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Articles 31 - 60 of 242
Full-Text Articles in Law and Philosophy
Democratic Justice In Transition, Marion Smiley
Democratic Justice In Transition, Marion Smiley
Michigan Law Review
Ruti Teitel's Transitional Justice and Ian Shapiro's Democratic Justice come out of very different academic traditions. But they both develop a view of justice that might loosely be called pragmatic by virtue of its treatment of justice as a value that is simultaneously grounded in practice and powerful in bringing about social and political change. Moreover, they both use this shared pragmatic view of justice to provide us with two things that are of great importance to the study of transitional justice and democracy in general. The first is an explanatory framework for understanding how legal institutions and claims about …
Where Is My Body? Stanley Fish's Long Goodbye To Law, Richard Delgado
Where Is My Body? Stanley Fish's Long Goodbye To Law, Richard Delgado
Michigan Law Review
Stanley Fish, author of Doing What Comes Naturally, Is There a Text in This Class?, There's No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It's a Good Thing, Too, and other paradigm-shifting books, and who recently left law teaching for a position in university administration, has written one last volume giving his colleagues in the profession he left behind something to think about. In his previous work, Fish, who taught English and law at Duke University, addressed central legal issues such as meaning, communication, and textual interpretation, challenging such received wisdoms as that every text has a single, determinate meaning, or …
Governmental Illegitimacy And Neocolonialism: Response To Review By James Thuo Gathii, Brad R. Roth
Governmental Illegitimacy And Neocolonialism: Response To Review By James Thuo Gathii, Brad R. Roth
Michigan Law Review
The essence of James Thuo Gathii's criticism of Governmental Illegitimacy in International Law is that my study seeks to answer a doctrinal question rather than to challenge the "Eurocentric" assumptions that pervade doctrinal thinking. Although I (inevitably) take exception to some of Professor Gathii's characterizations of the book's details, an elaborate clarification and defense of these finer points would amount to an uninteresting response to an interesting essay. Indeed, since Gathii characterizes the book as "well written, well-argued, and well-researched," and since I am in sympathy with the considerations that prompt him to go beyond the scope of what I …
On The Nature Of Norms: Biology, Morality, And The Disruption Of Order, Owen D. Jones
On The Nature Of Norms: Biology, Morality, And The Disruption Of Order, Owen D. Jones
Michigan Law Review
For a long time - and through the now-quaint division of disciplines - morals and norms have been set apart from other behaviorbiasing phenomena. They have also been set apart from each other. Morals are generally ceded in full to philosophers. Norms have been ceded to sociologists. In retrospect, it is not clear why this should be so. Reality is notoriously impervious to taxonomy, and the axis supposedly distinguishing morals from other norms is, after all, arbitrary. Moreover, behavior-biasing phenomena interact in important ways, making the study of parts - without more - just the study of parts. But one …
The Postmodern Infiltration Of Legal Scholarship, Arthur Austin
The Postmodern Infiltration Of Legal Scholarship, Arthur Austin
Michigan Law Review
For legal scholars it is the best of times. We are inundated by an eclectic range of writing that pushes the envelope from analysis and synthesis to the upper reaches of theory. Mainstream topics face fierce competition from fresh ideological visions, a variety of genres, and spirited criticism of the status quo. Young professors have access to a burgeoning variety of journals to circulate their ideas and advice while the mass media covets them as public intellectuals. There is a less sanguine mood; an increasingly vocal group of scholars complain that it is the worst of times and refer to …
Foreword: The Question Of Process, J. Harvie Wilkinson Iii
Foreword: The Question Of Process, J. Harvie Wilkinson Iii
Michigan Law Review
Many in the legal profession have abandoned the great questions of legal process. This is too bad. How a decision is reached can be as important as what the decision is. In an increasingly diverse country with many competing visions of the good, it is critical for law to aspire to agreement on process - a task both more achievable than agreement on substance and more suited to our profession than waving the banners of ideological truth. By process, I mean the institutional routes by which we in America reach our most crucial decisions. In other words, process is our …
Rejoinder: Twailing International Law, James Thuo Gathii
Rejoinder: Twailing International Law, James Thuo Gathii
Michigan Law Review
Brad Roth's response to my Review of his book seeks to privilege his approach to international law as the most defensible. His response does not engage one of the central claims of my Review - that present within international legal scholarship and praxis is a simultaneous and dialectical coexistence of the dominant conservative/liberal approach with alternative or Third World approaches to thinking and writing international law. Roth calls these alternative approaches critical and does not consider them insightful for purposes of dealing with issues such as anticolonialism. Roth's characterization of my Review as falling within critical approaches to international law …
Neoliberalism, Colonialism, And International Governance: Decentering The International Law Of Government Legitimacy, James Thuo Gathii
Neoliberalism, Colonialism, And International Governance: Decentering The International Law Of Government Legitimacy, James Thuo Gathii
Michigan Law Review
Brad R. Roth's Governmental Illegitimacy in International Law is a neoconservative realist response to liberal internationalists (or universalists). As a critique, the book unsurprisingly legitimizes the subject of its attack: liberal internationalism. That is so since in their opposition to each other, liberal internationalists and neoconservative realists fall within the same discursive formation - a Euro-American hegemony of thinking, writing, critiquing, engaging, producing, and practicing international law. This Review is an antihegemonic critique. It seeks to decenter this Euro-American opposition between liberal internationalism and neoconservative realism that has characterized the study of international law, especially in the post-Cold War period. …
Subversive Thoughts On Freedom And The Common Good, Larry Alexander, Maimon Schwarzschild
Subversive Thoughts On Freedom And The Common Good, Larry Alexander, Maimon Schwarzschild
Michigan Law Review
Richard Epstein is a rare and forceful voice against the conventional academic wisdom of our time. Legal scholarship of the past few decades overwhelmingly supports more government regulation and more power for the courts, partly in order to control businesses for environmental and other reasons, but more broadly in hopes of achieving egalitarian outcomes along the famous lines of race, gender, and class. Epstein is deeply skeptical that any of this is the shining path to a better world. Epstein's moral criterion for evaluating social policy is to look at how fully it allows individual human beings to satisfy their …
Positivism, Emergent And Triumphant, Vincent A. Wellman
Positivism, Emergent And Triumphant, Vincent A. Wellman
Michigan Law Review
Positivism is one of those words that triggers passionate and often contradictory responses. For some, positivism is a pejorative. Lon Fuller, perhaps more than anyone, charged that positivism was confused about the nature of law, blind to law's inherent morality, and morally corrupting to boot. He even suggested, in different ways, that positivism helped promote the rise of fascism in Europe. Others, in contrast, have treated positivism as a modest and undeniable truth about law. Law, they argued, is morally fallible, and accordingly, the existence and validity of law is a matter of social fact rather than moral necessity. H.L.A. …
In Defense Of The Good Samaritan, Hanoch Dagan
In Defense Of The Good Samaritan, Hanoch Dagan
Michigan Law Review
In the year 1880, in Dalles City, Oregon, a large and valuable load of lumber fell into the Columbia River and was about to be carried away by the river's waters. Since Savage, the owner of this lumber, was absent from the scene, Glenn - who, at that time, was doing construction work for Savage - "furnished help and did service" in saving the lumber "from being washed away and lost." Seven years later, the Supreme Court of Oregon rejected Glenn's claim that Savage owed him "the reasonable value" of his services as well as of the services of the …
Apparently Substantial, Oddly Hollow: The Enigmatic Practice Of Justice, Heidi Li Feldman
Apparently Substantial, Oddly Hollow: The Enigmatic Practice Of Justice, Heidi Li Feldman
Michigan Law Review
The Practice of Justice: A Theory of Lawyers' Ethics, by William H. Simon, is one of the most thoughtful and important books in legal theory - not just legal ethics - published in the past ten years. Like David Luban's seminal contribution to legal ethics, Lawyers and Justice: An Ethical Study, published a decade ago, Simon's book is a deliberate rival to accounts of lawyers' professional responsibility that begin with a command to zealous advocacy, end with a prohibition on outright illegal conduct, and offer nothing in between. Authors and commentators have grown increasingly dissatisfied with this as the basic …
The Myth Of Choice Of Law: Rethinking Conflicts, Kermit Roosevelt Iii
The Myth Of Choice Of Law: Rethinking Conflicts, Kermit Roosevelt Iii
Michigan Law Review
Choice of law is a mess. That much has become a truism. It is a "dismal swamp," a morass of confusion, a body of doctrine "killed by a realism intended to save it," and now "universally said to be a disaster." One way to demonstrate its tribulations would be to look at the academic dissensus and the hopelessly underdeterminative Restatement (Second) of Conflict of Laws. Another would be to examine the Supreme Court's abdication of the task of articulating constitutional constraints on state choice-of-law rules. This article will do both. At the outset, though, I want to suggest that one …
The Distributive Foundation Of Corrective Justice, Hanoch Dagan
The Distributive Foundation Of Corrective Justice, Hanoch Dagan
Michigan Law Review
There are two, apparently conflicting, approaches to private law theorizing. One approach - by now, dare I say, the prevailing approach - analyzes private law through the lens of its social, economic, cultural, or political meanings and ramifications. For the purposes of this Article, we may call the proponents of this approach the "social values school." Other theorists, those who take a corrective justice approach, insist that the adjective "private" is significant and should be the starting point for any understanding of "private law." They claim that this starting point inevitably generates a radically different understanding of private law. Organized …
Farewell To An Idea? Ideology In Legal Theory, David Charny
Farewell To An Idea? Ideology In Legal Theory, David Charny
Michigan Law Review
In 1956, Morocco inaugurated a constitutional democratic polity on the Western model. Elections were to be held, and political parties formed, with voters to be registered by party. The Berbers, however, did not join the parties as individual voters. Each Berber clan joined their chosen party as a unit. To consecrate (or, perhaps, to accomplish) the clan's choice, a bullock was sacrificed. These sacrificial rites offer a useful parable about the relationship between law and culture. The social order imposed by law depends crucially on the "culture" of the participants in the system - their habits, dispositions, views of the …
Rights Against Rules: The Moral Structure Of American Constitutional Law, Matthew D. Adler
Rights Against Rules: The Moral Structure Of American Constitutional Law, Matthew D. Adler
Michigan Law Review
The Bill of Rights, by means of open-ended terms such as "freedom of speech," "equal protection," or "due process," refers to moral criteria, which take on constitutional status by virtue of being thus referenced. We can disagree about whether the proper methodology for judicial application of these criteria is originalist or nonoriginalist. The originalist looks, not to the true content of the moral criteria named by the Constitution, but to the framers' beliefs about that content; the nonoriginalist tries to determine what the criteria truly require, and ignores or gives less weight to the framers' views. Bracketing this disagreement, however, …
Reply: Is Ignorance Of Fact An Excuse Only For The Virtuous?, Dan M. Kahan
Reply: Is Ignorance Of Fact An Excuse Only For The Virtuous?, Dan M. Kahan
Michigan Law Review
Professor Yeager's thoughtful response to my essay has convinced me that there is indeed a connection worth noting between the mistake of law doctrine and the mistake of fact doctrine. Yeager suggests that my position on mistake of law reduces to the view that someone who would be guilty of a "lesser wrong" were things as he perceived them to be may be punished for the "greater wrong" that he actually commits - a conception of mistake of fact that has provoked fierce denunciation from commentators. But I would in fact put things slightly differently: under both doctrines courts excuse …
Kahan On Mistakes, Daniel Yeager
Kahan On Mistakes, Daniel Yeager
Michigan Law Review
In Ignorance of Law Is an Excuse - but Only for the Virtuous, Professor Dan Kahan reconciles what I had thought was an irreconcilable body of law. To be sure, imposing order on whether and when mistakes of law should pass as responsibility-evading accounts of untoward actions is far from light work. Yet Kahan somehow pulls it off in just twenty-seven pages. In addition to acknowledging the importance of Professor Kahan's essay, I write here to point out if not correct what might have been two oversights in his view of the meaning and operation of mistakes. First, Kahan never …
Review Of What Are Freedoms For?, By John H. Garvey, Scott D. Pomfret
Review Of What Are Freedoms For?, By John H. Garvey, Scott D. Pomfret
Michigan Law Review
In 1988, Jeffrey Kendall and Barbara Zeitler Kendall were married. Though Jeffrey was Catholic at the time and Barbara was Jewish, the couple agreed to raise their children in Barbara's faith. In 1991, Jeffrey joined Boston Church of Christ, a fundamentalist Christian church. The tenets of that faith include a belief that those who do not accept Jesus Christ are damned to Hell, where there will be "weeping and gnashing of teeth." Barbara's faith also underwent a change during the marriage: she became an Orthodox Jew. Citing irreconcilable differences, the Kendalls sought a divorce in November, 1994. Before their marriage …
The Origin, Development, And Regulation Of Norms, Richard H. Mcadams
The Origin, Development, And Regulation Of Norms, Richard H. Mcadams
Michigan Law Review
For decades, sociologists have employed the concept of social norms to explain how society shapes individual behavior. In recent years, economists and rational choice theorists in philosophy and political science have started to use individual behavior to explain the origin and function of norms. For many in this group, the focus of study is the interaction of law and norms, of formal and informal rules. Exemplified by Robert Ellickson's Order Without Law, this literature uses norms to develop more robust explanations of behavior and to predict more accurately the effect of legal rules. Norms turn out to matter in legal …
The Empty Circles Of Liberal Justification, Pierre Schlag
The Empty Circles Of Liberal Justification, Pierre Schlag
Michigan Law Review
American liberal thinkers are fascinated with the justification of the liberal state. It is this question of justification that inspires and organizes the work of such leading liberal thinkers as John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, Frank Michelman, and Bruce Ackerman. The manifest import and prevalence of the question of justification among liberal thinkers makes it possible to speak here of a certain "practice of liberal justification." This practice displays a certain order and certain recursive characteristics. It is composed of a common ontology and a common narrative. It poses for itself a series of recursive intellectual problems answered with a stock …
Ignorance Of Law Is An Excuse - But Only For The Virtuous, Dan M. Kahan
Ignorance Of Law Is An Excuse - But Only For The Virtuous, Dan M. Kahan
Michigan Law Review
It's axiomatic that "ignorance of the law is no excuse." My aim in this essay is to examine what the "mistake of law doctrine" reveals about the relationship between criminal law and morality in general and about the law's understanding of moral responsibility in particular. The conventional understanding of the mistake of law doctrine rests on two premises, which are encapsulated in the Holmesian epigrams with which I've started this essay. The first is liberal positivism. As a descriptive claim, liberal positivism holds that the content of the law can be identified without reference to morality: one needn't be a …
The First Amendment Comes Of Age: The Emergence Of Free Speech In Twentieth-Century America, G. Edward White
The First Amendment Comes Of Age: The Emergence Of Free Speech In Twentieth-Century America, G. Edward White
Michigan Law Review
As the number of issues perceived as having First Amendment implications continues to grow, and the coterie of potential beneficiaries of First Amendment protection continues to widen - including not only the traditional oppressed mavericks and despised dissenters but some rich and powerful members from the circles of political and economic orthodoxy - alarms have been sounded. Another period of stocktaking for free speech theory appears to be dawning, and some recent commentators have proposed a retrenchment from the long twentieth- century progression of increasingly speech-protective interpretations of the First Amendment. At the heart of the retrenchment literature lies the …
The Politics Of Postmodern Jurisprudence, Stephen M. Feldman
The Politics Of Postmodern Jurisprudence, Stephen M. Feldman
Michigan Law Review
What is the politics of postmodern jurisprudence? Forms of postmodern interpretivism, including philosophical hermeneutics and deconstruction, assert that we are always and already interpreting. This assertion has provoked numerous scholarly attacks, many of which invoke standard modernist hobgoblins such as textual indeterminacy, solipsism, ethical relativism, and nihilism. From the modernist standpoint, postmodern jurisprudence thus is either conservative or apolitical because it lacks the firm foundations necessary for knowledge and critique. In this article, I argue that these modernist attacks not only are mistaken but that they also obscure the potentially radical political ramifications of postmodern interpretivism. My discussion focuses on …
Searching For Positivism, Philip Soper
Searching For Positivism, Philip Soper
Michigan Law Review
A Review of W.J. Waluchow, Inclusive Legal Positivism
Gossip And Metaphysics: The Personal Turn In Jurisprudential Writing, Michael Ansaldi
Gossip And Metaphysics: The Personal Turn In Jurisprudential Writing, Michael Ansaldi
Michigan Law Review
A Review of Neil Duxbury, Patterns of American Jurisprudence and John Henry Schlegel American Legal Realism and Empirical Social Science
Post Constitutionalism, Lawrence Lessig
Post Constitutionalism, Lawrence Lessig
Michigan Law Review
A Review of Robert C. Post, Constitutional Domains: Democracy, Community, Management
Progress And Constitutionalism, Robert F. Nagel
Progress And Constitutionalism, Robert F. Nagel
Michigan Law Review
A Review of Robin West, Progressive Constitutionalism: Reconstructing the Fourteenth Amendment
Words That Bind: Judicial Review And The Grounds Of Modern Constitutional Theory, John A. Drennan
Words That Bind: Judicial Review And The Grounds Of Modern Constitutional Theory, John A. Drennan
Michigan Law Review
A Review of John Arthur, Words That Bind: Judicial Review and the Grounds of Modern Constitutional Theory
Misunderstanding Positivism, Anthony J. Sebok
Misunderstanding Positivism, Anthony J. Sebok
Michigan Law Review
It is important that I point out the limited purposes of this article. I cannot, in the context of the argument I make, prove that positivism will not inevitably collapse into a conservative theory of law. Nor can I prove that positivism is not vulnerable to jurisprudential arguments unrelated to the attempt to link positivism with formalism, legal process, and originalism. I recognize that strong arguments have been made that modem positivism's attempts to divorce itself from classical positivism's command theory of law has opened up more problems than it has solved. I have certain views on whether that divorce …