Law and Philosophy Commons^™

The Right To Access To Justice: Its Conceptual Architecture, Daniel Bonilla Maldonado

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

The aim of this article is descriptive and analytical, rather than normative. This article aims to contribute to the current understanding of the ways in which modern legal consciousness builds, and is built by, the concept of access to justice. This concept, as part of the web of meanings that structures modern legal culture, provides the context in which modern subjects make sense of who they are and how they should interact with the world around them. This article examines the subjectivities, conceptual geographies, and interpretations of history created by the right to access to justice. It also examines a …

Introduction, Colin Crawford, Daniel Bonilla Maldonado

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

The papers gathered in this volume analyze access to justice in Latin America, Europe, and North America from a philosophical, legal, and sociological perspective. In these three regions of the world, as in the rest of the globe, liberal democracies face a troubling gap between the normative and the descriptive: the access to justice promises made by the legal and political system are not fully realized in practice. The studies collected here, therefore, share two baseline assumptions. First, the right of access to justice is fundamental in a liberal state. Access to justice ensures that citizens are able to defend …

Public Defenders' Offices In Brazil: Access To Justice, Courts, And Public Defenders, Alexandre Dos Santos Cunha

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

This essay discusses the impact of public defenders' offices in promoting equality through the enforcement of the right to access to justice in Brazil. To achieve this goal, this note is divided into two parts.

Part I presents the Brazilian public defenders' offices, their history, institutional design, rights, and prerogatives. Part II discusses the role played by public defenders in the enforcement of the right to access to justice in Brazil, as well as the relations established between public defenders and courts. The Conclusion attempts to assess the sustainability of the Brazilian model, in order to determine if there is …

Access To Justice For Collective And Diffuse Rights: Theoretical Challenges And Opportunities For Social Contract Theory, Colin Crawford

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

This analysis consists of three principal parts. First, it briefly reviews the classical contract account that explains how and why individuals enter civil society, found in the writings of both Hobbes and Locke. The analysis then examines the limited extent to which classical contract theory treats questions of rights vindication or, in more modern terms, with questions of access to justice. Second, the analysis examines the nature of collective and diffuse rights claims and will make a case for their importance in the modern world. Third, the analysis seeks to identify arguments from the classical account that might be useful …

Cause Lawyering And Compassionate Lawyering In Clinical Legal Education: The Case Of Chile, Fernando Munoz L.

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

In order to contribute from a situated perspective to a global narrative of access to justice, in the next sections I will trace the origins of compassionate and cause lawyering in the history of Chilean legal aid and training. Part II will explain how legal assistance to the poor was codified as a duty of legal professionals during the Middle Ages, in both canon law and in Castilian legislation. Part III will show that practical legal training, both in Spain and in Chile, began much later as the result of the ambition among prominent members of the legal profession to …

Public Law, Precarity, And Access To Justice, Amnon Lev

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

In the first part, I examine Thomas Hobbes' theory of commonwealth to see how it situates subjects in relation to justice. Hobbes famously founds his commonwealth on the equal subjection of all to the Leviathan, which is the equal subjection of all to law. We need to understand why he nevertheless needs to accommodate the diversity of society-the basic fact that some are weak while others are not-into the operation of the public law machine. As we shall see, the accommodation of social diversity is tied to a proto-liberal distinction between social spheres that relegates much of human life to …

Utopian Thinking For Progressive Constitutionalists, Mark Tushnet

Indiana Law Journal

The opening pages of Rousseau’s Social Contract have two striking phrases. The more celebrated is, “[m]an was born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” That, though, is preceded by this: “I want to inquire whether, taking men as they are and laws as they can be made to be, it is possible to establish some just and reliable rule of administration in civil affairs.” I take this second sentence as my guide: Taking the textual Constitution as it is and with the interpreted Constitution as it could be, can there be a constitutionalism that progressives could wholeheartedly endorse?

I …

Substitute And Complement Theories Of Judicial Review, David E. Landau

Indiana Law Journal

Constitutional theory has hypothesized two distinct and contradictory ways in which judicial review may interact with external political and social support. One line of scholarship has argued that judicial review and external support are substitutes. Thus, “political safeguard” theorists of American federalism and the separation of powers argue that these constitutional values are enforced through the political branches, making judicial review unnecessary. However, a separate line of work, mostly composed of social scientists examining rights issues, argues that the relationship between courts and outside support is complementary—judges are unlikely to succeed in their projects unless they have sufficient assistance from …

Puzzling Out Law's Person, David A. Wishart

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

How is the person to be conceptualized in law? Is it subject or object, what is its ontology and teleology? These are old questions, but ones newly raised by changing ideas of the province of the state, technology, and the extension of legality. Examples include the protection of the fetus in utero; contractualization of relationships, including those of welfare; the regulation of intimacy; the idea of government business; interventions in the business of the firm; and challenges to legal entitihood as constructing personhood. Much discussion of these is incommensurable in terms of place, culture, and discipline. This article ventures a …

Do Corporations Have Religious Beliefs?, Jason Iuliano

Indiana Law Journal

Despite two hundred years of jurisprudence on the topic of corporate personhood, the Supreme Court has failed to endorse a philosophically defensible theory of the corporation. In this Article, I attempt to fill that void. Drawing upon the extensive philosophical literature on personhood and group agency, I argue that corporations qualify as persons in their own right. This leads me to answer the titular question with an emphatic yes. Contrary to how it first seems, that conclusion does not warrant granting expansive constitutional rights to corporations. It actually suggests the opposite. Using the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate as a …

Epistemologies Of The South And Human Rights: Santos And The Quest For Global And Cognitive Justice, Jose-Manuel Barreto

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

This article offers an introduction to Boaventura de Sousa Santos's general philosophical orientation, explores the concepts of "abyssal thinking" and "epistemologies of the South," and draws consequences for the theory of human rights, taking into consideration the idea of rewriting the history of rights in the context of colonialism and Santos's proposal of a post-abyssal conception of rights and intercultural dialogue. This piece ends with some considerations on the cultural and political conditions for advancing a new understanding of human rights.

Book Review. Liberty: Rethinking An Imperiled Ideal By Glenn Tinder, Daniel O. Conkle

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

The Dialogue Of Heart And Head, Lynne N. Henderson

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

The Use Of Evolution Theory In Law, M. B. W. Sinclair

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Legal And Moral Duty In Game Theory: Common Law Contract And Chinese Analogies, Robert L. Birmingham

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Book Review. Law And Morality By Leon Petrazycki, Wencelas J. Wagner

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Historical Myth And Constitutional Absolutism, Hugh Evander Willis

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Liberty, Robert C. Brown

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Some Implications Of Juristic Pragmatism, Fowler Vincent Harper

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

The Nature Of Law, Hugh Evander Willis

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.