Legal History Commons^™

Interpretive Contestation And Legal Correctness, Matthew D. Adler

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

You Can't Go Holmes Again, Lumen N. Mulligan

Faculty Works

Under the standard interpretation of 28 U.S.C. § 1331, the so called Holmes test, pleading a federal cause of action is sufficient for finding federal question jurisdiction. In January 2012, the Supreme Court, in Mims v. Arrow Financial Services, LLC, recharacterized this standard test for § 1331 jurisdiction as one that considers whether “federal law creates [both] a private right of action and furnishes the substantive rules of decision.” In this first piece to address the Mims Court’s significant change to the § 1331 canon, I applaud its rights-inclusive holding. I contend that this rights-inclusive view rests upon a firmer …

Duncan Kennedy's Third Globalization, Criminal Law, And The Spectacle, Aya Gruber

Publications

No abstract provided.

Against Theories Of Punishment: The Thought Of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Marc O. Degirolami

Faculty Publications

This paper reflects critically on what is the near-universal contemporary method of conceptualizing the tasks of the scholar of criminal punishment. It does so by the unusual route of considering the thought of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, a towering figure in English law and political theory, one of its foremost historians of criminal law, and a prominent public intellectual of the late Victorian period. Notwithstanding Stephen's stature, there has as yet been no sustained effort to understand his views of criminal punishment. This article attempts to remedy this deficit. But its aims are not exclusively historical. Indeed, understanding Stephen's ideas …

Justice John Paul Stevens, Originalist, Diane Marie Amann

Scholarly Works

Commentators, including the author of a recent book on the Supreme Court, often attempt to give each Justice a methodological label, such as “practitioner of judicial restraint,” “legal realist,” “pragmatist,” or “originalist.” This Essay first demonstrates that none of the first three labels applies without fail to Justice John Paul Stevens; consequently, it explores the extent to which Justice Stevens’s jurisprudence paid heed to the fourth method, “originalism.” It looks in particular at Justice Stevens’s opinions in recent cases involving firearms, national security, and capital punishment. Somewhat at odds with conventional wisdom, the Essay reveals Justice Stevens as a kind …

Experimental Pragmatism In The Third Globalization, Justin Deystone

Publications

Pragmatism dominates contemporary legal thought, but knowing this isn’t knowing so much. Legal pragmatism means different things to different people, and as this essay argues, minimalist and experimentalist forms of regulation both share a broadly pragmatic sensibility about law and democracy. As a consequence, we need to tease out the various threads of legal pragmatism in the hope of distinguishing the pragmatisms that work from the ones that don’t, or less pragmatically, the ones that are just from the ones that are not. This knowledge will come from an ongoing assessment of the political stakes immanent in the pragmatisms, and …

Race As A Legal Concept, Justin Deystone

Publications

Race is a legal concept, and like all legal concepts, it is a matrix of rules. Although the legal conception of race has shifted over time, up from slavery and to the present, one element in the matrix has remained the same: the background rules of race have always taken a view of racial identity as a natural aspect of human biology. To be sure, characterizations of the rule have oftentimes kept pace with developments in race science, and the original invention of race as a rationale for the subordination of certain human populations is now a rationale with little …

Natural Law Theory: Its Past And Its Present, John M. Finnis

Journal Articles

The past in which theory of this kind had its origins is notably similar to the present. For this is theory-practical theory-which articulates a critique of critiques, and the critiques it criticizes, rejects and replaces have much in common whether one looks at them in their fifth century B.C. Hellenic (Sophistic) or their modem (Enlightenment, Nietzschean or postmodern) forms.

The Problem About The Nature Of Law Vis-À-Vis Legal Rationality Revisited: Towards An Integrative Jurisprudence, Imer Flores

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this paper the author argues, following Frederick Schauer, that attempting to move theoretically from-the-necessary-to-the-important may hinder our understanding of law. He further argues that attempting to move from-the-important-to-the-necessary may well be a more promising route for advancing our understanding of law as an interpretive practice which is not merely important or valuable but morally important or valuable and even necessary, as Ronald Dworkin has advocated. The authors argument also draws on the insights of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who by discussing the important, but apparently neither necessary nor sufficient aspects of legal practice, integrated both logic and experience into …

Confucian Virtue Jurisprudence, Linghao Wang, Lawrence B. Solum

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Virtue jurisprudence is an approach to legal theory that develops the implications of virtue ethics and virtue politics for the law. Recent work on virtue jurisprudence has emphasized a NeoAristotelian approach. This essay develops a virtue jurisprudence in the Confucian tradition. The title of this essay, “Confucian Virtue Jurisprudence,” reflects the central aim of our work, to build a contemporary theory of law that is both virtue-centered and that provides a contemporary reconstruction of the central ideas of the early Confucian intellectual tradition.

This essay provides a sketch of our contemporary version of Confucian virtue jurisprudence, including a view of …

Samantar, Official Immunity And Federal Common Law, Peter B. Rutledge

Scholarly Works

This essay examines the theoretical underpinnings of the immunity of foreign government officials following the Supreme Court's recent decision in Samantar. Part of a forthcoming symposium with the Lewis and Clark Law Review, the paper tackles the federal common law in the Court's decision and, more broadly, international civil litigation. It criticizes the Court's unexamined assumption that its federal common law power extended to create an immunity that, at best, coexists only uncomfortably alongside the legislative framework of the FSIA. It explains the problematic implications of this assertion of federal common law, both for suits against foreign officials and for …

Conservative Eras In Supreme Court Decision-Making: Employment Division V. Smith, Judicial Restraint, And Neoconservatism, Stephen M. Feldman

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Book Review. Justin Vaisse, Neoconservatism: The Biography Of A Movement, Jeffrey C. Tuomala

Faculty Publications and Presentations

No abstract provided.

The Real Formalists, The Real Realists, And What They Tell Us About Judicial Decision And Legal Education, Edward Rubin

Michigan Law Review

The periodization of history, like chocolate cake, can have some bad effects on us, but it is hard to resist. We realize, of course, that Julius Caesar didn’t think of himself as “Classical” and Richard the Lionhearted didn’t regard the time in which he lived as the Middle Ages. Placing historical figures in subsequently defined periods separates us from them and impairs our ability to understand them on their own terms. But it is difficult to understand anything about them at all if we try to envision history as continuous and undifferentiated. We need periodization to organize events that are …

Framing The Fourth, Tracey Maclin, Julia Mirabella

Michigan Law Review

Our knowledge of the Fourth Amendment's history was fundamentally transformed when William Cuddihy completed his Ph.D. dissertation in 1990. Cuddihy's study was the most comprehensive and detailed examination of the history of search and seizure law and essential reading for anyone interested in the amendment's history. At first, Cuddihy's work was little known: only a few people noticed when the highly regarded constitutional historian Leonard W. Levy stated that "Cuddihy is the best authority on the origins of the Fourth Amendment." Cuddihy finished his dissertation in 1990 and it remained unedited, unpublished, and largely unknown for several years-until Justice O'Connor …

Conference Bibliography: Selected Books And Other Publications By Conference Participants And New Scholarly Books Related To Law And The Humanities, University Of Nevada, Las Vegas -- William S. Boyd School Of Law

Association for the Study of Law, Culture, & the Humanities 14th Annual Conference

A selected bibliography was prepared in connection with the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities 14th Annual Conference held at the William S. Boyd School of Law, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, on March 11-12, 2011.

Conference Program -- Association For The Study Of Law, Culture, & The Humanities 14th Annual Conference, University Of Nevada, Las Vegas -- William S. Boyd School Of Law

Association for the Study of Law, Culture, & the Humanities 14th Annual Conference

The UNLV William S. Boyd School of Law hosted the Association for the Study of Law, Culture & the Humanities 14th Annual Conference from March 11-12, 2011. The Association brings together more than 275 interdisciplinary scholars from around the world each year to discuss law and legal issues from a broad perspective. Scholars attended the meeting at UNLV from Australia, Canada, England, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand and Sweden. The theme of the conference, drawing on the work of Nan Seuffert of the University of Waikato, was "Boundaries and Enemies."

The Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities …

Acontextual Judicial Review, Louis Michael Seidman

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Useless Property, Rashmi Dyal-Chand

Cardozo Law Review

In his exposition of an economic theory of property rights, Harold Demsetz reinforced a foundational assumption in property law: that private ownership is the best way to harness resources for wealth-building purposes. Implicit in Demsetz's model is the largely undefined belief that private ownership will incentivize appropriate use of the property because such use produces higher exchange value. This Article identifies a blind spot in Demsetz's theory that has largely escaped attention in property law and theory. While fully acknowledging the powerful connection between use and exchange value delineated by Demsetz, it argues that, in disparate markets for new or …

Women And Jurisprudence, Ma. Elodia Robles Sotomayor

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

No abstract provided.

The Deep Seabed: The Laws Of Nature And Nature’S Manganese Nodules, Jeffrey C. Tuomala

Faculty Publications and Presentations

No abstract provided.

The Relation Of Theories Of Jurisprudence To International Politics And Law, Anthony D'Amato

Faculty Working Papers

In this essay we shall be concerned with the real world relevance of theories of international law; that is, with the question of the theories themselves as a factor in international decision-making. To do this it is first necessary to review briefly the substance of the jurisprudential debate among legal scholars, then to view some basic jurisprudential ideas as factors in international views of "law," and finally to reach the question of the operative difference a study of these theories might make in world politics.

On The Connection Between Law And Justice, Anthony D'Amato

Faculty Working Papers

What does it mean to assert that judges should decide cases according to justice and not according to the law? Is there something incoherent in the question itself? That question will serve as our springboard in examining what is—or should be—the connection between justice and law. Legal and political theorists since the time of Plato have wrestled with the problem of whether justice is part of law or is simply a moral judgment about law. Nearly every writer on the subject has either concluded that justice is only a judgment about law or has offered no reason to support a …

An Essay On Torts: States Of Argument, Marshall S. Shapo

Faculty Working Papers

This essay summarizes high points in torts scholarship and case law over a period of two generations, highlighting the "states of argument" that have characterized tort law over that period. It intertwines doctrine and policy. Its doctrinal features include the tradtional spectrum of tort liability, the duty question, problems of proof, and the relative incoherency of damages rules. Noting the cross-doctrinal role of tort as a solver of functional problems, it focuses on major issues in products liability and medical malpractice. The essay discusses such elements of policy as the role of power in tort law, the tension between communitarianism …

The Hermeneutical And Rhetorical Nature Of Law, Francis J. Mootz Iii

McGeorge School of Law Scholarly Articles

No abstract provided.

Citizens United And Tiered Personhood, 44 J. Marshall L. Rev. 717 (2011), Atiba R. Ellis

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

One Day Criminal Careers: The Armed Career Criminal Act's Different Occassions Provisions, 44 J. Marshall L. Rev. 963 (2011), Jenny W.L. Osborne

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Temporary Insanity: The Strange Life And Times Of The Perfect Defense, Russell D. Covey

Faculty Publications By Year

The temporary insanity defense has a prominent place in the mythology of criminal law. Because it seems to permit factually guilty defendants to escape both punishment and institutionalization, some imagine it as the “perfect defense.” In fact, the defense has been invoked in a dizzying variety of contexts and, at times, has proven highly successful. Successful or not, the temporary insanity defense has always been accompanied by a storm of controversy, in part because it is often most successful in cases where the defendant’s basic claim is that honor, revenge, or tragic circumstance – not mental illness in its more …

Corporate Prerogative, Race, And Identity Under The Fourteenth Amendment, John A. Powell, Caitlin Watt

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Law, Politics, And The Erosion Of Legitimacy In The Delaware Courts, Kent Greenfield

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.