Law and Philosophy Commons^™

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 …

Spirit Of The Corporation, Russell Powell

Seattle University Law Review

Christian theologians have analyzed the productive and destructive qualities of institutions, sometimes attributing to them human virtues and vices. In City of God, Saint Augustine describes a utopian vision of human community within a Christian context as an alternative to the flawed “City of Man.” Contemporary theologians and sociologists have described collective structures of human behavior in institutions as having a kind of “spirit” analogous to the individual human “spirit.” Institutions are then assumed to take on an existence separate from the individuals within them, and in fact, the “spirit” of an institution influences the behavior of individuals. In The …

The Virginia Company To Chick-Fil-A: Christian Business In America, 1600–2000, Joseph P. Slaughter

Seattle University Law Review

The Supreme Court’s 2014 decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. is one of its most controversial in recent history. Burwell’s narrow 5–4 ruling states that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 applies to closely held, for-profit corporations seeking religious exemptions to the Affordable Care Act. As a result, the Burwell decision thrust Hobby Lobby, the national craft chain established by the conservative evangelical Green family of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, onto the national stage. Firms like Hobby Lobby and Chick-fil-A, however, reject the conventional wisdom Justice Ginsburg explained in Burwell and instead embrace an approach to business with …

Spirit Of The Corporation, Russell Powell

Seattle University Law Review

This Article provides a contemporary theoretical framework for Berle’s insight as a basis for considering its legal and ethical implications for corporate governance. Part II attempts to unpack contemporary understandings of spirit in order to provide a helpful working definition. Part III considers the origins and essential traits of the modern business corporation in the United States. The question posed by Berle—whether corporations can or ought to have a sort of moral orientation—is discussed in Part IV, while Part V ponders potential policy shifts that might tilt the orientation of the “spirit of the corporation” toward the common good. Part …

The Values Of The Administrative State: A Reply To Seidenfeld, Blake Emerson

Michigan Law Review Online

I appreciate the opportunity to continue the conversation on democracy in the administrative state that I hoped The Public’s Law would inspire. In his review, Mark Seidenfeld critiques some of the book’s legal reform proposals. He argues that I am too optimistic about the general public’s ability to participate in the administrative process, about administrators’ competence to reason about social values, and about courts’ capacity to police such reasoning.

The aspects of my argument Seidenfeld criticizes come at the conclusion of the book’s broader study of the intellectual and institutional history of the administrative state. This history is meant to …

Seeing (Platforms) Like A State: Digital Legibility And Lessons For Platform Governance, Neil Chilson

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

The growing backlash against Big Tech companies is a symptom of digital technology increasing the world’s legibility. James C. Scott’s book, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, explores how past governments responded to increased legibility – for good and for ill. This article shows how Scott’s historical lessons can guide governments and tech platforms as they seek to improve the human condition online.

The Critique And Praxis Of Rights, Bernard E. Harcourt

University of Colorado Law Review

No abstract provided.

Past Prescient, Christopher Tomlins

University of Colorado Law Review

No abstract provided.

Posthuman Dignity And The Problem Of The Body, Zachary R. Calo

Scholarly Works

This essay examines the anthropology of transhumanist and posthumanist thought, focusing on human dignity and the role of embodiment. It posits that posthumanism views the body as a barrier to achieving dignity rather than an intrinsic site of dignity, advocating for transcending biological limits towards a more dignified existence. The discourse contrasts transhumanist and bioconservative perspectives on dignity, emphasizing that dignity is not an inherent trait but is achieved through technological enhancement and the redefinition of embodiment, impacting contemporary ethical considerations in biotechnology.

Rabbi Lamm, The Fifth Amendment, And Comparative Jewish Law, Samuel J. Levine

Scholarly Works

Rabbi Norman Lamm’s 1956 article, “The Fifth Amendment and Its Equivalent in the Halakha,” provides important lessons for scholarship in both Jewish and American law. Sixty-five years after it was published, the article remains, in many ways, a model for interdisciplinary and comparative study of Jewish law, drawing upon sources in the Jewish legal tradition, American legal history, and modern psychology. In so doing, the article proves faithful to each discipline on its own terms, producing insights that illuminate all three disciplines while respecting the internal logic within each one. In addition to many other distinctions, since its initial publication, …

Think Again: The Thought Crime Doctrine And The Limits Of Criminal Law, Jordan Wallace-Wolf

Law Faculty Scholarship

According to the thought crime doctrine, neither beliefs nor intentions may be subject to criminal punishment. The doctrine is widely endorsed, but puzzling in its scope. Beliefs have a free speech credential: they play a straightforward role in the sincere exchange of ideas. Moreover, they are harmless, in the specific sense that they do not aim at action and so not at lawbreaking. But intentions are otherwise. They do not necessarily further the exchange of ideas and they may aim at wrongful, illegal conduct.

So why should the thought crime doctrine categorically protect them in addition to beliefs? Why not …

Cynicism As A Modus Of Political Agency: Can It Speak To International Law?, Hengameh Saberi

Articles & Book Chapters

This essay is a brief tour through the philosophical journey of cynicism as a critical ethos and modus of political agency. Against colloquial and psychological uses, all with a crippling effect, it seeks to remind of the best potential of a philosophical cynical temperament for a sense of empowered agency by revisiting its travels from ancient Athens to our time. With that history in sight, it will then in a preliminary and experimental fashion imagine some possible avenues through which international law can begin to appreciate a cynical orientation as a force for good rather than an enemy to deny, …

Confrontation In The Age Of Plea Bargaining [Comments], William Ortman

Law Faculty Research Publications

No abstract provided.

The People's Court: On The Intellectual Origins Of American Judicial Power, Ian C. Bartrum

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

This article enters into the modern debate between “consti- tutional departmentalists”—who contend that the executive and legislative branches share constitutional interpretive authority with the courts—and what are sometimes called “judicial supremacists.” After exploring the relevant history of political ideas, I join the modern minority of voices in the latter camp.

This is an intellectual history of two evolving political ideas—popular sovereignty and the separation of powers—which merged in the making of American judicial power, and I argue we can only understand the structural function of judicial review by bringing these ideas together into an integrated whole. Or, put another way, …

America’S Presidential Crisis Of Legitimacy: How The Electoral College Became Obsolete And How We Can Fix It, Julia Rose Foodman

Scripps Senior Theses

The goal of this thesis is to critique the current American Presidential electoral system, the Electoral College, and to show what an alternative could potentially mean for the American people. This paper seeks to answer the following questions: What are the main arguments for the Electoral College, why are they troubling, and how can we mend American Presidential elections for the greater purposes of political equality, democracy, and freedom? To do so, core arguments made by conservative pundits in favor of the Electoral College are outlined in order to bring attention to their logical, political, and moral inconsistencies. The inequalities …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

Introduction To The Edward Elgar Research Handbook On Law And Emotion, Susan A. Bandes, Jody Lynee Madeira, Kathryn D. Temple, Emily Kidd White

Articles & Book Chapters

The role of emotion in law has long been shrouded in mystery. The legal system is built on assumptions about human behavior, including assumptions about emotion. Thus, unavoidably, understanding emotion is an essential part of building a fairer, more effective system. Yet the emergence and growth of Law and Emotion as a field of study has been slowed by the belief that merely by acknowledging emotion, scholars and jurists would undermine the rule of law. It has been further hampered by the suspicion that emotions are too ephemeral or subjective to be understood in any systematic way. For too long, …

Images Of Reach, Range, And Recognition: Thinking About Emotions In The Study Of International Law, Emily Kidd White

Articles & Book Chapters

There is much critical potential in bringing together the philosophy of emotion and the study of international law. Narratives about legitimate political and legal authority have tended to either assume that it is possible to extricate emotions from political judgement, or to rest upon uncomplicated (and wholly demystified) assumptions about the legibility of emotions over time and place. Philosophers interested in emotion have regularly grappled with questions concerning an emotion’s reach and range (insofar that the emotion in question bears an intersubjective component), and recognition (comprehensibility) of emotions beyond one’s own social and political communities (or even beyond one’s self). …

Introduction To The Symposium: The Stakes For Critical Legal Theory, Elizabeth S. Anker, Justin Deystone

Publications

No abstract provided.

Deep Cuts: Four Critiques Of Legal Ideology, Justin Deystone, Akbar Rasulov

Publications

This Article begins an effort to rekindle the intellectual tradition of critical legal theory. The context for the project is significant. On the one hand is the grip of a social crisis, the contours of which continue to confound the commentariat. Racism, xenophobia, gendered violence, migration and nation, climate change, health pandemics, political corruption. The parade is as intimidating as it is spectacular. On the other hand, the very tools of criticism we depend upon in identifying these characters in the parade, much less the spectacle of the parade itself, are themselves in crisis. There is, in a word, a …