Law and Philosophy Commons^™

Foreword, Jedediah Britton-Purdy, Justin Deystone

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No abstract provided.

Law As A Form Of Life: On Capitalism And Critical Theory, Justin Deystone

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Foreword, Jedediah Britton-Purdy, Justin Deystone

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No abstract provided.

Against The Wind: James Boyd White And The Struggle To Keep Law Alive, Todd M. Stafford

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Introduction To The Symposium: The Stakes For Critical Legal Theory, Elizabeth S. Anker, Justin Deystone

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Deep Cuts: Four Critiques Of Legal Ideology, Justin Deystone, Akbar Rasulov

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This Article begins an effort to rekindle the intellectual tradition of critical legal theory. The context for the project is significant. On the one hand is the grip of a social crisis, the contours of which continue to confound the commentariat. Racism, xenophobia, gendered violence, migration and nation, climate change, health pandemics, political corruption. The parade is as intimidating as it is spectacular. On the other hand, the very tools of criticism we depend upon in identifying these characters in the parade, much less the spectacle of the parade itself, are themselves in crisis. There is, in a word, a …

Shareholder Primacy And The Moral Obligation Of Directors, Mark J. Loewenstein, Jay Geyer

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One of the most written-about and important topics in corporate law is the fiduciary obligations of corporate directors. Increasingly, critics of American capitalism have urged that corporations, and implicitly, corporate directors, act in a more socially responsible fashion and thus eschew the notion that shareholder primacy is the exclusive guide to a director’s fiduciary duty. Under this view, directors must consider the effect of their actions on “stakeholders” other than shareholders and be guided by morality—doing the right thing—when making business judgments.

When directors move away from shareholder primacy, however, decision-making becomes more difficult and problematic. This article analyzes the …

Global Energy Poverty: The Relevance Of Faith And Reason, Lakshman Guruswamy

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The challenge of energy poverty (EP) primarily confronts the least developed countries (LDCs) of the world, located in Africa and Asia, but is also prevalent within segments of more advanced developing countries in Asia. This article will first delineate the nature of global energy poverty that results in the premature deaths of millions of people and leads to pervasive sickness among many more millions. The article will next sketch the legal and political responses to this problem that have generally applied principles of sustainable development (SD) and the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of 2015 adopted by the General Assembly …

Love, Anger, And Social Change, Deborah J. Cantrell

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Emotions matter to social movement activists—including social movement lawyers. Emotions motivate activism and emotions sustain the long hard work of social change. Movement activists and lawyers know that from their own lived experiences. Further, when we listen to movement activists talk about their work, we hear them speak commonly about two emotions in particular—love and anger. To be a social movement activist (whether lawyer or non-lawyer) means to have passion about one’s cause, and to have a fire in the belly to keep going despite setbacks and slow progress. We hear activists and movement lawyers talk about how the love …

Artificial Intelligence And Law: An Overview, Harry Surden

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Much has been written recently about artificial intelligence (AI) and law. But what is AI, and what is its relation to the practice and administration of law? This article addresses those questions by providing a high-level overview of AI and its use within law. The discussion aims to be nuanced but also understandable to those without a technical background. To that end, I first discuss AI generally. I then turn to AI and how it is being used by lawyers in the practice of law, people and companies who are governed by the law, and government officials who administer the …

On Creativity In Constitutional Interpretation, Pierre Schlag

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In the present article a particular aspect of constitutional interpretation will be considered. This aspect is called "creative" and involves retrieving the meaning of an object of interpretation. It is with regard to this particular aspect or moment of interpretation that creativity is often viewed as something to be avoided, to be shunned. If the task at hand is to "retrieve" some meaning, then the idea that this meaning can be created, in whole or in part, seems quite simply antithetical to the enterprise at hand. It suffices to note that many jurists and legal thinkers believe that interpretation as …

Experimental Pragmatism In The Third Globalization, Justin Deystone

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Pragmatism dominates contemporary legal thought, but knowing this isn’t knowing so much. Legal pragmatism means different things to different people, and as this essay argues, minimalist and experimentalist forms of regulation both share a broadly pragmatic sensibility about law and democracy. As a consequence, we need to tease out the various threads of legal pragmatism in the hope of distinguishing the pragmatisms that work from the ones that don’t, or less pragmatically, the ones that are just from the ones that are not. This knowledge will come from an ongoing assessment of the political stakes immanent in the pragmatisms, and …

"Other Spaces" In Legal Pedagogy, Lolita Buckner Inniss

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There is an increasing focus upon the material and metaphoric spatial dimensions of various academic disciplines, including law. This essay considers the spatial dimensions of legal pedagogy, focusing on Critical Race Theory (CRT). The essay first explains the "critical program" in law and how CRT grows out of it. The essay then suggests that the critical program, and especially CRT, is as much a human geographic or spatial construct as it is a social, political or historic one, and briefly describes the nature of human geography and legal geography. It next considers how metaphors for understanding CRT's position in legal …

Marriage And Practical Knowledge, Robert F. Nagel

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The Concept Of "Less Eligibility" And The Social Function Of Prison Violence In Class Society, Ahmed A. White

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At War With The Eclectics: Mapping Pragmatism In Contemporary Legal Analysis, Justin Deystone

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This Article has two primary goals. The first is descriptive and seeks to respond to what appears to be an increasing degree of confusion over the word "pragmatism," especially as it is used in a good deal of legal literature. This descriptive aim begins by separating out three general categories of pragmatism: (1) the so-called "everyday" pragmatism familiar to the American vernacular, (2) the classical philosophy of the early pragmatist authors like William James and John Dewey, and (3) pragmatism as understood in the context of law. The majority of the Article is subsequently concerned with exploring this last category, …

Liberalism And Ability Taxation, David Hasen

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Recent tax scholarship has embraced the idea of individual endowment taxation, or taxation of human abilities, as an approach to ideal tax theory. Under endowment taxation, individuals are taxed according to their native abilities to command resources, rather than according to any actual index of goods or expenditures, such as income, consumption, or wealth, that otherwise might be thought relevant to the assignment of tax burdens. This Article argues that endowment taxation is incompatible with political theories that might broadly be described as "liberal," to the extent such theories support redistribution. It also argues that limited forms of endowment taxation …

A Psychology Of Emotional Legal Decision Making: Revulsion And Saving Face In Legal Theory And Practice, Peter H. Huang, Christopher J. Anderson

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Professor Martha C. Nussbaum is an accomplished scholar in an impressive variety of fields. Drawing on her diverse academic backgrounds, Nussbaum has written extensively about emotions and their importance for law from the perspective of her primary specialty, philosophy. Her book Hiding from Humanity criticizes the roles that two particular emotions, disgust and shame, play in the law. Its central thesis is that, as legal actors, we should be wary of disgust and shame because indulging in those emotions allows us to hide from our humanity - both our humanity in the general sense and also those specific features of …

Three Versions Of Nonsense, Paul Campos

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Righting Victim Wrongs: Responding To Philosophical Criticisms Of The Nonspecific Victim Liability Defense, Aya Gruber

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Modern criminal law is intensely one-sided in its treatment of victims and defendants. Crime victims and criminal defendants do not enter the trial process on an equal moral footing. Rather, from the beginning victims are assumed blameless, truthful, and even beyond doubt, while defendants are guilty, not worthy of credence, and immoral. This one-sided view of victims, however, is a fiction. As any other people, victims differ in their characterizations. Some are indeed trustworthy, truthful, blameless and ultimately innocent. Others, however, are bad actors themselves, have memory failures, falsely identify, provoke, and even lie. Some victims are in fact, and …

My Dinner At Langdell's, Pierre Schlag

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This essay begins on one of those cold wet April Cambridge mornings. It was too wet for fog, but too indifferent for rain. My head ached. My lips were dry and my tongue felt bloated. The fever had surely come back. Worse - the laudanum was wearing off. Tonight would be dinner at Langdell's. It occurred to me that not everyone is invited to Langdell's for dinner - certainly not wayward law professors from the provinces. This was an extraordinary opportunity. Blackstone would be there. Duncan Kennedy perhaps. Certainly the early Llewellyn. I knocked on the door.

A Bad Subject, Daria Roithmayr

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Preferences And Rational Choice: New Perspectives And Legal Implications: Introduction, Matthew D. Adler, Claire Finkelstein, Peter H. Huang

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Book Review, Lakshman Guruswamy

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Mountains Without Handrails … Wilderness Without Cellphones, Sarah Krakoff

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Easy For You To Say: An Essay On Outsiders, The Usefulness Of Reason, And Radical Pragmatism, Daria Roithmayr

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In this essay, I argue that Schlag's critique of reason fails to take into account the concerns of people of color and women in two ways. First, it fails to address the way in which the ideology of reason structures racial and gendered power. Second, it fails to consider the value of the ideology of reason for people of color and women, both of whom might extract political gain from deploying the incumbent ideology to their advantage. I offer a version of radical pragmatism that attempts to reconcile Schlag's critique of reason with these criticisms.

The Aesthetics Of American Law, Pierre Schlag

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Before the ethical dreams and political ambitions of law can even be articulated, let alone realized, the aesthetics of law have already shaped the medium within which those projects will have to do their work. This work attempts to retrieve and expose those recurrent forms that shape the creation, apprehension, and identity of law. What is at stake is an attempt to reveal the aesthetics within which American law is cast. The point is not simply to appreciate these aesthetics, but to understand how "substantive" conflicts in law are often motivated, sustained and circumscribed by the aesthetics through which they …

What The Twins Saw, Paul F. Campos

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Sex And The Social Order: The Selective Enforcement Of Colonial American Adultery Laws In The English Context, Carolyn B. Ramsey

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Introduction: Symposium On Constitutional Elitism, Robert F. Nagel

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