Jurisprudence Commons^™

On The Evolution Of The Canonical Dissent, Anita S. Krishnakumar

Faculty Publications

Legal theorists increasingly have come to recognize and study the existence of a constitutional canon composed of highly authoritative legal texts that command special reverence in the law. Among these highly authoritative texts are a series of dissenting opinions—e.g., Justice Holmes's in Lochner v. New York, and Justice Harlan's in Plessy v. Ferguson—that ironically are more famous than the majority opinions in most other cases. This Article examines the evolution of the dissenting canon, seeking to explain both the methods by which various dissenting opinions became canonized and the motivating factors behind these canonizations.

Specifically, the Article argues that the …

Judicial Auditing, Matthew L. Spitzer, Eric L. Talley

Faculty Scholarship

This paper presents a simple framework for analyzing a hierarchical system of judicial auditing. We concentrate on (what we perceive to be) the two principal reasons that courts and/or legislatures tend to scrutinize the decisions of lower echelon actors: imprecision and ideological bias. In comparing these two reasons, we illustrate how each may yield systematically distinct auditing and reversal behaviors. While auditing for imprecision tends to bring about evenhanded review/reversal, auditing for political bias tends to be contingent on the first mover's chosen action. Examples of these tendencies can be found in a number of legal applications, including administrative law, …

Contextualism: The Supreme Court's New Standard Of Judicial Analysis And Accountability, Shalin Sugunasiri

Dalhousie Law Journal

Over the past few years, the "contextual approach" to law has acquired considerable cachet in juridical discourses across the country. In the Supreme Court of Canada, contextualism is now the new standard of judicial analysis and accountability This article analyzes a decade of Supreme court jurisprudence on Charter interpretation, statutory interpretation and the common law in order to fully explicate what contextualism in law is, where it came from, and how it has achieved its current pre-eminent status. The future promise of the contextual approach is also here canvassed through a dialectical engagement with postmodernist concerns respecting inherent legal indeterminacies.

Poststructural Analysis Of The Power And Class Behind The Formalistic Application Of Erisa Preemption Of State Law, Erik Nelson

St. Thomas Law Review

This comment presents a poststructural approach to the current formulation of the Employment Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) of 1974. Part I details the context in which Congress created federal protection for ERISA beneficiaries. Part II illustrates how the judiciary wavered in its broad preemptive construction of ERISA before ultimately privileging a construction of ERISA which denied ERISA beneficiaries extracontractual and punitive damages. Part III will examine deconstruction and its impact on the jurisprudence of the federal courts. Part IV embarks on a deconstructionist analysis of the "relates to" preemptive provision of ERISA to reveal that the only rationality to …

Front Matter

St. Thomas Law Review

Front Matter includes Masthead and Table of Contents for St. Thomas Law Review Volume 9, Issue 2, Winter 1997.

Law As The Continuation Of God By Other Means, Pierre Schlag

Publications

No abstract provided.

Corporate Fiduciary Principles For The Post-Contractarian Era, Rutheford B. Campbell Jr.

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The impact of the law and economics movement on legal scholarship, legal analysis, and, ultimately, on the rules under which our society operates is substantial. The proponents of this movement ("Contractarians") articulate their positions skillfully and apply their principles broadly across the entire spectrum of our laws, including, of course, the area of corporate law.

The purpose of this Article is to propose, explain, and defend broad and unifying principles to guide the development of fiduciary duties of corporate managers in the post-Contractarian period. These principles are based on Pareto criteria, which are demonstrably appealing to society and provide workable …

Dolan V. Tigard: The Myth And Reality Of Its Impact On Takings Jurisprudence And Land Use Regulation, Stephen Truesdale Carney

St. Thomas Law Review

In June of 1994, the evolution of constitutional law took another small step forward when the United States Supreme Court decided Dolan v. City of Tigard. This decision has specific implications for the fields of environmental and land-use law. While many see those implications as deleterious to environmental concerns, others see them as a necessary clarification in a narrow but previously vague area of law. In Dolan, the issue before the court was whether the city's demand that the petitioner dedicate her property along a floodplain to public use as a condition for a building permit approval violated the Fifth …

Symposium On Law, Literature, And The Humanities. Introduction: Conducting Our Educations In Public, Thomas D. Eisele

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This symposium grew out of James Boyd White's Marx Lecture, given April 21, 1994, at the University of Cincinnati, and this issue owes its existence to some happy coincidences with that event. One coincidence was the idea occurring to a number of us that, as nice as it would be to publish Professor White's thoughts on the Crito in these pages of the Law Review, how much nicer still it would be to surround those thoughts, or to follow them, with the thoughts of other scholars in the field, showing how these others responded to the text discussed by White …

Towards The Deconstruction Of Legal Relativism, Philip E. Hesch, Christopher J. Grabarek

St. Thomas Law Review

The purpose of this Article is to examine the Relativist's position, extract the positive elements, and synthesize those elements into a new model of jurisprudence grounded in natural law. Out of this will flow a conceptual framework that allows both reason and empirical observations to be used in evaluating competing "moral" or legal postulates. Part Two of this Article focuses on how crises in science and metaphysics, which are similar to the current conceptual crisis in jurisprudence, were reconciled. Part Three outlines a new model of jurisprudence based on the insights detailed in Part One.

A Note To Our Readers, The Editors

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Consideration And Estoppel: Problem And Panacea, Bruce Macdougall

Dalhousie Law Journal

In his book, The History of the Common Law of Contract, A.W.B. Simpson demonstrates that consideration originally seems to have meant the "matter of inducement" - the "why" of entering a promise.' He writes: "The essence of the doctrine of consideration, then, is the adoption by the common law of the idea that the legal effect of a promise should depend upon the factor or factors which motivated the promise. To decide whether a promise to do X is binding, you need to know why the promise was made."2 In modem terms, according to Simpson, a promise which lacks any …

The Democratic Intellect: The State In The Work Of Madame Justice Wilson, Philip L. Bryden

Dalhousie Law Journal

It is a great honour to have been asked to provide an essay for this volume of reflections on the contribution Madame Justice Bertha Wilson has made to the development of law in Canada. To a certain extent, this is a matter of pride in finding my own name associated with that of the very learned and respected individuals who have set out their thoughts in this collection of articles. In the main, however, the honour comes from the opportunity to make a public statement of my own respect and admiration for Madame Justice Wilson and the significant role that …

The Jurisprudence Of Affirmative Action: Equality In Abstraction And Application, Alec Anthony Izzo

St. Thomas Law Review

Analyzing the results in affirmative action cases decided in the last fourteen years tends to invite specious observations. For example, it is true that only 50% of the affirmative action plans reviewed by the Supreme Court withstand constitutional attack, while 80% withstand federal statutory attack. Additionally, more than half of the Court's affirmative action opinions have been authored by Justice Brennan and in each case the challenged plan has been approved. Further, two cases evaluating the constitutional merits of affirmative action were written by Justice Powell, whose opinions resulted in findings of unconstitutionality, and whose language echoes long beyond his …

Approaching Aliens: A Plea For Jurisprudential Recovery As A Theoretical Introduction To (Ex)Socialist Legal Systems, Ivan L. Padjen

Dalhousie Law Journal

It might be wise to stop here. Even a reader who is sympathetic to jurisprudential imagination must regard the communicable part of my title with considerable misgiving. For he or she can hardly be unaware of the double jeopardy in which the general theorist of law places himself when dealing with socialist legal systems. The first has been aptly described by Alasdair MacIntyre in his parable of a man who aspired to be the author of the general theory of holes.' The moral of the story, that the concept of a hole is a poor foundation for a general theory …

Of Persons And Property: The Politics Of Legal Taxonomy, David Cohen, Allan C. Hutchinson

Dalhousie Law Journal

To talk of law without politics or history is nonsensical. All lawyers must concede that what they do takes place in historical circumstances and has political consequences. Every piece of law-making and law-application is a governmental act; it relies on political authority and claims binding force. Moreover, all legal activity occurs within a particular historical context; it is intended to respond to or influence a past, existing or anticipated state of affairs. This means that the study of law must concern itself with politics and history generally: it must not confine itself to only the politics and history of law. …

Living Without Rights-- In Manners, Religion, And Law, Richard Stith

Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Listening To Tribal Legends: An Essay On Law And The Scientific Method, Nancy Levit

Faculty Works

Much of jurisprudence is storytelling, recounting tales of what has gone before; improvising and crafting new stories of legal theory from old ones. Useful kernels are passed from one generation of legal thinkers to the next. Like tribal legends, the messages in many stories of jurisprudence can be understood only by a select audience. Legends often come with morals; theories of jurisprudence often impart prescription for living within the law. Jurisprudence, like legends, concerns fundamental issues, confronts cosmic questions and weaves in magic. Sometimes both possess humor as well.

Unfortunately, some modern versions of jurisprudential theories have become anecdotal. The …

Legal Fiction, James Boyle

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Legal Point Of View, L. C. Green

Dalhousie Law Journal

What is Law? By what criteria do we recognize valid law? These questions have exercised the minds of distinguished jurisprudential thinkers of the past. Every solution that has been propounded, whether in terms of natural law theory, command models, norm or rule models, seems to have been defective in one way or another. The main thesis of this book is that every attempt to find some "essence of law" - whether in terms of commands, rules or whatever - is bound to fail. The reason given is that there is not one and only one "true" conception of law. There …

The Legal Point Of View, L. C. Green

Dalhousie Law Journal

What is Law? By what criteria do we recognize valid law? These questions have exercised the minds of distinguished jurisprudential thinkers of the past. Every solution that has been propounded, whether in terms of natural law theory, command models, norm or rule models, seems to have been defective in one way or another. The main thesis of this book is that every attempt to find some "essence of law" - whether in terms of commands, rules or whatever - is bound to fail. The reason given is that there is not one and only one "true" conception of law. There …

Law And Today's Crisis-Situations, Thomas E. Davitt

Indiana Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Morality Of Law, By Lon L. Fuller, Edwin W. Tucker

Indiana Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Law And History, C. J. Friedrich

Vanderbilt Law Review

Law is frozen history. In an elementary sense, everything we study when we study law is the report of an event in history, and all history consists of such records or reports. It therefore cannot be my task to develop a sermon on the importance of historical records for the understanding of the law; the tie is too intimate and too obvious to need laboring." The work of Professor Maine on 'Ancient Law,'" wrote Professor T. W. Dwight in his Introduction to that book in the sixties of the last century, "is almost the only one in the English language …

Beutel: Some Potentialities Of Experimental Jurisprudence As A New Branch Of Social Science, Samuel I. Shuman

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Some Potentialities of Experimental Jurisprudence as a New Branch of Social Science. By Fredrick K. Beutel.

The Moral Decision: Right And Wrong In The Light Of American Law, By Edmond Cahn, W. Friedmann

Indiana Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Balance Sheet Of Law And Religion, Frank E. Horack Jr.

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

What Is Law, Roscoe Pound

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Law As A Science, George W. Goble

Indiana Law Journal

Reprinted from The Scientific Monthly, with the permission of that periodical.

Law And The Modern Mind, D. F. Cavers

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.