Law and Philosophy Commons^™

The Method Is The Message: Movement Law And The Social Change Commons, Raymond H. Brescia

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

Legal scholars have long sought to understand the relationship between social movements and the law. A new group of such scholars has argued that to better understand this relationship, and to advance social change that is effective, sustainable, equitable, and just, they must engage in dialogue with such movements to generate ideas that will catalyze that change. For those interested in generating ideas that can spark meaningful and lasting social change, such developments in legal scholarship represent an exciting evolution in the relationship between legal scholarship, legal scholars, and social movements: a relationship that appears to be growing stronger, deeper, …

Perceptions And Treatment Decisions For A Drug Offender Based On Social Class, Cocaine Type, Personal Characteristics, And Compassionate Love: A Vignette Study, Yasmin A. Odeh

Theses and Dissertations

Problem: The shift from a focus on rehabilitation to the more punitive, “tough on crime” approach to illegal behavior in the U.S. has been enacted in no small way by policies connected to the use and abuse of drugs. The disparities between crack and powder cocaine—two chemically similar substances—have headlined this shift (Vagins and McCurdy 2006). However, research is scarce on laypeople’s approval of deterrence approaches for drug offenses, including as a function of types (e.g., powder vs. cocaine possession). This study examined people’s perceptions of prosecutorial decisions for drug offenders—whether they are punished, rehabilitated, or both—and whether people perceived …

Being Pregnant In Someone Else's Body, Jennifer S. Hendricks

FIU Law Review

In the wake of the Dobbs decision overturning the right to abortion, now is a critical time to re-assess how legal feminism theorizes the pregnant body. Before Dobbs, feminist legal scholarship had blazed a path of anti-maternalism, a stance rooted in liberal, formalist notions of equality that denigrates the “feminine” and too often minimizes the importance of reproductive issues both as tools of sex-based subordination in the present and as foundations for liberation in the future. Anti-maternalism is attractive to legal scholars because it minimizes sex and gender differences and may appear to be gender-inclusive. It has produced arguments that …

An In-Depth Review Of Euthanasia-Related Practices, Arguments For/Against Them, And Proposed Solutions For Their Most Glaring Legal/Ethical Problems, Macon Plecha

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This paper’s goal is to cover the topic of euthanasia-related practices at great length. Terminology, history, and current programs around the world are discussed first, with the last point covering a wide geographical range: Colombia, Japan, Israel, and Africa, to name a few outside of the Western world standard. Arguments for and against euthanasia-related practices are explored. Within these arguments, several pressing legal and ethical issues arise, and the most severe of these are expanded on through the offering of potential solutions: how to handle stand-alone psychiatric cases, how to improve advanced directives and poor reporting rates, and how to …

The Role Of Tradition In Classical And Contemporary Argument, Laura A. Webb

Law Faculty Publications

Integrating tradition in legal arguments remains an effective persuasive strategy, serving as a source of legitimacy and appeal, fostering the establishment of a shared identity between the speaker and the audience, and cultivating a sense of belonging to a distinct group with defined notions of its identity. This chapter examines the strategic utilization of the concept of tradition in forensic rhetoric. It investigates how communicators shape and influence discourse within forensic settings by leveraging enduring cultural norms, purported intentions and beliefs of esteemed historical figures, and narratives concerning a people's historical trajectory. By examining cases from the popular courts of …

A Wise Latina Or A Wise Judge?: Exploring How Social Identity Shapes Knowledge Acquisition, Maribella Munoz-Jimenez

CMC Senior Theses

This paper examines the intersection of epistemology and social identity through the contrasting arguments of Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Sonia Sotomayor. Justice O’Connor’s claim that wisdom is universally accessible contrasts with Justice Sotomayor’s argument that social identities offer unique insights to decision-making. The analysis begins by defining traditional and contrasting it to standpoint epistemology, highlighting how social identity influences knowledge acquisition and supporting Justice Sotomayor’s argument (Chapter 1). It then critiques the potential pitfalls of standpoint epistemology, such as blind deference, through Dror’s weak inversion thesis and Táíwò’s perspective on how we often highlight a subsegment of marginalized voices …

Foreword, Jedediah Britton-Purdy, Justin Deystone

Publications

No abstract provided.

Volume 48 Masthead, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Volume 48 Masthead

Voting Matters: Materiality Considerations And The Shareholder Vote, Renee M. Jones

Seattle University Law Review

For the shareholder franchise to have meaning, shareholders must have access to relevant information to inform their voting decisions. The securities laws’ disclosure requirements play an essential role in informing the shareholder vote.

This Essay focuses on the question of the materiality of information in the context of shareholder voting. It addresses the question of whether ESG-related information is material, positioning the materiality inquiry within the context of shareholders’ voting decisions. It explores the definition of materiality with a focus on the “reasonable investor” concept embedded within the definition. The Essay argues that the implicit expectations of many commentators that …

Volume 48 Masthead, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Volume 48 Masthead

Understanding The Big Three’S Wavering Support Of Environmental And Social Shareholder Proposals, Jeff Schwartz, Jefferson Jensen

Seattle University Law Review

Because of their substantial equity portfolios, BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street (the Big 3) are central players in corporate governance. It is, therefore, critical to understand how they vote. One puzzle is that their support for shareholder proposals on environmental and social matters appears to waiver. In 2020, for instance, BlackRock supported 11.1% of environmental proposals at S&P 500 firms. In 2021, it seemingly reversed course, supporting 55.2%. It then flipped again, supporting 32.1% in 2022. Such statistics suggest that the Big 3 are constantly changing their views on these topics. This Article seeks to better understand whether this is …

Volume 48 Masthead, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Volume 48 Masthead

Introduction To Contemporary Facets Of Injustice, Gordon Babst

Political Science Faculty Books and Book Chapters

Injustice itself is too infrequently the subject of direct rumination, with one notable exception being Judith Shklar’s The Faces of Injustice. The chapters in this volume consider some contemporary injustices, revealing their presence in ways that help to explain current issues that range from inequities in food access to the dangers of Christian nationalism, from better understanding how to conceptualize international law, to income disparity and the tax code.

How Theories Of Art Can Inform Debates About Ai, Jessica Silbey

Faculty Scholarship

Debates about artificial intelligence (AI) tend to swing between the optimistic and the apocalyptic. I propose a less binary approach that frames conversations about AI from the perspectives of theories of art and creativity. Whether we agree that AI is artificial or intelligent, whether it should be constrained or liberated, we cannot deny its influence on literary, artistic, and innovative production. AI may be described as simply a new tool to produce art and science, like the camera or the microscope, or it may transform art and science, the way the internet transformed global communication. Either way, these debates about …

Property And Information, Jeanne L. Schroeder, David G. Carlson

Articles

The article proceeds as follows. As the information theory is a reaction to legal realism, Part I explores its antecedents in the work of Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld and Ronald H. Coase. Part II presents the information theory as arising from Professor Smith’s interpretation of the Coase theorem.11 In the imaginary world of TC0, we are supposedly indifferent to organizing by property and organizing by contract. Property eclipses contract as the organon of the economy because property reduces the cost of delineation and processing—of speaking and comprehending. We show that this theory is founded on a misunderstanding of Coase. Part III …

Paraconsistency In Legal Systems: Why Not To Evaluate The Law With Classical Logic, Sydney Coddington

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

The following paper puts forth an argument for the analysis of legal systems via paraconsistent logics instead of classical logic due to the existence of legal dialetheia - true contradictions born from the law. Given that contradictions lead to absurdity in classical logic, a paraconsistent perspective becomes the clear choice once the existence of legal dialetheia is established. The first half of this argument, therefore, aims to support the work of Graham Priest in establishing legal dialetheia by explaining his view and combatting his opponent, J.C. Beall, who finds such dialetheia to fail beyond the limited scope of a legal …

Challenging The Law, Steven Arrigg Koh

Faculty Scholarship

Frédéric Mégret’s engaging contribution, A Look Back at The Women’s Hague Peace Conference: What Contribution To International Law Today?, exposes a legal duality. On one hand, the legalist perspective: law is a closed system. From this perspective, law is objective, hard, universal, and bounded. On the other hand, the sociocultural perspective: law is a human practice. From this perspective, law is subjective, organic, particular, and porous. This Essay reads Mégret’s analysis of the 1915 International Congress of Women in The Hague as a “sociocultural challenge,” disrupting the legalist perspective on international law, war, and peace during World War I. …

Why Did Prosecution Strengthen President Trump In The 2024 Election?, Steven Arrigg Koh

Faculty Scholarship

Why did criminal prosecution strengthen President Donald Trump's electoral prospects in the 2024 federal election? It was not supposed to be this way: after President Trump's 2024 New York state conviction, many speculated that President Trump's "felon" status would imperil his political career. In fact, the opposite occurred: federal and state criminal prosecutions reenergized President Trump's 2024 presidential candidacy. Contemporary criminal law theories-traditional individualist, expressivist, and critical-struggle to explain why. 

This Article advances a theory of criminal coalescence to explain why the Trump prosecutions led the former President to political victory. Criminal coalescence is the intensification of mass support for …

Under What Circumstances Is "Caste" Likely To Be Useful As An Analytic Concept (And Should We Care)?, Sanford V. Levinson, Robert L. Tsai

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay is the product of the 2025 “Constitutional Law Schmooze,” where academics from a variety of disciplines and from all over the country meet to discuss a common topic of constitutional law chosen by the moderator. This year’s topic was “caste.” The two of us, having written independent “tickets” of admission for the schmooze—i.e., short essays setting out our tentative thoughts about “caste”—turned out to be relative skeptics about the value of the term for lawyers. We are certainly not hostile to those who differ with us. This should be regarded as a “friendly dissent,” as distinguished, say, from …

The Enduring Relevance Of Congress Despite The Court's Shift To “Ordinary Reader” Statutory Interpretation, Abbe R. Gluck, Laila M. Robbins

Journal of Law and Policy

Has Congress become irrelevant to statutory interpretation? The dominant theoretical and doctrinal paradigm in American statutory interpretation has always been the conversation between Congress and the courts. Today, however, the Court’s new, second-generation textualists claim they have left Congress behind. They argue they have changed textualism’s perspective, from an “insider” perspective focused on Congress’s textual choices, to an “outsider” perspective based on how “ordinary people” read statutes. The Court’s self-professed shift away from a legiscentric approach, if true, would be a seismic shift in the conception of the judicial role. Whereas judges and scholars—including first-generation textualists—had for a century focused …

The Broad Church Of Modern Textualism, Nicole Steitz, Brian G. Slocum, Kevin Tobia

Journal of Law and Policy

Nearly thirty years ago, Justice Scalia’s Tanner lectures branded Holy Trinity Church v. United States (1892) as the anti-textualist archetype, a decision trumping the text’s plain meaning with a suspect judicial investigation of the law’s purpose or spirit. And so Holy Trinity seemed, until Gales and Solan’s groundbreaking empirical study supported an alternative reading of the key statutory term (“labor or service”) that would avoid this conflict between text and purpose. Taking inspiration from Gales and Solan, we reconsider Holy Trinity using the precepts of modern textualism, with its increased emphasis on context, pragmatics, anti-literalism, legal meaning, holistic meaning, non-compositionality, …

The Pet Fish Canon, William N. Eskridge Jr.

Journal of Law and Policy

Inspired by the work of the late Professor Larry Solan, this article proposes that judges recognize as one of the textualist canons of statutory construction a “pet fish” canon. Such a canon would posit that when an ordinary reader would understand two or more words to yield a meaning that is different than the sum of the two words defined separately, the statutory interpreter should not disaggregate them. The Roberts Court has already followed such a linguistic precept in some statutory cases, and this article proposes that the Court recognize this as a canon considered at least as seriously as …

Grammar & Syntax Arguments On The Roberts Court, Anita S. Krishnakumar

Journal of Law and Policy

In his excellent book, The Language of Judges, Professor Solan demonstrates how judges use grammatical or linguistic arguments to avoid acknowledging statutory ambiguity—and how they often get the grammar or linguistics wrong. Since his book was published, textualism has become the dominant interpretive approach on the U.S. Supreme Court—and we have seen increasingly prominent battles involving grammatical devices and rules. This comment takes Professor Solan’s analysis as a jumping off point to evaluate how grammar and linguistic arguments are employed on the modern Supreme Court, in the age of textualism. The comment offers a brief empirical and doctrinal assessment of …

Interactional Ordering: Reconstructing Lon Fuller's Theory Of Private Law, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

Faculty Scholarship

While Lon Fuller is best remembered for his contributions to the fields of general jurisprudence and contract law, his work in each has long been seen as unrelated to the other. This Article shows that in a significantly underappreciated body of work, Fuller did connect the two and, in the process, developed the outlines of a robust theory of private law, best characterized as “interactional ordering.” Driven by Fuller’s efforts to develop a jurisprudence of form that was derived from conventionalism and natural law thinking, interactional ordering sees all normativity as originating in horizontal interactions between individuals in society, seeking …

Recovering Constitutional Identity In Colonial South India: Sedition, Sovereignty, And Small-C Constitutionalism In Pudukkottai, Bharath Gururagavendran

National Law School Journal

Constitutional identity is easiest to identify when it has already been credentialed: by a constitutional text, constituent authorisation, or judicial recognition. What remains visible when those markers are absent? Through a historically grounded study of the ‘Little Kingdom’ of Pudukkottai, a princely state in colonial South India, this article examines whether constitutional identity can be recovered from the small-c life of a polity whose opportunities for formal constitution-making were structurally foreclosed. Pudukkottai had no big-C moment. Its constitutional life, if it had one, must be reconstructed from less authoritative materials. The article argues that the absence of a constitutional text …

Revolutionizing Justice: Law Enforcement Through The Lens Of Progressive Law, Musmuliadin Musmuliadin, Erlyn Indarti, Nur Rochaeti

Indonesia Law Review

When government functions must be carried out and cannot be halted, even if the law does not clearly or completely regulate them, the role of discretionary authority (discretion) becomes crucial. This is particularly evident in the discretionary authority held by the Indonesian National Police, which is essential both for the police themselves and in the execution of their duties in conducting investigations and prosecutions. This study focuses on the application and implementation of discretion by the police in conducting investigations and prosecutions, and how a progressive legal framework can revolutionize the pursuit of justice. By employing a qualitative analysis and …

A Proxy For Piety: A Closer Look At Religious Cost In The Substantial Burden Inquiry, Philip Andrew B. Wines

Fordham Law Review Online

This Comment discusses whether the Establishment Clause and “religious question” doctrine prohibit courts from considering the subjective religious harm suffered by free exercise claimants when determining if laws impose a “substantial burden” on the claimant, as defined by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) and the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA). It explores a dilemma that courts are presently facing. They must choose either to wade into constitutionally perilous theological debates to decide cases on their merits, or to defer to free exercise claimants on their own assertions of substantial burden and risk swallowing up the law …

The Alabama Embryo Decision In Ethics, Law, And Politics, I. Glenn Cohen

Pace Law Review

No abstract provided.

Taxation's Limits, Luís C. Calderón Gómez

Northwestern University Law Review

Countless pages have been devoted to the question of why everyone should pay tax, yet its opposite has gone largely unnoticed: why should some people and organizations not pay tax? Our tax system exempts from ordinary income taxation a wide and diverse array of people and organizations engaged in significant economic activity—from parents providing childcare services for their family to consular activities and charities operating animal shelters—seemingly without a convincing explanation. Perhaps because of the dizzying diversity of tax-exempt activities, scholars and policymakers have avoided comprehensively or coherently justifying our exemption regimes.

This Article develops a novel normative theory that …

The Politics Of Legal Theory Revisited, Dan Priel

Articles & Book Chapters

Most legal positivists today hold that legal positivism is a morally neutral and the purely scriptive account of the nature of law. This article signs this claim by Brian Leiter’s claim to the contrary. While I welcome the political presuppositions of jurisprudential theories, I show that the association of legal positivism with radicalism is not true. Examining the works of prominent legal positivists, I show that there is no basis for thinking of any of them as a political radical. I also show that many legal positivists were politically conservative. Beyond the Historical Question, I as that argue is no …