Jurisprudence Commons^™

Legislating Inclusion, Lia Epperson

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Why We Need A Progressive Account Of Violence, Aya Gruber

Publications

No abstract provided.

The Market As A Legal Concept, Justin Deystone

Publications

In the wake of the recent financial crisis of 2008, and in the run-up to what some are calling a perfect fiscal storm, there is no shortage of commentary on the need for fundamental market reform. Though there are certainly disagreements about where the real problems are and what to do, almost all the commentary remains wedded to an old and entirely false image of “free competition.” Of course, there is hardly consensus about whether markets require the heavy hand of regulative control, or are better left to regulate themselves, but a belief in the distinction between these two images …

Interpretive Contestation And Legal Correctness, Matthew D. Adler

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Jurisdiction And Choice Of Law In International Antitrust Law - A Us Perspective, Ralf Michaels, Hannah L. Buxbaum

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

"She Stedfastly Accused Him In The Time Of Her Travail": Women's Words And Paternity Suits In 18th-Century Massachusetts, Kristin A. Olbertson

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

The article examines the decline of women's testimony in bastardy cases in post-revolutionary Massachusetts, arguing that this shift was driven by changing gender ideologies, the Anglicization of legal procedures, and the increasing exclusion of women from authoritative roles. While women's testimony was once central to determining paternity, by the late 18th century, male jurors became the primary decision-makers, reflecting broader societal efforts to restrict women's public roles. The analysis highlights how this transition underscores the intersection of legal and cultural changes in early America.

Abandoning Women To Their Rights: What Happens When Feminist Jurisprudence Ignores Birthing Rights, Rebecca A. Spence

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

The article argues that feminist jurisprudence has neglected the critical issue of birthing rights, failing to integrate them into legal scholarship and education. This omission leaves women vulnerable to violations of their autonomy and dignity during childbirth, as courts and legislatures often prioritize fetal interests and medical authority over women's rights. The article emphasizes the need for a more robust legal framework that protects women's rights to make autonomous decisions about their care, including access to midwifery and the right to refuse medical interventions.

Coexisting Normative Orders? Yes, But No, John M. Finnis

Journal Articles

There are indeed two normative orders. But not "coexisting" in the sense that French law coexists with English law, and English law with international law, and all of them with canon law. No, the relation between the normative orders is much more intimate than "coexistence" (in the focal sense of that term). The one is a necessary source of the full validity, and strategically important parts, of the other, and is a real but much less straightforward source (by determinatio) of all its other legitimate parts; and is also an ever-present source of legitimate, and in extreme cases delegitimising criticism …

Can Equitable Estoppel Be Used As An Effective Way For A Legal Parent To Obtain Child Support For The Children Of A Separated Same-Sex Couple?, Josh Smolow

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

No abstract provided.

The Limits Of Integrity, John D. Inazu

Scholarship@WashULaw

This article draws upon the work of theologian Stanley Hauerwas to demonstrate how Ronald Dworkin’s theory of law as integrity relies upon secular liberal presuppositions. Dworkin’s constraint on “religious convictions or goals” not only inhibits theological argument in our discussions about law and legal interpretation, but also neutralizes what may be the strongest objections to Dworkin’s normative views. The juxtaposition of Hauerwas and Dworkin is particularly apt because both hold similar interpretive commitments that hang in the balance between a fixed textualism and an unbounded pragmatism. Both justify their epistemic practices by a kind of faith — they do not …

Region Codes And The Territorial Mess, Peter K. Yu

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Time To Sever The Dead Hand: Fisk University And The Cost Of The Cy Pres Doctrine, Melanie B. Leslie

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Renegotiating The Social Contract, Jennifer S. Hendricks

Publications

This review of The Supportive State: Families, Government and America’s Political Ideals highlights Maxine Eichner’s important theoretical contributions to both liberal political theory and feminist theory, applauding her success in reforming liberalism to account for dependency, vulnerability, and families. The review then considers some implications of Eichner’s proposals and their likely reception among feminists. It concludes that The Supportive State is a sound and inspiring response to recent calls that feminist theory move from being strictly a school of criticism to developing a theory of governance.

The Politics Of Hate, Robert Tsai

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

This is a special issue dedicated to the topic of hate and political discourse. Collectively, the peer-reviewed articles in this volume are concerned with the political aspects of hatred, i.e., psychology, motivations, organization, tactics, and ends. The articles approach the problem from a variety of disciplines, including anthropology, history, law, literature, philosophy, political science, psychology, and sociology. Among the subjects analyzed: group hatred as a heritable trait; hate as an irrational system of thought; Italian fascism's construction of the Communist other; the rise of the English Defence League and its anti-Islam activities; the persistent myth of blood libel; judicial handling …

Gazing Into The Future: The 100-Year Legacy Of Justice William J. Brennan, Stephen Wermiel

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Introduction: How should Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., be remembered in 2056, one hundred years after he joined the United States Supreme Court, or in 2090, one hundred years after he left it? There is no set convention for how we evaluate the success or failure, the greatness or mediocrity, of our Supreme Court Justices. This is the case even in their lifetimes, let alone decades later. Yet there are some constants in Brennan's legendary judicial career that may guide the way to evaluating his legacy.

Using The Papers Of U.S. Supreme Court Justices: A Reflection, Stephen Wermiel

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

This essay examines the benefits and drawbacks of writing about the U.S. Supreme Court using the papers' of the Justices and how the work of Professor James F Simon highlights the benefits. The benefits are that the Justices' papers provide invaluable understanding of the Court's decisionmaking process, the influences that are significant, and how much substance actually matters. The papers shed light on why important legal doctrines developed in certain ways and what arguments held sway, identify rules that may be on thin ice in terms of underlying support, and show the nature of the working relationships among the Justices, …

Economic Development And The Problem With The Problem-Solving Approach, Justin Deystone

Publications

Scholars and practitioners alike have recently pointed to the idea of a "new moment" in the field of law and economic development, as well as a hope for a fruitful rethinking of political economy. The idea is that we have passed out of the period of high "neoliberalism," associated at one time with Reagan, Thatcher, and the so-called Washington Consensus and now eclipsed by the ascendance of the Obama Administration. The hope attending the new consensus is that, in the wake of neoliberal law and policy, the field of law and development might be on the verge of a new …

Experimental Pragmatism In The Third Globalization, Justin Deystone

Publications

Pragmatism dominates contemporary legal thought, but knowing this isn’t knowing so much. Legal pragmatism means different things to different people, and as this essay argues, minimalist and experimentalist forms of regulation both share a broadly pragmatic sensibility about law and democracy. As a consequence, we need to tease out the various threads of legal pragmatism in the hope of distinguishing the pragmatisms that work from the ones that don’t, or less pragmatically, the ones that are just from the ones that are not. This knowledge will come from an ongoing assessment of the political stakes immanent in the pragmatisms, and …

The Faculty Workshop, Pierre Schlag

Publications

This essay explores the ubiquitous law school institution, “The Faculty Workshop,” as an entrée into and manifestation of contemporary American legal thought. The Faculty Workshop is examined both as a regulator and expression of legal thought - at once governance system and symptom. We close by discussing “Stage 4.”

A "Neo-Feminist" Assessment Of Rape And Domestic Violence Law Reform, Aya Gruber

Publications

No abstract provided.

Humphrey’S Executor Squared: Free Enterprise Fund V. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board And Its Implications For Administrative Law Judges, Robert S. Garrison Jr.

Student Works

No abstract provided.

An Empirical Assessment Of Climate Change In The Courts: A New Jurisprudence Or Business As Usual?, J.B. Ruhl, David L. Markell

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

While legal scholarship seeking to assess the impact of litigation on the direction of climate change policy is abundant and growing in leaps and bounds, to date it has relied on and examined only small, isolated pieces of the vast litigation landscape. Without a complete picture of what has and has not been within the sweep of climate change litigation, it is difficult to offer a robust evaluation of the past, present, and future of climate change jurisprudence. Based on a comprehensive empirical study of the status of all (201) climate change litigation matters filed through 2010, this Article is …

Natural Law Theory: Its Past And Its Present, John M. Finnis

Journal Articles

The past in which theory of this kind had its origins is notably similar to the present. For this is theory-practical theory-which articulates a critique of critiques, and the critiques it criticizes, rejects and replaces have much in common whether one looks at them in their fifth century B.C. Hellenic (Sophistic) or their modem (Enlightenment, Nietzschean or postmodern) forms.

Planning Positivism And Planning Natural Law, Martin J. Stone

Articles

Scott Shapiro offers an elaboration and defense of “legal positivism,” in which the official acceptance of a plan figures as the central explanatory notion. Rich in both ambition and insight, Legality casts an edifying new light on the structure of positive law and its officialdom. As a defense of positivism, however, it exhibits the odd feature that its main claims will prove quite acceptable to the natural lawyer. Perhaps this betokens – what many have begun to suspect anyway – that our usual tests for classifying legal theories (as positivist or not) are, in the present state of discussion, no …

Provocation At Face Value, Kyron J. Huigens

Articles

To take provocation at face value is to plead and prove it as a manslaughter offense, as it is defined in most criminal codes. To do this seems to be both unnecessary and impossible. The defendant has the best access to evidence of provocation and will benefit from the proof of this partial defense, so why should he not be required to prove it? The prosecution has no incentive to prove provocation manslaughter because the definition of this offense includes a murder. Why would the prosecution, having proved a murder, set out to prove a lesser crime than the crime …

The Meaning Of Mcintyre, Adam N. Steinman

Faculty Scholarship

When certiorari was granted in J. McIntyre Machinery, Ltd. v. Nicastro, 131 S. Ct. 2780 (2011), many hoped that the Supreme Court would provide much-needed clarification to the area of personal jurisdiction. It didn’t. The Court failed to generate a majority opinion, splitting into Justice Kennedy’s four-Justice plurality, Justice Breyer’s two-Justice concurrence, and Justice Ginsburg’s three-Justice dissent.

This essay – for the Southwestern Journal of International Law’s 2012 symposium “Our Courts and the World: Transnational Litigation and Procedure” – examines how state and federal courts have been using the McIntyre decision. Some lower court opinions have mistakenly interpreted McIntyre as …

Property As Modularity, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Henry Smith’s Property as the Law of Things urges a return to an older conception of property as rights with respect to things – and justifies this in terms of a very new conception of property based on modularity. Throughout, he highlights the importance of information costs in determining the structure of property law, starting with a baseline of in rem rights of exclusion supplemented by governance rules to deal with exceptional situations. I fully agree with his emphasis on the centrality of things in the law of property, the in rem nature of property, the primacy of exclusion …

Patents 101: Patentable Subject Matter And Separation Of Powers, Max S. Oppenheimer

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

The definition of statutory subject matter lies at the heart of the patent system. It is the reflection of Congress's policy decision as to what types of inventions one may patent. While the congressional definition of statutory subject matter (in what is now 35 U.S.C. § 101) has remained fundamentally constant since 1790, the Supreme Court has reinterpreted and redefined statutory subject matter several times, leaving lower courts with the frustrating task of trying to develop a coherent jurisprudence against a changing landscape. This inconstancy has introduced uncertainty for inventors who are trying to make the fundamental decision of whether …