Jurisprudence Commons^™

Modal Retributivism: A Theory Of Sanctions For Attempts And Other Criminal Wrongs, Anthony M. Dillof

University of Richmond Law Review

Rather than building the case for modal retributivism from the ground up, this article takes the existing components of retributive thought and reassembles them into a sounder structure. The cogency of the argument against harm-based retributivism andthe appeal of modal retributivism will likely be strongest forthose who allow reason, as opposed to intuition, a leading role in resolving moral issues.

Leiter On The Legal Realists, Michael S. Green

Faculty Publications

In this essay reviewing Brian Leiter’s recent book Naturalizing Jurisprudence, I focus on two positions that distinguish Leiter’s reading of the American legal realists from those offered in the past. The first is his claim that the realists thought the law is only locally indeterminate – primarily in cases that are appealed. The second is his claim that they did not offer a prediction theory of law, but were instead committed to a standard positivist theory. Leiter’s reading is vulnerable, because he fails to discuss in detail those passages from the realists that inspired past interpretations. My goal is to …

Justice As Play, Jack L. Sammons

Mercer Law Review

I am interested here in using Johannes Huizinga's work on play, Homo Ludens, to explore a strange, yet civilizing, phenomenon. Why do we take those social disputes in our ordinary lives that often seem most serious and therefore most divisive, turn them over to playful participants in a legal game, and then choose, more or less, to call the outcome of this game justice and to trust it as such even to the point of preferring it to the political? Why, that is, do we think that it is justice that arises from this play?

This inquiry is not …

Shari'ah And Choice: What The United States Should Learn From Islamic Law About The Role Of Victims' Families In Death Penalty Cases, 44 J. Marshall L. Rev. 1 (2010), Susan C. Hascall

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

In God We Trust: The Judicial Establishment Of American Civil Religion, 43 J. Marshall L. Rev. 869 (2010), James J. Knicely, John W. Whitehead

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Transformation Of Freedom Of Speech: Unsnarling The Twisted Roots Of Citizens United V. Fec, 44 J. Marshall L. Rev. 69 (2010), Steven J. André

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Federal Rules Of Civil Procedure And Legal Realism As A Jurisprudence Of Law Reform, David Marcus

Georgia Law Review

Since the 1930s, legal realism has weathered claims that its adherents had no use for legal rules and lacked a positive program of law reform. This Article uses the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, the major procedural reform of the twentieth century, to illuminate more accurately the treatment of rules in realism as well as its constructive potential. It draws upon the published and unpublished writings of Charles Clark, the primary author of the Federal Rules and a leading realist, to describe a realist procedural jurisprudence and to explain why the Federal Rules neatly illustrate this jurisprudence in practice. Part …

When And How (If At All) Does Law Constrain Official Action?, Frederick Schauer

Georgia Law Review

Debates about the obligation to obey the law have been around for literally thousands of years, but the empirical side has received much less attention. Moreover, most of the existing empirical work has focused on citizens and not officials, and consequently we know little about the extent to which law qua law motivates official action. This Article seeks to encourage empirical inquiry into the particular question of whether officials obey the law as law, independent of the content of the law and independent of the possibility of sanctions for non-compliance. It offers the hypothesis that although there is much talk …

Abstention: The Unexpected Power Of Withholding Your Vote, Grant M. Hayden

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This Article examines the effect of abstentions on the outcome of votes. Scholars (and voters) operate under two basic assumptions about the nature of abstention. First, they assume that an abstention affects all alternatives in equal measure. Second, and relatedly, people assume that a voter’s preferred alternative will be less likely to win if that voter abstains (and, of course, more likely to win if she votes). Removing the potential full support of a vote and replacing it with the fifty-fifty proposition of an abstention should hurt the chances of a voter’s preferred alternative. These two assumptions guide the thinking …

Empirical Desert And The Moral Economy Of Punishment, Zachary R. Calo

Scholarly Works

This paper considers Paul Robinson's theory of empirical desert as an argument for moving beyond the debate between utilitarian and retributivist accounts of punishment. It is argued that empirical desert, in its attempt to replace philosophy with the insights of the social and biological sciences, fails to ground the foundational act of punishment in an adequate theoretical warrant. A particular problem confronting empirical desert is that while Robinson shifts the locus of punishment from theory to the intuitions of the relevant community, he does not adequately account for the dynamic process by which communities shape and structure their internal moral …

Philosophical Legal Ethics: Ethics, Morals, And Jurisprudence, Alice Woolley, W. Bradley Wendel, William H. Simon, Stephen Pepper, Daniel Markovitz, Katherine R. Kruse, Tim Dare

Faculty Scholarship

The authors and moderator David Luban participated in a plenary session of the International Legal Ethics Conference IV, held at Stanford. Each author answered and discussed questions arising from short papers they had written about the principal concern of legal ethics was the morality of lawyers, the morality of clients, or the morality of laws?

Those papers, which are to be published in Legal Ethics, are compiled here, along with the question and background information with which the panelists were provided.

The Living Constitution Of Ancient Athens: A Comparative Perspective On The Originalism Debate, 42 J. Marshall L. Rev. 463 (2009), Mark J. Sundahl

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Justice Sutherland Reconsidered, 62 Vand. L. Rev. 639 (2009), Samuel R. Olken

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

When Does Might Make Right? Using Force For Regime Change, John Linarelli

Scholarly Works

Should states use force to bring about regime change? International law recognizes no such grounds. This paper seeks to provide guidance from moral theory. The aim of this paper is to identify the moral grounds for the use of armed force by one state or a group of states, against another state, when the intention of the intervening states is to achieve a fundamental change in the character of the political and legal institutions of the other state. Lawyers tend to place the argument for regime change intervention within putative humanitarian intervention doctrines. The moral justification for humanitarian intervention is …

Reasons: Practical And Adaptive, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

I will consider some of the differences between epistemic reasons and reasons for action, and use these differences to illuminate a major division between types of normative reasons, which I will call ‘adaptive’ and ‘practical’ reasons. A few clarifications of some aspects of the concept of epistemic reasons will lead to a distinction between standard and non-standard reasons (section 1). Some differences between epistemic and practical reasons will be described and explained in section 2, paving the way to generalising the contrast and explaining the difference between adaptive and practical reasons (section 3). sections 4 and 5 further explain and …

Koans Of Equity, James Grimmelmann

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

The Force Of Law: The Role Of Coercion In Legal Norms, Ekow N. Yankah

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Virtue Of Judicial Statesmanship, Neil S. Siegel

Faculty Scholarship

Some of America's most important judges have emphasized or embodied the practice of judicial statesmanship. Yet from the examples they set, it is not particularly clear what judicial statesmanship is or why it matters. In this Article, I conceptualize the elusive phenomenon of judicial statesmanship, and I defend statesmanship as a core, if under appreciated, dimension of judicial role.

I argue that judicial statesmanship defines a virtue in the role of a judge. Statesmanship charges judges with approaching cases so as to facilitate the capacity of the legal system to legitimate itself over the long run and with respect to …

The Concept And The Rule Of Law, Jeremy Waldron

Georgia Law Review

This Essay explores and connects two issues: (1) the relation between the Rule of Law (or legality) and the work we do in general jurisprudence on the concept of law; and (2) the distinction between conceptions of the Rule of Law that emphasize certainty, rules, and predictability and conceptions of the Rule of Law that also emphasize procedure and argument, even when legal argumentation detracts from the certainty emphasized the first set of conceptions. First, the Essay argues in favor of a more demanding understanding of what law it (informed by the ideal of the Rule of Law); in other …

Reason, Reasons And Normativity, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

All normative phenomena are normative in as much as, and because, they provide reasons or are partly constituted by reasons. This makes the concept of a reason key to an understanding of normativity. Believing that, I will here present some thoughts about the connection between reasons and Reason and between Reason and normativity.

Taking Text Too Seriously: Modern Textualism, Original Meaning, And The Case Of Amar's Bill Of Rights, William Michael Treanor

Michigan Law Review

Championed on the Supreme Court by Justice Scalia and Justice Thomas and in academia most prominently by Professor Akhil Amar textualism has emerged within the past twenty years as a leading school of constitutional interpretation. Textualists argue that the Constitution should be interpreted in accordance with its original public meaning, and in seeking that meaning, they closely parse the Constitution's words and grammar and the placement of clauses in the document. They have assumed that this close parsing recaptures original meaning, but, perhaps because it seems obviously correct, that assumption has neither been defended nor challenged. This Article uses Professor …

Theorizing The Law/Politics Distinction: Neutral Principles, Affirmative Action, And The Enduring Legacy Of Paul Mishkin, Robert C. Post, Neil S. Siegel

Faculty Scholarship

Paul Mishkin was a colleague and a teacher to us, and we each esteem him as a master craftsman of the law: learned, wise, and far-sighted. To re-read his publications is to enter an astonishing world of clarity and integrity, a world in which no word is wasted and insight is deep and revealing.

Early in his career Mishkin saw that the law could be apprehended from two distinct and in part incompatible perspectives: from the internal perspective of a faithful practitioner and from the external perspective of the general public. If the social legitimacy of the law as a …

Umpires At Bat: On Integration And Legitimation, Neil S. Siegel

Faculty Scholarship

During his confirmation hearings. Chief Justice Roberts captured the public's imagination when he offered an interpretation of the role that judges play in our society when interpreting the Constitution. Judges and Justices are servants of the law, not the other way around, he said. Judges are like umpires. Umpires don't make the rules, they apply them. The role of an umpire and a judge is critical. They make sure everybody plays by the rules, but it is a limited role. Nobody ever went to a ball game to see an umpire.

In this inquiry, I identify some tensions between the …

At War With The Eclectics: Mapping Pragmatism In Contemporary Legal Analysis, Justin Deystone

Publications

This Article has two primary goals. The first is descriptive and seeks to respond to what appears to be an increasing degree of confusion over the word "pragmatism," especially as it is used in a good deal of legal literature. This descriptive aim begins by separating out three general categories of pragmatism: (1) the so-called "everyday" pragmatism familiar to the American vernacular, (2) the classical philosophy of the early pragmatist authors like William James and John Dewey, and (3) pragmatism as understood in the context of law. The majority of the Article is subsequently concerned with exploring this last category, …

The Practice Of Value – Reply, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

The privilege of having three sets of extensive and hard-hitting comments on one's work is as welcome as it is rare, and especially so on this occasion as the lectures were, for me, but the first (well, not entirely first) stab at a subject I hope to explore at greater length. The reflections that follow will respond to some of the criticisms, but will not be a point by point reply. I will use the occasion to clarify some obscurities in the lectures, and to contrast my view with some of my critics' own positions. I will proceed thematically, starting …

The Argument From Justice, Or How Not To Reply To Legal Positivism, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Robert Alexy wrote a book whose avowed purpose is to refute the basic tenets of a type of legal theory which 'has long since been obsolete in legal science and practice'. The quotation is from the German Federal Constitutional Court in 1968. The fact that Prof Alexy himself mentions no writings in the legal positivist tradition [in English] later than Hart's The Concept of Law (1961) may suggest that he shares the court's view. The book itself may be evidence to the contrary. After all why flog a dead horse? Why write a book to refute a totally discredited …

Can There Be A Theory Of Law?, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

The paper deals with the possibility of a theory of the nature of law as such, a theory which will be necessarily true of all law. It explores the relations between explanations of concepts and of the things they are concepts of, the possibility that the law has essential properties, and the possibility that the law changes its nature over time, and that what is law at a given place and time depends on the culture and concepts of that place and time. It also considers the possibility of understanding the institutions, such as the law, of cultures whose concepts …

Book Review, Brian Leiter

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

Herbert Hart Elucidated, A. W. Brian Simpson

Michigan Law Review

There are a number of good biographies of judges, but very few of individual legal academics; indeed, so far as American legal academics are concerned, the only one of note that comes to mind is William Twining's life of Karl Llewellyn. Llewellyn was, of course, a major figure in the evolution of American law, and his unusual life was a further advantage for his biographer. In this biography, Nicola Lace has taken as her subject an English academic who also had an unusual career, one whose contribution was principally not to the evolution of the English legal system but to …

What Nobody Knows, John C. P. Goldberg

Michigan Law Review

By meditating on displays of cunning in literature, history, and current events, Don Herzog in his new book isolates and probes difficult puzzles concerning how to understand and evaluate human conduct. The point of the exercise is not to offer a system or framework for resolving these puzzles. Quite the opposite, Cunning aims to discomfit its academic audience in two ways. First, it sets out to show that some of the central dichotomies of modem thought-those between means and ends, reason and desire, self-interest and morality, fact and value, virtue and vice, knowledge and politics, authenticity and artifice, and appearance …