Law and Philosophy Commons^™

Theorizing The Law/Politics Distinction: Neutral Principles, Affirmative Action, And The Enduring Legacy Of Paul Mishkin, Robert C. Post, Neil S. Siegel

Faculty Scholarship

Paul Mishkin was a colleague and a teacher to us, and we each esteem him as a master craftsman of the law: learned, wise, and far-sighted. To re-read his publications is to enter an astonishing world of clarity and integrity, a world in which no word is wasted and insight is deep and revealing.

Early in his career Mishkin saw that the law could be apprehended from two distinct and in part incompatible perspectives: from the internal perspective of a faithful practitioner and from the external perspective of the general public. If the social legitimacy of the law as a …

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

Publications

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, …

Dworkin V. The Philosophers: A Review Essay On Justice In Robes, Michael S. Green

Faculty Publications

In this review essay, Professor Michael Steven Green argues that Dworkin's reputation among his fellow philosophers has needlessly suffered because of his refusal to back down from his "semantic sting" argument against H. L. A. Hart. Philosophers of law have uniformly rejected the semantic sting argument as a fallacy. Nevertheless Dworkin reaffirms the argument in Justice in Robes, his most recent collection of essays, and devotes much of the book to stubbornly, and unsuccessfully, defending it. This is a pity, because the failure of the semantic sting argument in no way undermines Dworkin's other arguments against Hart.

The Practice Of Value – Reply, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

The privilege of having three sets of extensive and hard-hitting comments on one's work is as welcome as it is rare, and especially so on this occasion as the lectures were, for me, but the first (well, not entirely first) stab at a subject I hope to explore at greater length. The reflections that follow will respond to some of the criticisms, but will not be a point by point reply. I will use the occasion to clarify some obscurities in the lectures, and to contrast my view with some of my critics' own positions. I will proceed thematically, starting …

The Argument From Justice, Or How Not To Reply To Legal Positivism, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Robert Alexy wrote a book whose avowed purpose is to refute the basic tenets of a type of legal theory which 'has long since been obsolete in legal science and practice'. The quotation is from the German Federal Constitutional Court in 1968. The fact that Prof Alexy himself mentions no writings in the legal positivist tradition [in English] later than Hart's The Concept of Law (1961) may suggest that he shares the court's view. The book itself may be evidence to the contrary. After all why flog a dead horse? Why write a book to refute a totally discredited …

Transparency And Determinacy In Common Law Adjudication: A Philosophical Defense Of Explanatory Economic Analysis, Jody S. Kraus

Faculty Scholarship

Explanatory economic analysis of the common law has long been subject to deep philosophical skepticism for two reasons. First, common law decisions appear to be cast in the language of deontic morality, not the consequentialist language of efficiency. For this reason, philosophers have claimed that explanatory economic analysis cannot satisfy the transparency criterion, which holds that a legal theory's explanation must provide a plausible account of the relationship between the reasoning it claims judges actually use to decide cases and the express reasoning judges provide in their opinions. Philosophers have doubted that the economic analysis has a plausible account of …

The Problem Of Authority: Revisiting The Service Conception, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

The problem I have in mind is the problem of the possible justification of subjecting one's will to that of another, and of the normative standing of demands to do so. The account of authority that I offered, many years ago, under the title of the service conception of authority, addressed this issue, and assumed that all other problems regarding authority are subsumed under it. Many found the account implausible. It is thin, relying on very few ideas. It may well appear to be too thin, and to depart too far from many of the ideas that have gained currency …

Three Versions Of Nonsense, Paul Campos

Publications

No abstract provided.

Law School Enters The Matrix: Teaching Critical Legal Studies, Jerry L. Anderson

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

In The Tout Court Of Shakespeare: Interdisciplinary Pedagogy In Law, Desmond Manderson

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

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

Publications

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

Publications

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.

The Role Of Well-Being, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

"Well-being" signifies the good life, the life which is good for the person whose life it is. I have argued that well-being consists in a wholehearted and successful pursuit of valuable relationships and goals. This view, a little modified, is defended , but the main aim of the article is to consider the role of well-being in practical thought. In particular I will examine a suggestion which says that when we care about people, and when we ought to care about people, what we do, or ought to, care about is their well-being. The suggestion is indifferent to who cares …

Incorporation By Law, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

My purpose here is to examine the question of how the law can be incorporated within morality and how the existence of the law can impinge on our moral rights and duties, a question (or questions) which is a central aspect of the broad question of the relation between law and morality. My conclusions cast doubts on the incorporation thesis, that is, the view that moral principles can become part of the law of the land by incorporation.

The Unruliness Of Rules, Peter A. Alces

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

About Morality And The Nature Of Law, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

In support of my longstanding claim that the traditional divide between natural law and legal positivist theories of law, the present paper explores a variety of necessary connections between law and morality which are consistent with theories of law traditionally identified as positivist.

Law And Judicial Duty, Philip A. Hamburger

Faculty Scholarship

Two hundred years ago, in Marbury v. Madison, Chief Justice Marshall delivered an opinion that has come to dominate modern discussions of constitutional law. Faced with a conflict between an act of Congress and the U.S. Constitution, he explained what today is known as "judicial review." Marshall described judicial review in terms of a particular type of "superior law" and a particular type of "judicial duty." Rather than speak generally about the hierarchy within law, he focused on "written constitutions."

He declared that the U.S. Constitution is "a superior, paramount law" and that if "the constitution is superior to any …

Teaching Wesley Hohfeld's Theory Of Legal Relations, Curtis Nyquist

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

Bijuralism In Law's Empire And In Law's Cosmos, Nicholas Kasirer

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

The Aesthetics Of American Law, Pierre Schlag

Publications

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 …

Reasoning With Rules, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

What is special about legal reasoning? In what way is it distinctive? How does it differ from reasoning in medicine, or engineering, physics, or everyday life? The answers range from the very ambitious to the modest. The ambitious claim that there is a special and distinctive legal logic, or legal ways of reasoning, modes of reasoning which set the law apart from all other disciplines. Opposing them are the modest, who claim that there is nothing special to legal reasoning, that reason is the same in all domains. According to them, only the contents of the law differentiate it from …

Law And Phrenology, Pierre Schlag

Publications

As the intellectual credentials of American law become increasingly dubious, the question arises: how has this discipline been intellectually organized to sustain belief among its academic practitioners? This Commentary explores the nineteenth-century pseudo-science of phrenology as a way of gaining insight into the intellectual organization of American law. Although there are, obviously, significant differences, the parallels are at once striking and edifying. Both phrenology and law emerged as disciplinary knowledges through attempts to cast them in the form of sciences. In both cases, the "sciences" were aesthetically organized around a fundamental ontology of reifications and animisms -- "faculties" in the …

The Empty Circles Of Liberal Justification, Pierre Schlag

Publications

No abstract provided.

Mapping The Limits Of Skepticism In Law And Morals, Eric Blumenson

Suffolk University Law School Faculty Works

This article identifies the theoretical and practical limits of postmodern skepticism about objective, transcultural standards in law and morals.

Stanley Fish tells us that moral issues are intelligible only within the "paradigms or communities that give them their local and changeable shape." This is one formulation of antifoundationalism, which rejects the idea of a transcultural moral reality that binds all people. Antifoundationalists see value judgments as contingent cultural products that cannot be objectively true.

But can we do anything with this thesis in practice? Postmodern pragmatists like Richard Rorty and Joan Williams believe that we can; they say we would …

The Antinomy Of Coherence And Determinacy, William A. Edmundson

Faculty Publications By Year

Coherence and determinacy are both apparent desiderata for bodies of law and legal systems. Unfortunately, in legal systems of any complexity, increasing the degree of one invariably brings about a lessening of the other. For theories of law - such as Ronald Dworkin's - that emphasize the importance of coherence in judicial reasoning, while requiring as a condition of legitimacy that legal rights pre-exist judicial decisions, this must be an unwelcome fact.

The First Cut Is (Not) The Deepest: Deconstructing "Female Genital Mutilation" And The Criminalization Of The Other, David Fraser

Dalhousie Law Journal

Deconstruction, as a 'philosophy'andas a strategy for the reading of texts, offers us the ability to engage in a politics and ethics of justice which seeks to recognize our responsibility to the Other. By 'reading' 'female genital mutilation' with this obligation in mind, this article attempts to deal with the prejudices and barriers to justice which present themselves to those of us in the West who seek an engagement with the Other. The article offers a warning and a reading of the 'text' of 'female genital mutilation' informed by our obligation to justice.

Values, Pierre Schlag

Publications

No abstract provided.

A Heterodox Catechism, Paul Campos

Publications

No abstract provided.

The Paradox Of Punishment, Paul Campos

Publications

Retribution demands reciprocity. In this Essay, Professor Campos contends that classic retributive theory encounters a logical paradox when it attempts to equalize the status of criminal and victim through the institution of punishment. This paradox arises out of a clash between the deontological requirements of equality and justice. He concludes by speculating on the historical relationship between rationalist justifications for vengeance and the elimination of punishment as public spectacle.

Rights, Communities, And Tradition, Brian Slattery

Articles & Book Chapters

This paper argues that there is a close connection between basic human rights and communal bonds. It criticizes the philosophical views of Alan Gewirth and Alasdair MacIntyre, which in differing ways deny this connection.