Legal History Commons^™

The Aretaic Turn In Constitutional Theory, Lawrence B. Solum

Faculty Scholarship

The author argues that the aretaic turn in constitutional theory is an institutional approach to theories of constitutional interpretation ought to be supplemented by explicit focus on the virtues and vices of constitutional adjudicators. Part I, The Most Dysfunctional Branch, advances the speculative hypothesis that politicization of the judiciary has led the political branches to exclude consideration of virtue from the nomination and confirmation of Supreme Court Justices and to select Justices on the basis of the strength of their commitment to particular positions on particular issues and the fervor of their ideological passions.

Part II, Institutionalism and Constitutional …

Nietzsche In Law's Cathedral: Beyond Reason And Postmodernism, John Linarelli

Scholarly Works

Nietzsche had very little to say about law and what he did say is fragmentary and sporadic. Nietzsche's philosophy, however, offers a basis for theorizing about law. I use Nietzsche's important works to interpret two major movements in legal thought. The first part of the paper examines how Nietzsche's philosophy augments our understanding of deontological theories about the law. Nietzsche produced a substantial ethical theory. The second part of the paper examines how Nietzsche's philosophy helps us to understand law and economics. Nietzsche had a great deal to say about the intellectual predecessor to law and economics, utilitarianism, and his …

Holmes, Common Law Theory, And Judicial Restraint, 36 J. Marshall L. Rev. 457 (2003), Frederic R. Kellogg

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Law And Judicial Duty, Philip A. Hamburger

Faculty Scholarship

Two hundred years ago, in Marbury v. Madison, Chief Justice Marshall delivered an opinion that has come to dominate modern discussions of constitutional law. Faced with a conflict between an act of Congress and the U.S. Constitution, he explained what today is known as "judicial review." Marshall described judicial review in terms of a particular type of "superior law" and a particular type of "judicial duty." Rather than speak generally about the hierarchy within law, he focused on "written constitutions."

He declared that the U.S. Constitution is "a superior, paramount law" and that if "the constitution is superior to any …

Review Of Explaining The English Revolution: Hobbes And His Contemporaries, Donald J. Herzog

Reviews

The explosion of primary texts from seven- teenth-century England continues to trigger an explosion of scholarly treatments today. For good reason, too: Lots of the primary texts are amazing, and not just those tired old warhors- es, Hobbes's Leviathan and Locke's Second Treatise. As fun and challenging as the primary texts are, you are forgiven a touch of skepticism if you wonder just what the latest author has to add to our understanding. You might redouble your skepticism if you just glance at Mark Stephen Jendrysik's table of contents, offering chapters on Winstanley, Milton, Cromwell, Filmer, and Hobbes, and zeroing …

The Force Of Ancient Manners: Federalist Politics And The Unitarian Controversy, Marc Arkin

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Value Of Dissent, Lawrence B. Solum

Faculty Scholarship

This essay reviews Dissent, Injustice, and the Meanings of America by Steven H. Shiffrin (1999).

Theorizing about the freedom of speech has been a central enterprise of contemporary legal scholarship. The important contributions to the debate are simply far too numerous to categorize. One ambition of this theorizing is the production of a comprehensive theory of the freedom of expression, a set of consistent normative principles that would explain and justify First Amendment doctrine. Despite an outpouring of scholarly effort, the consensus is that free speech theory has failed to realize this imperial ambition. Rather than searching for the global …

Legal Institutions In Professor H.L.A. Hart's Concept Of Law, Robert S. Summers

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Language Matters, 34 J. Marshall L. Rev. 163 (2000), Jane B. Baron

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Politics Of Meaning: Law Dictionaries And The Liberal Tradition Of Interpretation, Gary L. Mcdowell

Law Faculty Publications

At least since John Cowell's Interpreter was adjudged by the Committee on Grievances of the House of Commons in 1610 to be "very unadvised, and undiscreet, tending to the disreputation of the honour and power of the common laws" have law dictionaries been objects of occasional controversy. Yet legal dictionaries, as well as dictionaries more generally, have remained a constant resource in American law for those seeking to give meaning to the words of both statutes and constitutional provisions. They have appeared in the pages of the reports since the beginning of the republic; a majority of the justices of …

Positivism, Emergent And Triumphant, Vincent A. Wellman

Michigan Law Review

Positivism is one of those words that triggers passionate and often contradictory responses. For some, positivism is a pejorative. Lon Fuller, perhaps more than anyone, charged that positivism was confused about the nature of law, blind to law's inherent morality, and morally corrupting to boot. He even suggested, in different ways, that positivism helped promote the rise of fascism in Europe. Others, in contrast, have treated positivism as a modest and undeniable truth about law. Law, they argued, is morally fallible, and accordingly, the existence and validity of law is a matter of social fact rather than moral necessity. H.L.A. …

Imperatives, Normativity, And The Law, Gregory Silverman

Faculty Articles

In this article Professor Silverman sets out to resolve the problem of legal normativity. Professor Silverman argues that legal scholars have been prevented from transcending the limited conception of law engendered by a key dogma of nineteenth century jurisprudence: the dogma that laws are a species of commands, orders, or imperatives. As a result, even as we enter the twenty-first century, legal scholars have yet to articulate a legal architectonic that properly situates the normative commitments of a society within a post-modern legal system. An adequate theory of law must offer an account of the normativity of law: an account …

Sex And The Social Order: The Selective Enforcement Of Colonial American Adultery Laws In The English Context, Carolyn B. Ramsey

Publications

No abstract provided.

Death Penalty: A Philosophical And Theological Perspective, 30 J. Marshall L. Rev. 463 (1997), Walter Berns, Nancy Bothne, William Bowers, Richard Dieter, Richard Land, James Lund, Austin Sarat

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Review Of Reason And Rhetoric In The Philosophy Of Hobbes, Donald J. Herzog

Reviews

In the 1960s, Quentin Skinner wrote a series of polemical if terse papers arguing that the conventional approach to the history of political theory was confused. Using Hobbes as something of a vehicle for his position, Skinner enunciated what is now well known as the "Cambridge" approach to political theory. He urged that we situate authors in their intellectual contexts so that we can isolate what is distinctive, perhaps subversive, in their use of language: only then, he argued, can we have any valid historical understanding on what they are doing in writing these weird books in the first place. …

The First Amendment Comes Of Age: The Emergence Of Free Speech In Twentieth-Century America, G. Edward White

Michigan Law Review

As the number of issues perceived as having First Amendment implications continues to grow, and the coterie of potential beneficiaries of First Amendment protection continues to widen - including not only the traditional oppressed mavericks and despised dissenters but some rich and powerful members from the circles of political and economic orthodoxy - alarms have been sounded. Another period of stocktaking for free speech theory appears to be dawning, and some recent commentators have proposed a retrenchment from the long twentieth- century progression of increasingly speech-protective interpretations of the First Amendment. At the heart of the retrenchment literature lies the …

Legal Realism, Lex Fori, And The Choice-Of-Law Revolution, Michael S. Green

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Table Of Contents - Cardozo Law Review, Volume 15, Issue 5

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Law, Postmodernism And Resistance: Rethinking The Significance Of The Irish Hunger Strike, Part Ii, Richard F. Devlin Frsc

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

In recent years legal scholars have drawn upon the insights of postmodernism and deconstruction as methods for the interpretation of legal texts. In this article the author attempts to assess the work of Baudrillard, Derrida and Lyotard not merely as interpretative strategies but as potential socio-legal theories. In order to ground the analysis, the author locates the assessment in the context of the hunger strike by Irish prisoners in 1981. Drawing on the insights of postmodernism and deconstruction the author proposes that the fast can be understood as the erruption of a pre-colonial juridical consciousness by means of which the …

Law, Postmodernism And Resistance: Rethinking The Significance Of The Irish Hunger Strike, Part I, Richard F. Devlin Frsc

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

In recent years legal scholars have drawn upon the insights of postmodernism and deconstruction as methods for the interpretation of legal texts. In this article the author attempts to assess the work of Baudrillard, Derrida and Lyotard not merely as interpretative strategies but as potential socio-legal theories. In order to ground the analysis, the author locates the assessment in the context of the hunger strike by Irish prisoners in 1981. Drawing on the insights of postmodernism and deconstruction the author proposes that the fast can be understood as the erruption of a pre-colonial juridical consciousness by means of which the …

Review Of Political Discourse In Early Modern Britain, Donald J. Herzog

Reviews

This is a festschrift for the indefatigable J. G. A. Pocock (indefatigable indeed: the volume closes with a daunting nine-page bibliography of Pococks work to date, a veritable flood of erudition that shows no signs of ebbing). The essays are better than what usually end up stuck in such volumes: better as a simple matter of scholarly quality, but better too as exemplary models of what is distinctive in Pocock's approach. I suppose that at this price, no one will consider asking impoverished graduate students to purchase the volume. But there are always reserve desks, not to mention xerox machines …

Moral Foundations Of Constitutional Thought: Current Problems, Augustinian Prospects, Arthur J. Burke

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Moral Foundations of Constitutional Thought: Current Problems, Augustinian Prospects by Graham Walker

Review Of Transforming Political Discourse, Donald J. Herzog

Reviews

Political theorists are almost always fond of giving each other home- work assignments but not generally fond of completing them. The opening salvo in a promised three-volume campaign to redefine the tasks of political theory, Transforming Political Discourse might seem to invite more weary shrugs. Surely, we have too many manifestos already. Well, yes -but this one, happily, is modest, sensible, and mercifully brief. Better yet, its brevity is positively austere in sketching the metadescription of what the promised land looks like. The argument actually hangs on a series of show-and-tell exercises, which are supposed to be applications of the …

The Iroquois Great Law Of Peace And The United States Constitution: How The Founding Fathers Ignored The Clan Mothers, Renée Jacobs

American Indian Law Review

No abstract provided.

Equal Protection, Class Legislation, And Sex Discrimination: One Small Cheer For Mr. Herbert Spencer's Social Statics, Mark G. Yudof

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Fourteenth Amendment: From Political Principle to Judicial Doctrine by William E. Nelson

Critical Legal Studies, Michael F. Colosi

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Critical Legal Studies by Allan C. Hutchinson

Classical Republicanism And The American Revolution, Gordon S. Wood

Chicago-Kent Law Review

In his Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution, Professor Wood outlines the evolution of republicanism from antiquity to the eighteenth century and notes the ensuing evolution of American politics away from even this late republicanism.

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, …

Work On A Labor Theory Of Meaning, Kenneth Casebeer

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Roscoe Pound And American Sociology: A Study In Archival Frame Analysis, Sociobiography And Sociological Jurisprudence, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Roscoe Pound (1870-1964) was a noted botanist, jurist, and sociologist who founded the American school of sociological jurisprudence. Pound's sociological ideas originated at the University of Nebraska. Pound developed numerous ties to other sociologists, joined the American Sociological Society, and published in the American Journal of Sociology. Pound's modern erasure from sociological chronicles is attributed in part to hegemonic processes. The collection of archival data for this study in the history of sociology is generalized (by extending Erving Goffman's metatheory of meaning) as "archival frame analysis." Pound's intellectual milieu is analyzed using Mary Jo Deegan's theory of "core codes" …