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Full-Text Articles in Law

Property, Duress, And Consensual Relationships, David Blankfein-Tabachnick Apr 2016

Property, Duress, And Consensual Relationships, David Blankfein-Tabachnick

Michigan Law Review

Professor Seana Valentine Shiffrin has produced an exciting new book, Speech Matters: On Lying, Morality, and the Law. Shiffrin’s previous rigorous, careful, and morally sensitive work spans contract law, intellectual property, and the freedoms of association and expression. Speech Matters is in line with Shiffrin’s signature move: we ought to reform our social practices and legal and political institutions to, in various ways, address or accommodate moral values—here, a stringent moral prohibition against lying, a strident principle of promissory fidelity, that is, the principle that one ought to keep one’s promises, and the general value of veracity. The book …


Residential Protectionism And The Legal Mythology Of Home, Stephanie M. Stern May 2009

Residential Protectionism And The Legal Mythology Of Home, Stephanie M. Stern

Michigan Law Review

The theory that one's home is a psychologically special form of property has become a cherished principle of property law, cited by legislators and touted extensively in the legal scholarship. Influential scholars, most notably Margaret Radin, have asserted that ongoing control over one's home is necessary for an individual's very personhood and ability to flourish in society. Other commentators have expounded a communitarian vision of the home as rooting individuals in communities of close-knit social ties. Remarkably, the legal academy has accepted these theoretical accounts of the home without demanding a shred of empirical evidence. The misplaced belief in the …


Against Practice, Anthony V. Alfieri Jan 2009

Against Practice, Anthony V. Alfieri

Michigan Law Review

This Review examines the theory/practice dichotomy in legal education through the prism of the Carnegie Foundation's Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law. Descriptively, it argues that the Foundation's investigation of law school curricular deficiencies in the areas of clinical-lawyer skills, professionalism, and public service overlooks the relevance of critical pedagogies in teaching students how to deal with difference-based identity and how to build cross-cultural community in diverse, multicultural practice settings differentiated by mutable and immutable characteristics such as class, gender, and race. Prescriptively, it argues that the Foundation's remedial call for the curricular integration of clinical lawyer …


Toward A Third-Wave Feminist Legal Theory: Young Women, Pornography And The Praxis Of Pleasure, Bridget J. Crawford Jan 2007

Toward A Third-Wave Feminist Legal Theory: Young Women, Pornography And The Praxis Of Pleasure, Bridget J. Crawford

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

Part I of this Article explores the general themes of third-wave feminist writings. The Article begins with an overview of third-wave feminist literature and its predominant concerns. These concerns are (1) dissatisfaction with earlier feminists; (2) the multiple nature of personal identity; (3) the joy of embracing traditional feminine appearance and attributes; (4) the centrality of sexual pleasure and sexual self-awareness; (5) the obstacles to economic empowerment; and (6) the social and cultural impact of media and technology. Textual analysis reveals third-wave feminists' reliance on non-legal tools for remedying gender inequality. Although third-wave feminists acknowledge the law's role in women's …


The Multistate Bar Exam As A Theory Of Law, Daniel J. Solove May 2006

The Multistate Bar Exam As A Theory Of Law, Daniel J. Solove

Michigan Law Review

What is the most widely read work of jurisprudence by those in the legal system? Is it H.L.A. Hart's The Concept of Law? Ronald Dworkin's Law's Empire? No. It is actually the Multistate Bar Exam ("Bar Exam"). Perhaps no other work on law has been so widely read by those in the legal profession. Although the precise text of the Bar Exam is different every year, it presents a jurisprudence that transcends the specific language of its text. Each year, thousands of lawyers-to-be ponder over it, learning its profound teachings on the meaning of the law. They study …


Was The Frog Prince Sexually Molested?: A Review Of Peter Westen's The Logic Of Consent, Heidi M. Hurd May 2005

Was The Frog Prince Sexually Molested?: A Review Of Peter Westen's The Logic Of Consent, Heidi M. Hurd

Michigan Law Review

Peter Westen's The Logic of Consent is nothing short of a tour de force. In the tradition of the very best and most significant contributions to legal theory, Professor Westen demonstrates that we do not know what we think we know about a capacity that on a daily basis turns trespasses into dinner parties, brutal batteries into football games, rape into lovemaking, and the commercial appropriation of name and likeness into biography. While we all employ claims of consent in everyday moral gossip to absolve some and withhold sympathy from others, and while courts of law across the nation commonly …


Unity And Pluralism In Contract Law, Nathan Oman May 2005

Unity And Pluralism In Contract Law, Nathan Oman

Michigan Law Review

It is a cliché of contemporary legal scholarship that, in the last few decades, the study of law has witnessed a vast proliferation of competing theoretical approaches. The old faith in the careful honing of doctrinal concepts and the essential usefulness of legal analysis has given way to a cacophony of competing theoretical sects. Economists, moral philosophers, sociologists, historians, and others have stepped forward to offer the insights of this or that discipline as a new and superior path to legal enlightenment. Perhaps nowhere has this cliché been truer than in the realm of contracts scholarship, where, for a generation, …


Deferring, Frederick Schauer May 2005

Deferring, Frederick Schauer

Michigan Law Review

Many academics, upon encountering a book on deference by a leading legal theorist, would assume that the book was still another contribution to a long and prominent debate about the existence (or not) of an obligation to obey the law. But that would be a mistake. In fact, this is a book not about obligation or obedience but about deference, and it is precisely in that difference that the significance of Philip Soper's book lies. Especially in law, where the Supreme Court (sometimes) defers to the factual, legal, and even constitutional determinations of Congress and administrative agencies, where appellate courts …


The Unruliness Of Rules, Peter A. Alces May 2003

The Unruliness Of Rules, Peter A. Alces

Michigan Law Review

Analytical jurisprudence depends on a posited relation between rules and morality. Before we may answer persistent and important questions of legal theory - indeed, before we can even know what those questions are - we must understand not just the operation of rules but their operation in relation to morality. Once that relationship is formulated, we may then come to terms with the likes of inductive reasoning in Law, the role of precedent, and the fit, such as it is, between Natural Law and Positivism as well as even the coincidence (or lack thereof) between inclusive and exclusive positivism. That …


Meaning's Edge, Love's Priority, Patrick Mckinley Brennan May 2003

Meaning's Edge, Love's Priority, Patrick Mckinley Brennan

Michigan Law Review

The story is told of an American wending his way through the British Museum. Reaching the Rosetta Stone, he reached right over the railing, touched the scarred slab, and lamented: "It doesn't feel meaningful." Whereupon an old Briton was heard to mumble: "The poor American's got this old thing confused with the Blarney Stone." A bully presses his case, but meaning is much more modest. Powerless to insist upon itself, meaning lies in wait of discovery. What distinguishes the Rosetta Stone from other rocks of the same kind and size is that it was someone's - or rather a group's …


Terry Sandalow: Mind And Man, Francis A. Allen Aug 2001

Terry Sandalow: Mind And Man, Francis A. Allen

Michigan Law Review

My first encounter with Terry Sandalow occurred in a classroom at the University of Chicago in the fall of 1956. I had just joined that faculty, and Terry, a third-year student, was a member of my class in constitutional law. Early in the course I called on Terry to state the case that was the subject of the morning's discussion. He replied that he had not been able to read the assignment prior to class. The response did not come as a complete surprise since I was dimly aware that he was a member of the law review staff and …


Democratic Justice In Transition, Marion Smiley May 2001

Democratic Justice In Transition, Marion Smiley

Michigan Law Review

Ruti Teitel's Transitional Justice and Ian Shapiro's Democratic Justice come out of very different academic traditions. But they both develop a view of justice that might loosely be called pragmatic by virtue of its treatment of justice as a value that is simultaneously grounded in practice and powerful in bringing about social and political change. Moreover, they both use this shared pragmatic view of justice to provide us with two things that are of great importance to the study of transitional justice and democracy in general. The first is an explanatory framework for understanding how legal institutions and claims about …


Apparently Substantial, Oddly Hollow: The Enigmatic Practice Of Justice, Heidi Li Feldman Jan 1999

Apparently Substantial, Oddly Hollow: The Enigmatic Practice Of Justice, Heidi Li Feldman

Michigan Law Review

The Practice of Justice: A Theory of Lawyers' Ethics, by William H. Simon, is one of the most thoughtful and important books in legal theory - not just legal ethics - published in the past ten years. Like David Luban's seminal contribution to legal ethics, Lawyers and Justice: An Ethical Study, published a decade ago, Simon's book is a deliberate rival to accounts of lawyers' professional responsibility that begin with a command to zealous advocacy, end with a prohibition on outright illegal conduct, and offer nothing in between. Authors and commentators have grown increasingly dissatisfied with this as the basic …


Legal Theory And The Obligation To Obey, Philip E. Soper Jan 1984

Legal Theory And The Obligation To Obey, Philip E. Soper

Articles

Contributions to this symposium will undoubtedly share, with other recent discussions of the issue, the assumption that one does not need to decide what law is before deciding whether there is an obligation to obey it. More precisely, the assumption seems to be that our ordinary, pre-analytic understanding of "law" provides a completely adequate base for discussions about law's moral authority. The more refined disputes about the nature of law that dominate analytical jurisprudence can thus be ignored.


Cahn: The Sense Of Injustice, Michigan Law Review May 1950

Cahn: The Sense Of Injustice, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A Review of THE SENSE OF INJUSTICE. By Edmond N. Cahn.