing a task for legal philosophy, in light of the fact that legal systems …

Legality, Morality, Duality, Joshua Davis

Joshua P. Davis

This Article proposes legal dualism as a novel resolution to one of the central debates in jurisprudence—that between natural law and legal positivism. It holds that the nature of law varies with the purpose for which it is being interpreted. Natural law provides the best account of the law when it serves as a source of moral guidance and legal positivism when it does not. The Article explores dualism by contrasting it with the defense of legal positivism in Scott Shapiro’s justly renowned book, LEGALITY. Shapiro offers arguably the most sophisticated defense of positivism to date. This Article argues that …

American Legal Realism And Practical Guidance, Joshua Davis, Manuel Vargas

Joshua P. Davis

H.L.A. Hart’s well-known rejection of American Legal Realism turned in part on the idea that Realism lacked the resources to provide the sort of guidance that we might reasonably seek from a theory of law. Although Hart's criticisms were widely regarded as devastating, in recent years American Legal Realism has undergone something of a renaissance. The principal architect of that renaissance is Brian Leiter, who has re-established Realism as an important and even indispensable approach to jurisprudence. In this chapter, our aim is to show how, despite its considerable attractions, Leiter’s brand of Legal Realism appears to be in much …

The Limits Of Game Theory On Important Legal Issues, Robert Sanger

Robert M. Sanger

Political strategists often talk in terms of targeting the “persuadable middle.” This term is used regarding volatile issues like same-sex marriage, war, or the death penalty. It is a core feature of undergraduate “game theory” classes taught within Economics departments but it is also a concept that has become a staple of political campaign consultants.

The “persuadable middle” concept is severely flawed in practice. Recent scholarly research has shown that the very fact of utilizing economic “game theory” and concepts like the “persuadable middle” has unintended consequences. By staying away from moral discourse in potentially volatile debates and focusing instead …

Local Government, "One Person, One Vote," And The Jewish Question, Kenneth Stahl

Kenneth Stahl

Enlightenment thinkers were transfixed by “the Jewish Question”– how to incorporate the manifestly unassimilated Jewish community into a modern nation-state predicated on the idea of a uniform and homogenous citizenry. Their solution was to strip the Jewish community of its collective political character and recapitulate the Jews as abstract citizens of the state. Each Jew was henceforth to be “a man on the street and a Jew at home.”

American constitutional law has confronted its own version of the Jewish question in the problematic position of local governments. Like the Jewish ghettos of feudal Europe, cities historically were autonomous corporate …

Retroactivity And Prospectivity Of Judgments In American Law, Richard Kay

Richard Kay

In every American jurisdiction, new rules of law announced by a court are presumed to have retrospective effect—that is, they are presumed to apply to events occurring before the date of judgment. There are, however, exceptions in certain cases where a court believes that such application of the new rule will upset serious and reasonable reliance on the prior state of the law. This essay, a substantially abridged version of the United States Report on the subject, submitted at the Nineteenth International Congress of Comparative Law, summarizes these exceptional cases. It shows that the proper occasions for issuing exclusively or …

On The Conceptual Confusions Of Jurisprudence, Aaron Rappaport

Aaron Rappaport

For more than half a century, legal theorists have tried to identify and describe the concept of law, employing a method called “conceptual analysis” to pursue this goal. Yet the details of that methodology remain obscure, its merits largely accepted without careful analysis. A reassessment is long past due. This paper offers the first comprehensive survey of the way conceptual analysis has been used in legal theory. The paper identifies four different forms of conceptual analysis – the empirical, intuitive, categorical and contingent methods of analysis. After clarifying the core assumptions of each approach, the paper evaluates whether any of …

De Recto, De Jure, Or De Facto: Another Look At The History Of U.S./Tribal Relations, Marren Sanders

Marren Sanders

The history of relations between the United States and Native nations is often divided by scholars into specific eras defined by the Congressional policy in force at the time. Each federal policy had profound consequences for tribes and their sovereign ability to manage their lands and resources. This article surveys the history of U.S./tribal relations through the lens of the Professors Joseph Kalt and Joseph William Singer’s scheme of tribal sovereignty. Part I looks at how tribal sovereign rights to manage their people, lands, and resources have been recognized in varying degrees since the time of first contract with European …

Directors’ Legal Duties And Csr: Prohibited, Permitted Or Prescribed In Contemporary Corporate Law?, Benedict Sheehy, Donald Feaver

Benedict Sheehy

Abstract: The interaction between CSR obligations and directors’ legal duties is seriously under examined. This article addresses that lack by examining directors’ duties in case law and legislation across the major commonwealth countries and the USA. It provides an analysis of leading cases and examines how they deal with the issues of the shareholder primacy doctrine, corporate legal theory, CSR and directors’ duties. The article reviews fiduciary relations and duties, analyses the directors’ duties to exercise power in the best interests of the company as a whole and for proper purposes. As this area of law is highly contested there …

The Practice And Theory Of Lawyer Disqualification, Keith Swisher

Keith Swisher

Lawyer disqualification is commonly feared — as a “strategic,” “tactical,” and “harassing” “potent weapon” depriving clients of their trusted counsel of choice. Although disqualification comes with costs, fundamental misunderstandings fuel this common fear. This Article finds that disqualification is a uniquely effective remedy for lawyer misconduct and makes the following contributions to the law and practice of lawyer disqualification: (1) an exhaustive study surveying disqualification cases and refuting the common misconception that disqualification motions are uncontrollably on the rise and uncontrollably bad; (2) an accessible analysis of lawyer disqualification doctrine that permits lawyers and judges to begin assessing common disqualification …

Decorating The Structure: The Art Of Making Human Law, Brian M. Mccall

Brian M McCall

Entender Los Males Económicos Modernos A La Luz De La Doctrina Social Católica, Brian M. Mccall

Brian M McCall

In a general sense, St. Thomas Aquinas predicted the paralysis and chaos of the financial and economic systems in America and Europe which occurred in 2008, when he predicted that in a society where unjust exchanges dominate, eventually all exchanges will cease. St. Thomas also points out that although human law cannot prohibit all injustice, society cannot escape the consequences of transgressing the divine law which leaves “nothing unpunished.” Thus, at least part of the explanation for that crisis whose effects remain with us today lies in continuous violations of natural justice by our economic system. Neither one product nor …

Entender Los Males Economómicos Modernos A La Luz De La Doctrina Social Cátolica (Understanding Modern Economic Woes In Light Of Catholic Social Doctrine), Brian M. Mccall

Brian M McCall

En sentido general, Santo Tomás Aquino predijo la parálisis y el caos del sistema financiero económico en Estados Unidos y Europa que ocurrió en 2008, cuando predijo que en una sociedad donde los intercambios injustos dominan, eventualmente todos los intercambios podrán cesar. Santo Tomás también señala que aunque la ley humana no pueda prohibir todas las injusticias, la sociedad no puede escapar de las consecuencias de trasgredir la ley divina que no deja nada en la impunidad. Así, al menos una parte de la explicación para esta crisis cuyos efectos permanecen con nosotros en la actualidad se encuentra en las …

Anarchy, Order, And Trade: A Structuralist Account Of Why A Global Commercial Legal Order Is Emerging, Bryan H. Druzin

Bryan H. Druzin

While still fragmented, we are witnessing the emergence of a global commercial legal order independent of any one national legal system. This process is unfolding both on the macro-level of state actors as well as that of private individuals and organizations. On the macro-level, the sources of this legal order are complex international agreements; on the micro-level, private contracts employing commercial customary practices and arbitration are driving this process forward. Yet there is no comparable evolution occurring (in any substantial sense) in non-commercial areas of law such as criminal, tort, or family law. There is an overall asymmetry in the …

Restraining The Hand Of Law: A Conceptual Framework To Shrink The Size Of Law, Bryan H. Druzin

Bryan H. Druzin

There is a fierce ideological struggle between two warring camps: those who rally against expansive government and those who support it. Clearly, the correct balance must be struck between the extremes of legislative over-invasiveness and the frightening total absence of legal structure. This paper articulates a framework that allows for legislative parsimony—a way to scale back state law in a way that avoids lurching to unnecessary extremes. I assume the libertarian premise that law should strive to encroach as minimally as possible upon social order, yet I argue that we must do this in a highly selective fashion, employing a …

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Is The Use Of Calling Emerson A Pragmatist: A Brief And Belated Response To Stanley Cavell, Allen P. Mendenhall

Allen Mendenhall

This essay investigates the relationship between Ralph Waldo Emerson and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. in the context of the common law. Holmes’s Emersonian writings, in particular his dissents, fall within the theoretical framework of agonism, which Harold Bloom refers to as a revisionary and Emersonian “program.” Agonism as a political and aesthetic theory maintains that sites of contestation can be productive rather than destructive; it suggests that confrontational relationships can be at once mutually offsetting and generative. Drawing from the Greek word for an athletic competition, agonism applied to rhetoric underscores the importance of mutuality to conflict: writers struggling against …