Law Commons^™

Addressing The Harms Of Pornography, Gillian Allison

Honors Theses, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Within this paper I look at the existing philosophical work on pornography, from scholars like Catherine MacKinnon, Ronald Dworkin, and Rae Langton to show the current state of the pornography debate that I intend to enter by presenting my own argument about the morality of pornography. I argue that while pornography is harmful, these harms are best resolved through increased sexual education and the popularization and production of more inclusive pornography. The harms pornography causes are so great because pornography is where a lot of people learn about sex. Pornography was never designed to depict an average sexual experience. If …

Sovereign Authority And Rule Of Law: The Effect Of U.S. Use Of Torture On Political Legitimacy, Sydney Bradley

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Governmental sovereignty is created and maintained by mutual respect for the rule of law by the government and citizens. To maintain legitimacy, a government must act within the bounds of the contract that created it. Otherwise, the relationship founded by said contract would be nullified, as would the duties and obligations that flow from that relationship. Torture exemplifies an ultra vires act used by the United States to show the consequences of over-extended authority on political legitimacy and the rule of law. Founded on the philosophies of Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes, and Christine Korsgaard, this research investigates the nature of …

Of Law And Other Artificial Normative Systems, Mitchell N. Berman

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

Different theories of law are situated within different pictures of our normative landscape. This essay aims to make more visible and attractive one picture that reflects basic positivist sensibilities yet is oddly marginalized in the current jurisprudential literature. The picture that I have in mind tries to vindicate surface appearances. It maintains that the social world is densely populated by countless normative systems of human construction (“artificial normative systems”) whose core functions are to generate and maintain norms (oughts, obligations, powers, rights, prohibitions, and the like). The norms that these systems output are conceptually independent from each other, and may …

The History Of Inequality In Education And The Question Of Equality Versus Adequacy, Diana Carol Dominguez

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Although the U.S. Constitution espouses equality, it clearly is not practiced in all aspects of life with education being a significant outlier. In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote about inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These two theories are related to education through educational adequacy and equality. Sufficientarianism, or educational adequacy, says that what is important is that everyone has “good enough” educational opportunities, but not the same ones. Egalitarianism, or educational equality, says that there is an intrinsic value in having the same educational opportunities and only having good enough opportunities misses something …

Carl Cohen’S ‘Kind’ Arguments For Animal Rights And Against Human Rights, Nathan Nobis

Nathan M. Nobis, PhD

Carl Cohen’s arguments against animal rights are shown to be unsound. His strategy entails that animals have rights, that humans do not, the negations of those conclusions, and other false and inconsistent implications. His main premise seems to imply that one can fail all tests and assignments in a class and yet easily pass if one’s peers are passing and that one can become a convicted criminal merely by setting foot in a prison. However, since his moral principles imply that nearly all exploitive uses of animals are wrong anyway, foes of animal rights are advised to seek philosophical consolations …

Philosophical Foundations Of Physician-Assisted Death And Euthanasia Legislation In Oregon And The Netherlands: A Comparative Analysis, Rebecca F. Stein

Honors Theses (PPE)

No abstract provided.

Search, Seizure, And Immunity: Second-Order Normative Authority And Rights, Stephen E. Henderson, Kelly Sorensen

Stephen E Henderson

A paradigmatic aspect of a paradigmatic kind of right is that the rights holder is the only one who can alienate it. When individuals waive rights, the normative source of that waiving is normally taken to be the individual herself. This moral feature—immunity—is usually in the background of discussions about rights. We bring it into the foreground here, with specific attention to a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision, Kentucky v. King (2011), concerning search and seizure rights. An entailment of the Court’s decision is that, at least in some cases, a right can be removed by the intentional actions of …

Natural Law, Slavery, And The Right To Privacy Tort, Anita L. Allen

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

In 1905 the Supreme Court of Georgia became the first state high court to recognize a freestanding “right to privacy” tort in the common law. The landmark case was Pavesich v. New England Life Insurance Co. Must it be a cause for deep jurisprudential concern that the common law right to privacy in wide currency today originated in Pavesich’s explicit judicial interpretation of the requirements of natural law? Must it be an additional worry that the court which originated the common law privacy right asserted that a free white man whose photograph is published without his consent in …

Law, Philosophy, And Civil Disobedience: The Laws' Speech In Plato's 'Crito', Steven Thomason

Articles

Plato's 'Crito' is an examination of the tension between political science, a life devoted to the rational discourse and the critique of politics, and the demands of allegiance and service to the city. The argument Socrates makes in the name of the laws is not just meant to persuade Crito. Rather, it is a philosophic defense of the city itself, the philosophic response to Socrates' own speech in the Apology defending philosophy. This speech reveals the dangers and problems of a life devoted to philosophy when reason is directed to politics and calls into question the values and way of …

Are Institutions And Empiricism Enough? A Review Of Allen Buchanan, Human Rights, Legitimacy, And The Use Of Force, Matthew J. Lister

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

Legal philosophers have given relatively little attention to international law in comparison to other topics, and philosophers working on international or global justice have not taken international law as a primary focus, either. Allen Buchanan’s recent work is arguably the most important exception to these trends. For over a decade he has devoted significant time and philosophical skill to questions central to international law, and has tied these concerns to related issues of global justice more generally. In what follows I review Buchanan’s new collection of essays, Human Rights, Legitimacy, and the Use of Force, paying special attention to …

Gaining Ground: Towards A Discourse Of Posthuman Animality, Anne Louise Schillmoller

Anne Schillmoller

Edit My Photo Join My Mailing List Edit Author InfoAnne Louise Schillmoller Southern Cross University ■Contact Information Edit Author Background Edit Links Search the Selected Works of Anne Louise Schillmoller Search All Sites User Guide Read Our FAQs Contact Support RSS Feed Print this page Bookmark Update Site Articles Next»Revise WithdrawCancelGaining Ground: Towards a Discourse of Posthuman AnimalityAnne Louise Schillmoller, School of Law and Justice Southern Cross University Abstract The paper seeks articulate possibilities for a reciprocal ground of animality, a non hegemonic conceptual frontier within which the sovereign terrain of liberal humanism might yield to networks of alliances and …

Gaining Ground: Towards A Discourse Of Posthuman Animality: A Geophilosophical Journey, Anne Louise Schillmoller

Anne Schillmoller

The paper seeks articulate possibilities for a reciprocal ground of animality, a non hegemonic conceptual frontier within which the sovereign terrain of liberal humanism might yield to networks of alliances and reciprocities among human and other animals. The objective is to locate topographies where the conditions of creaturely life may be conceptualised in relational and non anthropocentric terms. It seeks to identify possibilities for a discourse of animality which avoids the haunting spectre of humanism. Specifically, it explore routes which may avoid the dualisms of western thought and identify alternative ways by which animality might be conceptualised and represented. Its …

James Wilson And The Scottish Enlightenment, William Ewald

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

No abstract provided.

Indivisibility And Linkage Arguments: A Reply To Gilabert, James W. Nickel

Articles

This reply discusses Pablo Gilabert's response to my article, "Rethinking Indivisibility." It welcomes his distinction between conceptual, normative, epistemic, and causal forms of support from one right to another. It denies, however, that "Rethinking Indivisibility" downplayed linkage arguments for human rights (although it did call for careful evaluation of such arguments), and rejects Gilabert's suggestion that we understand the indivisibility of two rights as two rights being highly useful to each other (interdependence) rather than as mutual indispensability. In the final section, I offer two new worries about the system-wide indivisibility of human rights.

The Perils Of Forgetting Fairness, Michael B. Dorff, Kimberly Kessler Ferzan

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

No abstract provided.

A Primary Human Challenge, Carroy U. Ferguson

Carroy U "Cuf" Ferguson, Ph.D.

We may ask why, at both the individual and collective levels, it has seemed so difficult for us to choose to evolve our human games with Joy. There is no one answer for such a question, for each of us has the gift of free will. I will suggest, however, that built into our human games is what I call a primary human challenge. That primary human challenge is a dynamic tension, flowing from our creative urge for the freedom “to be” who we really are in our current physical form, and simultaneously to embrace our responsibility for our Being-ness.

Liability Insurance, Moral Luck, And Auto Accidents, Tom Baker

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

Beginning with the seminal work by Williams and Nagel, moral philosophers have used auto accident hypotheticals to illustrate the phenomenon of moral luck. Moral luck occurs in the hypotheticals because (and to the extent that) two equally careless drivers are assessed differently because only one of them caused an accident. This article considers whether these philosophical discussions might contribute to the public policy debate over compensation for auto accidents. Using liability and insurance practices in the United States as an illustrative example, the article explains that auto liability insurance substantially mitigates moral luck and argues that, as a result, the …

The Role Of Moral Philosophers In The Competition Between Deontological And Empirical Desert, Paul H. Robinson

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

Desert appears to be in ascendence as a distributive principle for criminal liability and punishment but there is confusion as to whether it is a deontological or an empirical conception of desert that is or should be promoted. Each offers a distinct advantage over the other. Deontological desert can transcend community, situation, and time to give a conception of justice that can be relied upon to reveal errors in popular notions of justice. On the other hand, empirical desert can be more easily operationalized than can deontological desert because, contrary to common wisdom, there is a good deal of agreement …

The Rhetoric Of Anti-Relativism In A Culture Of Certainty, Howard Lesnick

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

No abstract provided.

A Contractarian Argument Against The Death Penalty, Claire Oakes Finkelstein

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

Opponents of the death penalty typically base their opposition on contingent features of its administration, arguing that the death penalty is applied discriminatory, that the innocent are sometimes executed, or that there is insufficient evidence of the death penalty’s deterrent efficacy. Implicit in these arguments is the suggestion that if these contingencies did not obtain, serious moral objections to the death penalty would be misplaced. In this Article, Professor Finkelstein argues that there are grounds for opposing the death penalty even in the absence of such contingent factors. She proceeds by arguing that neither of the two prevailing theories of …

Hobbes And The Internal Point Of View, Claire Oakes Finkelstein

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

No abstract provided.

Law, Ethics And Mystery, Geoffrey C. Hazard Jr.

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

No abstract provided.

Ripstein, Rawls, And Responsibility, Stephen R. Perry

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

No abstract provided.

Harm, History, And Counterfactuals, Stephen R. Perry

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

No abstract provided.

No Other Gods: Answering The Call Of Faith In The Practice Of Law, Howard Lesnick

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

No abstract provided.

Privacy Isn't Everything: Accountability As A Personal And Social Good, Anita L. Allen

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

No abstract provided.

Two Concepts Of Immortality: Reframing Public Debate On Stem-Cell Research, Frank Pasquale

Faculty Scholarship

Regenerative medicine seeks not only to cure disease, but also to arrest the aging process itself. So far, public attention to the new health care has focused on two of its methods: embryonic stem-cell research and therapeutic cloning. Since both processes manipulate embryos, they alarm those who believe life begins at conception. Such religious objections have dominated headlines on the topic, and were central to President George W. Bush's decision to restrict stem-cell research.

Although they are now politically potent, the present religious objections to regenerative medicine will soon become irrelevant. Scientists are fast developing new ways of culturing the …

Excuses And Dispositions In Criminal Law, Claire Oakes Finkelstein

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

No abstract provided.

Method And Principle In Legal Theory, Stephen R. Perry

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

No abstract provided.

Two Men On A Plank, Claire Oakes Finkelstein

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

No abstract provided.