Legal History Commons^™

Specific Agreements About Race: A Response To Professor Sunstein, Sheri Johnson

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Triumph Of Gilmore's The Death Of Contract, Robert A. Hillman

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Lynching, Federalism, And The Intersection Of Race And Gender In The Progressive Era, Barbara Holden-Smith

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Property Rules And Liability Rules: The Cathedral In Another Light, James E. Krier, Stewart J. Schwab

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Ronald Coase's essay on "The Problem of Social Cost" introduced the world to transaction costs, and the introduction laid the foundation for an ongoing cottage industry in law and economics. And of all the law-and-economics scholarship built on Coase's insights, perhaps the most widely known and influential contribution has been Calabresi and Melamed's discussion of what they called "property rules" and "liability rules." Those rules and the methodology behind them are our subjects here.

We have a number of objectives, the most basic of which is to provide a much needed primer for those students, scholars, and lawyers who are …

Prediction And The Rule Of Law, Michael C. Dorf

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The View From The International Plane: Perspective And Scale In The Architecture Of Colonial International Law, Annelise Riles

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Representing In-Between: Law, Anthropology, And The Rhetoric Of Interdisciplinarity, Annelise Riles

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

This article considers how lawyers and nonlawyers discuss the contribution of interdisciplinary scholarship to the law as a means of rethinking the relationship between these differences. The article first examines the arguments of the nineteenth-century lawyer Henry Maine and of the twentieth-century anthropologist Edmund Leach on the subject, and notes the difference between Maine's emphasis on "movement" from one theoretical discovery to another and Leach's emphasis on creating relationships between disciplines by exploiting a "space in between" the two. Then, turning to contemporary scholarship in legal anthropology, "Law and Society," and the sociology of law, the article critiques the rigid …

Baseline Problems In Assessing Chapter 11, Theodore Eisenberg

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Dealing with failing businesses is like dealing with failing marriages. It is messy. The bigger the business the messier the process is likely to be. Many big business failures in the United States go through their death throes or cure their ills in reorganizations under Chapter 11 of the Bankruptcy Act. As the vehicle in which big business messes travel, Chapter 11 is viewed as unnecessarily complex, time-consuming, and costly. The justification for Chapter 11's very existence has been challenged.

This article suggests that we are blaming the vehicle for the mess that it carries. Much of what is problematic …

The Argument From Ordinary Meaning In Statutory Interpretation, Robert S. Summers, Geoffrey Marshall

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Formal Character Of Law, Robert S. Summers

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Confessions, Criminals, And Community, Sheri Lynn Johnson

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Law And Equity In Contract Enforcement, Emily Sherwin

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Talking About Difference: Meanings And Metaphors Of Individuality, Gregory S. Alexander

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

This paper discusses the relationship between communitarianism and difference theory. Specifically, it focuses on the rhetorical practices that have created an apparent conflict between difference theory and communitarianism. My purpose is to suggest why this conflict dissolves when community and difference are understood as strategic rhetorics that share a common political vision.

Dilemmas Of Group Autonomy: Residential Associations And Community, Gregory S. Alexander

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

We are a society of groups. De Tocqueville's observation that the principle of association shapes American society remains as valid today as it was in the mid-nineteenth century. For us, as for others, the vita activa is participation in a seemingly limitless variety of groups. The importance of group activity in our national character has strongly influenced the agenda of political questions that recur in American political and legal theory. One of the fundamental normative questions on this agenda concerns the proper relationship between groups and the polity. To what extent should the polity foster connections between associations and the …

Legal Pragmatism In The People's Republic Of China, Xingzhong Yu

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Commentary On “On The Nature Of Bankruptcy”: Bankruptcy And Bargaining, Theodore Eisenberg

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

At a conference on bargaining, it should not be surprising that there is more than one perspective on the relationship between bankruptcy and bargaining. Dean Jackson and Professor Scott's article emphasizes a hypothetical bargain to be struck by idealized participants in a firm. It explores the relationship between bankruptcy and that bargain. By imagining what that bargain would look like, Jackson and Scott construct new justifications for bankruptcy law's distributional rules. Such a theory, however, is subject to reservations about the depth of insight that can be gained from examination of purely theoretical bargains. Stripped of real-world characteristics, hypothetical bargains …

The Crisis In Modern Contract Theory, Robert A. Hillman

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Transformation Of Trusts As A Legal Category, 1800-1914, Gregory S. Alexander

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Sometimes we are least aware of that which most affects us. So it seems with respect to legal categories. Lawyers do not take legal categories very seriously today. But they should. Legal categories are central to legal reasoning; indeed it is almost impossible to imagine legal reasoning without the use of categories. Categorical thinking affects every area of law. The purpose of this article is to illuminate, through a case-study, the contingent and ideological character of legal categories. It focuses on the development of trusts into and then as a discrete legal category during the period between the beginning of …

Beyond The Ordinary Religion, Roger C. Cramton

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Summers's Primer On Fuller's Jurisprudence – A Wholly Disinterested Assessment Of The Reviews By Professors Wueste And Lebel, Robert S. Summers

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Some Considerations Which May Lead Lawmakers To Modify A Policy When Adopting It As Law, Robert S. Summers

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Role Of History In Constitutional Interpretation: A Case Study, Gary J. Simson

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Liberalism, Radicalism, And Legal Scholarship, Steven H. Shiffrin

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The Future Of Economics In Legal Education: Limits And Constraints, Robert S. Summers

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

On Identifying And Reconstructing A General Legal Theory – Some Thoughts Prompted By Professor Moore’S Critique, Robert S. Summers

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Concept Of Property In Private And Constitutional Law: The Ideology Of The Scientific Turn In Legal Analysis, Gregory S. Alexander

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

In recent academic writing on the general problem of constitutional protection of property under the takings clause and due process clauses, a mode of analysis has emerged that is evidently different from the conventional analysis of constitutional property claims. In general terms, this new mode is characterized by an effort to analyze claims on an openly teleological and systematic basis. To be sure, this mode is not exclusively of recent origin. But it is a discernible trend in the body of scholarship that discusses constitutional protection of property in the context of previously unfamiliar sorts of private economic interests.

Most …

Reply To Mr Mackie, Robert S. Summers

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Working Conceptions Of "The Law", Robert S. Summers

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

This exploratory essay is an admixture of amateur psychology, moral theory, and jurisprudence. It grows out of seminars I have given for judges, and reflects that focus. Co-theorists will now see some of what I have been telling practitioners. And error in my story may be exposed. But one can have no qualms about this. It is especially important to have things put right for judges.

The General Duty Of Good Faith – Its Recognition And Conceptualization, Robert S. Summers

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Pragmatic Instrumentalism In Twentieth Century American Legal Thought—A Synthesis And Critique Of Our Dominant General Theory About Law And Its Use, Robert S. Summers

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.