Law and Society Commons^™

The Crimson Logic Case: When Is A Judgment Not A Judgment?, S. Chandra Mohan

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

After a 62-day trial, which concluded on 29 December 2006, all four defendants in the CrimsonLogic case1 were acquitted. The accused were the CEO, Financial Controller, Vice-President of the Trade & Logistics Business Unit and Corporate Counsel of CrimsonLogic, an IT systems provider. They were charged, on one count, with engaging in a conspiracy to pay a bribe of $35,000 to Mathias Tan, an IT manager of the supermarket Carrefour, as an inducement for Tan to recommend the award of an IT contract to CrimsonLogic. In acquitting the defendants, the trial judge declared that there was a 'serious doubt' as …

Property And Empire: The Law Of Imperialism In Johnson V. M’Intosh, Jedediah Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

Chief Justice's Marshall's opinion in Johnson v. M'Intosh, 21 U.S. (8 Wheat.)543 (1823) has long been a puzzle, both in its doctrinal structure and in long, strange dicta which are both triumphal and elegiac. In this Essay, I show that the opinion becomes newly intelligible when read in the context of the law and theory of colonialism, concerned, like the case itself, with the expropriation of continents and relations between dominant and subject peoples. I examine several instances where the seeming incoherence of the opinion instead shows its debt to imperial jurisprudence, which rested on a distinction between two bodies …

Foreign Authority, American Exceptionalism, And The Dred Scott Case, Sarah H. Cleveland

Faculty Scholarship

At least since Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in 1831, the idea that America is distinctive from other nations has permeated much political and social commentary. The United States has been variously perceived as unique in its history, its culture, its national values, its social movements, and its social and political institutions. While the term technically refers only to distinctiveness or difference, "exceptionalism" may have positive or negative aspects – what Harold Koh has called "America's Jekyll-and-Hyde exceptionalism." In the legal realm, claims of exceptionalism have been offered to support what Michael Ingnatieff identifies as "legal isolationism" – or refusal by …

Moral And Religious Convictions As Categories For Special Treatment: The Exemption Strategy, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

My topic differs from the usual inquiries about morality and law, such as how far law should embody morality, whether legal interpretation (always or sometimes) includes moral judgment, and whether an immoral law really counts as law. Concentrating on exemptions from ordinary legal requirements, I am interested in instances when the law might make especially relevant the moral judgments of individual actors. I am particularly interested in whether the law should ever treat moral judgments based on religious conviction differently from moral judgments that lack such a basis.

A striking example for both questions is conscientious objection to military service. …

Shape Stops Story, Elizabeth F. Emens

Faculty Scholarship

Storytelling and resistance are powerful tools of both lawyering and individual identity, as I argue in this brief essay published in Narrative as part of a dialogue on disability, narrative, and law with Rosemarie Garland-Thompson and Ellen Barton. Garland-Thompson's work shows us the life-affirming potential of storytelling, its role in shaping disability identity, and its role in communicating that identity to the outside world. By contrast, Barton powerfully shows how those same life-affirming narratives can force a certain kind of storytelling, can create a mandate to tell one story and not another. In short, Barton reminds us of the need …

An Answer To The Question: "What Is Poststructuralism?", Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

What is poststructuralism? It has always struck me as odd that so many critical theorists are reluctant to offer an answer to this question. In this essay, I unpack the term and provide a synoptic answer. Poststructuralism, I suggest, is a style of critical reasoning that focuses on the moment of ambiguity in our systems of meaning, as a way to identify the ethical choices that we make when we overcome the ambiguity and move from indeterminacy to certainty of belief in our efforts to understand, interpret, and shape our environment. Post-structuralism concentrates on the moment when we impose meaning …

International Union, U.A.W. V. Johnson Controls: The History Of Litigation Alliances And Mobilization To Challenge Fetal Protection Policies, Caroline Bettinger-Lopez, Susan P. Sturm

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court's decision in Johnson Controls is the culmination of a long legal campaign by labor, women's rights, and workplace safety advocates to invalidate restrictions on women's employment based on pregnancy. This campaign powerfully demonstrates the use of amicus briefs as opportunities to link the efforts of groups with overlapping agendas and to shape the Supreme Court's understanding of the surrounding empirical, social and political context. But Johnson Controls also provides important lessons about the narrowing effects and fragility of litigation-centered mobilization. The case affirmed an important anti-discrimination principle but ironically left women (and men) with the right to …

On The Effective Communication Of The Results Of Empirical Studies, Part Ii, Christina L. Boyd, Lee Epstein, Andrew D. Martin

Scholarship@WashULaw

While law professors are increasingly making use of data in their scholarship and while the data work housed in their studies is (generally) of a high quality, they have been less effective at communicating the products of their labor. A strong devotion to tabular, rather than graphical, displays, and claims about "statistical significance" rather than substantive importance, are just two areas requiring improvement. Here, as in Part I, we attempt to adapt a burgeoning literature in the social and statistical sciences to the unique interests of legal scholars. Our proposals are many in number, but none is particularly difficult to …

Links And Choices: Popular Legal Culture In The Work Of Lawrence M. Friedman, Jo Carrillo

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Race, Redistricting, And Representation, Guy-Uriel Charles

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay, which was written for the Ohio State Law Journal's symposium on Election Law and the Roberts Court, examines the Court's decision in League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) v. Perry. The Essay explores two ways of reading LULAC: first as a racial representation case and second as a case concerned with representation itself. The essay argues that politics not race is the majority's worry in LULAC and that the case is the first application of Justice Kennedy's representation rights concept first introduced in Vieth.

Law, Social Justice, Economic Development, And Modern Banking Sector Legal Reform: Taking In The 'Excluded', Joseph J. Norton

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This chapter examines a critical banking reform issue in developing countries – the equitable inclusion of individuals effectively excluded from mainstream banking/financial sectors of their respective countries. The author sets forth the proposition that the equitable and accessible provision of banking services has never been considered a core component to modern banking sector legal reform and assessment in the developing world. After more than two decades of study and practical involvement with financial sector reform in developing, transitioning and emerging economies, the author has the general view that the future banking/financial sector legal policy and infrastructure reform process for International …

The Practice Of Law In The Peaceable Kingdom, Robert P. Burns

Georgia Law Review

Milner Ball would be the last person to claim to have constructed a system. After all, he writes in the essay form, one that is "tentative, reflective, suggestive, contradictory, and incomplete."' It is a style that suggests there is more afoot than any science or philosophy is likely to conceive and that much of what is most important has to be shown, not stated. Surely, the notion of a system, as in "the legal system," reflects many of the qualities that, as we will see, he is most at pains to criticize. However, there are definitely themes in his work …

Meeting Of The Minds, Part Ii: A Dark And Angry God Arises, Paul J. Heald

Georgia Law Review

In 1988, Professor Heald found a lost manuscript of Steve Allen's groundbreaking television show, "A Meeting of the Minds."' In that episode, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Mark Kelman, Blaise Pascal, and Richard Posner discussed the nature of law.2 While completing renovation of a house, possibly visited by Allen, Heald recently found another manuscript jammed on top of an old water tank...

Ennobling Direct Democracy, Sherman J. Clark

University of Colorado Law Review

In this essay, Professor Clark argues that we should be attentive to the effect that direct democracy might have on our public character. Building upon earlier work, Clark suggests that the initiative in particular threatens to debase us by undercutting a crucial character trait which might best be called "responsibility-taking." The bulk of this essay is devoted to explaining what this means, and why it matters. Why should we care about the effect of political processes on public character? Why is this particular trait important and worth preserving? How is it threatened by direct democracy? In conclusion, and by way …