Law and Philosophy Commons^™

Jaunary 21, 2010: What’S Religion Got To Do With It?, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “What’s religion got to do with it?“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

January 19, 2010: Dances With Wolves Meets The Matrix, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “Dances with Wolves Meets The Matrix“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

January 17, 2010: Edward Schillebeeckx, 1914-2009, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “Edward Schillebeeckx, 1914-2009“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

January 14, 2010: Can Science Explain Religion?, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “Can Science Explain Religion?“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

January 12, 2010: The European Court Of Human Rights, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “The European Court of Human Rights“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

January 8, 2010: The 2010 Annual Conference On Christian Legal Thought, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “The 2010 Annual Conference on Christian Legal Thought“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

January 5, 2010: Is The World Real?, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “Is the World Real?“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

January 3, 2010: Sarah Palin As Herbert Hoover, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “Sarah Palin as Herbert Hoover“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

Seeking Common Ground: A Secular Statement, Bruce Ledewitz

Ledewitz Papers

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

The New New Secularism And The End Of The Law Of The Separation Of Church And State, Bruce Ledewitz

Ledewitz Papers

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

Shari'ah And Choice: What The United States Should Learn From Islamic Law About The Role Of Victims' Families In Death Penalty Cases, 44 J. Marshall L. Rev. 1 (2010), Susan C. Hascall

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Rawls And Reparations, Martin D. Carcieri

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

In the past two years, four related events have sharpened debates on race in the U.S.: President Obama's election, the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, that Court's ruling in Ricci v. DeStefano, and the arrest of Obama's friend, Harvard professor Henry Gates. The President has spoken of a "teaching moment" arising from these events. Moreover, his writings, speeches and lawmaking efforts illustrate the contractual nature of Obama's thinking. The President (and all concerned citizens) should thus find useful an analysis of racial policy and justice in light of the work of John Rauls. Rawls may …

Necessary Fictions: Indigenous Claims And The Humanity Of Rights, Peter Fitzpatrick

Human Rights & Human Welfare

To begin, not propitiously. When checking whether my title ‘Necessary Fictions’ was being used elsewhere, Google revealed that it was going to be used in a future talk, and by me. It transpired mercifully that this use was going to be quite different to the present which suggested the prospect of a new academic genre: same title, different paper; rather than the standard combination of same paper, different title. Fortuitously, that contrast gave me the leitmotiv for this talk – that things ostensibly the same can be different, and that things ostensibly different can be the same.

© Peter Fitzpatrick. …

In God We Trust: The Judicial Establishment Of American Civil Religion, 43 J. Marshall L. Rev. 869 (2010), James J. Knicely, John W. Whitehead

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Transformation Of Freedom Of Speech: Unsnarling The Twisted Roots Of Citizens United V. Fec, 44 J. Marshall L. Rev. 69 (2010), Steven J. André

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Abstention: The Unexpected Power Of Withholding Your Vote, Grant M. Hayden

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This Article examines the effect of abstentions on the outcome of votes. Scholars (and voters) operate under two basic assumptions about the nature of abstention. First, they assume that an abstention affects all alternatives in equal measure. Second, and relatedly, people assume that a voter’s preferred alternative will be less likely to win if that voter abstains (and, of course, more likely to win if she votes). Removing the potential full support of a vote and replacing it with the fifty-fifty proposition of an abstention should hurt the chances of a voter’s preferred alternative. These two assumptions guide the thinking …

The Federal Rules Of Civil Procedure And Legal Realism As A Jurisprudence Of Law Reform, David Marcus

Georgia Law Review

Since the 1930s, legal realism has weathered claims that its adherents had no use for legal rules and lacked a positive program of law reform. This Article uses the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, the major procedural reform of the twentieth century, to illuminate more accurately the treatment of rules in realism as well as its constructive potential. It draws upon the published and unpublished writings of Charles Clark, the primary author of the Federal Rules and a leading realist, to describe a realist procedural jurisprudence and to explain why the Federal Rules neatly illustrate this jurisprudence in practice. Part …

When And How (If At All) Does Law Constrain Official Action?, Frederick Schauer

Georgia Law Review

Debates about the obligation to obey the law have been around for literally thousands of years, but the empirical side has received much less attention. Moreover, most of the existing empirical work has focused on citizens and not officials, and consequently we know little about the extent to which law qua law motivates official action. This Article seeks to encourage empirical inquiry into the particular question of whether officials obey the law as law, independent of the content of the law and independent of the possibility of sanctions for non-compliance. It offers the hypothesis that although there is much talk …

Federal Philosophy Of Science: A Deconstruction- And A Reconstruction, Susan Haack

Articles

No abstract provided.

Bentham On Stilts: The Bare Relevance Of Subjectivity To Retributive Justice, Dan Markel, Chad Flanders, David C. Gray

All Faculty Scholarship

In recent work, various scholars have challenged retributive justice theorists to pay more attention to the subjective experience of punishment, specifically how punishment affects the experiences and well-being of offenders. The claim developed by these “subjectivists” is that because people’s experiences with pain and suffering differ, both diachronically and inter-subjectively, their punishments will have to be tailored to individual circumstances as well.

Our response is that this set of claims, once scrutinized, is either true, but of limited significance, or nontrivial, but unsound. We don’t doubt the possibility that different people will react differently to the same infliction of punishment. …

Liberalism's Ambivalence, Anne Dailey

Faculty Articles and Papers

This short comment on Nomi Stolzenberg's symposium paper, Liberalism in Love (28 Quinnipiac L. Rev. 593 (2010)), addresses the enduring conflict between rationalism and romanticism as it manifests itself in law. In psychology, the cognitive/behavioral revolution has brought about a dramatic decline in the prominence of psychoanalytic research and therapy. But I argue that this conquest should be seen more in terms of an ambivalence. In law, rationalist ideas about the self and individual decision making necessarily coexist with more romantic ideas about identity and selfhood. Nomi Stolzenberg's essay moves us to think about law in integrated terms: not defined …

Hobbes And Wolf-Man: Melancholy And Animality In Modern Sovereignty, Diego Rossello

Studio for Law and Culture

Homo homini lupus, man is a wolf to man, remains one of the most well-known and often quoted dictums in the tradition of political theory. Political theorists take this phrase by Thomas Hobbes in the Epistle Dedicatory of De Cive to illustrate the brutish, anarchical and violent condition of man in the natural condition, prior to the establishment of a civil state. Contrary to conventional wisdom, I suggest that this brief passage directs our attention to lycanthropy: an acute melancholic syndrome which 17th century physiologists thought could turn humans into animals. I suggest that Hobbes’s political theory stands for a …

Ghana Journey: Private Investment, Public Funding, And Domestic Reform, Ronald C. Griffin

Journal Publications

Some folks are good. But man is evil. He is driven by impulses, avarice, reason, scholarship, and barbarism. Ghana's history affirms some of the social and philosophical claims about man and evil. A scholarly narrative about American economic life, trenched in Ghana like an overlay, will unveil bits about big businesses, small businesses, and doing business in Ghana.

Empirical Desert And The Moral Economy Of Punishment, Zachary R. Calo

Scholarly Works

This paper considers Paul Robinson's theory of empirical desert as an argument for moving beyond the debate between utilitarian and retributivist accounts of punishment. It is argued that empirical desert, in its attempt to replace philosophy with the insights of the social and biological sciences, fails to ground the foundational act of punishment in an adequate theoretical warrant. A particular problem confronting empirical desert is that while Robinson shifts the locus of punishment from theory to the intuitions of the relevant community, he does not adequately account for the dynamic process by which communities shape and structure their internal moral …

Visionary Pragmatism And The Value Of Privacy In The Twenty-First Century, Danielle Keats Citron, Leslie Meltzer Henry

Michigan Law Review

Part I of our Review discusses the central premises of Understanding Privacy, with particular attention paid to Solove's pragmatic methodology and his taxonomy of privacy. We introduce his pluralistic approach to conceptualizing privacy, which urges decision makers to assess privacy problems in context, and we explore his view that meaningful choices about privacy depend on an appreciation of how privacy benefits society as a whole. We also describe how Solove's taxonomy aims to account for the variety of activities that threaten privacy. In Part II, we analyze the strengths of Solove's pragmatism by demonstrating its functionality and flexibility in …

Susan Wolf On The Meaning Of Life: A Review, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

The book comprises the two Tanner Lectures given by Susan Wolf at Princeton in 2007; helpful comments by John Koethe, Robert M. Adams, Nomy Arpaly, and Jonathan Haidt;Wolf ’s replies; and a brief introduction by Stephen Macedo. Wolf writes elegantly and thoughtfully, and the book, which seems to preserve in length and style its origins as two lectures, is full of sensible, suggestive ideas. The Tanner Lectures are meant to reach a nonspecialist audience, and some specialist readers may wish to have more on less, a desire likely to affect especially those who, like myself, share Wolf ’s basic approach …

On Respect, Authority & Neutrality: A Response, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

I owe a great debt to Professors Wall, Darwall, and Green for their willingness to challenge, develop, and question some of my publications, which forced me to confront a few of the shortcomings in my views and, I hope, to clarify and improve some of them. Given the diversity of the topics, I respond to each separately. I aimed to avoid minor points and to write only on matters which affect the cogency of my views or theirs on important issues.1 For that reason, as well as for reasons of space, not all the issues they raise are dealt …

Philosophical Legal Ethics: Ethics, Morals, And Jurisprudence, Alice Woolley, W. Bradley Wendel, William H. Simon, Stephen Pepper, Daniel Markovitz, Katherine R. Kruse, Tim Dare

Faculty Scholarship

The authors and moderator David Luban participated in a plenary session of the International Legal Ethics Conference IV, held at Stanford. Each author answered and discussed questions arising from short papers they had written about the principal concern of legal ethics was the morality of lawyers, the morality of clients, or the morality of laws?

Those papers, which are to be published in Legal Ethics, are compiled here, along with the question and background information with which the panelists were provided.

Being In The World, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

Actions for which we are responsible constitute our engagement with the world as rational agents. What is the relationship between such actions and our capacities for rational agency? I take this to be a question about responsibility in a particular use of that term, which I shall call ‘responsibility’. We are not responsible for all our intentional actions (actions under hypnosis, for example), but we can nevertheless be responsible for actions we do not adequately control, for negligent actions, and for non‐intentional omissions. Appreciating this helps show that familiar principles of responsibility are false: those which delimit responsibility to intentional …

Human Rights Without Foundations, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

This is a good time for human rights. Not that they are respected more than in the past. The flagrant resort to kidnapping, arbitrary arrests, and torture by the United States of America (USA), and the unprecedented restriction of individual freedom in the USA, and in Great Britain (GB), cast doubt about that. It is a good time for human rights in that claims about such rights are used more widely in the conduct of world affairs than before. There are declarations of and treaties about human rights, international courts and tribunals with jurisdiction over various human right violations. They …