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Looking And Seeing, Nicolas Cornell Mar 2024

Looking And Seeing, Nicolas Cornell

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On November 6, 1938, Charles T. Dashiell, Jr, was driving south through Maryland. Around 5.30 or 6, Dashiell picked up two 19-year- old hitchhikers, J. Reginald Moore and Reginald Porter. Moore and Porter had been dropped off by Moore’s older brother and were now seeking to rejoin him several miles further on. The two boys got into Dashiell’s one-seat coup, with Moore sitting in the middle and Porter sitting on the right. It was a clear day, and the road was dry. Dashiell’s car lights were turned on and in good working condition.


The Possession Heuristic, James E. Krier, Christopher Serkin May 2015

The Possession Heuristic, James E. Krier, Christopher Serkin

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A heuristic, as Daniel Kahneman (2011: 98) observes, “is a simple procedure that helps find adequate, though often imperfect, answers to difficult questions.” Kahneman is a psychologist, one of a handful of scholars who have brought heuristics to the attention of a general audience, thanks in large part to several books (Kahneman, Slovic, and Tversky 1982; Gilovich, Driffin, and Kahneman 2002). Just as Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 ideas about paradigms in the history of science are fodder for academics in all sorts of fields (this for better or worse), so too for Kahneman and company’s ideas about heuristics, and legal academics …


A Standard Of Global Justice, Steven R. Ratner Jan 2015

A Standard Of Global Justice, Steven R. Ratner

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This chapter presents the standard of justice that is used in this book to appraise international law. That standard is based on two core principles, or what the book calls pillars—the promotion of international and intrastate peace, on the one hand, and respect for the basic human rights of all individuals, on the other. The justice of international norms is determined by the extent to which they lead to a state of affairs involving peace and human rights, with some room for deontological considerations in limited situations. The chapter defends the choice of these two pillars. It elaborates on the …


Dignity As Perception: Recognition Of The Human Individual And The Individual Animal In Legal Thought, Joseph Vining Jan 2013

Dignity As Perception: Recognition Of The Human Individual And The Individual Animal In Legal Thought, Joseph Vining

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'To their murderers these wretched people were not individuals at all. They came in wholesale lots and were treated worse than animals.' This was Telford Taylor, beginning the presentation of the 'Medical Case' at the Nuremberg Trials after the Second World War. The 'Medical Case' was not about genocide or war or the conduct of war. It was about experimentation on human beings; and it was this trial that produced the 'Nuremberg Code', the first control of such treatment of human beings by one another. The word 'individual' came naturally to Taylor the lawyer as a starting point, and with …


The Creation Of Authority In A Sermon By Saint Augustine, James Boyd White Jan 2013

The Creation Of Authority In A Sermon By Saint Augustine, James Boyd White

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My way of honoring Joe today will not be to describe or extol his achievements directly but to try to show something of what I have learned from him, particularly in the way I approach a new text and problem, in this case the creation of authority in one of Augustine's sermons.


The Filaments Of The Vicarious: Notes To The Authors Of This Book, Joseph Vining Jan 2013

The Filaments Of The Vicarious: Notes To The Authors Of This Book, Joseph Vining

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Forty years is the unit of work in focus here. You have or will have units of forty years of your own, a unit of work like this. I can best respond to your generosity with a look back at the course of this effort of mine and its internal and external connections over time, to illustrate and help us keep in mind the way we mutually influence each other in our thought and lives. Origins and influences can begin with a biology teacher in secondary school, J. C. Catt, for whom I wrote a long paper on a drop …


The Resilience Of Law, Joseph Vining Jan 2009

The Resilience Of Law, Joseph Vining

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One of the striking developments in academic law in the past half century is the reconception of law as one of the social sciences. The idea at work in this movement, as Joseph Vining says in this essay, is not that the law should use the findings of other disciplines for its own purposes and in its own way, but that in some deep way law itself - legal thinking, legal life - can and ought to proceed on the premises of social science, indeed of science itself. This is in one sense obviously impossible: a scientific rule is a …


Authority And Reality, Joseph Vining Jan 2007

Authority And Reality, Joseph Vining

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Imagination has been introduced as a term of art in discussion of the social and political world. Some years ago James Boyd White turned to it in The Legal Imagination, his monumental work on the foundations of secular law and legal practice. A prominent example of its use today is Charles Taylor's Modern Social Imaginaries, tracing changes in the common mind leading to what we now call modernity. The term can have a large scope and at the same time a rather definite meaning. "Imagination" is at the center of Mark Massa's comments on the contrarian position of the Catholic …


Of Grace And Dignity In Law: A Tribute To Friedrich Schiller., Daniel H. Halberstam Jan 2006

Of Grace And Dignity In Law: A Tribute To Friedrich Schiller., Daniel H. Halberstam

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When we think of Friedrich Schiller's connection to the law, we usually think of the great playwright's rich treatment of criminal law and public order in his plays. Despite the fact that Schiller abandoned the study of law at an early age, thinking it too dry, Schiller's work frequently and explicitly dealt with legal issues. His main focus was crime and punishment, on the one hand, and revolution and state legitimacy, on the other. From Schiller's first play, Die Rauber to Fiesco, Don Carlos, Wallenstein, The Bride of Messina, and Wilhelm Tell, as well as many of the others, Schiller …


Perceiving Imperceptible Harms (With Other Thoughts On Transitivity, Cumulative Effects, And Consequentialism), Donald H. Regan Jan 2000

Perceiving Imperceptible Harms (With Other Thoughts On Transitivity, Cumulative Effects, And Consequentialism), Donald H. Regan

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Many writers believe there can be cases which satisfy the following description: starting from an initial state of affairs, it is possible to make a series of changes, none of which alters the value of the state of affairs in any way, but such that the final state of affairs that results from the series of changes is worse than the initial state of affairs. I shall call the claim that there can be such cases the "ex nihilo" claim, since in a sense it asserts that the bad effects of the complete series of changes arise ex nihilo. Proponents …


Gewirth On Necessary Goods: What Is The Agent Committed To Valuing?, Donald H. Regan Jan 1999

Gewirth On Necessary Goods: What Is The Agent Committed To Valuing?, Donald H. Regan

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In this chapter I shall be concerned with stage I of Gewirth's argument, in which he argues that the agent must value her freedom and well-being as necessary goods. Stage I has attracted less criticism over the years than stages II and III, but even so, a good deal has been written about it. I do not claim to have found any brand new objection to Gewirth's argument. The core of my objection occurred to me during my first reading of Reason and Morality, and it obviously occurred to a number of other people as well. 3 But it is …


Republican Legal Systems, Mortimer N.S. Sellers Jan 1998

Republican Legal Systems, Mortimer N.S. Sellers

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This paper discusses the basic attributes of republican legal systems. I will suggest that republican principles provide the only sound basis for a just legal order, and conclude that all laws in all jurisdictions deserve public deference only to the extent that they reflect republican structures of government and legislation.


Law's Normative Claims, Philip E. Soper Jan 1996

Law's Normative Claims, Philip E. Soper

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People can look at non-conforming behaviour in two ways: either the person is acting immorally or the moral theory that condemns the behaviour is mistaken. To choose the former is to reflect a confidence in the existing moral theory, while choosing the latter is evidence that moral theory for that particular behaviour is wrong. This point says a lot about the link between the descriptive and evaluative enterprises of law. The development of basic moral principles, which draws from moral intuition, is a similar process when it comes to developing social practices, which in turn draw from human behaviour. Legal …


Imagining The Law, James Boyd White Jan 1994

Imagining The Law, James Boyd White

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My aim in this paper is to trace out a certain line of thought about what it might mean to think of law rhetorically. In doing this I shall be resisting the impulse, quite common in our culture, to see the law from the outside, as a kind of intellectual and social bureaucracy; rather I am interested in seeing it from the inside, as it appears to one who is practicing or teaching it. Throughout I shall conceive of the law as a system of discourse that the lawyer and judge must learn and use, and of which we can …


The Ethics Of Meaning, James Boyd White Jan 1992

The Ethics Of Meaning, James Boyd White

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In choosing what I call "the ethics of meaning" as the subject of this chapter I bring together two of the most complex and difficult terms in our language. To begin with "meaning", few things are harder to talk about than the complex and tangled process by which what we say - or do - takes on a meaning for another. Meaning is a mixture of conscious intention and subconscious wish, of expectation and imagination, of varying and often incompatible perceptions of context, and this on the part of both writer and reader. As for "ethics": it involves nothing less …


Making Sense Of Criminal Law, James Boyd White Jan 1991

Making Sense Of Criminal Law, James Boyd White

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When a student comes to law school, he leaves behind a world he knows and understands and turns to another world, that of the law, which at the beginning he cannot comprehend. He is immersed in a body of literature that is at once assertive and confusing; he attends a series of classes in which his teacher seems to make the unsettling assumption that he already knows what he came to learn. One question he will naturally ask himself of all this - his experience of the law - is whether it makes any sense to him. And for a …


Translation, Interpretation, And The Law, James Boyd White Jan 1990

Translation, Interpretation, And The Law, James Boyd White

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As my title suggests I wish here to elaborate some connections among the practices we know as translation, interpretation, and law.


The Autonomy Of Law: Two Visions Compared, Richard O. Lempert Jan 1987

The Autonomy Of Law: Two Visions Compared, Richard O. Lempert

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During the past decade the effort to understand the place of the legal system in society has, in England and America, given rise to a renewed interest in the possibility of legal autonomy (Thompson, 1975; Balbus, 1973; 1977; Trubek, 1977). More recently, on the continent of Europe, especially in Germany, scholars have focused on an apparently radical form of autonomy — embodied in the idea of an autopoietic system — in an effort to understand how law functions (Luhmann, 1985 d; Teubner, 1984). These two approaches to understanding the legal system paint pictures that have much in common, but they …


Philosophy And The Constitution, Donald H. Regan Jan 1986

Philosophy And The Constitution, Donald H. Regan

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The Constitution is one of the great achievements of political philosophy; and it may be the only political achievement of philosophy in our society. The Framers of the Constitution and the leading participants in the debates on ratification shared a culture more thoroughly than did any later American political elite. They shared a knowledge (often distorted, but shared nevertheless) of ancient philosophy and history, of English common law, of recent English political theory, and of the European Enlightenment.They were the American branch of the Enlightenment,and salient among their membership credentials was their belief that reasoned thought about politics could guide …


Duties Of Preservation, Donald H. Regan Jan 1986

Duties Of Preservation, Donald H. Regan

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The central philosophical problem concerning our duties with regard to nature is this: We are strongly inclined to think we have certain duties which are not fully accounted for by instrumental arguments. We are also strongly inclined to hold a view about value that seems to make it impossible to account for these duties by any noninstrumental arguments. Hence our perplexity. It seems that we have duties to respect living creatures; to avoid causing the extinction of species; even to preserve complex parts of the environment s uch as a tropical rain forest or the Grand Canyon. If we ask …


Paternalism, Freedom, Identity, And Commitment, Donald H. Regan Jan 1983

Paternalism, Freedom, Identity, And Commitment, Donald H. Regan

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Some years ago, I wrote an essay entitled "Justifications for Paternalism." That essay is here revised, and expanded by the addition of a new topic. Many readers of the original version did not understand that the two principal sections presented arguments that were quite independent. I would therefore emphasize that in the present version the three principal sections (II, III, and IV) are separable one from another. Not surprisingly, in an essay so disconnected, I reach no general conclusions I have much confidence in. I suspect the reason for the failure is that I have been insufficiently daring in rejecting …


Desert And Deterrence: An Evaluation Of The Moral Bases For Capital Punishment, Richard O. Lempert Jan 1980

Desert And Deterrence: An Evaluation Of The Moral Bases For Capital Punishment, Richard O. Lempert

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Because the death penalty was so influential in its development, the law of homicide cannot be thoroughly understood without considering the subject of capital punishment. The question of whether or not the State is justified in taking an offender's life has for centuries been fraught with controversy. Moreover, the law on the subject has become enormously complicated as the courts have attempted to assure that the death penalty is fairly administered.


Justifications For Paternalism, Donald H. Regan Jan 1974

Justifications For Paternalism, Donald H. Regan

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One of the most troublesome problems concerning the appropriate extent of government interference with individuals' activity is the problem of paternalism-that is, the problem of when, if ever, the state may compel an individual to do or to refrain from some act or activity "for his own good." One would hardly know this was a troublesome problem just from looking at the literature on political and legal philosophy. It is hard to think of an influential philosophical discussion of the matter more recent than John Stuart Mill's. But paternalism is a problem which keeps coming up in discussions among philosophers …


Right1, Right2, Right3, Right4 And How About Right?, Layman E. Allen Jan 1971

Right1, Right2, Right3, Right4 And How About Right?, Layman E. Allen

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Careful communication is frequently of central importance in law. The language used to communicate even with oneself in private thought profoundly influences the quality of that effort; but when one attempts to transmit an idea to another, language assumes even greater significance because of the possibilities for enormously distorting the idea. Word-skill is to be prized. Few have expressed this more aptly or succinctly than Wesley N. Hohfeld: ...[I]n any closely reasoned problem, whether legal or nonlegal, chameleon-hued words are a peril both to clear thought and to lucid expression.