Jurisprudence Commons^™

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 …

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 …

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 …

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.

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 …

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.

Public Legal Reason, Lawrence B. Solum

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay develops an ideal of public legal reason - a normative theory of legal reasons that is appropriate for a society characterized by religious and moral pluralism. One of the implications of this theory is that normative theorizing about public and private law should eschew reliance on the deep premises of deontology or consequentialism and should instead rely on what I shall call public values - values that can be affirmed without relying on the deep and controversial premises of particular comprehensive moral doctrines.

The ideal of public legal reason is then applied to a particular question - whether …

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 …

Dostoyevsky And The Therapeutic Jurisprudence Confession, 40 J. Marshall L. Rev. 41 (2006), Amy D. Ronner

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Cognitive Dissonance Revisited: Roper V. Simmons And The Issue Of Adolescent Decision-Making Competence, 52 Wayne L. Rev. 1 (2006), Donald L. Beschle

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

What Do We Owe Each Other In The Global Economic Order?: Constructivist And Contractualist Accounts, John Linarelli

Scholarly Works

No legal system deserving of continued support can exist without an adequate theory of justice. A world trade constitution cannot credibly exist without a clear notion of justice upon which to base a consensus. This paper examines two accounts of fairness found in moral philosophy, those of John Rawls and Tim Scanlon. The Rawlsian theory of justice is well-known to legal scholars. Scanlon's contractualist account may be less well-known. The aim of the paper is to start the discussion as to how fairness theories can be used to develop the tools for examining international economic policies and institutions. After elaborating …

Three Versions Of Nonsense, Paul Campos

Publications

No abstract provided.

A Theory In Search Of A Court, And Itself: Judicial Minimalism At The Supreme Court Bar, Neil S. Siegel

Faculty Scholarship

Cass Sunstein has prominently and provocatively advocated a theory of judicial minimalism. He has claimed that minimalism provides both an accurate descriptive account of how the Supreme Court decides constitutional cases and a persuasive normative theory of how the Justices should exercise their power of judicial review. In fact, he has written that the October 2003 Term demonstrates the Court's commitment to judicial minimalism.

In this Article, I demonstrate a deep tension between Professor Sunstein's aspiration that minimalism serve as an empirically testable (and thus descriptively accurate) account of the Supreme Court's work, and his ambition that minimalism provide a …

On Legal Pragmatism: Where Does "The Path Of The Law" Lead Us?, Susan Haack

Articles

No abstract provided.

"Is That English You're Speaking?" Why Intention Free Interpretation Is An Impossibility, Larry Alexander, Saikrishna Prakash

San Diego Law Review

"Textualism" is a very general and abstract term that represents a variety of views about the interpretation of legal texts. One strand of textualism is conceptual and descriptive; this strand makes claims about what texts actually mean. Another strand of textualism is normative; this strand makes claims about how judges ought to proceed when they interpret particular kinds of legal texts, such as constitutions and statutes. In the first part of this paper, we are particularly concerned with an especially strong form of conceptual textualism - the position that texts can be interpreted without any reference, express or implied, to …

Law School Enters The Matrix: Teaching Critical Legal Studies, Jerry L. Anderson

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

In The Tout Court Of Shakespeare: Interdisciplinary Pedagogy In Law, Desmond Manderson

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

The Layers Principle: Internet Architecture And The Law, Lawrence B. Solum, Minn Chung

Faculty Scholarship

This essay addresses the fundamental questions of Internet governance: whether and how the architecture of the Internet should affect the shape and content of legal regulation of the global network of networks. Our answer to these questions is based on the concept of layers, the fundamental architectural feature of the Internet. Our thesis is that legal regulation of the Internet should be governed by the layers principle - the law should respect the integrity of layered Internet architecture. This principle has two corollaries. The first corollary is the principle of layer separation: Internet regulation should not violate or compromise the …

The Secret Life Of The Political Question Doctrine, 37 J. Marshall L. Rev. 441 (2004), Louis Michael Seidman

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Philosophy Of Contract Law, Jody S. Kraus

Faculty Scholarship

This article identifies a set of methodological commitments that help to explain the methodological differences between autonomy (deontic) and economic contract theories that have opposing views about the nature of law and legal theory. It begins with the discussion of the four methodological issues that divide contemporary autonomy and economic theories of contract. The dispute over the relative priority of the normative and explanatory enterprises of contract theory may simply reflect the different theoretical goals of deontic and economic theorists. These intellectual origins may explain not only the different priorities of deontic and economic contract theories, but their different conceptions …