Jurisprudence Commons^™

Pandora's Amphora: The Ambiguity Of Gifts, Jeanne L. Schroeder

Articles

The law is notoriously suspicious of gifts, giving gratuitous promises less protection than contracts. An analysis based on the political philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel and the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan reveals that the law's ambivalence reflects the fundamental ambiguous nature of gifts.

The two dominant jurisprudential analyses of gift-utilitarianism and romanticism-share the single erroneous assumption that contract relations are characterized by atomistic rational behavior. The utilitarian, who views all human relations in terms of individual self-interest, analyzes gift as a primitive, incomplete, imperfect, and inferior form of contract. In contrast, the romantic, who believes that human relations can, and …

"A Revolution Which Seeks To Abolish Law, Must End Necessarily In Despotism": Louisa Mccord And Antebellum Southern Legal Thought, Alfred L. Brophy

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

Louisa McCord's essays provide a unique lens into the legal and political thought of antebellum Southern society, particularly her defense of slavery and the role of law in maintaining social order. She argued that law should ensure basic fairness in market transactions but should not interfere with the institution of slavery, which she viewed as a matter of sentiment rather than legal regulation. McCord's work challenges the notion that legal history is confined to the common law tradition, emphasizing the importance of understanding law as part of a broader societal outlook.

Indirect Infringement And Counterfeiting: Remedies Available Against Those Who Knowingly Rent To Counterfeiters, Barbara Kolsun, Jonathan Bayer

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Mapping Mediation: The Risks Of Riskin's Grid, Kimberlee K. Kovach, Lela P. Love

Articles

We use maps for orientation and guidance. A topographical map and compass guide us through unmarked terrain. To pass a bar exam, law students follow a course carefully mapped out by BAR/ BRI. To understand political configurations, we study maps of the world, indicating countries and states and their boundaries. Maps are important. They create paradigms or "boxes" within which to operate safely and efficiently. The universe a map depicts-what is put in and what is left out-must have an internal cohesion, logic, and accuracy. If not, maps misguide their users.

Estoppel In Property Law, Stewart E. Sterk

Articles

The article explores the complex role of estoppel doctrine in property law, emphasizing its promise-based nature and its distinct application compared to contract law. It highlights how estoppel enforces promises, resolves disputes, and protects interests in property law, particularly in family and neighbor disputes. The analysis critiques the reliance vs. promise debate, asserting that promise is the critical factor. The article also underscores the challenges of enforcing oral promises and the importance of written agreements to avoid injustice and ensure clarity in property transactions.

The Judge's Dilemma: Duty Or Conscience?, Robert W. Sweet

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Second Circuit "Estopped": There Is No Promissory Estoppel In New York, Arthur B. Schwartz

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Board Of Directors And Internal Control, Melvin A. Eisenberg

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Burden Of Proof And Estimation Of Drug Quantities Under The Federal Sentencing Guidelines, Johan Bring, Colin Aitken

Cardozo Law Review

According to the United States Federal Sentencing Guidelines (the "FSG"), a person convicted for handling drugs should not only be sentenced for the quantity seized but also for the total quantity handled as "part of the same course of conduct or common scheme or plan as the offense of conviction." Hence, judges, probation officers, and lawyers often need to estimate the total quantity of drugs handled. The evidence on which to base such an estimation, however, differs greatly in both characteristic and quality. The types of evidence could include: the quantity of drugs seized, information concerning quantities handled …

Family Law Of The Two Chinas: A Comparative Look At The Rights Of Married Women In The People's Republic Of China And The Republic Of China, Janice A. Lee

Cardozo Journal of International and Comparative Law

The note examines the rights of married women in the People's Republic of China (PRC) and Taiwan, highlighting how traditional Confucian values continue to influence family law and practice despite legal reforms aimed at promoting gender equality. It argues that while both countries have enacted progressive laws, societal attitudes and enforcement mechanisms often undermine these legal advancements, perpetuating women's subordinate status.

Rational And Irrational Proof Revisited, Mirjan Damaska

Cardozo Journal of International and Comparative Law

It is interesting to examine fact-finding practices in culturally distant societies. These practices often seem thoroughly permeated by unreason, or else seriously defective in terms of the demands of rational inquiry. But if we look at them more carefully, placing them in their native cultural milieu, it usually emerges that they are not nearly as unreasonable as superficial inspection suggests. Our readiness to see them as tainted by unreason and radically different from our own, springs in large part from the failure to appreciate the degree to which the rationality of proof is culturally determined.' But as soon as the …

Finding The Truth In An American Criminal Trial: Some Observations, Frank J. Macchiarola

Cardozo Journal of International and Comparative Law

The article critiques the American adversarial criminal trial system, arguing that its focus on procedure and individual rights often hinders the pursuit of truth. While the system is deeply rooted in American cultural values, such as distrust of government and a commitment to individual liberties, its emphasis on adversarial contest rather than truth-seeking leads to inefficiencies and public dissatisfaction. The author highlights the tension between the system's theoretical commitment to justice and its practical limitations, particularly as illustrated by high-profile cases like the O.J. Simpson trial.

The Hazards Of Tinkering With The Common Law Of Future Interests: The California Experience, Laura E. Cunningham

Articles

No abstract provided.

The American Adversarial System In Criminal Cases: Between Ideology And Reality, Johannes F. Nijboer

Cardozo Journal of International and Comparative Law

The article critically examines the adversarial system in American criminal cases, contrasting it with the inquisitorial system prevalent in many European countries. It argues that while the adversarial system remains a defining feature of U.S. criminal procedure, the inquisitorial system, as a historical concept, no longer exists in its traditional form. The analysis emphasizes the need for nuanced comparative legal scholarship to avoid oversimplification and highlights the cultural and historical contexts shaping these procedural systems.

Does The Subject Matter? Viewpoint-Neutrality And Freedom Of Speech, Wojciech Sadurski

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

What Price Peace: From Nuremberg To Bosnia To The Nobel Peace Prize, Malvina Halberstam

Articles

No abstract provided.

Juno Moneta: On The Erotics Of The Marketplace, Jeanne L. Schroeder

Articles

The article explores how property and the feminine, as legal fictions, facilitate the creation of subjectivity through the lens of Hegelian philosophy and Lacanian psychoanalysis. It critiques the liberal individual as an insufficient concept for subjectivity, arguing that subjectivity is constructed, not natural. The analysis examines how legal frameworks privilege masculine metaphors, such as possession, while repressing feminine ones, and posits that the pursuit of a perfect market represents a destructive ideal that undermines freedom and subjectivity.

Taking Care Of Our Daughters, Katharine K. Baker

Cardozo Law Review

In The Neutered Mother, The Sexual Family and Other Twentieth Century Tragedies, Martha Fineman gives a powerful critique of the traditional family and proposes an innovative model for change. In the course of her critique, Fineman reveals a number of important truths. Primary among these truths are (1) that dependency begets dependency; (2) that equality rhetoric and practice are vacuous vehicles for justice in a world in which differing degrees of dependency beget different ability; (3) that the privacy and silence of dependency is crucial to patriarchy's construction of the family. Dependencies are created every time a baby is …

Fugitives And Agrarians In A World Without Frontiers, Jim Chen

Cardozo Law Review

Rien de grand avant l'tat. Let the French have their Colbertisme; Americans hold steadfast their faith in constitutionalism, the unofficial civic religion of the United States. Implicit in originalism, the most rigidly orthodox variant of America's constitutional faith is the belief that the legal world began with the framing of the Constitution. "All things created before me were not eternal": with the Constitution as creation, the American legal imagination need not embrace anything that occurred before 1787.

The Decline Of The Western Nation State And The Rise Of The Regime Of International Federalism, John O. Mcginnis

Cardozo Law Review

The nation state is in decline, at least among the Western industrialized nations. Decline is a relative term. It does not suggest that the nation state has disappeared, but rather, that it is no longer as defining a feature of geopolitics as it once was, and will likely remain a less controlling feature. In the West, the era of the nation state was characterized by entities that approximated, even if they never attained, absolute control over their territory. First, the nation state had substantial control over economic affairs within its borders. While the world has always been to some extent …

Hermann Heller - An Introduction, David Dyzenhaus

Cardozo Law Review

Hermann Heller (July 17, 1891 - November 4, 1933) came from a Jewish family in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He interrupted his law studies to volunteer for service in the Austrian army during the First World War. His experiences as a front-line fighter left him with a heart condition which contributed to his death at the age of forty-two. But his poor health did not dampen his deeply combative spirit-a spirit which he put at the service of German social democracy. In March 1920, together with Gustav Radbruch (who had just successfully promoted Heller's Habilitation, his senior doctorate, at Kiel), …

The Nature And Structure Of The State, Hermann Heller

Cardozo Law Review

The question of the "purpose" of the state has been a permanent and fundamental problem of all theories of the state ever since Aristotle opened his Politics with the theory of the purpose of the state and placed this sentence at its head: pasa koinonia agathou tivos heneka sunesteken. It was left to the Romantics to contest for the first time the appropriateness of this question and to maintain that the state "just as the plant and the animal" is selfdirected. From that time on, theories have neglected the question of the purpose of the state. They decline to …

Freestanding Legal Pragmatism, Thomas C. Grey

Cardozo Law Review

John Rawls has recently presented liberalism as a political philosophy that can stand free of the comprehensive moral and metaphysical views with which it has been associated. You don't have to be a neo-Kantian like Rawls, so he argues, to accept his Kantiansounding theory of justice. Millian utilitarians, Aristotelian perfectionists, and Thomistic theists can also commit to the basic liberal rights: democratic government, freedom of speech and religion, equal opportunity, the rule of law, private property, and a welfare safety net. Rawls believes that there is no need for citizens to resolve their deepest philosophical disagreements in order to be …

Pragmatism And Law: A Response To David Luban, Richard Rorty

Cardozo Law Review

Judge Posner's "Pragmatic Adjudication" is enormously refreshing. It cuts through an immense amount of tiresome and pointless talk about "the nature of law" and "the relation of law to politics" and gets down to the question: how should appellate court judges in a particular country at a particular time do their work? It not only argues lucidly for a particular answer to that question, but it also gives a good sense of what it must be like to be in Judge Posner's shoes. Posner helps you understand what sorts of things judges have to worry about, and what sorts of …

What’S Pragmatic About Legal Pragmatism?, David Luban

Cardozo Law Review

Does legal pragmatism have anything at all to do with pragmatism? Both Thomas Grey and Richard Posner seem to suggest that in important respects the answer is no. Grey tells us that even a devout anti-pragmatist in matters ontological can endorse legal pragmatism, while Posner adds the converse, that pragmatic philosophy may at times impel a judge to decide cases like a formalist. These conclusions suggest that talk of legal pragmatism may simply be a pun on what philosophers take pragmatism to be. Lest this appear a far-fetched suggestion, remember that in philosophy the word "realism" often refers to the …

It’S A Positivist, It’S A Pragmatist, It’S A Codifier! Reflections On Nietzsche And Stendhal, Richard H. Weisberg

Cardozo Law Review

Richard Rorty writes that "[n]owadays, Allan Bloom and Michael Moore seem to be the only people who still think pragmatism is dangerous to the moral health of our society." Given the source, I would not contest the generalization. Nor would I seek to correct the adjective about pragmatism used more than once by Professors Rorty and Grey: "banal." Indeed, the popularity of pragmatism may reflect its banality. Its amorphous nature has produced strange alliances. For example, the same Stanley Fish who once declared Richard Posner's humanistic forays to be "execrable" now joins Posner's pragmatic program almost without qualification. If Pragmatism's …

Pragmatism, Pluralism, And Legal Interpretation: Posner’S And Rorty’S Justice Without Metaphysics Meets Hate Speech, Michel Rosenfeld

Cardozo Law Review

Not surprisingly, legal interpretation is in a crisis in pluralist societies with widely diverging conceptions of the good. When there is sharp disagreement over fundamental values, there seems to be a complete lack of objective criteria to interpret legal texts, and particularly broadly articulated wide ranging textual provisions such as those characteristic of constitutions. Accordingly, interpretation looms as hopelessly subjective, and the interpretive subject as indispensable but utterly problematic. In a homogeneous society with widely shared religious, ethical, and political values, legal interpretations will count as just if they manage to reconcile justice according to law with justice beyond law. …

Pragmatism And Realism, Hilary Putnam

Cardozo Law Review

Let me begin by asking what will undoubtedly seem to many, if not all of you, a most peculiar question: How did it happen that the first philosopher to present a completely worked out version of direct realism in the entire history of modem philosophy was none other than the American pragmatist, William James?

Pragmatic Adjudication, Richard A. Posner

Cardozo Law Review

Pragmatism is at one level a philosophical position, just as scientific realism, transcendental idealism, existentialism, utilitarianism, and logical positivism are. It is the level well illustrated by a recently published book in which Richard Rorty and his critics go at each other hammer and tongs over such questions as whether language reflects reality, whether free will is compatible with a scientific outlook, and whether such questions are even meaningful. It is not the level at which this paper is pitched. My concern is with an issue in "applied" pragmatism, although after listening to Professor Grey's talk at the conference about …

What’S The Use Of Calling Emerson A Pragmatist?, Stanley Cavell

Cardozo Law Review

I applaud the revival of interest in John Dewey and William James, on various intellectual and political grounds, and seek to learn what is at stake for others in their revival. But I also wish to suspend applause-doubtless more a transcendentalist than a pragmatist gesture on my part-for ideas that seem to be gaining prominence within this movement, expressed by writers and thinkers whom I admire, according to which Emerson is to be understood as a proto-pragmatist and Wittgenstein as, let's say, a neo-pragmatist. Perhaps I will be taken as struggling merely over labels; but sometimes labels should be struggled …