Committing perjury is frequently treated as closely related-if not equivalent-to lying. Both legal scholars of perjury and philosophers of lying make this assumption. This, in turn, informs subsequent conclusions about both the nature of perjury and the nature of lying.
The philosophy of disability has burgeoned into a field of its own. Like the general field of disability studies, it hosts a multiplicity of schools, expertise and methodologies. It is unified, if at all, by a desire for the social integration of people perceived or understood to be "different", mentally or physically. This article aims to orient the reader within the field of...
How universities should deal with campus sexual assault is thorny and divisive, perhaps more so than any other current topic in the academy. Title IX is at the center of the debate on this issue, particularly following the issuance of the "Dear Colleague Letter" ("DCL") by the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights ("OCR") in 2011.1 The DCL made it clear that sexual...
Kristie Mayhugh, Elizabeth Ramirez, Cassandra Rivera, and Anna Vasquez were convicted for sexually assaulting a child. The prosecution's evidence included testimony from children and an expert witness who testified that objective signs of abuse existed. But years later one of the witnesses-now an adult-admitted to having fabricated the story with her sister. Another witness came...
Has modem philosophy taken a "practical turn?" If such a turn requires the first emphasis on practicality, then probably not. Prior philosophy has not discarded or neglected practicality. But a "turn" might instead be understood as a profound transformation.
The South Sea bubble burst suddenly in September 1720, the second in a chain of panics that struck Paris, London, and Amsterdam in quick succession. The crash in London was by far the most severe; within weeks two-thirds of England's nominal wealth had evaporated, public credit had collapsed, and London's most distinguished banking houses tottered on the brink of ruin. Commerce...
Jerome N. Frank (1889-1957) and Lon L. Fuller (1902-1978) are not frequently classed together in discussions of twentieth-century legal thought. Although they both wrote extensively about the nature of law and adjudication over roughly the same period of time (1930s-1950s), they are typically seen as standing on opposite sides of the issues that matter most in legal theory.
In the vast literature on American war powers, attention is rarely paid to the product of war, the dead human body, and its impact on war politics and war powers. In legal scholarship on the war powers, the practice of war usually happens in the background. Presidents, Congress, and courts are in the foreground. Killing in war is thereby a background phenomenon, an aspect of the...
Most authors of legal scholarship would probably hesitate to describe their writings as heroic tales of (intellectual) conquest and adventure. They would also most likely deny that they are unreliable storytellers. Equally, conventional accounts of legal scholarship tend to view it as lacking a common structure. This article challenges these assumptions by offering a novel...
This essay studies in detail, for the first time and in the context of legal as well as art history, Sir Joshua Reynolds's representation of Justice (1779). We argue that the image is of particular significance in the history of representations of justice, and marks the emergence of neoclassical ideals. These ideals became, for example in the work of Sir William Blackstone...
Can a speech restriction ever be inherently good? Can we ever justify censorship as intrinsically beneficial, and not simply a justifiable means of protecting something more important than free expression? For those steeped in American law and culture, these questions may seem almost heretical. But they deserve exploring, particularly given the prevalence and variety of...
Then Jesus said to them, "Prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown, and among their own kin, and in their own house
Because contractual obligations result from acts of agreement, every contract has an origin story-a story about what the parties did to change their legal situation, to enter into a contract. Theories of contract law, in turn, often tell stylized versions of such stories. These theory stories tell us about the character of the parties, what they want from their transaction, how...
Her ancestors helped win America's independence. As a child, she watched House debates with rapt attention, vowing eventually to return to her beloved Capitol building. She gazed out on millions of cheering faces during her father's three presidential campaigns. Her uncle was a governor and vice-presidential nominee, her father the American Secretary of State. She ran the...
What has happened to the civil rights movement? Just a quarter of a century ago, the spiritual and moral courage of civil rights leaders touched the conscience of a nation, which watched while peaceful protesters were beaten and small children were blown to bits. The images demolished the mythology that the system of racial segregation had any relationship to the preservation of...
The United States has always proclaimed itself the land of liberty, and scholars still usually identify its prevailing political ideas as "liberal" or at least "liberal republican." These characterizations undoubtedly make much sense. Americans would not have replaced English subjectship with the particular political status they created, citizenship in a commercial republic...
Catharine A. MacKinnon. Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987. Pp. 315. $25.00 hardcover, $9.95 paperback. Judith Becker and Ellen Levine, the two women who wrote a dissenting statement on the Report of the 1986 Meese Commission on Pornography, pointed out that it was almost impossible, under the conditions of the...
Wayne C. Booth. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Pp. xii, 534. $29.95. Beaten by his stepfather, cut off from the love and care of his mother, David Copperfield turns for companionship to a company of friends whom the gloomy Murdstones have not had the forethought to suppress: My father had left a small collection of books...
In the beginning was the fog
This essay provides an introduction to American popular culture, specifically designed to be of use to those interested in evaluating the relationship between law, lawyers, and public consciousness or popular values as they have developed within American society. It is fair to ask from the outset what possible justification there can be for devoting even a short essay like this...
I want to examine here the contemporary American scholarship on the relations between law and literature. Along the way, I will try to evaluate the success of particular efforts within the enterprise, but my main goal is broader. I will try to define the nature and purpose of this multifold academic enterprise, and to examine and criticize the larger claims that American legal...
"You have never read Tacitus?" Justice Hugo Black said to me on the second day of my clerkship with him, "Why, then, you are not a lawyer." He made me drop all else until I had read his own highly and very personally annotated Tacitus. Kant and Bentham continue to battle through the casebooks today as they did when Baron Bramwell in the 1870s said that for the convenience of...
According to many accounts, the Sanctuary Movement first arose in the United States-Mexico border region in response to a dramatic increase in the flow of Salvadoran refugees to the United States in 1980. Churches responded by providing food, shelter and solace. At the time, all that most people knew about El Salvador was that its archbishop, Oscar Romero, had recently been...
"For me the law is all over. I am caught, you know; there is always some rule that I'm supposed to follow, some rule I don't even know about that they say. It's just different and you can't really understand." These words were spoken by Spencer, a thirty-five-year-old man on public assistance (general relief), whom I first encountered in the waiting room of a legal services...
Puccini's Turandot might seem an unlikely source of insights for feminist theory. It is, after all, an opera composed by a rake based upon a play written by a misogynist. Yet it is the uncanny nature of great works of art that they often undermine and even transcend the prejudices of the artists who create them. Of course, this begs an important question. Is Turandot a great work...