Law and Philosophy Commons^™

The Limits Of Deliberation About The Public's Values, Mark Seidenfeld

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Public's Law: Origins and Architecture of Progressive Democracy by Blake Emerson.

Two Visions Of Contract, Hanoch Dagan

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Justice in Transactions: A Theory of Contract Law. by Peter Benson.

Learning To Love One-Party Rule: A Beginner’S Guide, Bruce Ledewitz

Newspaper Columns

Collected biweekly contributions to the Pennsylvania Capital-Star, a nonpartisan, nonprofit news site.

March 24, 2021: Learning To Love One-Party Rule, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “Learning to Love One-Party Rule“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

Self-Determination In American Discourse: The Supreme Court’S Historical Indoctrination Of Free Speech And Expression, Jarred Williams

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

Within the American criminal legal system, it is a well-established practice to presume the innocence of those charged with criminal offenses unless proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Such a judicial framework-like approach, called a legal maxim, is utilized in order to ensure that the law is applied and interpreted in ways that legislative bodies originally intended.

The central aim of this piece in relation to the First Amendment of the United States Constitution is to investigate whether the Supreme Court of the United States has utilized a specific legal maxim within cases that dispute government speech or expression regulation. …

Lawmakers, Wolf Need To Clarify Pa.’S Mail-In Voting Law Before 2022, Bruce Ledewitz

Newspaper Columns

Collected biweekly contributions to the Pennsylvania Capital-Star, a nonpartisan, nonprofit news site.

March 9, 2021: The Future Of Mail-In Voting In Pennsylvania--The Week's Column, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “The Future of Mail-in Voting in Pennsylvania--the week's column“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

March 6, 2021: A Hallowed Secularism Way Of Life, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “A Hallowed Secularism Way of Life“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

Artificial Intelligence And Moral Rights, Martin Miernicki, Irene (Huang Ying) Ng

Centre for AI & Data Governance (2019-2025)

Whether copyrights should exist in content generated by an artificial intelligence is a frequently discussed issue in the legal literature. Most of the discussion focuses on economic rights, whereas the relationship of artificial intelligence and moral rights remains relatively obscure. However, as moral rights traditionally aim at protecting the author’s “personal sphere”, the question whether the law should recognize such protection in the content produced by machines is pressing; this is especially true considering that artificial intelligence is continuously further developed and increasingly hard to comprehend for human beings. This paper first provides the background on the protection of moral …

Pernicious Loyalty, Andrew S. Gold

William & Mary Law Review

Fiduciary loyalty is generally considered valuable, and in the usual case it is. Yet some of the very features of loyalty that make it valuable also encourage behaviors harmful to beneficiaries, third parties, or society as a whole. Examples include the corporate director whose concern with shareholder wealth maximization leads to considerable environmental harm and the skillful attorney whose zealous representation undermines justice between the parties. In short, actions that are motivated by good-faith fiduciary loyalty may be undesirable in individual cases. I will describe such cases as cases of pernicious loyalty. Outside the law, pernicious loyalty is often limited …

The Moral Ambiguity Of Public Prosecution, Gabriel S. Mendlow

Articles

Classic crimes like theft and assault are in the first instance wrongs against individuals, not against the state or the polity that it represents. Yet our legal system denies crime victims the right to initiate or intervene in the criminal process, relegating them to the roles of witness or bystander—even as the system treats prosecution as an institutional analog of the interpersonal processes of moral blame and accountability, which give pride of place to those most directly wronged. Public prosecution reigns supreme, with the state claiming primary and exclusive moral standing to call offenders to account for their wrongs. Although …

We Have To Defeat The Myth Of The Stolen Election. We Risk Destroying Our Democracy If We Don't, Bruce Ledewitz

Newspaper Columns

Collected biweekly contributions to the Pennsylvania Capital-Star, a nonpartisan, nonprofit news site.

February 24, 2021: It Is Not Clear Whether Republicans Really Believe The 2020 Election Was Stolen--This Week's Column, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “ It Is Not Clear Whether Republicans Really Believe the 2020 Election Was Stolen--This Week's Column“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

Featured Speaker, Mary C. Gentile

Villanova Law Review Norman J. Shachoy Symposium

No abstract provided.

Review Of Lisa Kemmerer's Sister Species: Women, Animals, And Social Justice, Marine Lercier

Between the Species

What do we have in common with animals, and what do these women have in common? We are Sister Species, if not sisters at all. Lisa Kemmerer invites us to realize that we are more alike than different and to become aware of what our animal brothers and especially sisters experience: the suffering they endure because of our absurd inconsistencies and oppositions - even within the animal rights movement, often unbeknownst to us. The goal: more effective discourse and action, educating us to the other in the face of a norm imposed by a power, a discourse of normalization …

February 10, 2021: The San Francisco School Board Was Wrong To Remove Washington And Lincoln--This Week's Column In The Capital-Star, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “The San Francisco School Board Was Wrong to Remove Washington and Lincoln--this week's column in the Capital-Star“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

The San Francisco School Board’S Vote Removing Lincoln’S, Washington's Names Was Wrong. Here's Why, Bruce Ledewitz

Newspaper Columns

Collected biweekly contributions to the Pennsylvania Capital-Star, a nonpartisan, nonprofit news site.

February 9, 2021: God And The Pandemic, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “God and the Pandemic“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

February 5, 2021: New York Review Letter To The Editor Concerning Originalism, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “ New York Review Letter to the Editor Concerning Originalism“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

Pa. Rep. Mike Kelly Came Closer Than You Think To Stealing The Election For Trump, Bruce Ledewitz

Newspaper Columns

Collected biweekly contributions to the Pennsylvania Capital-Star, a nonpartisan, nonprofit news site.

January 28, 2021: Miike Kelly Got Closer Than People Think To Stealing The Election For Trump, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “Mike Kelly Got Closer than People Think to Stealing the Election for Trump“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

January 11, 2021: Pa. Senate Republicans Need To Seat Dem. Jim Brewster--This Week's Column In The Pennsylvania Capital-Star, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “Pa. Senate Republicans Need to Seat Dem. Jim Brewster--this week's column in the Pennsylvania Capital-Star“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

Pa. Senate Republicans Need To Seat Sen. Jim Brewster, Bruce Ledewitz

Newspaper Columns

Collected biweekly contributions to the Pennsylvania Capital-Star, a nonpartisan, nonprofit news site.

The Tale Of Two Harts; A Schlegelian Dialectic, Charles L. Barzun

Buffalo Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Failure Of Imagination: A Theoretical And Pragmatic Analysis Of Utopianism As An Orientation For Human Life, Maverick Edwards

Liberty University Journal of Statesmanship & Public Policy

Utopian theorists have long attempted to imagine “perfect” frameworks for human life. From Plato’s description of the ideal, state-centric society in the “Laws”, to Murray Rothbard’s anarcho-capitalist society, theorists have created a myriad of solutions they believe will fix most, if not all, human dilemmas. In analyzing these utopian projects from pragmatic and theoretical perspectives, this paper will argue that utopias are a failed project. Pragmatically, the development of utopia has a long and consistent track record of failure. Even the “successes” of utopian thought are under scrutiny, as they ultimately collapsed. Theoretically, the conceptualization of “perfection” entails unimaginable risk. …

Book Review, Secular Surge: A New Fault Line In American Politics, Bruce Ledewitz

Ledewitz Papers

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

John Stuart Mill’S Harm Principle And Free Speech: Expanding The Notion Of Harm, Melina Constantine Bell

Scholarly Articles

This article advocates employing John Stuart Mill’s harm principle to set the boundary for unregulated free speech, and his Greatest Happiness Principle to regulate speech outside that boundary because it threatens unconsented-to harm. Supplementing the harm principle with an offense principle is unnecessary and undesirable if our conception of harm integrates recent empirical evidence unavailable to Mill. For example, current research uncovers the tangible harms individuals suffer directly from bigoted speech, as well as the indirect harms generated by the systemic oppression and epistemic injustice that bigoted speech constructs and reinforces. Using Mill’s ethical framework with an updated notion of …

Improving The Ethical Review Of Health Policy And Systems Research: Some Suggestions, Govind Persad

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Consistent and well-designed frameworks for ethical oversight enable socially valuable research while forestalling harmful or poorly designed studies. I suggest some alterations that might strengthen the valuable checklist Rattani and Hyder propose in this issue of Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics Reference Rattani and Hyder for the ethical review of health policy and systems research (HPSR), or prompt future work in the area.

How People Judge Institutional Corruption, Elinor Amit, Eugy Han, Ann-Christin Posten, Steven Sloman

Connecticut Law Review

Institutional corruption refers to actions that are legal yet carry negative consequences for the greater good. Such legal yet harmful behaviors have been observed among politicians and donors who establish quid-pro-quo relationships in exchange for money and among doctors who receive gifts from pharmaceutical companies in return for recommending the companies’ drugs. How does the general public reconcile the tension between the legal status of an action and its impact on the greater good and judge the action’s moral acceptability? We explored this question empirically by comparing the relative weight people give to the legal status of actions and to …

Duress In Immigration Law, Elizabeth A. Keyes

Seattle University Law Review

The doctrine of duress is common to other bodies of law, but the application of the duress doctrine is both unclear and highly unstable in immigration law. Outside of immigration law, a person who commits a criminal act out of well-placed fear of terrible consequences is different than a person who willingly commits a crime, but American immigration law does not recognize this difference. The lack of clarity leads to certain absurd results and demands reimagining, redefinition, and an unequivocal statement of the significance of duress in ascertaining culpability. While there are inevitably some difficult lines to be drawn in …