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The Limits Of Social Policy, Cary Coglianese

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Limits of Social Policy by Nathan Glazer

Critical Legal Studies, Michael F. Colosi

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Critical Legal Studies by Allan C. Hutchinson

Shattered Mirrors: Our Search For Identity And Community In The Aids Era, William J. Aseltyne

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Shattered Mirrors: Our Search for Identity and Community in the AIDS Era by Monroe E. Price

The Child Sexual Abuse Literature: A Call For Greater Objectivity, John E.B. Myers

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Accusations of Child Sexual Abuse by Hollida Wakefield and Ralph Underwager., The Battle and the Backlash: The Child Sexual Abuse War by David Hechler., On Trial: America's Courts and Their Treatment of Sexually Abused Children by Billie Wright Dziech and Chales B. Schudson.

Sociological Justice, Christopher M. Adams

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Sociological Justice by Donald Black

Homelessness: A Historical Perspective On Modern Legislation, Mark Peters

Michigan Law Review

This Note will demonstrate how current legislative responses to homelessness are bound and crippled by the social reform theories of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Before legislators can devise more efficient remedies to tackle current problems, they must identify and transcend earlier, ineffective thinking. This requires viewing the homelessness problem· in historical perspective. Specifically, legislatures must (1) examine the origins of the legal system's underlying conceptions about homelessness, (2) understand how these conceptions undermined earlier legislation designed to deal with the crisis, and (3) isolate, and escape, the modem manifestations of these conceptions.

This Note examines the early twentieth …

Social Irresponsibility, Actuarial Assumptions, And Wealth Redistribution: Lessons About Public Policy From A Prepaid Tuition Program, Jeffrey S. Lehman

Michigan Law Review

In this article, I shall try to illuminate the question of how governments, as opposed to private insurers, grapple with the problem of intergenerational social irresponsibility. I shall do so by analyzing and criticizing a single public program. That program, the Michigan Education Trust (MET), was the most widely publicized government action in the field of higher education finance during the 1980s. MET allows parents of young children to purchase contracts promising to cover the children's tuition at Michigan public colleges when they enroll up to eighteen years later.

In setting forth this case study, I also attempt to develop …

Contract Law, Default Rules, And The Philosophy Of Promising, Richard Craswell

Michigan Law Review

Among the topics addressed by moral philosophy is the obligation to keep one's promises. To many philosophers, there is something strange (or, at least, something calling for explanatie1n) in the idea that moral obligations can be created simply by an individual's saying so yet this is what seems to happen when a person makes a promise. Consequently, there is by now a large body of literature attempting to identify the exact source and nature of this moral obligation.

Part I of this article presents a more detailed survey of recent philosophical writings about promises, for the benefit of legal readers …

The Constitution's Accommodation Of Social Change, Philip A. Hamburger

Michigan Law Review

Did the framers and ratifiers of the United States Constitution think that changes in American society would require changes in the text or interpretation of the Constitution? If those who created the Constitution understood or even anticipated the possibility of major social alterations, how did they expect constitutional law - text and interpretation - to accommodate such developments?

The effect of social change upon constitutional law was an issue the framers and ratifiers frequently discussed. For example, when AntiFederalists complained of the Constitution's failure to protect the jury trial in civil cases, Federalists responded that a change of circumstances might, …

A Tale Of Two Clients: Thinking About Law As Language, Clark D. Cunningham

Michigan Law Review

This is a true story. It is actually three true stories. The article taken as a whole tells a story of my personal search for a new way of talking about the experience of being a lawyer, a quest which is leading me to think more and more about law as a kind of language and lawyering as a form of translation. Rather like a medieval romance, embedded within this story of a quest are two tales, about clients I have represented in the course of my clinical teaching.

As much as possible, both levels of narrative are presented in …

Empathy, Legal Storytelling, And The Rule Of Law: New Words, Old Wounds?, Toni M. Massaro

Michigan Law Review

The legal storytelling theme that is the focus of this symposium is part of a larger, ongoing intellectual movement. American legal scholarship of the past several decades has revealed deep dissatisfaction with the abstract and collective focus of law and legal discourse. The rebellion against abstraction has, of late, been characterized by a "call to context." One strand of this complex body of thought argues that law should concern itself more with the concrete lives of persons affected by it. One key word in the dialogue is the term "empathy," which appears frequently in the work of critical legal studies, …

The Obliging Shell: An Informal Essay On Formal Equal Opportunity, Patricia Williams

Michigan Law Review

I am struck by the Court's use of the word "equality" in the last line of its holding. It seems an extraordinarily narrow use of "equality," when it excludes from consideration so much clear inequality. It, again, resembles the process by which the Parol Evidence Rule limits the meaning of documents or words by placing beyond the bounds of reference anything that is inconsistent, or, depending on the circumstances, even that which is supplementary. It is this lawyerly language game of exclusion and omission that is the subject of the rest of this essay.

The Cognitive Dimension Of The Agon Between Legal Power And Narrative Meaning, Steven L. Winter

Michigan Law Review

In Part II, I first provide a brief description of what we are learning about the grounded and imaginative nature of the cognitive process. I then elaborate the cognitive structure of the concept narrative and consider the manner in which we employ that concept in recognizing, understanding, and constructing narratives of all types - from folktales like the midrash to avant-garde literature like Waiting for Godot. In Part III, I employ this information about the cognitive and narrative processes to explore the secondary role of narrative in the institutionalization of legal and social meaning. I will identify the cognitive …