Law and Philosophy Commons^™

Kelsen's Pure Theory Of Law, Henry Cohen

The Catholic Lawyer

No abstract provided.

Justice Scalia And The Rule Of Law: Originalism Vs. The Living Constitution, Richard F. Duncan

College of Law, Faculty Publications

Justice Antonin Scalia's sudden death in February, 2016, was a great loss for his family, a great loss for his friends, and a great loss for the "Written Constitution" of the United States of America. We will have no more of his brilliant, witty, and pugnacious judicial opinions. Instead, we will have to settle for the body of work he left behind as his legacy. But, as one commentator has said, his opinions are "so consistent, so powerful, and so penetrating in their devotion to the rule of law"—the real rule of law, not the political decrees of ...

Law And Morality: A Kantian Perspective, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

The relationship between law and morality has emerged as the central question in the jurisprudential reflection of our time. Those who call themselves positivists hold with H.L.A. Hart that calling a statute or a judicial decision "law" need not carry any implications about the morality of that statute or decision. Valid laws might be immoral or unjust. Those who resist this reduction of law to valid enactments sometimes argue, with Lon Fuller, that moral acceptability is a necessary condition for holding that a statute is law; or, with Ronald Dworkin, that moral principles supplement valid enactments as components ...

The History, Meaning, And Use Of The Words Justice And Judge, Jason Boatright

St. Mary's Law Journal

The words justice and judge have similar meanings because they have a common ancestry. They are derived from the same Latin term, jus, which is defined in dictionaries as “right” and “law.” However, those definitions of jus are so broad that they obscure the details of what the term meant when it formed the words that eventually became justice and judge. The etymology of jus reveals the kind of right and law it signified was related to the concepts of restriction and obligation. Vestiges of this sense of jus survived in the meaning of justice and judge.

Although justice and ...

Politics And The Supreme Court: The Need For Ideological Balance, David Orentlicher

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Objective And Subjective Tests In The Law, R. George Wright

The University of New Hampshire Law Review

Across many subject areas, the law commonly attempts to distinguish between objective and subjective tests, and to assess the merits of objective as opposed to subjective legal tests. This Article argues that all such efforts are fundamentally incoherent and ultimately futile in practice. As demonstrated below, what the law takes to be objective in the relevant sense is essentially constituted by what the law takes to be subjective, and vice versa. Judicial preoccupation with objective and subjective tests thus does no more than distract from more meaningful concerns. Judicial attention should be directed away from this hopeless distinction, and instead ...

Theory And Application Of Roscoe Pound's Sociological Jurisprudence: Crime Prevention Or Control?, Louis H. Masotti, Michael A. Weinstein

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The current interest in reforming the administration of justice has been triggered by a number of factors including the 1967 report of the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice and the treatment afforded arrestees during the civil disorders of the past few years. The nation is alarmed at the reported annual increases in crime, and this alarm was manifested in the 1968 presidential election when "law and order" became a major issue. Superficially the answer may seem clear: more effective enforcement of the law and, when necessary, more stringent laws. The critical issue, however, is ...

The Moral Significance Of Sacrifice, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

The paper offers a few reflections on moral implications of making sacrifices and of possible duties to make sacrifices. It does not provide an exhaustive or a systematic account of the subject. There are too many disparate questions, and too many distant perspectives from which to examine them to allow for a systematic let alone an exhaustive account, and too many factual issues that I am not aware of. Needless to say, the observations that follow are in part stimulated by the popularity of some views that are mistaken. I will not however examine any specific view or account of ...

Susan Wolf On The Meaning Of Life: A Review, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

A review in Ethics of Wolf's account of the meaning of life in her Tanner Lectures, examining the relations of the meaning of life, well-being, value, one's attitude to one's activities and one's success in them

The Right To Disobey, Joel Feinberg

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Conflicts of Law and Morality by Kent Greenwalt