Jurisprudence Commons^™

Severability, John Copeland Nagle

Journal Articles

When a court holds a provision of a statute unconstitutional, a question remains regarding the validity of the remainder of the statute. The court may find that the unconstitutional provision may be severed from the statute and leave the remainder of the statute in effect. Alternatively, the court may hold that the unconstitutional provision cannot be severed and invalidate the entire statute.

This article argues that the jurisprudence surrounding the issue of severability is confusing and inconsistent. After explaining the concept of severability and its ramifications for statutes, I trace the development of the current judicial test for determining when …

With Liberty And Justice For Whom? The Recent Evangelical Debate Over Capitalism (Book Review), Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

Those who for scholarly or journalistic convenience aggregate hundreds of Christian denominations into four or five "movements" put the radical Christian pacifist Jim Wallis (of Sojourners magazine) and Dr. Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority, in one theological category. They are both evangelicals, heirs of Calvinism and the Radical Reformation, both practitioners of "conservative Protestant orthodoxy," both believers in the fundamental authority of the Bible.

And, because both of them, and thousands of Christians who follow one or both of them, are trying to respond to the criticism that evangelicalism (or "fundamentalism") neglects social and economic issues, they are …

A Stream Of Legal Consciousness: The Current Of Commerce Doctrine From Swift To Jones And Laughlin, Barry Cushman

Journal Articles

In this article on constitutional development and the New Deal Court, Professor Cushman argues that the conventional story of the Court's radical reversing of its jurisprudence in the face of the Court-packing plan is misconceived. The article instead seeks to demonstrate that Jones & Laughlin, one of the cases comprising the Constitutional Revolution of 1937, was conceptually, stylistically, and doctrinally congruent with the Court's contemporary jurisprudence. The paradigm shift in commerce clause jurisprudence. Professor Cushman contends, came not in 1937, but in 1941 and 1942, after Roosevelt had had an opportunity to refashion the Court with a new generation of …

What's Left?, Guyora Binder

Journal Articles

Addressing the future of radical politics at the end of the cold war, this article offers a reconstruction of radical theory around the goal of enabling collaborative self-realization through participatory democratic politics. It offers an interpretation of the radical tradition as defined by a view of human nature as a cultural artifact, and a conception of liberation as the self-conscious transformation of human nature. It proceeds to critique radical theory’s traditional focus on revolution as the means of radical transformation. Distinguishing instrumental and self-expressive conceptions of transformation it critiques revolutionary processes as tending to reproduce instrumental culture. It offers democratic …

Feminist Jurisprudence: The 1990 Myra Bradwell Day Panel, Elizabeth M. Schneider, Lucinda M. Finley, Carin Clauss, Joan Bertin

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

The Tempting Of America, Gerard V. Bradley

Journal Articles

THE TEMPTING OF AMERICA by Robert Bork. New York: The Free Press/Macmillan, 1990. Hdbd: pp. xiv-432.

In the concluding third of The Tempting of America Robert Bork recounts his unsuccessful fight to gain Senate confirmation to the Supreme Court.

Bork relates his war story to the rest of the book. In the first two-thirds of Tempting, he takes us on a grand tour of the Constitution's career, starting in the courts with Chief Justice John Marshall, on through the Civil War, Reconstruction, and New Deal eras. He finishes with a detailed examination of the Warren, Burger and Rehnquist Courts. …

Tribe's "Jurisprudence Of The Religion Clauses", Gerard V. Bradley

Journal Articles

Laurence Tribe has usefully been described as a constitutional apologist for liberal political causes. His conspicuous opposition to the nomination of Judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court and his imaginative defenses of Roe v. Wade have fueled that image. Tribe's "jurisprudence of the religion clauses" both confounds and complicates the picture. He sees no constitutional difficulty with public education vouchers, and defends the Catholic Church against "pro-choicers" who would strip its tax-exempt status because of the Bishops' "pro-life" activities. Tribe thinks that a public school moment-of-silence can be consistent with the Constitution and carves out a considerable zone of …

Allocating Risks And Suffering: Some Hidden Traps, John M. Finnis

Journal Articles

The economic analysis of which Adam Smith is a principal founder is helpful in practical reasoning about problems of justice precisely insofar as it systematically calls attention to the side-effects of individual choices and actions and behavior. Still, it would be a mistake to conclude that we need only a more adequate account of the benefits and burdens up for distribution or allocation by those responsible for the common good or general fate. We need also to bear in mind what Smith did not forget and what economics does not comprehend, the requirements of commutative justice. To see this, we …

Mastery, Slavery, And Emancipation, Guyora Binder

Journal Articles

Hegel's dialectic of master and slave in the Phenomenology of Mind portrays a master unable to win genuine recognition from a slave because unwilling to confer it. The dialectic implies that freedom has to be conceived as association based on mutual respect, rather than independence. This article offers a communitarian interpretation of emancipation inspired by Hegel's dialectic of master and slave. It proceeds from an account of slave society which, like Hegel's dialectic, equates slavery with the denial of social recognition. This account argues that the experience of slave society led both the masters and the slaves to conceive of …

Natural Law And Justice (Book Review), Robert E. Rodes

Journal Articles

Professor Weinreb's aim in this thoughtful and thought-provoking book is a drastic overhaul of the ongoing debate about natural law. Natural law as he sees it is not a mere theory about the relation of law and morality: it is a comprehensive theory about the place of human beings in the cosmos. As such, it has a profound bearing on legal questions, but not in the way its current proponents have in mind. By recasting the fundamental question of natural law, Weinreb sheds light on many subsidiary questions of legal theory. This is a difficult book, because it is closely …

Some Reasons For A Restoration Of Natural Law Jurisprudence, Charles E. Rice

Journal Articles

The growing influence of utilitarianism and legal positivism in American jurisprudence today and the decline of natural law have produced an ominous shift in the foundation of our legal system. This shift is illustrated by various courts' approaches to momentous legal issues of the Twentieth Century such as abortion and euthanasia. Ultimately, legal positivism is unacceptable as a jurisprudential framework because it provides no inherent limits on the power of the state and no basis for determining what is just. In contrast, the natural law provides a jurisprudential framework that both guides and limits the civil law. It therefore is …

Beyond Criticism, Guyora Binder

Journal Articles

During the 1980’s, Critical Legal Studies was frequently criticized for offering no policy prescriptions. This essay explained critical scholars’ reluctance to propose policy as a reflection of their epistemological and political critiques of instrumentalist policy analysis. Because critical scholars saw both causal relationships and interests as highly contingent on normative assumptions, they were skeptical of claims that well-intentioned law reforms would benefit the interests of the poor and the powerless. Valuing democratic participation, critical legal scholars were also reluctant to define the interests of the powerless for them. The essay proceeded to argue that critical legal scholars should see instrumentalism …

Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (Book Review), Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

Book review of: Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, by Jerome Bruner; Time, Narrative, and History, by David Carr; Law, Freedom, and Story: The Role of Narrative in Therapy, Society, and Faith, by John C. Hoffman; and Narrative and Morality, by Paul Nelson.

On Critical Legal Studies As Guerilla Warfare, Guyora Binder

Journal Articles

This sardonic 1987 essay defended Critical Legal Studies (CLS) against alarmist attacks from the right, claiming that CLS was dangerously subversive of the rule of law, and seemingly contradictory attacks from the left dismissing CLS as empty theorizing lacking any practical implications for reform. The essay responded that while CLS lacked proposals for legislative reform, it favored a highly participatory process of reform, drawn from experience in the student movements of the 1960’s. It distrusted state power and bureaucracy as engines of change, and favored community organization, civil society, and popular mobilization.

On Reason And Authority In Law's Empire, John M. Finnis

Journal Articles

Law's Empire will shape jurisprudence by its admirably resourceful attention to understanding a community's law "internally". It promotes reflective understanding of the practical argumentation constitutive of the attitude(s) in which that law subsists. But the book neglects some of practical understanding's resources of political and moral theory, and overestimates practical reasoning's power to identify options as the best and the right)

The Unity Of Law & Morality: A Refutation Of Legal Positivism (Book Review), John H. Robinson

Journal Articles

Professor Robinson provides a critique of M.J. Detmold’s book, The Unity of Law & Mortality: A Refutation of Legal Positivism. He argues that the book is flawed for failure to present his adversary’s position and for failure to explain the reasons for embracing an ontological perspective towards all ethics. Despite its ambition, the argument does not get off the ground.

On "The Critical Legal Studies Movement", John M. Finnis

Journal Articles

"The present study critically examines the account of legal thought developed in Roberto Unger's very long article, ""The Critical Legal Studies Movement"" (1983), and tests it against Unger's own account of certain ""exemplary"" difficulties in the Anglo-American law of Contract. These scrutinies reveal that Unger's account fundamentally misunderstands the ways of legal thought, and disguises its misunderstanding behind equivocations on ""(in)determinate"" and ""(un)justified."""

Beyond Cases: Reconsidering Judicial Review, Janet S. Lindgren

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Book Review: Development Control, Geoffrey Bennett

Journal Articles

Mr. Alder's book is a lucid and informative contribution on the subject of development control. The book is largely concerned with analyzing the impact of judicial decisions in the [English] courts on planning law relating to development control.

Truthfulness And Tragedy (Book Review), Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

This is the third book in which Professor Stanley Hauerwas has developed his "story" approach to Christian ethics. It is a collection of essays, almost all of which appeared in periodicals, written while he was developing his theory more systematically in Vision and Virtue (1974), and in Character and the Christian Life (1975). One of the chapters here, on suicide and euthanasia, was written with Dr. Richard Bondi; two others, on story theology and on Albert Speer's Inside the Third Reich, were written with Father David B. Burrell. The essays are arranged so that they explain and defend Hauerwas' thought …

Justiciability And Theories Of Judicial Review: A Remote Relationship, Lee A. Albert

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Book Review, Clarence Emmett Manion

Journal Articles

Reviewing: THE PRICE OF PERFECT JUSTICE. By Macklin Fleming. The Adverse Consequences of Current Legal Doctrine on the American Courtroom. Justice of the California Court of Appeals (Basic Books, Inc. New York).

Toward A Jurisprudence For The Law Office, Thomas L. Shaffer, Louis M. Brown

Journal Articles

Brown is the founder and foremost exponent of preventive law jurisprudence. Shaffer has dwelt in recent books and essays on the parallels between humanistic psychology and the fife of lawyers. In this dialogue they focus their somewhat diverse insights on law as living; on their agreement that lawyer-client decisions are law in any functional sense of the word; and on the premise that an explicable jurisprudence is implicit in the process of law office decision making.

Politics And Jurisprudence In West Germany: State Financing Of Political Parties, Donald P. Kommers

Journal Articles

The relationship between political parties and representative government has been an important consideration in the constitutional jurisprudence of the Federal Republic of Germany. The Federal Constitutional Court has gone further than any other constitutional tribunal in the West to promote a free and competitive party system, and the Court’s decisions affecting the status of parties under the Basic Law, especially those having to do with party finance, are a marvelous illustration of the interplay between politics and law. The Federal Constitutional Court’s decision in 1966 to invalidate a federal plan for subsidizing political parties is a good example of the …

Some Speculation About Artificial Intelligence And Legal Reasoning, Bruce G. Buchanan, Thomas E. Headrick

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Comparative Judicial Behavior (Book Review), Donald P. Kommers

Journal Articles

This book consists of several cross-cultural and exploratory studies of judicial decision-making, and is one of the first to appear in the developing field of comparative judicial politics. A product of many months of collaboration between American and Asian scholars at the East-West Center, University of Hawaii, it deals chiefly with decision-making processes in the high courts of Japan, Hawaii, India, Canada, Australia, and the Philippines. The Asian contributors are mainly law teachers with a strong interest in the sociology of law; the American scholars are mainly teachers of political science whose special interest is the study of judicial behavior. …

Developments In Judicial Jurisprudence, John M. Finnis

Journal Articles

The purpose of this Comment is to explore briefly the fundamentals of what Prof. H. L. A. Hart has called "the contribution offered by the judges to the jurisprudence of our day", and to indicate in outline the disparity between this contribution and those of the most recent academic writings.

The Straw Man Of Legal Positivism, Thomas F. Broden

Journal Articles

The typical view of many lawyers, philosophers, theologians and other thoughtful persons toward a so-called school of jurisprudence generally known as legal positivism is one of condemnation. According to this typical view legal positivism is a well developed philosophy of law the main tenets of which are that might makes right and that law and state sovereignty are absolute and not subject to independent moral evaluation. Needless to say this assumed jurisprudential view is roundly indicted, deplored and declaimed against with vigor and venom. We are warned that legal positivists are insidious termites threatening the very foundation of our law, …

Fire Insurance For Freedom, Clarence Emmett Manion

Journal Articles

Mr. President Betts, Mr. President-Elect, gentlemen of the International Association of Insurance Counsel and your lovely ladies: I am particularly grateful and edified to a very great extent by the intelligent interest of the advocates of the advocates—may I say that of your lovely wives—for their sustained interest in these legalisms that you have heard here this morning. It is very impressive, and it encourages me to say primarily to the ladies present that what I am ostensibly addressing to the gentlemen, I am really addressing to you. I know, of course, that you are defense lawyers primarily, and I …

Foreword, Joseph O'Meara

Journal Articles

The Natural Law Institute, a function of The Law School of The University of Notre Dame, was organized in 1947. Five annual convocations were held under its auspices, the last one in December of 1951. Thereafter a search was undertaken for a way in which the Institute could function effectively on a year-round rather than a once-a-year basis. After exploring many possibilities, it was decided to publish this journal, the Natural Law Forum.