Law Commons^™

On The Idea Of Private Law, Martin Stone

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Ten Precepts Of American Slavery Jurisprudence: Chief Justice Roger Taney's Defense And Justice Thurgood Marshall's Condemnation Of The Precept Of Black Inferiority, A. Leon Higginbotham Jr.

Cardozo Law Review

Approximately twenty-five years ago, a group of thoughtful scholars, under the tutelage of Stanley Katz and Owen Fiss, met at the University of Chicago to discuss slavery law. Stanley Katz has previously noted that the conference generated extraordinary academic inquiries, as well as many books and articles. In this Article, I will describe briefly the intellectual journey I have traveled which was, in no small part, shaped by the conference and the interrelationships I have had since then, with so many scholars, as we have tried to get better insights into the interrelated issues of bondage, freedom, and the Constitution.

The Unconventional Equal Protection Jurisprudence Of Jury Selection, Joel H. Swift

Northern Illinois University Law Review

This article traces the development of equal protection jurisprudence as it has been applied to one aspect of the criminal justice system, to wit, selection of juries. It demonstrates that the United States Supreme Court's approach has been inconsistent with conventional equal protection doctrine in two ways. Unlike conventional doctrine, which requires proof of subjective intent to discriminate to make out a prima facie case, the Court has found that the mere use of a jury selection process that has a proven statistically disparate negative impact on the selection of African-American jurors is sufficient to establish a prima facie violation …

Opening Address, Stanley N. Katz

Cardozo Law Review

I am more moved by this occasion than any of you other than Owen Fiss can imagine, for it takes me back to my first days teaching law at the University of Chicago in the fall of 1971. It was then and there that I began two of the most important friendships of my life with Harry Kalven and Owen Fiss. We agreed to begin a series of seminars on the law of slavery, which in the end carried on for three years.

The Hermeneutic Of Acceptance And The Discourse Of The Grotesque, With A Classroom Excercise On Vichy Law, Richard Weisberg

Cardozo Law Review

As a nonspecialist on the laws of slavery, I can best contribute to this discourse by suggesting some reflection on the comparative nature of racial discrimination in constitutionally based and seemingly enlightened legal systems. To the American system under close scrutiny in this Symposium, my recently completed work on Vichy law may lend some degree of further understanding. For the legalized persecution of Jews in France during the period 1940- 44 stands as a classic twentieth-century example of what I believe to have been at work in antebellum America: the elaboration through traditional patterns of legal reasoning of a discourse …

Law And Undecidability: A New Vision Of The Proceduralization Of Law, Jacques Lenoble

Cardozo Law Review

As a leading citizen of the Age of Reason, Pierre Simon Laplace liked to remark that there never could have been two Isaac Newtons for there was but a single world to be discovered. Laplace's aphorism neatly captured a fundamental assumption that has underlain the classical unity of science and reason under modernity. Today, in the wake of challenges posed by intellectual developments such as unstable systems and chaotic structures, the classical presupposition of a stable, objective, and physical world that serves as the horizon of scientific knowledge has begun to teeter. New cracks in the grand edifice of modem …

Family Quarrel, Frank I. Michelman

Cardozo Law Review

In Chapter 6 of Between Facts and Norms, Jurgen Habermas examines what he calls the republican conception of lawmaking. He draws this conception, which he also styles "communitarian," partly from writings of this author that have in turn been much inspired by the works of Professor Habermas.

Law And Philosophy: Some Consequences For The Law Deriving From The Sociological Reconstruction Of Philosophical Theory, Mark Gould

Cardozo Law Review

Jurgen Habermas wants to provide a (quasi) transcendental grounding for democracy. He believes that the constituent attribute of Homo Sapiens is ordinary speech and that embedded in speech is a set of "validity claims" that are redeemable-asymptotically-only in an ideal speech situation. This ideal serves as a regulative fiction for our everyday world of social institutions. While it may not actually be present in institutional form, it serves as a ground for the normative critique of the actual social world in which we live.

Habermas And The Counterfactual Imagination, Michael K. Power

Cardozo Law Review

The epistemological problem of critical theories is easy to state but hard to resolve. On the one hand, if the theories are too descriptive and draw their conceptual resources from the ideas and institutions which currently exist, they lose their critical force. While they may provide elaborate reconstructions of the structure of social practices, they remain internal to these practices, part of a field of knowledge in which, at worst, theory is merely a form of public relations. On the other hand, if they articulate forms of critique that are entirely external to the systems of knowledge and practice that …

The Dynamics Of Constitutional Adjudication, Bernhard Schlink

Cardozo Law Review

Habermas determines the role and legitimacy of constitutional adjudication through three confrontations. First, he confronts both the liberal and the welfare-state paradigms of law, seeing constitutional adjudication move from the former to the latter. Habermas wants this move to arrive at a procedural paradigm of law. Second, he confronts a norm- and a value-oriented understanding of the constitution. Habermas indicates the dangers of the former and the merits of the latter, and attempts to show that principles, understood as norms, should guide constitutional adjudication. Third, he confronts the liberal and the republican views of the political and constitutional process, developing …

Quod Omnes Tangit: Remarks On Jurgen Habermas’S Legal Theory, Niklas Luhmann

Cardozo Law Review

Quod omnes tangit, omnibus tractari et approbari debet. The Middle Ages found this rule in Roman law. It had to do with the circumstance of a plurality of legal guardians over the same ward. In the typical case, one guardian's approval was legally sufficient authorization in legal transactions. Since every other rule had seriously damaged business dealings, the business partner's confidence had to be protected. On the other hand, this consideration-that one guardian's approval is legally sufficient authorization for an emancipation-could not have led to a fully realized emancipation of a ward. Nor could it have led to the …

Replik Auf Beitrage Zu Einem Symposion Der Benjamin N. Cardozo School Of Law, Jürgen Habermas

Cardozo Law Review

Jeder Autor steht in der Schuld seiner Leser; das gilt erst recht ftr einen anspruchsvollen Autor, der eine umfangreiche und komplexe Untersuchung vorlegt und daftir-noch vor der Publikation des Buches in deutscher Sprache an einer amerikanischen Universitat-die kritische Aufmerksamkeit hervorragender Kollegen findet. Aus den sorgfaltigen Kommentaren habe ich grossen Gewinn gezogen. Diese Behauptung wird sich anhand meiner Antwort nachpriifen lassen, mit der ich zugleich meinen Dank abstatten mochte.

Liberties And Popular Sovereignty: On Jurgen Habermas’S Reconstruction Of The System Of Rights, Ingeborg Maus

Cardozo Law Review

The justifications Jurgen Habermas gives for a system of rights bring together the central intentions of his theory of law. The chapter of his book which provides these justifications is devoted in part to developing the underlying tension between "facticity and validity" as the basic structure of law taking the extreme and, for that reason, illuminating aspect of the guarantee of liberty through coercion. It also elucidates the motives for reestablishing the centuries-old connection between legal theory and social theory in the context of the most topical social problems. Whereas all subsectors of contemporary society have been juridified on a …

Communicative Power And The Concept Of Law, Ulrich K. Preub

Cardozo Law Review

The idea that the law was founded on the self-interest and the will of rational individuals was first developed and proven in the social contract theories of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. These theorists reacted-admittedly, in extremely different ways-to the problem of finding a collective basis in a world which had lost its common religious fundaments and the economic basis of feudal communal life. The European world of the seventeenth century had fallen apart. The universalism of the catholic world had been replaced by a plurality of subjective worldviews championed by individuals, groups, sects, and new social entities. How could one …

Why Care? The Trouble With Social Rights, Günter Frankenberg

Cardozo Law Review

While not everybody will agree that social rights are good in general, the ranks of the "not-everybody" will fill when one wants to decide who needs which particular social rights. Even those who claim to be philosophically and practically supportive of the idea and the benefits of social rights find it difficult to come up with a strong argument for them and usually invoke vague or weak obligations to support the victims of capitalism or, if you will, the market society or the mere necessity to preserve social peace by a minimally redistributive social policy. Social scientists have plausibly claimed …

Preface, Michel Rosenfeld

Cardozo Law Review

This symposium issue of the Cardozo Law Review which coincides with the English publication of Jurgen Habermas's Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, represents the culmination of an extraordinary interdisciplinary and intercontinental intellectual journey. The papers published in this issue were first presented at a conference held at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law on September 20 and 21, 1992, in which Jurgen Habermas and thirty-two scholars from the United States, Germany, and many other countries, representing the fields of law, philosophy, sociology, and political science engaged in two days of …

Jurisprudence And Validity, David M. Rasmussen

Cardozo Law Review

The relationship between law and philosophy and their respective discourses has never been harmonious. Just as Plato wanted to throw the poets out of his Republic on the basis of their tendency to corrupt, the law as a discipline has not been overwhelmed by those whose Platonic fervor would purify their enterprise and set them straight. The difference between legal procedure and philosophical-political reflection has not been easy to reconcile. Hobbes argued for the virtues of sovereignty against the self-regulating legal discipline that Lord Coke represented as having confidence in the practical orientation of "Juris prudentia," Blackstone tried …

Legitimacy And Diversity: Dialectical Reflections On Analytical Distinctions, Thomas Mccarthy

Cardozo Law Review

Jurgen Habermas's discourse theory of democracy has repeatedly been criticized for placing too much emphasis on consensus and not enough on conflict. He wants, it seems, to defend a discourse-theoretical version of the "general will" as the key to democratic legitimacy, whatever the cost. The costs are usually reckoned in terms of the theory's tenuous relation to the hurly-burly of democratic practice, where disagreement is the rule and unanimity is in short supply. Many of these criticisms miss their target, for they are often based on superficial readings and serious misunderstandings. But enough of them hit the mark to indicate …

The Retrieval Of The Democratic Ethos, Richard J. Bernstein

Cardozo Law Review

For over thirty years I have been a sympathetic although critical reader of Habermas. Initially, I was struck by his nuanced insight into the American pragmatic tradition and his appropriation of the radical democratic ethos of the pragmatic movement. I felt then, and still believe, that Habermas has a more profound and subtle understanding of what is best and most enduring in pragmatism-especially in the thought of Peirce, Dewey, and Mead-than many of my American colleagues. I was also attracted to Habermas for other reasons. He is a dialectical thinker who has the courage to buck fashionable trends-who refuses to …

Jurgen Habermas’S Theory Of Legal Discourse, Robert Alexy

Cardozo Law Review

Jurgen Habermas's discourse theory of law attempts to show that the ideal contents of the discourse principle can be realized within the institutional frame of a legal system. The result is a theory of the democratic constitutional state whose basic idea is the association and self-determination of free and equal consociates under the law. This theory is far more than a mere application of discourse theory to the law. Discourse theory, on the one hand, demands the institutionalization of a legal system for reasons internal to the theory. On the other hand, the positive law remains dependent on discourse theory …

Law And Political Culture, Dick Howard

Cardozo Law Review

A decade ago Habermas announced a project in his The Theory of Communicative Action. Those who slipped into the habit of talking about this project as his Rechtsphilosophie may be surprised by the sobriety of Habermas's choice for the book's title. The foreword to Faktizitat und Geltung rejects any comparison with Hegel's systematic Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts. Habermas contrasts his "methodical-pluralistic" proposals to the idealistic concepts of Geist and Sittlichkeit, which are unable to account for complex modern societies. The apparent modesty of Habermas's claims is underlined by his subtitle, Contributions to a Discourse Theory of …

Changing America: Three Arguments About Asian Americans And The Law , Frank H. Wu

American University Law Review

No abstract provided.

"Do Justice!": Variations Of A Thrice-Told Tale, Michael Herz

Articles

Although recent debates would suggest that narrative scholarship is brand new,4 lawyers, judges, and law professors, like all humankind, have always offered stories for illustration or support or to make a point in an indirect, and often more effective, way. Learned Hand's story about telling Justice Holmes to "do justice" is one widely-used example, offered by many writers in addition to Judge Bork and Professor Chayes. Its popularity is easy to understand. The story has a substantive message, pithily expressed, on a basic jurisprudential issue; it involves two members of the pantheon; and it crams a lot of human interest …

Corporate Fiduciary Principles For The Post-Contractarian Era, Rutheford B. Campbell Jr.

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The impact of the law and economics movement on legal scholarship, legal analysis, and, ultimately, on the rules under which our society operates is substantial. The proponents of this movement ("Contractarians") articulate their positions skillfully and apply their principles broadly across the entire spectrum of our laws, including, of course, the area of corporate law.

The purpose of this Article is to propose, explain, and defend broad and unifying principles to guide the development of fiduciary duties of corporate managers in the post-Contractarian period. These principles are based on Pareto criteria, which are demonstrably appealing to society and provide workable …

Mapping The Limits Of Skepticism In Law And Morals, Eric Blumenson

Suffolk University Law School Faculty Works

This article identifies the theoretical and practical limits of postmodern skepticism about objective, transcultural standards in law and morals.

Stanley Fish tells us that moral issues are intelligible only within the "paradigms or communities that give them their local and changeable shape." This is one formulation of antifoundationalism, which rejects the idea of a transcultural moral reality that binds all people. Antifoundationalists see value judgments as contingent cultural products that cannot be objectively true.

But can we do anything with this thesis in practice? Postmodern pragmatists like Richard Rorty and Joan Williams believe that we can; they say we would …

The Antinomy Of Coherence And Determinacy, William A. Edmundson

Faculty Publications By Year

Coherence and determinacy are both apparent desiderata for bodies of law and legal systems. Unfortunately, in legal systems of any complexity, increasing the degree of one invariably brings about a lessening of the other. For theories of law - such as Ronald Dworkin's - that emphasize the importance of coherence in judicial reasoning, while requiring as a condition of legitimacy that legal rights pre-exist judicial decisions, this must be an unwelcome fact.

Schrodinger’S Cat, Eugenics, And The Compulsory Sterilization Of Welfare Mothers: Deconstructing An Old/New Rhetoric And Constructing The Reproductive Right To Natality For Low-Income Women Of Color, Beverly Horsburgh

Cardozo Law Review

In Part I of this Article, I briefly trace the history of racism, sexism, and class bias in western scientific thought as well as the legal consequences that ensued in this country from scientific prejudice. In Part II, I turn to eugenics in our own time and explore the sterilization abuse of poor women of color as a disguised form of eugenics. I argue that the lack of popular sympathy for the reproductive problems of these women, due to their negative dehumanizing stereotyping and the pervasive influence of sociobiology, facilitates public acceptance of harsher measures in the future. I refer, …

Against Market Rationality: Moral Critiques Of Economic Analysis In Legal Theory, Jane B. Baron, Jeffrey L. Dunoff

Cardozo Law Review

Sometimes, apparently unrelated bodies of thought turn out to contain and express common themes. To our surprise, we found a set of common themes and concerns running through three bodies of theory that might otherwise appear unconnected: environmental ethics, civic republicanism, and commodification. In very different contexts, authors in all three areas seemed to ask some very similar questions. Collected together, these questions comprise a novel critique of the economic analysis of law-a "moral" critique that is quite different from technical and distributional critiques that have been offered in the past.

The Court And The Changing Constitution: A Discussion, Carl Sividorski, James Gardner, Barry Latzer, Peter Galie

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Review Essay: The Challenges Of Religous Neutrality, Samuel J. Levine

Scholarly Works

Levine begins this review essay by noting that at the outset of his discussion, Gedicks notes the difficulty one faces in critically engaging Supreme Court decisions in the area of church and state law. Gedicks goes on to premise his analysis on the identification of “competing rhetorical discourses of church-state relations,” through which he attempts to “organize virtually all of religion clause doctrine.” Gedicks applies this phenomenon, which he terms “discourse,” to church and state law. Thus, in The Rhetoric of Church and State: A Critical Analysis of Religion Clause Jurisprudence, Professor Gedicks succeeds in his goal of providing a …