Legal History Commons^™

The Importance Of Being Empirical, Michael Heise

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Legal scholarship is becoming increasingly empirical. Although empirical methodologies gain important influence within the legal academy, their application in legal research remains underdeveloped. This paper surveys and analyzes the state of empirical legal scholarship and explores possible influences on its production. The paper advances a normative argument for increased empirical legal scholarship.

Charting The Influences On The Judicial Mind: An Empirical Study Of Judicial Reasoning, Gregory C. Sisk, Michael Heise, Andrew P. Morriss

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

In 1988, hundreds of federal district judges were suddenly confronted with the need to render a decision on the constitutionality of the Sentencing Reform Act and the newly promulgated criminal Sentencing Guidelines. Never before has a question of such importance and involving such significant issues of constitutional law mandated the immediate and simultaneous attention of such a large segment of the federal trial bench. Accordingly, this event provides an archetypal model for exploring the influence of social background, ideology, judicial role and institution, and other factors on judicial decisionmaking. Based upon a unique set of written decisions involving an identical …

The Supreme Court 1997 Term -- Foreword: The Limits Of Socratic Deliberation, Michael C. Dorf

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Feminist Legal Theory, Feminist Lawmaking, And The Legal Profession, Cynthia Grant Bowman, Elizabeth M. Schneider

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Infinity Within The Brackets, Annelise Riles

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The ethnographic subjects of this article are UN-sponsored international conferences and their legal documents. Drawing upon fieldwork among Fiji delegates at these conferences, in this article I demonstrate the centrality of matters of form, as distinct from questions of “meaning,” in the negotiation of international agreements. A parallel usage of documents and of mats among Fijian negotiators provides a heuristic device for exploring questions of pattern and scale in the aesthetics of negotiation.

The Boiling Pot Of Lawyer Conflicts In Bankruptcy, Charles W. Wolfram

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

I take up here only two modest pieces of the current puzzle of lawyer conflicts of interest in bankruptcy practice. One involves the decision of the American Law Institute (hereinafter "ALI") to sidestep the entire field in the course of drafting its Restatement of the Law Governing Lawyers (hereinafter "Restatement"). The other involves the decision of the National Bankruptcy Review Commission (hereinafter "NBRC") to refuse to recommend that Congress do anything at all major to disturb existing law in the same realm. Either the law of lawyer conflicts in bankruptcy has been blessed in its present state by two prestigious …

Property As Propriety, Gregory S. Alexander

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

"Lit. Theory" Put To The Test: A Comparative Literary Analysis Of American Judicial Tests And French Judicial Discourse, Mitchel De S.-O.-L'E. Lasser

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The formalism/policy dichotomy has structured American jurisprudential analyses of judicial decisionmaking for most of the twentieth century. In this Article, Professor Lasser analyzes and compares American multi-part judicial tests and French civil judicial discourse to demonstrate that the dichotomy reflects and informs the ways in which judicial decisions are written. Drawing on the works of Roman Jakobson, Roland Barthes, and Paul de Man, he constructs a literary methodology to analyze American and French judicial discourse. Professor Lasser contends that the formalism/policy dichotomy is part of a larger process by which the American and French judicial systems justify how they produce …

The Concept Of Religion, Eduardo M. Peñalver

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Are Housekeepers Like Judges?, Stephen P. Garvey

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Professor Greenawalt proposes that we look at interpretation "from the bottom up." By taking a close look at informal relationships between an authority and his or her agent, and how the agent "faithfully performs" instructions within such relationships, he hopes to gain insight into the problems surrounding the interpretation of legal directives. The analysis of "faithful performance" in informal contexts which Professor Greenawalt presents in From the Bottom Up is the first step in a larger project. His next step is to see what lessons the interpretation of instructions in informal contexts has for law. This Comment tries to contribute …

Limited-Domain Positivism As An Empirical Proposition, Stewart J. Schwab

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

In his typically clear statement of a provocative thesis, Fred Schauer, along with his co-author, Virginia Wise, ask us to think about positivism in a new way. Their claim has two parts. First, Schauer and Wise redefine legal positivism as an empirical claim about the limited domain of information that legal decisionmakers use to make decisions. Second, they begin testing the extent to which our legal system in fact reflects this limited domain. Ironically, Schauer and Wise believe that positivism, so conceived, is "increasingly false." Thus, their two-part approach is, first, to declare that legal positivism should be conceived of …

Recipe For Trouble: Some Thoughts On Meaning, Translation And Normative Theory, Michael C. Dorf

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Cathedral At Twenty-Five: Citations And Impressions, James E. Krier, Stewart J. Schwab

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

It was twenty-five years ago that Guido Calabresi and Douglas Melamed published their article on property rules, liability rules, and inalienability. Calabresi, then a law professor, later a dean, is now a federal judge. Melamed, formerly a student of Calabresi's, is now a seasoned Washington attorney. Their article—which, thanks to its subtitle, we shall call The Cathedral—has had a remarkable influence on our own thinking, as we tried to show in a recent paper.

This is not the place to rehash what we said then, but a summary might be in order. First, we demonstrated that the conventional wisdom …

How Law Is Formal And Why It Matters, Robert S. Summers

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Two- And Three-Dimensional Property Rights, Emily Sherwin

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

A Nonoriginalist Perspective On The Lessons Of History, Michael C. Dorf

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

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 …