Natural Law Commons^™

Pacific Islands And The U.S. Military: The Legal Borderlands Of The Environmental Movement, Sonia Lei

Seattle University Law Review

Climate change remains an urgent, ongoing global issue that requires critical examination of institutional polluters. This includes the world’s largest institutional consumer of petroleum: the United States military. The Department of Defense (DoD) is a massive institution with little oversight, a carbon footprint spanning the globe, a budget greater than the next ten largest nations combined, and overly generous exemptions to environmental regulations and carbon reduction targets. This Comment examines how this lack of accountability and oversight plays out in the context of three Pacific islands that have hosted U.S. military bases for decades. By considering the environmental impact of …

The Consumer’S Choice To Boycott, Agnes Bresee

Seattle University Law Review

In the wake of employees losing their jobs upon voicing their political opinions concerning Israel, Harvard and Columbia law students’ job offers being rescinded upon expressing support for Palestine, and the names and social media profiles of individuals who support Palestine being collected and listed on Canary Mission, such backlash may leave many Americans wondering what form of resistance to settler-colonialist apartheid is acceptable in the twenty-first century. Recently, the movement to collectively boycott brands like Starbucks, which sued its Worker’s Union for a tweet expressing support for Palestine; Disney, which donated money to Israel; and McDonald’s, where a location …

A Different Approach To Agency Theory And Implications For Esg, Jonathan Bonham, Amoray Riggs-Cragun

Seattle University Law Review

In conventional agency theory, the agent is modeled as exerting unobservable “effort” that influences the distribution over outcomes the principal cares about. Recent papers instead allow the agent to choose the entire distribution, an assumption that better describes the extensive and flexible control that CEOs have over firm outcomes. Under this assumption, the optimal contract rewards the agent directly for outcomes the principal cares about, rather than for what those outcomes reveal about the agent’s effort. This article briefly summarizes this new agency model and discusses its implications for contracting on ESG activities.

Overseeing The Administrative State, Jill E. Fisch

Seattle University Law Review

In a series of recent cases, the Supreme Court has reduced the regulatory power of the Administrative State. Pending cases offer vehicles for the Court to go still further. Although the Court’s skepticism of administrative agencies may be rooted in Constitutional principles or political expediency, this Article explores another possible explanation—a shift in the nature of agencies and their regulatory role. As Pritchard and Thompson detail in their important book, A History of Securities Law in the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court was initially skeptical of agency power, jeopardizing Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR)’s ambitious New Deal plan. The Court’s acceptance …

The Sec, The Supreme Court, And The Administrative State, Paul G. Mahoney

Seattle University Law Review

Pritchard and Thompson have given those of us who study the SEC and the securities laws much food for thought. Their methodological focus is on the internal dynamics of the Court’s deliberations, on which they have done detailed and valuable work. The Court did not, however, operate in a vacuum. Intellectual trends in economics and law over the past century can also help us understand the SEC’s fortunes in the federal courts and make predictions about its future.

A Hard Pill To Swallow: The Abysmal Mental Health Standards Of Detained Immigrant Children In The United States, Rama Bankesly

Seattle University Law Review

After setting foot into the U.S., unaccompanied children must learn to navigate academic and legal systems while receiving little support and carrying the heavy burden of effects of trauma on their mental health. They need access to mental health care from qualified professionals, but as this Comment will explain, they systematically fail to receive care, as can be seen in cases like Doe v. Shenandoah Valley Juv. Ctr. Comm’n. In Shenandoah, an unaccompanied child arrived in the U.S. and was placed in a facility that failed to provide remotely adequate mental health care and in fact was subjected …

Students For Fair Admissions: Affirming Affirmative Action And Shapeshifting Towards Cognitive Diversity?, Steven A. Ramirez

Seattle University Law Review

The Roberts Court holds a well-earned reputation for overturning Supreme Court precedent regardless of the long-standing nature of the case. The Roberts Court knows how to overrule precedent. In Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (SFFA), the Court’s majority opinion never intimates that it overrules Grutter v. Bollinger, the Court’s leading opinion permitting race-based affirmative action in college admissions. Instead, the Roberts Court applied Grutter as authoritative to hold certain affirmative action programs entailing racial preferences violative of the Constitution. These programs did not provide an end point, nor did they require assessment, review, periodic expiration, or revision for greater …

Why Equity Follows The Law, Adam J. Macleod

Scholarly Articles

Renewed attention to equity in higher education is welcome because true equity helps us to reason together well. When administered correctly, the jurisprudence of equity models civil discourse and, therefore, can teach us how to carry out civic engagement reasonably. Equitable interpretation of the law teaches us how to understand each other charitably. And equity’s deference to law teaches us how to reason well together about our practical problems. Law is the practical reasoning that we do together. Equity serves the ends of justice by serving law, rather than undermining it. These functions of equity in adjudication point toward a …

Belief In War, Mary Ellen O'Connell

Journal Articles

Introductory Statement

Belief in war dominates our world. From Ukraine to Sudan to America’s ‘war on terror’, extraordinary resources are poured into militaries and arms races. The explanation for why belief in war has become prominent in foreign and security policy in Russia, the United States., China, NATO states and many other places is linked to the influence of Realist political theory. Pope St. John XXIII’s encyclical Pacem in Terris argued for honoring the alternatives to Realism – international law and institutions. It is time for an encyclical that responds directly to Realism and teaches belief in the authentic natural …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

Response To Conophillips' Opposition To Un Rapporteurs Amicus Brief, William Snape, David Hunter

Amicus Briefs & Court Filings

Defendant-Intervenor ConocoPhillips made a number of incorrect and misleading statements in their opposition to the UN Special Rapporteurs proposed amicus brief. This response explains the relationship of the UN Special Rapporteurs to American University’s Washington College of Law, as well as the employment status of the two attorneys who authored the UN Rapporteurs’ amicus brief.

Through The Looking Glass: Professional Responsibility, The Public Interest, And The Future Of Legal Ethics And Lawyer Regulation In The United States: Speech: Welcome And Opening Remarks, William C. Hubbard

South Carolina Law Review

No abstract provided.

Balancing The Inequities In Applying Natural Property Rights To Rights In Real Or Intellectual Property, Lolita Darden

Texas A&M Journal of Property Law

Eric Claeys’s book, Natural Property Rights, introduces a Lockean-based theory of interest-based natural property rights. Central to Claeys’s theory are the concepts of justified interests and productive use. A justified interest, Claeys writes, exists when an individual demonstrates a stronger interest in a resource than anyone else in the community and uses the resource productively in a manner that is “intelligent, purposeful, value-creating, . . . sociable,” and leads to survival or flourishing. Claeys’s theory demonstrates “how a standard justification for property gets implemented in practice” and how a community’s “goods” build on the individual’s goods.

Claeys’s community “goods” focus, …

How Far Does Natural Law Protect Private Property?, James W. Ely Jr.

Texas A&M Journal of Property Law

This Article first explores the ambiguous relationship between natural law and the rights of property owners in American history. It points out that invocation of natural law principles was frequently conflated with English common law guarantees of property rights in the Revolutionary Era. Reliance on natural law as a source of protection for private property faded during the nineteenth century and was largely rejected in the early twentieth century.

The Article then considers the extent to which natural law principles are useful in addressing contemporary issues relating to eminent domain and police power regulation of private property. Taking a skeptical …

The Natural Right Of Property, Timothy Sandefur

Texas A&M Journal of Property Law

This Article offers a critical examination of Eric Claeys’s argument for natural property rights, focusing in particular on the questions of self-ownership and the so-called “Lockean proviso.” It argues that while Claeys is generally on the right track in his argument for natural property rights, he errs in omitting a self-ownership argument, some version of which is necessary for a proper naturalistic account of property, and that the Lockean proviso is neither necessary for such an account nor defensible in its own right. I conclude that the concerns animating the Lockean proviso argument are adequately dealt with by an alternative …

Ad Coelum And The Design Of Property Rights, Joseph A. Schremmer

Texas A&M Journal of Property Law

This Article seizes on a specific doctrinal discussion in Eric Claeys’s Natural Property Rights to argue for the importance of understanding property doctrines in the context of a system of interconnecting rules and standards and not in isolation. The ad coelum doctrine provides that land ownership entails ownership of the suprajacent airspace as well as the underlying subsurface. As Claeys’s discussion highlights, scholars disagree about the significance of ad coelum both conceptually, as to what function the rule serves in defining and allocating property, and normatively. It is only by viewing ad coelum in the context of how it interacts …

Natural Property Rights: A Reply, Eric R. Claeys

Texas A&M Journal of Property Law

This Reply concludes the symposium hosted by the Texas A&M University Journal of Property Law on the author’s forthcoming book Natural Property Rights. The Reply shows how natural law and rights apply to a wide range of doctrinal examples raised in this symposium—including business associations, correlative oil rights, timber extraction, sinking coastlands, water law, nuisance law, property rights in subsurface minerals, and the issues about sovereignty and property disposition associated with Johnson v. M’Intosh (1823). The Reply also addresses a wide range of skeptical objections to natural law—especially the arguments that it relies too much on intuitions and …

Business Organizations As Natural Objects Of Ownership, Kevin Douglas

Texas A&M Journal of Property Law

Given the importance of “property rights” in American law and cul- ture, academic and judicial disagreement over the content of the con- cept is a problem. Professor Eric Claeys makes considerable progress toward resolving this problem in his forthcoming book, Natural Prop- erty Rights. Using John Locke’s labor theory of property, the treatise identifies intelligible limits to the kinds of objects that qualify as prop- erty and provides guidance on how legal rights should operate for a given category of objects. It also identifies several examples of American law that already follow a Lockean framework. The chapters Designing Property Rights …

Natural Law, Assumptions, And Humility, Ezra Rosser

Texas A&M Journal of Property Law

This review of Natural Property Rights celebrates Eric Claeys’s efforts to resuscitate natural law as a viable approach to property law. Although readers unlikely to be convinced that natural law is the way to best understand property rights, Claeys succeeds in breathing new life into natural law. Natural Property Rights’ emphasis on use as property law’s fundamental value creates space to reconceptualize the rights of property owners and the place of non-owners within a just theory of property rights. The main critiques of Natural Property Rights offered in this review center around the choice to prioritize rights over duties …

The Future Of Natural Property Law: Comments On Eric Claeys’S Natural Property Rights, Christopher Serkin

Texas A&M Journal of Property Law

Professor Eric Claeys is among the most thoughtful modern proponents of natural property rights. His new book, provided to conference participants in draft form, is typical of his rigorously analytical approach. It is an impressive articulation of a natural rights-based account of property. It significantly advances the debate over natural rights and should be taken seriously even by those who do not find it entirely convincing.

There are real-world political stakes in abstract-seeming questions of property theory because natural rights are often deployed to limit government regulation of property. Natural rights contrast with positivist accounts that locate the content of …

Natural Property Rights: An Introduction, Eric R. Claeys

Texas A&M Journal of Property Law

This Article introduces a symposium hosted by the Texas A&M University Journal of Property Law. The symposium is on a forthcoming book, and in that book the author introduces and defends a theory of property relying on labor, natural rights, and mine-run principles of natural law. Parts I and II of the Article preview the main claims of the book, summarizing part by part and chapter by chapter.

The rest of the Article illustrates how the theory introduced in the book applies to a contemporary resource dispute. The Article studies an ongoing lawsuit styled Campo v. United States, now …

Too Simple Rules For A Complex World? Prior Appropriation Water Rights As Natural Rights, Vanessa Casado-Pérez

Texas A&M Journal of Property Law

This Article assesses the fit of Professor Claeys’s theory of Natural Property Rights to traditional prior appropriation, the regime that allocates water in the West, and its capacity to fit the future of the regime. Natural Property Rights does not offer clear answers to the conflicts under the prior appropriation doctrine of water when there is scarcity. This Article explores the lack of determinacy of Claeys’s theory and the maladjustment between the theory and some of the foundational prior appropriation principles, which cannot be ignored even in the most stylized form of the regime. In particular, the Article analyzes the …

Oil, Trees, And Water: Evaluating The Transition From Natural Property Rights To Property Conventions, John A. Lovett

Texas A&M Journal of Property Law

In his new book, Natural Property Rights, Eric Claeys offers a property theory grounded in a person’s ability to make productive or purposive use of a resource and the requirement of clear communication about the extent of a person’s claim to that resource. This Article illustrates some of the normative and practical advantages of Claeys’s theory by using it to explicate three property disputes that have arisen in Louisiana concerning highly contested natural resources—oil, trees, and water. The Article argues that Claeys’s theory illuminates a major focal case in the development of Louisiana’s law of the obligations of neighborhood, …

Opus As The Core Of Property, Adam Macleod

Texas A&M Journal of Property Law

No account of property law can achieve a comprehensive understanding without factoring in natural rights. Professor Eric Claeys’s new book offers a significant contribution to contemporary property theory by setting out the most comprehensive and defensible theory of natural property rights to appear in a long time. Claeys describes the function of property as productive work. Intentional planning, purposeful effort, and creative ordering enable people to achieve lives of flourishing. And, as Claeys demonstrates in careful detail, the various norms and institutions of property law make possible those exercises of practical reason and the flourishing that results from them. Natural …

Property And Moral Responsibilities: Some Reflections On Modern Catholic Social Theory, Lucia A. Silecchia

Texas A&M Journal of Property Law

Professor Eric Claeys’s forthcoming book, Natural Property Rights, offers a deep perspective on property rights principles. However, while the law tends to focus—as I believe it must—on property rights, rights are inextricably intertwined with duties or responsibilities. The natural rights framework for property is, as Claeys says, “good enough for government work.” It reflects a principled way for the government to allocate property rights and use the law to protect them.

However, it is necessary to look beyond what is desirable for government to protect through law. Other sources propose parameters for reasoned use of property with an emphasis …

Comparing & Contrasting Economic And Natural Law Approaches To Policymaking, Eric Kades

Texas A&M Journal of Property Law

Eric Claeys’s monograph, Natural Property Rights, offers a comprehensive and thoughtful articulation of a general theory of property rights rooted in the natural law tradition. This detailed review compares Claeys’s work with the consequentialist law and economics perspective on property. After contrasting their objectives, assumptions, and methodologies this article concludes that, unlike more absolutist approaches, Claeys’s flavor of natural property rights places a modicum of weight on the welfare effects central to economic analysis. This restrained nod in the direction of practicality, however, does not eliminate some of the long-known weaknesses of natural law. Perhaps the most glaring gap …

Eugenics Not Eradication: How People With Disabilities Have Lost The Right To Life, Ava Standish

Helm's School of Government Conference - 2021-2024

Disability-selective abortion stems from a eugenical philosophy not a hope of eradication. Disabilities cannot be eradicated because they are not diseases. Eugenics seeks to purify society from those who are considered “inferior” and to encourage the rate of births considered “superior.” Eugenics continues today through selective abortion of children with disabilities. These children deserve the right to life guaranteed by natural rights, human rights, and the laws of the United States. Children with disabilities, particularly Down Syndrome, have lost this right to life in the United States and abroad. In the United States, 67% of children with Down Syndrome are …

Christian Influence On Roman Natural Law In The Corpus Juris Civilis, Bryce Tenberg

Helm's School of Government Conference - 2021-2024

Few civilizations have influenced the contemporary world more than the Romans, and the same can be said regarding the field of law. Today, legal foundations throughout the West are built upon the Roman legal system, with the Code of Justinian—also known as the Corpus Juris Civilis—being arguably the most influential. This work compiled and simplified centuries of Roman law to ensure a more efficient jurisprudence, and due to its survival, it would form the foundation of the modern jurisprudence. However, at the same time this work was written, the empire had changed significantly with the adoption of Christianity. This …

Natural Lights & Natural Rights: The Problem Of The New Classical Natural Law Theory, Charles Neville Cacciatore

LSU Master's Theses

The present work examines the natural law jurisprudence of John Finnis. It argues that Finnis’s teaching is a genuinely new natural law theory. Finnis’s jurisprudence is not a re- presentation of the jurisprudence of St. Thomas Aquinas because its central element—a doctrine of natural rights—is a departure from Aquinas’s natural law teaching. In support of these claims, the present work relies upon the scholarship of Ernest L. Fortin, A.A. Following Fr. Fortin, it presents an understanding of the natural law that endorses a clear distinction between natural right and natural rights—between premodern political philosophy and modern political philosophy.

The Future Of Natural Property Law: Comments On Eric Claeys's Natural Property Rights, Christopher Serkin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Professor Eric Claeys is among the most thoughtful modern proponents of natural property rights. His new book, provided to conference participants in draft form, is typical of his rigorously analytical approach. It is an impressive articulation of a natural rights-based account of property. It significantly advances the debate over natural rights and should be taken seriously even by those who do not find it entirely convincing.

There are real-world political stakes in abstract-seeming questions of property theory because natural rights are often deployed to limit government regulation of property. Natural rights contrast with positivist accounts that locate the content of …