Legal Theory Commons^™

Legitimation, Mark C. Modak-Truran

Mark C Modak-Truran

This article identifies three different conceptions of legitimation - pre-modern, modern, and post-secular - that compete both within and across national boundaries for the coveted prize of informing the social imaginary regarding how the government and the law should be legitimated in constitutional democracies. Pre-modern conceptions of legitimation consider governments and rulers legitimate if they are ordained by God or if the political system is ordered in accordance with the normative cosmic order. Contemporary proponents of the pre-modern conception range from those in the United States who maintain that the government has been legitimated by the “Judeo-Christian tradition” to those …

Voice Without Say: Why Capital-Managed Firms Aren’T (Genuinely) Participatory, Justin Schwartz

Justin Schwartz

Why are most capitalist enterprises of any size organized as authoritarian bureaucracies rather than incorporating genuine employee participation that would give the workers real authority? Even firms with employee participation programs leave virtually all decision-making power in the hands of management. The standard answer is that hierarchy is more economically efficient than any sort of genuine participation, so that participatory firms would be less productive and lose out to more traditional competitors. This answer is indefensible. After surveying the history, legal status, and varieties of employee participation, I examine and reject as question-begging the argument that the rarity of genuine …

A Noble Cause: A Case Study Of Discrimination, Symbols, And Reciprocity, In: Diversity And European Human Rights, Yofi Tirosh

Yofi Tirosh

This chapter is part of a volume dedicated to rewriting human rights cases issued by the European Court of Human Rights. It uses the case of De La Cierva Osorio De Moscoso v. Spain (1999) as a platform to discuss the inherent tension typifying signs such as nobility titles – as merely symbolic or as carrying substantive content. The problem of one’s ownership of signs is especially acute in the case of women. I will argue that the distinction between form and substance collapses in this case, as in many other cases that involve allocation of allegedly merely symbolic signifiers …

Gay And Lesbian Elders: History, Law, And Identity Politics In The United States, Nancy J. Knauer

Nancy J. Knauer

The approximately two million gay and lesbian elders in the United States are an underserved and understudied population. At a time when gay men and lesbians enjoy an unprecedented degree of social acceptance and legal protection, many elders face the daily challenges of aging isolated from family, detached from the larger gay and lesbian community, and ignored by mainstream aging initiatives. Drawing on materials from law, history, and social theory, this book integrates practical proposals for reform with larger issues of sexuality and identity. Beginning with a summary of existing demographic data and offering a historical overview of pre-Stonewall views …

The Rhetoric Of Anti-Relativism In A Culture Of Certainty, Howard Lesnick

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Scope Of Tolerance And Its Moral Reasoning, Raphael Cohen-Almagor

raphael cohen-almagor

This essay aims to consider the scope of tolerance and its moral reasoning. I first discuss the reluctance of prominent philosophers to prescribe boundaries to liberty and tolerance. I then focus attention on Rawls’ discussion on tolerance, which I find quite disappointing, yet argue that his line of reasoning on the question of tolerating the intolerant contributed to the very fashionable consequentialist approach. After criticizing the consequentialist reasoning I introduce an alternative approach: the principled reasoning. I explain that much of the liberal reasoning is inspired by the fear of sliding down the slippery slope, and finally turn to discuss …

Science, Identity, And The Construction Of The Gay Political Narrative, Nancy J. Knauer

Nancy J. Knauer

This Article contends that the current debate over gay civil rights is, at base, a dispute over the nature of same-sex desire. Pro-gay forces advocate an ethnic or identity model of homosexuality based on the conviction that sexual orientation is an immutable, unchosen, and benign characteristic. The assertion that, in essence, gays are "born that way," has produced a gay political narrative that rests on claims of shared identity (i.e., homosexuals are a blameless minority) and arguments of equivalence (i.e., as a blameless minority, homosexuals deserve equal treatment and protection against discrimination). The pro-family counter-narrative is based on a behavioral …

Homosexuality As Contagion: From The Well Of Loneliness To The Boy Scouts, Nancy J. Knauer

Nancy J. Knauer

In the political arena, there are currently two central and competing views of homosexuality. Pro-family organizations, working from a contagion model of homosexuality, contend that homosexuality is an immoral, unhealthy, and freely chosen vice. Many pro-gay organizations espouse an identity model of homosexuality under which sexual orientation is an immutable, unchosen, and benign characteristic. Both pro-family and pro-gay organizations believe that to define homosexuality is to control its legal and political status. This sometimes bitter debate regarding the nature of same-sex desire might seem like an exceedingly contemporary development. However, the ex-gay media blitz of 2000 represents only the latest …

A Liberal Theory Of Social Welfare: Fairness, Utility, And The Pareto Principle, Howard F. Chang

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Possibility Of A Fair Paretian, Howard F. Chang

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Hazards Of Legal Fine Tuning: Confronting The Free Will Problem In Election Law Scholarship, Michael A. Fitts

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Relativism, Reflective Equilibrium, And Justice, Justin Schwartz

Justin Schwartz

THIS PAPER IS THE CO-WINNER OF THE FRED BERGER PRIZE IN PHILOSOPHY OF LAW FOR THE 1999 AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE BEST PUBLISHED PAPER IN THE PREVIOUS TWO YEARS.

The conflict between liberal legal theory and critical legal studies (CLS) is often framed as a matter of whether there is a theory of justice that the law should embody which all rational people could or must accept. In a divided society, the CLS critique of this view is overwhelming: there is no such justice that can command universal assent. But the liberal critique of CLS, that it degenerates into …

What's Wrong With Exploitation?, Justin Schwartz

Justin Schwartz

Abstract: Marx thinks that capitalism is exploitative, and that is a major basis for his objections to it. But what's wrong with exploitation, as Marx sees it? (The paper is exegetical in character: my object is to understand what Marx believed,) The received view, held by Norman Geras, G.A. Cohen, and others, is that Marx thought that capitalism was unjust, because in the crudest sense, capitalists robbed labor of property that was rightfully the workers' because the workers and not the capitalists produced it. This view depends on a Labor Theory of Property (LTP), that property rights are based ultimately …

In Defence Of Exploitation, Justin Schwartz

Justin Schwartz

The concept of exploitation is thought to be central to Marx's Critique of capitalism. John Roemer, an analytical (then-) Marxist economist now at Yale, attacked this idea in a series of papers and books in the 1970s-1990s, arguing that Marxists should be concerned with inequality rather than exploitation -- with distribution rather than production, precisely the opposite of what Marx urged in The Critique of the Gotha Progam.

This paper expounds and criticizes Roemer's objections and his alternative inequality based theory of exploitation, while accepting some of his criticisms. It may be viewed as a companion paper to my What's …

The Paradox Of Ideology, Justin Schwartz

Justin Schwartz

A standard problem with the objectivity of social scientific theory in particular is that it is either self-referential, in which case it seems to undermine itself as ideology, or self-excepting, which seem pragmatically self-refuting. Using the example of Marx and his theory of ideology, I show how self-referential theories that include themselves in their scope of explanation can be objective. Ideology may be roughly defined as belief distorted by class interest. I show how Marx thought that natural science was informed by class interest but not therefore necessarily ideology. Capitalists have an interest in understanding the natural world (to a …

Functional Explanation And Metaphysical Individualism, Justin Schwartz

Justin Schwartz

A number of (present or former) analytical Marxists, such as Jon Elster, have argued that functional explanation has almost no place in the social sciences. (Although the discussion is framed in terms of a debate among analytical Marxists, the point is quite general, and Marxism is used for illustrative purposes.) Functional explanation accounts for what is to be explained by reference to its function; thus, sighted organism have eyes because eyes enable them to see. Elster and other critics of functional explanation argue that this pattern of explanation is inconsistent with "methodological individualism," the idea, as they understand it, that …

The Wellsprings Of Legal Responses To Inequality: A Perspective On Perspectives, Howard Lesnick

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.