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Full-Text Articles in Law
Addressing The Harms Of Pornography, Gillian Allison
Addressing The Harms Of Pornography, Gillian Allison
Honors Theses
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 …
Of Law And Other Artificial Normative Systems, Mitchell N. Berman
Of Law And Other Artificial Normative Systems, Mitchell N. Berman
All Faculty Scholarship
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 …
Natural Law, Slavery, And The Right To Privacy Tort, Anita L. Allen
Natural Law, Slavery, And The Right To Privacy Tort, Anita L. Allen
All Faculty Scholarship
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
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
Are Institutions And Empiricism Enough? A Review Of Allen Buchanan, Human Rights, Legitimacy, And The Use Of Force, Matthew J. Lister
All Faculty Scholarship
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 …
Indivisibility And Linkage Arguments: A Reply To Gilabert, James W. Nickel
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
The Perils Of Forgetting Fairness, Michael B. Dorff, Kimberly Kessler Ferzan
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Liability Insurance, Moral Luck, And Auto Accidents, Tom Baker
Liability Insurance, Moral Luck, And Auto Accidents, Tom Baker
All Faculty Scholarship
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
The Role Of Moral Philosophers In The Competition Between Deontological And Empirical Desert, Paul H. Robinson
All Faculty Scholarship
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
The Rhetoric Of Anti-Relativism In A Culture Of Certainty, Howard Lesnick
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
A Contractarian Argument Against The Death Penalty, Claire Oakes Finkelstein
A Contractarian Argument Against The Death Penalty, Claire Oakes Finkelstein
All Faculty Scholarship
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
Hobbes And The Internal Point Of View, Claire Oakes Finkelstein
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Law, Ethics And Mystery, Geoffrey C. Hazard Jr.
Law, Ethics And Mystery, Geoffrey C. Hazard Jr.
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Ripstein, Rawls, And Responsibility, Stephen R. Perry
Ripstein, Rawls, And Responsibility, Stephen R. Perry
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Harm, History, And Counterfactuals, Stephen R. Perry
Harm, History, And Counterfactuals, Stephen R. Perry
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
No Other Gods: Answering The Call Of Faith In The Practice Of Law, Howard Lesnick
No Other Gods: Answering The Call Of Faith In The Practice Of Law, Howard Lesnick
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Privacy Isn't Everything: Accountability As A Personal And Social Good, Anita L. Allen
Privacy Isn't Everything: Accountability As A Personal And Social Good, Anita L. Allen
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Two Concepts Of Immortality: Reframing Public Debate On Stem-Cell Research, Frank Pasquale
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 …
Method And Principle In Legal Theory, Stephen R. Perry
Method And Principle In Legal Theory, Stephen R. Perry
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Excuses And Dispositions In Criminal Law, Claire Oakes Finkelstein
Excuses And Dispositions In Criminal Law, Claire Oakes Finkelstein
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Two Men On A Plank, Claire Oakes Finkelstein
Two Men On A Plank, Claire Oakes Finkelstein
All Faculty Scholarship
Can two individuals, each of whom needs a certain resource for his survival, have equal and conflicting rights to that resource? If so, is each entitled to try to exclude the other from its use? An old chestnut of moral and legal philosophy raises the problem. Following a shipwreck, two men converge simultaneously on a plank floating in the sea. There is no other plank available and no immediate hope of rescue. Unfortunately the plank can support only one; it sinks if two try to cling to it. Is it permissible for each to attempt to secure his own survival …
Equality And Affiliation As Bases Of Ethical Responsibility, Geoffrey C. Hazard Jr.
Equality And Affiliation As Bases Of Ethical Responsibility, Geoffrey C. Hazard Jr.
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Positivism And The Notion Of An Offense, Claire Oakes Finkelstein
Positivism And The Notion Of An Offense, Claire Oakes Finkelstein
All Faculty Scholarship
While the United States Supreme Court has developed an elaborate constitutional jurisprudence of criminal procedure, it has articulated few constitutional doctrines of the substantive criminal law. The asymmetry between substance and procedure seems natural given the demise of Lochner and the minimalist stance towards due process outside the area of fundamental rights. This Article, however, argues that the "positivistic" approach to defining criminal offenses stands in some tension with other basic principles, both constitutional and moral. In particular, two important constitutional guarantees depend on the notion of an offense: the presumption of innocence and the ban on double jeopardy. Under …
Lying To Protect Privacy, Anita L. Allen
Lying To Protect Privacy, Anita L. Allen
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Preempting Oneself: The Right And The Duty To Forestall One's Own Wrongdoing, Leo Katz
Preempting Oneself: The Right And The Duty To Forestall One's Own Wrongdoing, Leo Katz
All Faculty Scholarship
Economists and philosophers working on problems of rational choice have for some time been concerned with various puzzles raised by so-called "Ullysean" configurations: actors who rationally cause themselves to act irrationally. (e.g., the person who swallows Thomas Schelling's famous irrationality pill to preempt an attempted robbery). What has attracted less attention is that these configurations present fascinating problems for morality, most especially for non-consequentialist morality. This article undertakes the exploration of some of these problems and the implications they hold for the morality of preemptive detention, preemptive self-defense, the creation of prophylactic crimes (like our drug laws) and a variety …
Hart's Methodological Positivism, Stephen R. Perry
Hart's Methodological Positivism, Stephen R. Perry
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
The Religious Lawyer In A Pluralist Society, Howard Lesnick
The Religious Lawyer In A Pluralist Society, Howard Lesnick
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Hobbes, Formalism, And Corrective Justice, Anita L. Allen, Maria H. Morales
Hobbes, Formalism, And Corrective Justice, Anita L. Allen, Maria H. Morales
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
The Wellsprings Of Legal Responses To Inequality: A Perspective On Perspectives, Howard Lesnick
The Wellsprings Of Legal Responses To Inequality: A Perspective On Perspectives, Howard Lesnick
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Look Before You Leap: Some Cautionary Notes On Civic Republicanism, Michael A. Fitts
Look Before You Leap: Some Cautionary Notes On Civic Republicanism, Michael A. Fitts
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.