Law and Philosophy Commons^™

The Force Of Ancient Manners: Federalist Politics And The Unitarian Controversy, Marc Arkin

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Contradictions, Open Secrets, And Feminist Faith In Enlightenment, Heather Hughes

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

INTRODUCTION: Judges often malign exception making as the erosion of legal rules, yet in the same breath sanction the territory that exceptions have eclipsed to date. Judges may embrace as precedent the course of exceptions that has shaped doctrine so far, but then cite the importance of enforcing common law rules to refuse exceptions that would redress violence against women. This paradoxical stance prompts many feminists to target ignorance of violence in women's lives as the source of judicial resistance to establishing exceptions to rules that prevent recovery for women's harms. These feminists call for education, for increased awareness, to …

Understanding "Depolicing": Symbiosis Theory And Critical Cultural Theory, Frank Rudy Cooper

Scholarly Works

Doctrinal analyses help us understand what law does. Identity theory helps us understand why law operates in certain ways. Cultural studies can help us understand that where law operates is crucial to both how it operates, and on whom.

Nancy Ehrenreich's Subordination and Symbiosis: Mechanisms of Mutual Support Between Subordinating Systems is especially valuable because her symbiosis theory expands identity theory. Ehrenreich turns our attention to the subjectivities of those who are partly subordinated but mostly privileged-those who accept their own oppression in return for the "compensation" of being able to use the law to subordinate others. Nonetheless, symbiosis theory …

How Theology Might Learn From Law (Symposium: The Theology Of The Practice Of Law), James Boyd White

Articles

I want to start today with an account of the way lawyers think and speak, and then ask whether it might be useful for the theologically minded to take these practices and procedures seriously as a ground of comparison from which to look at their own. In doing this I shall look at the practice of law with an emphasis not on its social effects or ethical difficulties but on the nature of the activity itself, viewed from the inside, asking in particular what kind of knowledge it requires and creates in its practitioner. What does the lawyer learn from …

Legal Knowledge, James Boyd White

Articles

What do we know when we know the law? I asked a rabbi I know how he would answer that question with respect to Jewish law. Does someone know the law when he can repeat the rules that tell him what to do? Or when he can engage in the activity of reading them, sepa­rately or in conjunction with each other, and applying them sensibly to new circumstances? Is even that enough? My friend said it was not: he must know who he is in relation to the law, both as an individual and as a member of a people; …

Is There An Implicit Theology In The Practice Of Ordinary Law?, Joseph Vining

Articles

We should have a text to help us-lawyers and theologians almost always do. Consider this from Wordsworth, and ask whether it goes too far if Wordsworth were thought to be speaking to the practicing lawyer: Here you stand, Adore, and worship, when you know it not; Pious beyond the intention of your thought; Devout above the meaning of your will. -Yes, you have felt, and may not cease to feel. The estate of Man would be indeed forlorn If false conclusions of the reasoning Power Made the Eye blind, and closed the passages Through which the Ear converses with the …

Signaling Or Reciprocating? A Response To Eric Posner's Law And Social Norms, Dan M. Kahan

University of Richmond Law Review

There is an almost heretical disenchantment with law percolating within the legal academy. Conventional wisdom sees law as the natural solution to problems of collective action. When attaining some societal good-for example, a clean environment, a stock of useful technologies, a public education system, or a transportation infrastructure-depends on the willingness of individuals to behave in a manner that is not in their material interest, the law supplies incentives-such as tax abatements for nonpolluters, property rights for inventors, and punishments for tax cheats-that bring individual interests into alignment with collective ones. The problem, though, is that a regime of regulatory …

University Of Richmond Law Review

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Wrestling With Jefferson: The Struggles Of A Biographer, Richard B. Bernstein

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

The Value Of Rational Nature, Donald H. Regan

Articles

Kant tells us in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals that rational nature is an end in itself; that it is the only thing which is unconditionally valuable; and that it is the ultimate condition of all value.1 A striking trend in recent Kant scholarship is to regard these value claims, rather than the formalism of universalizability, as the ultimate foundation of Kant’s theory.2 But does rational nature as Kant conceives it deserve such veneration? Can it really carry the world of value on its shoulders? I think not. As will become clear, I do not doubt the value …

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 …

Horrible Holmes, Mathias Reimann

Michigan Law Review

Holmes has kept scholars busy for most of a century, and the resulting volume of literature about him is staggering. In that last twenty years along, we have been blessed with four biographies, four symposia, three new collections of his works, two volumes of essays, and various monographs, not to mention a multitude of free-standing law review articles. Since life is short, everyone who adds to the deluge, including Albert Alschuler with his new book, bears a heavy responsibility to make the expenditure of trees, library space, and reading time worthwhile. Does Law Without Values fulfill that responsibility? Despite the …

Pragmatism Regained, Christopher Kutz

Michigan Law Review

Jules Coleman's The Practice of Principle serves as a focal point for current, newly intensified debates in legal theory, and provides some of the deepest, most sustained reflections on methodology that legal theory has seen. Coleman is one of the leading legal philosophers in the Anglo-American world, and his writings on tort theory, contract theory, the normative foundations of law and economics, social choice theory, and analytical jurisprudence have been the point of departure for much of the most interesting activity in the field for the last three decades. Indeed, the origin of this book lies in Oxford University's invitation …

The Storrs Lectures: Liberals And Romantics At War: The Problem Of Collective Guilt, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

Somehow we in the West thought the age of war was behind us. After nuking Hiroshima, after napalming Vietnam, we had only distaste for the idea and the practice of war. The thought of dying for a noble cause, the pursuit of honor in the name of patria, brotherhood in arms – none of this appealed to us anymore. "I hate war and so does Eleanor," opined FDR in the oft-repeated lyrics of Pete Seeger. War became a subject for ironic disdain. As Tom Lehrer caught the mood of the 1960s: "We only want the world to know that …

The Fault Of Not Knowing, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

Despite the outpouring of interest in tort and criminal theory over the last thirty years, not much progress has been made toward understanding the basic concepts for analyzing liability. Common law theorists of torts and criminal law tend to accept the conventional distinction between objective and subjective standards and the view that objective negligence is not really fault in the way that subjective negligence is. The author's view is that this distinction between objective and subjective standards is misunderstood and that, in fact, so-called objective negligence is a test of fault or culpability in the same way that subjective standards …

Persuasion: A Model Of Majoritarianism As Adjudication, Christopher J. Peters

All Faculty Scholarship

This article, which has been published in slightly revised form at 96 Nw. U.L. Rev. 1 (2001), is an application and extension of my theory of adjudication as representation, which holds that the procedural elements of litigant participation and interest representation confer democratic legitimacy on court decisions. In the article, I first develop the notion of a "majoritarian difficulty": the often-ignored tension between democratic self-rule and majority domination of the political minority. Second, I offer a model of majoritarianism as a type of adjudication, in which interested parties lobby for favorable decisions by a neutral decisionmaker. Third, I contend that …

Do We Have A Right To Common Goods?, Andrei Marmor

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Individuals have rights. I will assume that this means that individuals have interests which are important enough to justify the imposition of duties on others in order to secure those interests. Groups of individuals, such as nations or ethnic minorities, plausibly have rights as well. Groups of individuals may have group interests appropriately protected by the imposition of duties on others, typically, on governments, or on other larger political entities. My concern in this essay is with the question of what individuals or groups may have a right to. In particular I want to explore the question of whether people …

Where Is My Body? Stanley Fish's Long Goodbye To Law, Richard Delgado

Michigan Law Review

Stanley Fish, author of Doing What Comes Naturally, Is There a Text in This Class?, There's No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It's a Good Thing, Too, and other paradigm-shifting books, and who recently left law teaching for a position in university administration, has written one last volume giving his colleagues in the profession he left behind something to think about. In his previous work, Fish, who taught English and law at Duke University, addressed central legal issues such as meaning, communication, and textual interpretation, challenging such received wisdoms as that every text has a single, determinate meaning, or …

Democratic Justice In Transition, Marion Smiley

Michigan Law Review

Ruti Teitel's Transitional Justice and Ian Shapiro's Democratic Justice come out of very different academic traditions. But they both develop a view of justice that might loosely be called pragmatic by virtue of its treatment of justice as a value that is simultaneously grounded in practice and powerful in bringing about social and political change. Moreover, they both use this shared pragmatic view of justice to provide us with two things that are of great importance to the study of transitional justice and democracy in general. The first is an explanatory framework for understanding how legal institutions and claims about …

Mr. Carroll’S Mental State Or What Is Meant By Intent, Bruce Ledewitz

Ledewitz Papers

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

Making The Familiar Conventional Again, Steven L. Winter

Law Faculty Research Publications

No abstract provided.

Dna: Lessons From The Past - Problems For The Future - Introduction, Bailey Kuklin, Margaret A. Berger

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Justification For Protecting Reasonable Expectations, Bailey Kuklin

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Reflections On When "We, The People" Kill, 34 J. Marshall L. Rev. 713 (2001), Michael P. Seng

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Why Do People Support Capital Punishment? The Death Penalty As Community Ritual, 33 Conn. L. Rev. 765 (2001), Donald L. Beschle

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Why Miranda Does Not Prevent Confessions: Some Lessons From Albert Camus, Arthur Miller And Oprah Winfrey, 51 Syracuse L. Rev. 863 (2001), Timothy P. O'Neill

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Meaning, Intention, And The Hearsay Rule., Paul F. Kirgis

Faculty Law Review Articles

In this Article, I draw on insights from the linguistic discipline of pragmatics to offer another way to understand and apply the definition of hearsay in the Federal Rules of Evidence. Pragmatics is concerned with how we use language in real-world contexts to accomplish various objectives.' By identifying the conventions that govern language usage, pragmatics provides ways to analyze what a speaker means when he says something and how meaning is conveyed through language.5 Pragmatics thus has obvious utility for the study of hearsay.

The philosopher Paul Grice looms over the field of pragmatics. His theory of conversational implicature revolutionized …

It's Conflict All The Way Down, Michael Fischl

Faculty Articles and Papers

No abstract provided.

A Pragmatic Justification Of The Judicial Hunch, Mark C. Modak-Truran

Journal Articles

Judges currently face a daunting task. On the one hand, they are increasingly aware of the indeterminacy of the law, while on the other hand, they face an explosion of fact. Judges are floating on shaky legal timbers in a sea of documents, deposition transcripts, affidavits, oral courtroom testimony, and expert opinions. The explosion of fact alone presents monumental problems for deciding cases without unduly simplifying or reducing this factual complexity. For example, both federal and state judges are implementing case management systems to deal with their crushing case loads and the increasing complexity of their cases. In addition, there …

Finding A Sense Of Self In The World: A Process For Overcoming Personal And Collective Alienation After Institutional Abuse, Seetal Kaur Sunga

LLM Theses

The author examines three aspects of dispute resolution involving cases of physical and sexual abuse in institutions and other environments. She focuses on judicial and alternative processes that deal with identity formation, empowerment and monetary compensation. She argues that sexual abuse and physical abuse create specific harms to the identity and power of abused persons. These harms should be addressed through a process that can allow for identity-formation and re-configuration of the power relationship between the parties. The author concludes that judicial processes recognize identity formation that occurs outside the legal arena, and are capable of recognizing the power of …