Law and Philosophy Commons^™

February 1, 2020: David Brooks And The 4 Narratives, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “David Brooks and the 4 Narratives“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

February 1, 2020: David Brooks And The 4 Narratives, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “David Brooks and the 4 Narratives“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

Production, Not Dependence: The Metaphysics Of Causation And Its Role In Explanation, Responsibility, And The Law, Yuval Abrams

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Causation is production, not dependence. It is not merely a matter of how two facts or events covary, but about what underlies that covariation. Furthermore, causation is unified (not fragmented or plural) and is a natural relation (in the world). To cause is to make something happen, to generate. The causal nexus (the web of causal influence) consists entirely of productive positive causes. With these fixed, the (causal) dependence relations are determined.

Dependence belongs to the theory of explanation. Causal dependence is an explanatory notion: A causally explains B, in virtue of a causal relation between cause C and effect …

Reporting Certainty, James A. Macleod

BYU Law Review

Legal theorists, judges, and legal writing instructors persistently decry the assertions of certainty—”obviously X,” “undoubtedly Y,” etc.—that litter judicial opinions. According to the conventional view, the rhetoric of certainty that these assertions epitomize is disingenuous. It also reflects, and even encourages, poor judicial decision-making. And as if that were not enough, it is so unpersuasive that it is counter-persuasive: it signals uncertainty, nonobviousness, etc.—the exact opposite of what its author intends. Judges, for these and other reasons, should abstain from needless assertions of certainty and the myopic thinking they evince. That much is certain.

Yet the rhetoric of certainty persists. …

The Effects Of Rejecting Mind-Body Dualism On U.S. Law, Matthew W. Lawrence

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

While neuroscience continues to make it clearer that mental processes, effects, disorders, and states can be described through physical observation, the metaphysical notion of mind-body dualism still pervades the U.S. legal system. In this Article, I discuss many areas where mind-body dualism holds fast, and others where mind-body dualism has already been explicitly or impliedly rejected. I argue that in most areas, the dualist distinction would have little to no impact on the values the law already describes. However, I argue that rejecting dualism would have an impact on fundamental rights analyses. First Amendment free speech rights, fundamental rights, and …

Mercy Otis Warren: Republican Scribe And Defender Of Liberties, Mary Kathryn Mueller

Bound Away: The Liberty Journal of History

An active proponent of republican government, Mercy Otis Warren had a significant role in the revolutionary period. She was a woman who was close to the action, well-acquainted with the central figures, and instrumental in bringing about the monumental changes in America in the late 1700s. Referred to as the “muse of the revolution,”[1] Mercy Otis Warren used her pen to significantly broaden the colonial understanding of a republican form of government and passionately promote it. From a collection of early poems and political satires written in the years preceding the war to her epic history of the revolution published …

January 18, 2020: Tamsin Shaw And “The Need For Us To Converge On Some Shared Values To Have A Functioning Form Of Government.”, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, Tamsin Shaw and “the need for us to converge on some shared values to have a functioning form of government.” discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

January 4, 2020: David, It Was Already Done--It's Called Hallowed Secularism, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “David, It Was Already Done--It's Called Hallowed Secularism“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

Saving Judicial Independence From The Nihilism Of Court-Packing, Bruce Ledewitz

Ledewitz Papers

Published scholarship collected from academic journals, law reviews, newspaper publications & online periodicals.

Beyond Settlement: Reconceptualizing Adr As “Conflict Process Strategy”, Deborah Thompson Eisenberg

Faculty Scholarship

“Alternative dispute resolution” or “ADR” has reached a paradoxical moment: it is both ubiquitous in practice and at risk of extinction as a distinct concept and field. As the ADR field nears middle age—nearly fifty years after the Pound Conference of 1976—“ADR” has become so popular in name, fractured in practice, and jumbled in theory that it risks a metaphorical genericide, a concept in trademark law when a product name is used to refer to so many things (incorrectly) that it becomes “generic” and confusing. Analogously, the name “ADR” has been applied to so many different processes and concepts that …

Practical Truth: The Value Of Apparent Honesty In Supreme Court Opinions, Timothy C. Macdonnell

Scholarly Articles

Judicial honesty or judicial candor is the subject of significant scholarly attention, but it is not the focus of this Essay. Rather, the author's focus is on the importance that appearing honest has on the persuasive force of an opinion and the dangers associated with failing to achieve that goal. This distinction is not intended to suggest Justices should seek apparent honesty while not being actually honest. Rather, this Essay emphasizes that actually honest opinions must also be apparently honest. Thus, judicial candor is necessary to apparent honesty, but it is not always sufficient on its own.

To support the …

The Moral Weight Of Preferences: Death, Sex, And Dementia, Shannon Fyfe, Elizabeth Lanphier

Scholarly Articles

In "Cognitive Transformation, Dementia, and the Moral Weight of Advance Directives," Emily Walsh raises pertinent questions regarding the stability of preferences, and interests, across time, particularly in the setting of dementia diagnosis (Walsh 2020). Advance directive policy and practice rely on an at least somewhat coherent account of personal identity, and we largely agree with Walsh that dementia raises complex issues for philosophical accounts of personal identity.

Gamesmanship And Criminal Process, John D. King

Scholarly Articles

We first learn formal structures of rules, procedures, and norms of conduct through games and sports. These lessons illuminate and inform human behavior in other contexts, including the adversarial world of criminal litigation. As critiques of the legitimacy and fairness of the criminal justice system increase, the philosophy and jurisprudence of sport offer a comparative legal system to examine criminal litigation. Allegations of gamesmanship—the aggressive and strategic use of rules that violate some sense of decorum or culture yet remain within the formal rules of engagement—cut across both contexts. This Article examines what sports can teach us about gamesmanship in …

The Case For Valuing Non-Health And Indirect Benefits, Govind Persad, Jessica Du Toit

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Health policy is only one part of social policy. Although spending administered by the health sector constitutes a sizeable fraction of total state spending in most countries, other sectors such as education and transportation also represent major portions of national budgets. Additionally, though health is one important aspect of economic and social activity, people pursue many other goals in their social and economic lives. Similarly, direct benefits—those that are immediate results of health policy choices—are only a small portion of the overall impact of health policy. This chapter considers what weight health policy should give to its “spill-over effects,” namely …

Expensive Patients, Reinsurance, And The Future Of Health Care Reform, Govind Persad

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

In 2017, Americans spent over $3.4 trillion-nearly 18% of gross domestic product-on health care. This spending is unevenly distributed: Almost a quarter is spent on the costliest 1% of patients, and almost half on the costliest 5%. Most of these patients soon return to a lower percentile, but many continue or economic, analysis of existing and proposed options for sharing expensive patients' costs. Third, it bridges the disconnected literature on reinsurance, limit setting, and health care financing, identifying how proposals in these different areas intersect. to incur health care costs in the top percentiles year after year. This Article focuses …

Disability Law And The Case For Evidence-Based Triage In A Pandemic, Govind Persad

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

This Essay explains why model policies proposed or adopted in response to the COVID-19 pandemic that allocate scarce medical resources by using medical evidence to pursue two core goals—saving more lives and saving more years of life—are compatible and consonant with disability law. Disability law, properly understood, permits considering medical evidence about patients’ probability of surviving treatment and the quantity of scarce treatments they will likely use. It also permits prioritizing health workers, and considering patients’ post-treatment life expectancy. These factors, when based on medical evidence and not inaccurate stereotypes, are legal to consider even if they disadvantage some patients …

Replacing Death With Life? The Rise Of Lwop In The Context Of Abolitionist Campaigns In The United States, Michelle Miao

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

On the basis of fifty-four elite interviews[1] with legislators, judges, attorneys, and civil society advocates as well as a state-by-state data survey, this Article examines the complex linkage between the two major penal trends in American society during the past decades: a declining use of capital punishment across the United States and a growing population of prisoners serving “life without the possibility of parole” or “LWOP” sentences. The main contribution of the research is threefold. First, the research proposes to redefine the boundary between life and death in relation to penal discourses regarding the death penalty and LWOP. LWOP …

Women's Spaces, Women's Rights: Feminism And The Transgender Rights Movement, Christen Price

Marquette Law Review

None

In Memory Of Professor James E. Bond, Janet Ainsworth

Seattle University Law Review

Janet Ainsworth, Professor of Law at Seattle University School of Law: In Memory of Professor James E. Bond.

Hyperreal: Law And The Interpretation Of Visual Media, Amy L. Landers

Kentucky Law Journal

No abstract provided.