Law and Philosophy Commons^™

The Guise Of The Bad, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

My topic is the possibility of acting in the belief that the action is bad and for the reason that it is, as the agent believes, bad. On route, I examine another question – namely whether agents can, without having any relevant false beliefs, perform actions motivated by the badness of those actions. The main worry is the compatibility of action for the sake of the bad with the thesis of the Guise of the Good (roughly that actions undertaken with an intention to perform them are undertaken because they are, as the agents see things, good in some respects). …

Dangerous Diagnoses, Risky Assumptions, And The Failed Experiment Of "Sexually Violent Predator" Commitment, Deirdre M. Smith

Faculty Publications

In its 1997 opinion, Kansas v. Hendricks, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a law that reflected a new model of civil commitment. The targets of this new commitment law were dubbed “Sexually Violent Predators” (SVPs), and the Court upheld indefinite detention of these individuals on the assumption that there is a psychiatrically distinct class of individuals who, unlike typical recidivists, have a mental condition that impairs their ability to refrain from violent sexual behavior. And, more specifically, the Court assumed that the justice system could reliably identify the true “predators,” those for whom this unusual and extraordinary deprivation of liberty …

Defeating The Super Pacs That Distort Our Political Process, Bruce Ledewitz

Ledewitz Papers

Published scholarship collected from academic journals, law reviews, newspaper publications & online periodicals.

Realism About Judges, Richard A. Posner

Northwestern University Law Review

No abstract provided.

An Addendum In Light Of Recent Developments, Bruce Ledewitz

Ledewitz Papers

Published scholarship collected from academic journals, law reviews, newspaper publications & online periodicals.

Beyond Edmunds: The State Constitutional Legacy Of Chief Justice Ronald D. Castille, Bruce Ledewitz

Ledewitz Papers

Published scholarship collected from academic journals, law reviews, newspaper publications & online periodicals.

Concept And Contract In The Future Of International Law, John Linarelli

Scholarly Works

This is an article written for a symposium on Joel Trachtman’s book, The Future of International Law. I first deal with the contractarian features of Trachtman’s approach to understanding international law. Using the tools of new institutional economics and constitutional economics, Trachtman seeks to describe the features of an international legal system. This is positive political theory or at least relates substantially to the methods of positive political theory. I explore a different approach, one connecting to normative political theory. In its ambitious sense, my approach would see international law as a form of moral argument, but in its modest …

Beyond Max Weber: The Need For A Democratic (Not Aristocratic) Theory Of The Modern State, William J. Novak

Articles

We cannot wish (or think) away the modern state any more than the postwar generation could wish away atomic power. And we cannot ignore the state in our efforts to come to terms with modern economy and society any more than we can ignore equally difficult concepts like modern capitalism or modern law. Attempts to try to reckon with modernity in lieu of hard thinking about such abstract concepts will probably end up deploying some overdetermined and cartoonish causation of a mainly biographical or interest-group sort. Or, like libertarianism, neoliberalism, or other popular anti-statist credos, they will leave us with …

Deal Leaves Court Issues Unresolved, Bruce Ledewitz

Ledewitz Papers

Published scholarship collected from academic journals, law reviews, newspaper publications & online periodicals

Pa. Gay Marriage With An Exemption, Bruce Ledewitz

Ledewitz Papers

Published scholarship collected from academic journals, law reviews, newspaper publications & online periodicals

Experimenting With Religious Liberty: The Quasi-Constitutional Status Of Religious Exemptions, Bruce Ledewitz

Ledewitz Papers

Published scholarship collected from academic journals, law reviews, newspaper publications & online periodicals.

The Vietnam Draft Cases And The Pro-Religion Equality Project, Bruce Ledewitz

Ledewitz Papers

Published scholarship collected from academic journals, law reviews, newspaper publications & online periodicals.

An Opinion For The Ages, Bruce Ledewitz

Ledewitz Papers

Published scholarship collected from academic journals, law reviews, newspaper publications & online periodicals

Stretching Religious Liberty, Bruce Ledewitz

Ledewitz Papers

Published scholarship collected from academic journals, law reviews, newspaper publications & online periodicals

Pennsylvania’S Supreme Court, Still Broken, Bruce Ledewitz

Ledewitz Papers

Published scholarship collected from academic journals, law reviews, newspaper publications & online periodicals

What Marriage Law Can Learn From Citizenship Law (And Vice Versa), Govind Persad

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Citizenship and marriage are legal statuses that generate numerous privileges and responsibilities. Legal doctrine and argument have analogized these statuses in passing: consider, for example, Ted Olson’s statement in the Hollingsworth v. Perry oral argument that denying the label “marriage” to gay unions “is like you were to say you can vote, you can travel, but you may not be a citizen.” However, the parallel between citizenship and marriage has rarely been investigated in depth. This paper investigates the marriage-citizenship parallel with a particular focus on three questions prompted by recent developments in law and policy: 1) Should we provide …

Outing The Majority: Gay Rights, Public Debate, And Polarization After Doe V. Reed, Marc Allen

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

In 2010, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Doe v. Reed that Washington citizens who signed a petition to eliminate legal rights for LGBT couples did not have a right to keep their names secret. A year later, in ProtectMarriage.com v. Bowen, a district court in California partially relied on Reed to reject a similar request from groups who lobbied for California Proposition 8-a constitutional amendment that overturned the California Supreme Court's landmark 2008 gay marriage decision. These holdings are important to election law, feminist, and first amendment scholars for a number of reasons. First, they flip the traditional …

The Moral Significance Of Economic Life, Andrzej Rapaczynski

Faculty Scholarship

Much of the modern perception of the role of economic production in human life – whether on the Left or on the Right of the political spectrum – views it as an inferior, instrumental activity oriented toward self-preservation, self-interest, or profit, and thus as essentially distinct from the truly human action concerned with moral values, justice, and various forms of self-fulfillment. This widely shared worldview is rooted, on the one hand, in the Aristotelian tradition that sees labor as a badge of slavery, and freedom as lying in the domain of politics and pure (not technical) knowledge, and, on the …

Violence And Poltical Incivility, David Lyons

Mercer Law Review

The charge to our panel refers to "the deterioration of the political conversation," to "deep ... divisions in society," and to recent violence- especially the tragic events in Tuscon. It asks us to identify "the virtues required.for our common life as citizens in a democracy and for civil democratic conversation." I shall offer observations and conjectures on each issue, stressing the historical background.

Let me suggest, first,. that the nonconstructive and increasingly abusive character of our political discourse may be relatively mild manifestations of an even more troubling malaise of our society- commonplace unlawful violence. I wish to draw your …

You Say You Want A (Nonviolent) Revolution, Well Then What? Translating Western Thought, Strategic Ideological Cooptation, And Institution Building For Freedom For Governments Emerging Out Of Peaceful Chaos, Donald J. Kochan

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Toward A Meaning-Full Establishment Clause Neutrality, Bruce Ledewitz

Ledewitz Papers

Published scholarship collected from academic journals, law reviews, newspaper publications & online periodicals.

Robert Taylor, An Appreciation, Bruce Ledewitz

Ledewitz Papers

Published scholarship collected from academic journals, law reviews, newspaper publications & online periodicals.

Grassroots Originalism: Rethinking The Politics Of Judicial Philosophy, Mary Ziegler

Scholarly Publications

How has originalism become so politically successful? In answering this question, leading scholarship has focused on the ways in which political leaders, judges, and lawyers have cultivated popular support for originalism. In one account, legal academics, politicians, and judges have explained the legal merits of originalism as a method of interpretation: its political neutrality and its democratic legitimacy. In a second version, political leaders—in particular, the Reagan Administration and the judges it nominated—made apparent that originalism would often produce outcomes that social conservatives found satisfactory. With some exceptions, leading studies primarily address the contributions made by elites to rhetoric about …

"Becker On Ewald On Foucault On Becker": American Neoliberalism And Michel Foucault's 1979 Birth Of Biopolitics Lectures, Gary S. Becker, Francois Ewald, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

In a series of lectures delivered in 1979 at the Collège de France under the title The Birth of Biopolitics, Michel Foucault conducted a close reading of Gary Becker’s writings on human capital and on crime and punishment, within the context of an elaboration and critique of American neoliberalism. Foucault was assisted at the time, at the Collège de France, by François Ewald. Since then, there has been ongoing debate over Foucault’s views about neoliberalism. In this historic meeting at the University of Chicago between Professors Becker and Ewald, Professor Ewald presents a framework to understand Foucault’s writings on Becker; …

Political Disobedience, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

The political phenomenon that was born in Zuccotti Park in the fall of 2011 and spread rapidly across the nation and abroad immediately challenged our vocabulary, our grammar, our political categories – in short, our very language of politics. Although it was quickly apparent that a political paradigm shift had taken place before our eyes, it was hard to discern what Occupy Wall Street really represented, politically. It is time to begin to name this phenomenon and in naming to better understand it. So let me propose a term: political disobedience.

The Liberty Of Free Riders: The Minimum Coverage Provision, Mill’S 'Harm Principle,' And American Social Morality, Jedediah S. Britton-Purdy, Neil S. Siegel

Faculty Scholarship

In this Article, we show that cost-shifting and adverse selection problems link the federalism dimension of the debate over the Affordable Care Act to the doctrinally separate and suppressed individual rights dimension. As the scope of these free-rider problems justifies federal power to require individuals to obtain health insurance coverage, so the very existence of the free-rider problems illuminates the difficulty of arguing directly — as opposed to indirectly through the Commerce Clause — that the minimum coverage provision infringes individual liberty. The interdependence between some people’s decisions to forgo insurance and the well-being of other people means that refusing …

Step Down, Justice Melvin, Bruce Ledewitz

Ledewitz Papers

Published scholarship collected from academic journals, law reviews, newspaper publications & online periodicals

Justice’S Suspension Is Dubious, Bruce Ledewitz

Ledewitz Papers

Published scholarship collected from academic journals, law reviews, newspaper publications & online periodicals

Sandel On Religion In The Public Square, Hugh Baxter

Faculty Scholarship

In the final chapter of "Justice" (2009), Sandel calls for a “new politics of the common good,” which he presents as an alternative to John Rawls’s idea of public reason. Sandel calls “misguided” Rawls’s search for “principles of justice that are neutral among competing conceptions of the good life.” According to Sandel, “[i]t is not always possible to define our rights and duties without taking up substantive moral questions; and even when it’s possible it may not be desirable.” In taking up these moral questions, Sandel writes, we must allow specifically religious convictions and reasons into the sphere of public …

It’S Time To Reconsider Graduation Prayer In Public High Schools, Bruce Ledewitz

Ledewitz Papers

Published scholarship collected from academic journals, law reviews, newspaper publications & online periodicals.