Law and Philosophy Commons^™

Production, Not Dependence: The Metaphysics Of Causation And Its Role In Explanation, Responsibility, And The Law, Yuval Abrams

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Causation is production, not dependence. It is not merely a matter of how two facts or events covary, but about what underlies that covariation. Furthermore, causation is unified (not fragmented or plural) and is a natural relation (in the world). To cause is to make something happen, to generate. The causal nexus (the web of causal influence) consists entirely of productive positive causes. With these fixed, the (causal) dependence relations are determined.

Dependence belongs to the theory of explanation. Causal dependence is an explanatory notion: A causally explains B, in virtue of a causal relation between cause C and effect …

Reporting Certainty, James A. Macleod

BYU Law Review

Legal theorists, judges, and legal writing instructors persistently decry the assertions of certainty—”obviously X,” “undoubtedly Y,” etc.—that litter judicial opinions. According to the conventional view, the rhetoric of certainty that these assertions epitomize is disingenuous. It also reflects, and even encourages, poor judicial decision-making. And as if that were not enough, it is so unpersuasive that it is counter-persuasive: it signals uncertainty, nonobviousness, etc.—the exact opposite of what its author intends. Judges, for these and other reasons, should abstain from needless assertions of certainty and the myopic thinking they evince. That much is certain.

Yet the rhetoric of certainty persists. …

The Effects Of Rejecting Mind-Body Dualism On U.S. Law, Matthew W. Lawrence

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

While neuroscience continues to make it clearer that mental processes, effects, disorders, and states can be described through physical observation, the metaphysical notion of mind-body dualism still pervades the U.S. legal system. In this Article, I discuss many areas where mind-body dualism holds fast, and others where mind-body dualism has already been explicitly or impliedly rejected. I argue that in most areas, the dualist distinction would have little to no impact on the values the law already describes. However, I argue that rejecting dualism would have an impact on fundamental rights analyses. First Amendment free speech rights, fundamental rights, and …

Mercy Otis Warren: Republican Scribe And Defender Of Liberties, Mary Kathryn Mueller

Bound Away: The Liberty Journal of History

An active proponent of republican government, Mercy Otis Warren had a significant role in the revolutionary period. She was a woman who was close to the action, well-acquainted with the central figures, and instrumental in bringing about the monumental changes in America in the late 1700s. Referred to as the “muse of the revolution,”[1] Mercy Otis Warren used her pen to significantly broaden the colonial understanding of a republican form of government and passionately promote it. From a collection of early poems and political satires written in the years preceding the war to her epic history of the revolution published …

January 18, 2020: Tamsin Shaw And “The Need For Us To Converge On Some Shared Values To Have A Functioning Form Of Government.”, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, Tamsin Shaw and “the need for us to converge on some shared values to have a functioning form of government.” discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

January 4, 2020: David, It Was Already Done--It's Called Hallowed Secularism, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “David, It Was Already Done--It's Called Hallowed Secularism“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

Saving Judicial Independence From The Nihilism Of Court-Packing, Bruce Ledewitz

Ledewitz Papers

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

Beyond Settlement: Reconceptualizing Adr As “Conflict Process Strategy”, Deborah Thompson Eisenberg

Faculty Scholarship

“Alternative dispute resolution” or “ADR” has reached a paradoxical moment: it is both ubiquitous in practice and at risk of extinction as a distinct concept and field. As the ADR field nears middle age—nearly fifty years after the Pound Conference of 1976—“ADR” has become so popular in name, fractured in practice, and jumbled in theory that it risks a metaphorical genericide, a concept in trademark law when a product name is used to refer to so many things (incorrectly) that it becomes “generic” and confusing. Analogously, the name “ADR” has been applied to so many different processes and concepts that …

Practical Truth: The Value Of Apparent Honesty In Supreme Court Opinions, Timothy C. Macdonnell

Scholarly Articles

Judicial honesty or judicial candor is the subject of significant scholarly attention, but it is not the focus of this Essay. Rather, the author's focus is on the importance that appearing honest has on the persuasive force of an opinion and the dangers associated with failing to achieve that goal. This distinction is not intended to suggest Justices should seek apparent honesty while not being actually honest. Rather, this Essay emphasizes that actually honest opinions must also be apparently honest. Thus, judicial candor is necessary to apparent honesty, but it is not always sufficient on its own.

To support the …

The Moral Weight Of Preferences: Death, Sex, And Dementia, Shannon Fyfe, Elizabeth Lanphier

Scholarly Articles

In "Cognitive Transformation, Dementia, and the Moral Weight of Advance Directives," Emily Walsh raises pertinent questions regarding the stability of preferences, and interests, across time, particularly in the setting of dementia diagnosis (Walsh 2020). Advance directive policy and practice rely on an at least somewhat coherent account of personal identity, and we largely agree with Walsh that dementia raises complex issues for philosophical accounts of personal identity.

Gamesmanship And Criminal Process, John D. King

Scholarly Articles

We first learn formal structures of rules, procedures, and norms of conduct through games and sports. These lessons illuminate and inform human behavior in other contexts, including the adversarial world of criminal litigation. As critiques of the legitimacy and fairness of the criminal justice system increase, the philosophy and jurisprudence of sport offer a comparative legal system to examine criminal litigation. Allegations of gamesmanship—the aggressive and strategic use of rules that violate some sense of decorum or culture yet remain within the formal rules of engagement—cut across both contexts. This Article examines what sports can teach us about gamesmanship in …

The Case For Valuing Non-Health And Indirect Benefits, Govind Persad, Jessica Du Toit

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Health policy is only one part of social policy. Although spending administered by the health sector constitutes a sizeable fraction of total state spending in most countries, other sectors such as education and transportation also represent major portions of national budgets. Additionally, though health is one important aspect of economic and social activity, people pursue many other goals in their social and economic lives. Similarly, direct benefits—those that are immediate results of health policy choices—are only a small portion of the overall impact of health policy. This chapter considers what weight health policy should give to its “spill-over effects,” namely …

Expensive Patients, Reinsurance, And The Future Of Health Care Reform, Govind Persad

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

In 2017, Americans spent over $3.4 trillion-nearly 18% of gross domestic product-on health care. This spending is unevenly distributed: Almost a quarter is spent on the costliest 1% of patients, and almost half on the costliest 5%. Most of these patients soon return to a lower percentile, but many continue or economic, analysis of existing and proposed options for sharing expensive patients' costs. Third, it bridges the disconnected literature on reinsurance, limit setting, and health care financing, identifying how proposals in these different areas intersect. to incur health care costs in the top percentiles year after year. This Article focuses …

Disability Law And The Case For Evidence-Based Triage In A Pandemic, Govind Persad

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

This Essay explains why model policies proposed or adopted in response to the COVID-19 pandemic that allocate scarce medical resources by using medical evidence to pursue two core goals—saving more lives and saving more years of life—are compatible and consonant with disability law. Disability law, properly understood, permits considering medical evidence about patients’ probability of surviving treatment and the quantity of scarce treatments they will likely use. It also permits prioritizing health workers, and considering patients’ post-treatment life expectancy. These factors, when based on medical evidence and not inaccurate stereotypes, are legal to consider even if they disadvantage some patients …

Replacing Death With Life? The Rise Of Lwop In The Context Of Abolitionist Campaigns In The United States, Michelle Miao

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

On the basis of fifty-four elite interviews[1] with legislators, judges, attorneys, and civil society advocates as well as a state-by-state data survey, this Article examines the complex linkage between the two major penal trends in American society during the past decades: a declining use of capital punishment across the United States and a growing population of prisoners serving “life without the possibility of parole” or “LWOP” sentences. The main contribution of the research is threefold. First, the research proposes to redefine the boundary between life and death in relation to penal discourses regarding the death penalty and LWOP. LWOP …

Women's Spaces, Women's Rights: Feminism And The Transgender Rights Movement, Christen Price

Marquette Law Review

None

In Memory Of Professor James E. Bond, Janet Ainsworth

Seattle University Law Review

Janet Ainsworth, Professor of Law at Seattle University School of Law: In Memory of Professor James E. Bond.

Hyperreal: Law And The Interpretation Of Visual Media, Amy L. Landers

Kentucky Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Unh Students’ Attitudes Toward University Of New Hampshire Police, Angela R. Hurley

Honors Theses and Capstones

This study examines undergraduate students from the University of New Hampshire attitudes towards campus police, specifically how student experience with campus police affects their attitudes toward them. There were a total of 113 respondents from the University of New Hampshire that answered an online survey. The survey looked specifically at the relationship between students' experience and attitudes towards UNH police, hypothesizing that students who had perceived fair encounters with campus police would be more likely to contact them in an emergency and have more positive attitudes toward them . Multivariate analysis shows perceptions of witnessing an interaction and being approached …

Sustainable Tax Policy Through The Lens Of Intergenerational Justice, Neil H. Buchanan

UF Law Faculty Publications

As the papers in this issue demonstrate, the tax system, both domestically and internationally, can be used to help undo generations of damage to all aspects of society, allowing our children and grandchildren to inherit a society that is more just and prosperous than what we are living with today. This is what sustainable policy design requires.

The Radical Philosophy Of Rights By Costas Douzinas (London: Routledge, 2019, 246 Pp., £34.99), Allan C. Hutchinson

Articles & Book Chapters

No abstract provided.

Panel Discussion: The Right To Education: With Liberty, Justice, And Education For All?

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

No abstract provided.

Motives And Fiduciary Loyalty, Stephen R. Galoob, Ethan J. Leib

Faculty Scholarship

How, if at all, do motives matter to loyalty? We have argued that loyalty (and the duty of loyalty in fiduciary law) has a cognitive dimension. This kind of “cognitivist” account invites the counterargument that, because most commercial fiduciary relationships involve financial considerations, purity of motive cannot be central to loyalty in the fiduciary context. We contend that this counterargument depends on a flawed understanding of the significance of motive to loyalty. We defend a view of the importance of motivation to loyalty that we call the compatibility account. On this view, A acts loyally toward B only if …

The Modern Architecture Of Religious Freedom As A Fundamental Right, Peter G. Danchin

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

On Emotions And The Politics Of Attention In Judicial Reasoning, Emily Kidd White

Articles & Book Chapters

Legal doctrine regularly requires judges to both understand and use emotions in different ways. This chapter explores the role of emotions in fixing and sustaining judicial attention on the impact of a law on the constitutional rights of an individual or group. That certain forms of wrong or harm, including forms of political and social exclusion, are difficult to detect in the absence of focused attention is, I think, what Elizabeth Bishop’s poem ‘Man-Moth’, excerpted here in epigraph, intends to express. This chapter explores the role of emotions in setting up the serious, sustained inquiry into the impact of a …

Two Theologies Of Chosenness, Benjamin Berger

Articles & Book Chapters

What must we explain if we are seeking to understand the theologies of US exceptionalism?

One answer is that our burden is to explain the particular. Here, the appropriate move is to examine the unique histories and imaginative formations of religious, legal, and political life in the United States. We might look to the unique religious history of the early colonies, to the distinctive role that “Church” plays in US constitutional life, or to the tethering of the market, politics, and religion that has a particular shape and force in US political and legal life. With this move, one is …

Book Review, Terje Einarsen & Joseph Rikhof, A Theory Of Punishable Participation In Universal Crimes (2018), Mark A. Drumbl, Lauren Hancock

Scholarly Articles

In A Theory of Punishable Participation in Universal Crimes, Terje Einarsen and Joseph Rikhof unpack concepts of liability for individual contributions to universal crimes. Universal crimes – namely genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and acts of aggression – tend to occur when a state or another powerful organization (a non-state actor, for example) collectivizes and channels the involvement of many people to commit the crime. The people who execute the acts are rarely ever the people who coordinate them. This disjuncture renders participation difficult to define and punish – individual acts may elide conventional legal intelligibility. Consequently, only …

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

Publications

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 …

Promise, Agreement, Contract, Gregory Klass

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

It is natural to wonder about contract law’s relationship to the morality of promises and agreements. This Chapter distinguishes two ways to conceive of that relationship. First, parties’ agreement-based moral obligations might figure into the explanation of contract law—into an account of its functions or justifications. Contract law might serve to enforce parties’ first-order performance obligations, to enforce second-order remedial obligations, to support the culture of making and keeping agreements more generally, or at least to do no harm to that culture or to people’s ability to act morally. Second, contract can be understood as the legal analog to promise. …

You That Build The Death Planes: Bob Dylan, War And International Affairs, Michael L. Perlin

Articles & Chapters

Several years ago, I wrote that Bob Dylan was “a scholar with a well-developed jurisprudence on a range of topics including civil, criminal, public, and private law” (Perlin, 2011, p.1396). In that article, I discussed and analyzed Dylan songs that dealt with, variously, civil rights, inequality in the criminal and civil justice systems, institutions, governmental/judicial corruption, equality and emancipation, and the role of lawyers in the legal process. (Id.). But I noted that I was omitting – for space considerations – any discussion of Dylan songs dealing with war and international affairs (Id., p. 1398, n. 15).

In this paper, …