Law and Philosophy Commons^™

An Eye For An Eye Makes A Vigilant Society, Liam C. Preyer

Capstone Showcase

Vigilantism is one of the oldest practices of mankind; for as long as there have been moral and legal laws to govern us and live by, there have been individuals who have sought justice outside these systems. Vigilantism is the response to failures in the justice system, and in the United States in particular, we have seen examples from the Western Frontier to the modern-day digital landscape. This paper will explore the nature of vigilante justice through historical, psychological, media-driven, legal, and digital lenses. We will explore how cultural narratives, media influences, government actions, and psychological motivations have shaped the …

Green Dividends: A Case Study In Green Dividends And The Conditions For Private Ordering Solutions, Anne M. Tucker

Seattle University Law Review

This Essay introduces a novel private ordering solution to facilitate corporate investments in pro-social and environmental initiatives: Green dividends. Green dividends are an optional increase in shareholder dividends that are returned to the company to be reinvested in environmental initiatives or kept by a shareholder.

Green dividends pose an alternative to the current gridlocked debate that corporations can’t, won’t, shouldn’t, and shouldn’t even try to act in pro-social or environmental ways. Turning the common refrains on their head converts each narrative into an element for a successful private ordering solution: authority, accountability, shareholder buy-in, and government- backed enforcement. With Green …

Does Climate Disclosure Work To Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions? Emerging Evidence Suggests Cautious Optimism, Cynthia A. Williams

Seattle University Law Review

Significant regulatory resources have been spent developing global, voluntary climate and sustainability disclosure standards, such as the TCFD, TNRD, and ISSB’s Sustainability and Climate Disclosure standards, or domestically required disclosures, such as in the EU and in the U.S. Thus, it is important to evaluate whether this disclosure, particularly voluntary, qualitative disclosure, will have the power to shift the allocation of capital, will have a significant effect on the management of climate risk within firms, and ultimately will reduce climate change risk and biodiversity loss.

In this Article, several interrelated questions will be discussed. First, what does the empirical evidence …

Identifying Intangible And Biocultural Heritage Elements Toward Environmental Understanding: Engaging Stakeholders Through Art, Martha B. Lerski

Publications and Research

Grounded in a case study in Barbuda in the Caribbean, this research examines sustainability from the perspective of what arts and heritage can contribute to community engagement and local and broader understandings about the environment. This article documents a growing body of literature recognizing the role of arts and culture, including local knowledge and traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), in climate change endeavors. Art and TEK present expansive world views. Contextual information situates research done on the island of Barbuda pre- and post-Hurricane Irma. Visual arts workshops engaged community members in mixed methods research. Results documented cultural elements, particularly intangible and …

Should Like Cases Be Decided Alike? A Formal Analysis Of Formal Equality, Benjamin B. Johnson, Richard Jordan

UF Law Faculty Publications

The idea of formal equality—the principle that we should treat like cases alike—is a cornerstone of political and legal theory that supporters have placed at the heart of theories of justice since Aristotle. Critics have rejected it as vacuous or a tool of oppression. Despite its central importance, formal equality has received little formal analysis. In this article, we formalize the like-cases maxim and explore its implications. We show that both Aristotle’s principle of proportionality and Dworkin’s principle of integrity can be directly derived from formal equality. It is therefore not vacuous, but formal equality is more demanding than its …

Axiomatic Shifting Paradigms: Wittgenstein’S Language-Games, Gödel’S Incompleteness Theorem, Language, Law, And The Limits Of Formalism, Charles Edward Andrew Lincoln Iv

University of Arkansas at Little Rock Law Review

This Article shows how Ludwig Wittgenstein’s idea of “language-games” and Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems mark the outer limits of legal formalism and other leading interpretive theories—textualism, originalism, and purposivism. It begins by tracing Wittgenstein’s progression from a “picture theory” of language to the view that social context drives meaning more than any simple correspondence between words and reality. Gödel’s work on formal systems, suggesting that mathematics—long held as the pinnacle of logical certainty—itself cannot be both consistent and complete, reinforces the notion that purely “logical” approaches cannot capture the full range of linguistic and social nuances at play in law. …

A Wise Latina Or A Wise Judge?: Exploring How Social Identity Shapes Knowledge Acquisition, Maribella Munoz-Jimenez

CMC Senior Theses

This paper examines the intersection of epistemology and social identity through the contrasting arguments of Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Sonia Sotomayor. Justice O’Connor’s claim that wisdom is universally accessible contrasts with Justice Sotomayor’s argument that social identities offer unique insights to decision-making. The analysis begins by defining traditional and contrasting it to standpoint epistemology, highlighting how social identity influences knowledge acquisition and supporting Justice Sotomayor’s argument (Chapter 1). It then critiques the potential pitfalls of standpoint epistemology, such as blind deference, through Dror’s weak inversion thesis and Táíwò’s perspective on how we often highlight a subsegment of marginalized voices …

The Method Is The Message: Movement Law And The Social Change Commons, Raymond H. Brescia

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

Legal scholars have long sought to understand the relationship between social movements and the law. A new group of such scholars has argued that to better understand this relationship, and to advance social change that is effective, sustainable, equitable, and just, they must engage in dialogue with such movements to generate ideas that will catalyze that change. For those interested in generating ideas that can spark meaningful and lasting social change, such developments in legal scholarship represent an exciting evolution in the relationship between legal scholarship, legal scholars, and social movements: a relationship that appears to be growing stronger, deeper, …

An In-Depth Review Of Euthanasia-Related Practices, Arguments For/Against Them, And Proposed Solutions For Their Most Glaring Legal/Ethical Problems, Macon Plecha

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This paper’s goal is to cover the topic of euthanasia-related practices at great length. Terminology, history, and current programs around the world are discussed first, with the last point covering a wide geographical range: Colombia, Japan, Israel, and Africa, to name a few outside of the Western world standard. Arguments for and against euthanasia-related practices are explored. Within these arguments, several pressing legal and ethical issues arise, and the most severe of these are expanded on through the offering of potential solutions: how to handle stand-alone psychiatric cases, how to improve advanced directives and poor reporting rates, and how to …

The Role Of Tradition In Classical And Contemporary Argument, Laura A. Webb

Law Faculty Publications

Integrating tradition in legal arguments remains an effective persuasive strategy, serving as a source of legitimacy and appeal, fostering the establishment of a shared identity between the speaker and the audience, and cultivating a sense of belonging to a distinct group with defined notions of its identity. This chapter examines the strategic utilization of the concept of tradition in forensic rhetoric. It investigates how communicators shape and influence discourse within forensic settings by leveraging enduring cultural norms, purported intentions and beliefs of esteemed historical figures, and narratives concerning a people's historical trajectory. By examining cases from the popular courts of …

Law-Following Ai: Designing Ai Agents To Obey Human Laws, Cullen O'Keefe, Ketan Ramakrishnan, Janna Tay, Christoph Winter

Fordham Law Review

Artificial intelligence (AI) companies are working to develop a new type of actor: “AI agents,” which we define as AI systems that can perform computer-based tasks as competently as human experts. Expert-level AI agents will likely create enormous economic value but also pose significant risks. Humans use computers to commit crimes, torts, and other violations of the law. As AI agents progress, therefore, they will be increasingly capable of performing actions that would be illegal if performed by humans. Such lawless AI agents could pose a severe risk to human life, liberty, and the rule of law.

Designing public policy …

Paraconsistency In Legal Systems: Why Not To Evaluate The Law With Classical Logic, Sydney Coddington

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

The following paper puts forth an argument for the analysis of legal systems via paraconsistent logics instead of classical logic due to the existence of legal dialetheia - true contradictions born from the law. Given that contradictions lead to absurdity in classical logic, a paraconsistent perspective becomes the clear choice once the existence of legal dialetheia is established. The first half of this argument, therefore, aims to support the work of Graham Priest in establishing legal dialetheia by explaining his view and combatting his opponent, J.C. Beall, who finds such dialetheia to fail beyond the limited scope of a legal …

Foreword, Jedediah Britton-Purdy, Justin Deystone

Publications

No abstract provided.

Being Pregnant In Someone Else's Body, Jennifer S. Hendricks

FIU Law Review

In the wake of the Dobbs decision overturning the right to abortion, now is a critical time to re-assess how legal feminism theorizes the pregnant body. Before Dobbs, feminist legal scholarship had blazed a path of anti-maternalism, a stance rooted in liberal, formalist notions of equality that denigrates the “feminine” and too often minimizes the importance of reproductive issues both as tools of sex-based subordination in the present and as foundations for liberation in the future. Anti-maternalism is attractive to legal scholars because it minimizes sex and gender differences and may appear to be gender-inclusive. It has produced arguments that …

How Theories Of Art Can Inform Debates About Ai, Jessica Silbey

Faculty Scholarship

Debates about artificial intelligence (AI) tend to swing between the optimistic and the apocalyptic. I propose a less binary approach that frames conversations about AI from the perspectives of theories of art and creativity. Whether we agree that AI is artificial or intelligent, whether it should be constrained or liberated, we cannot deny its influence on literary, artistic, and innovative production. AI may be described as simply a new tool to produce art and science, like the camera or the microscope, or it may transform art and science, the way the internet transformed global communication. Either way, these debates about …

Why Did Prosecution Strengthen President Trump In The 2024 Election?, Steven Arrigg Koh

Faculty Scholarship

Why did criminal prosecution strengthen President Donald Trump's electoral prospects in the 2024 federal election? It was not supposed to be this way: after President Trump's 2024 New York state conviction, many speculated that President Trump's "felon" status would imperil his political career. In fact, the opposite occurred: federal and state criminal prosecutions reenergized President Trump's 2024 presidential candidacy. Contemporary criminal law theories-traditional individualist, expressivist, and critical-struggle to explain why. 

This Article advances a theory of criminal coalescence to explain why the Trump prosecutions led the former President to political victory. Criminal coalescence is the intensification of mass support for …

Under What Circumstances Is "Caste" Likely To Be Useful As An Analytic Concept (And Should We Care)?, Sanford V. Levinson, Robert L. Tsai

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay is the product of the 2025 “Constitutional Law Schmooze,” where academics from a variety of disciplines and from all over the country meet to discuss a common topic of constitutional law chosen by the moderator. This year’s topic was “caste.” The two of us, having written independent “tickets” of admission for the schmooze—i.e., short essays setting out our tentative thoughts about “caste”—turned out to be relative skeptics about the value of the term for lawyers. We are certainly not hostile to those who differ with us. This should be regarded as a “friendly dissent,” as distinguished, say, from …

Property And Information, Jeanne L. Schroeder, David G. Carlson

Articles

The article proceeds as follows. As the information theory is a reaction to legal realism, Part I explores its antecedents in the work of Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld and Ronald H. Coase. Part II presents the information theory as arising from Professor Smith’s interpretation of the Coase theorem.11 In the imaginary world of TC0, we are supposedly indifferent to organizing by property and organizing by contract. Property eclipses contract as the organon of the economy because property reduces the cost of delineation and processing—of speaking and comprehending. We show that this theory is founded on a misunderstanding of Coase. Part III …

Perceptions And Treatment Decisions For A Drug Offender Based On Social Class, Cocaine Type, Personal Characteristics, And Compassionate Love: A Vignette Study, Yasmin A. Odeh

Theses and Dissertations

Problem: The shift from a focus on rehabilitation to the more punitive, “tough on crime” approach to illegal behavior in the U.S. has been enacted in no small way by policies connected to the use and abuse of drugs. The disparities between crack and powder cocaine—two chemically similar substances—have headlined this shift (Vagins and McCurdy 2006). However, research is scarce on laypeople’s approval of deterrence approaches for drug offenses, including as a function of types (e.g., powder vs. cocaine possession). This study examined people’s perceptions of prosecutorial decisions for drug offenders—whether they are punished, rehabilitated, or both—and whether people perceived …

Revolutionizing Justice: Law Enforcement Through The Lens Of Progressive Law, Musmuliadin Musmuliadin, Erlyn Indarti, Nur Rochaeti

Indonesia Law Review

When government functions must be carried out and cannot be halted, even if the law does not clearly or completely regulate them, the role of discretionary authority (discretion) becomes crucial. This is particularly evident in the discretionary authority held by the Indonesian National Police, which is essential both for the police themselves and in the execution of their duties in conducting investigations and prosecutions. This study focuses on the application and implementation of discretion by the police in conducting investigations and prosecutions, and how a progressive legal framework can revolutionize the pursuit of justice. By employing a qualitative analysis and …