Law and Society Commons^™

When Legal Cultures Collide, Richard F. Devlin Frsc

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

In this essay, I attempt to consider the juridical significance of the Irish hunger strike of 1981. I focus on this almost unreal, but tragically too real, 'event' for two reasons. First, on the basis of the rereading or representation that I offer in this essay, the hunger strike provides an opportunity to reflect upon what is perhaps the most enduring and intractable question of social theory: the relationship between structure and agency. Specifically, it enables us to critically interrogate the aspirations and assumptions of a colonial legal structure and the agentic resistance of the juridically colonized. The second reason …

Some Problems With Public Reason In John Rawls's Political Liberalism, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

Political Liberalism is a major addition to the political theory of John Rawls. In many respects, it develops or alters views expressed in his famous A Theory of Justice. For changes that appeared in various articles Rawls published after the earlier book, Political Liberalism tends to offer nuances of difference. The most original chapter is about public reason, and my comments are directed to that subject, which has now become a centerpiece of Rawls's theory. I draw in Rawls's other views only as they bear on public reason.

My aim is to present some problems I see with his …

The European Bank For Reconstruction And Development And The Post-Cold War Era, John Linarelli

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Secular Fundamentalism, Paul F. Campos

Publications

No abstract provided.

Saving The Self?, Daniel R. Ortiz

Michigan Law Review

In a recent article, Law, Politics, and the Claims of Community, Stephen A. Gardbaum accurately diagnoses one of the greatest problems in contemporary political and legal theory: the "complete confusion" about what communitarianism means.

Gardbaum's basic insight is, I think, both powerful and correct. We have been seeing contradiction and conflict where there often is none at all. As important and salutary as his account is, however, it deserves response. His taxonomy of communitarianism, the heart of his piece, well shows that communitarianism makes fundamentally different types of claims. It does not, however, make as many different kinds of …

Strategies Of Connection: Prostitution And Feminist Politics, Margaret A. Baldwin

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

A feminist political approach to prostitution must begin from these strengths and be tested against the standards set by them. I want to address how taking each of these strengths seriously can create sustained resistance against prostitution.

The Political Economy Of The Wagner Act: Power, Symbol, And Workplace Cooperation, Mark Barenberg

Faculty Scholarship

To shed light on the legal debate over new forms of workplace collaboration, this Article reexamines the origins of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. Professor Barenberg concludes that the Wagner Act scheme was profoundly cooperationist, not adversarial as is conventionally assumed. Revisionist historiography shows that, contrary to the claims of public choice theorists, Senator Wagner's network of political entrepreneurs was the decisive force in the conception and enactment of the new labor policy, amidst interest group paralysis and popular unrest. Drawing on original archival materials and oral histories, Professor Barenberg reconstructs the progressive ideology of Wagner and his …

Machiavelli And The Politics Of Welfare, National Health, And Old Age: A Comparative Perspective Of The Policies Of The United States And Canada, Camilla Watson

Scholarly Works

This Article maintains that in order to fully comprehend the politics of welfare, retirement security, and national health coverage, it is necessary to examine Machiavellian principles in relation to the variables of economic development and inter-party competition. If the principles of Machiavelli are applied in a slightly different and more constructive manner, they may facilitate reform of the American welfare, retirement, and national health systems. Now that the political balance in the United States has shifted from the conservative to the liberal, the time is ripe to consider reforming the entire Social Security system and instituting a comprehensive national health …

Child Care Enterprise, Community Development, And Work, Peter R. Pitegoff

Faculty Publications

Child care enterprise can be a vehicle for community-based economic development. Beyond the critical goal of child care service, day care as an enterprise can help build capacity for job creation and entrepreneurship in the inner city and in disadvantaged communities. Stable child care institutions with quality jobs can sound a counterpoint to the feminization of poverty. The demand for child care services is substantial and growing. In single parent families and in households with two working parents, day care is essential to enable parents to work or go to school. Further, high quality early childhood programs can have a …

Ackerman's Proposal For Popular Constitutional Lawmaking: Can It Realize His Aspirations For Dualist Democracy?, Philip J. Weiser

Publications

No abstract provided.

The Government Of Germany, Donald P. Kommers

Book Chapters

Chapter Outline:
A. Political Development
B. Political Processes and Institutions
C. Public Policy

3rd ed. HarperCollins College Publishers c1993

A Constitutional Right Of Religious Exemption: An Historical Perspective, Philip A. Hamburger

Faculty Scholarship

Did late eighteenth-century Americans understand the Free Exercise Clause of the United States Constitution to provide individuals a right of exemption from civil laws to which they had religious objections? Claims of exemption based on the Free Exercise Clause have prompted some of the Supreme Court's most prominent free exercise decisions, and therefore this historical inquiry about a right of exemption may have implications for our constitutional jurisprudence. Even if the Court does not adopt late eighteenth-century ideas about the free exercise of religion, we may, nonetheless, find that the history of such ideas can contribute to our contemporary analysis. …

Suicide And Justice, Arthur J. Jacobson

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

International Law, Mark Weston Janis

Faculty Articles and Papers

The recent developments in Eastern Europe and the Persian Gulf dramatize the efforts of the United States to muster the support of other states and international organizations in asserting principles of international law and process. These diplomatic initiatives to win a global consensus about the rule of law in international politics reflect an important turn in U.S. policy. In the past few decades the United States has mostly enunciated a parochial rhetoric regarding international law, treating it either as a sort of extension of United States law or as a flexible framework that somehow always promoted U.S. legal and political …

Of Persons And Property: The Politics Of Legal Taxonomy, David S. Cohen

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

The essay falls into three major parts. In the first part, we explain and describe what we believe to be the core idea of law - that it represents a discursive and taxonomic economy which is used to give meaning to the world by creating a particular and partial reality. The concepts and language lawyers use, the way those media are deployed, the argumentative devices relied upon, and the values inculcated combine in conscious and unconscious ways to constitute law and a legal style of life. In part two, we tell two stories. One involves the Supreme Court's treatment of …

Democracy, Counterinsurgency, And Human Rights: The Case Of Peru, Angela Cornell, Kenneth Roberts

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The wave of authoritarianism that swept over Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s focused international attention on the human rights violations committed by military dictatorships. As most Latin American nations experienced transitions to democratic rule in the 1980s, hopes were raised that human rights would be more widely respected. Nevertheless, it is questionable whether a regime change from dictatorship to democracy necessarily entails renewed respect for human rights. Does redemocratization represent a fundamental change in the exercise of political authority—that is, in relations between the state and civil society—or are there conditions under which democratic institutions and constitutional norms …

Political Pressure And Judging In Constitutional Cases, Robert F. Nagel

Publications

No abstract provided.

Strategic Research In Law And Society, Bryant G. Garth

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Implementing Brown In The Nineties: Political Reconstruction, Liberal Recollection, And Litigatively Enforced Legislative Reform, James S. Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

Opposed for a decade by a hostile national administration, faced with the prospect for decades to come of an unsympathetic federal judiciary, and amidst declarations of the Second Reconstruction's demise, civil rights organizations have undertaken recently to rethink their litigation agendas. I have two motivations for offering some thoughts in support of that task. First, the civil rights community has requested the assistance of the academy in reshaping the community's litigation agenda and, in my case, in identifying "new strategies for implementing Brown v. Board of Education." Second, my analysis of the principal "old" strategy for implementing Brown, …

Law's Centaurs: An Inquiry Into The Nature And Relations Of Law, State And Violence, Richard F. Devlin Frsc

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The unfortunate truth claim which I wish to pursue in this paper is that the deep structural presupposition (which is almost universal amongst lawyers and clearly dominant among lay people) that law and violence stand in stark opposition is false. I argue that violence is endemic to any conception of modern law, that it is authorized by the legislature and/or executive, sanctioned by the judiciary, and perpetrated by what are euphemistically called the forces of law and order - the police, the military et cetera. In brief, I wish to posit the disquieting thought that legal violence is a sine …

The Future Of Liberal Legal Scholarship, Ronald K.L. Collins, David M. Skover

Michigan Law Review

Earl Warren is dead.

A generation of liberal legal scholars continues, nevertheless, to act as if the man and his Court preside over the present. While this romanticism is understandable, it exacts a high price in a world transformed.

The following commentary is a reconstructive criticism written from the perspective of two liberals concerned about the future of "legal liberalism." We present our views as a commentary to emphasize their preliminary character; they represent our current assessment of where liberals stand and where they might redirect their energies.

Rummaging Through The Emperor's Wardrobe, Don Herzog

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Politics: A Work in Constructive Social Theory. 3 Volumes by Roberto Mangabeira Unger

The Authoritarian Impulse In Constitutional Law, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Should there be greater participation by legislators and citizens in constitutional debate, theory, and decision-making? An increasing number of legal theorists from otherwise divergent perspectives have recently argued against what Paul Brest calls the "principle of judicial exclusivity" in our constitutional processes. These theorists contend that because issues of public morality in our culture either are, or tend to become, constitutional issues, all political actors, and most notably legislators and citizens, should consider the constitutional implications of the moral issues of the day. Because constitutional questions are essentially moral questions about how active and responsible citizens should constitute themselves, we …

Teaching Tolerance, Robert F. Nagel

Publications

No abstract provided.

Constituting Communities Through Words That Bind: Reflections On Loyalty Oaths, Sanford Levinson

Michigan Law Review

Preparation of this essay has not served to resolve my own ambivalences about what, after all, Duncan Kennedy once named the "fundamental contradiction" of all social life, the tension between "individual freedom" and the coercive communal life with "[o]thers (family, friends, bureaucrats, cultural figures, the state)" that is "necessary if we are to become persons at all - they provide us the stuff of our selves and protect us ,in crucial ways against destruction." It should not be surprising if something so fundamental does not prove amenable to resolution. In any case, the reader should not expect to find a …

A Comment On Religious Convictions And Lawmaking, John H. Garvey

Michigan Law Review

Professor Kent Greenawalt's Cooley Lectures on Religious Convictions and Lawmaking are fresh, honest, and thoughtful. They offer some troubling questions for liberal democratic theorists (Greenawalt names Bruce Ackerman and John Rawls as representatives of the class) who argue that good citizens and officials should set their religious co~victions aside when they deal with political questions. Greenawalt contends that religious liberal democrats are not committed to such a program of self-denial - that sometimes (though not always) political judgments can rest on religious convictions. I think he is right but too modest about the implications of his thesis.

Freedom Of Speech As Therapy, Pierre Schlag

Publications

No abstract provided.

Book Review Of Passion: An Essay On Personality , Richard F. Devlin Frsc

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Passion is a cogently structured, compel Jingly argued and seductively enthralling masterpiece which, in years to come, will undoubtedly stand out as an inspirational source for many who seek social transformation. Unger's style, in this essay at least, is lucid and inviting. Substantively, Passion demonstrates not only the depth of his penetrating intellect but also his command of an array of' disciplines. Unger's polymathy is all the more impressive when we remember that ours is an era in which idiosyncratic specialization is the norm.

Commissioning Morallity: An Introduction To The Symposium, Alan J. Weisbard, John D. Arras

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Electoral Folklore: An Empirical Examination Of The Abortion Issue, Jeffrey W. Stempel

Scholarly Works

Though partisans on both sides claim credit for electoral victories and defeats, and politicians treat both groups with deference, few studies have attempted to gauge the impact of the abortion issue in more than an anecdotal manner. In 1976, NARAL noted that of the 13 members of the U.S. Representatives that lost re-election bids, nine were pro-life, and four were pro-choice. A study conducted by the Alan Guttmacher Institute of the 1974 House races found that, in “competitive” districts, 92 percent of the pro-choice candidates studied were re-elected while only 61 percent of the pro-life candidates were returned to Congress, …