Archive for the ‘Legal Theory’ Category
A Civil Procedure Curriculum Challenge
posted by Spencer Waller
I read with great interest Jon Siegel’s recent post on curricular reform and the thirty or so comments it generated. I don’t really disagree with his main point that law school is mostly about “acquiring the ability to acquire skills and knowledge.” But at the same time, I don’t spend that much time on personal jurisdiction and Erie in my civil procedure class and wanted to use this post to explain why.
I started teaching civil procedure during my time at Brooklyn Law School where civil procedure was a two semester five credit course. When I got to Loyola, civ pro was a two semester six credit course. Two years ago we moved to a one semester four credit course as part of a general reform of the first year curriculum. So I have now taught the course in just about every possible permutation.
I currently spend the first 2/3 of the course on the litigation process and about the remaining 1/3 on personal jurisdiction and Erie. I am probably in the minority on this and it’s hard to find a casebook that is set up the way I prefer.
I do it this way because of my belief that only a detailed study of the litigation process reflected in the FRCP can convey a deep understanding of the American civil justice system and its strengths and weaknesses. For better or worse, we have a system that (until very recently) has deemphasized pleadings and uses discovery to lay the groundwork for settlement or summary judgment for those cases that make it into the system and is increasing reliant on ADR for those cases that don’t. Of late, the Supreme Court has seemingly raised the bar on pleadings in Twombley and Iqbal and reinvigorated motions to dismiss as a more meaningful part of the litigation process. One cannot understand what we do, how we do it, why the rest of the world thinks we are crazy, what is changing, and what needs to be changed without a large amount of class time, which of necessity limits the amount of time devoted to personal jurisdiction and Erie.
All this is driven by my view of in most litigation the law is easy, but the facts are hard. Discovery is where the facts come in. If you don’t understand how parties marshal, present, and protect facts from their files, from the real world, and from the other side through discovery then the students leave civ pro (and possibly law school) without any real clue how our civil justice system works. Read the rest of this post »
October 12, 2009 at 9:56 am
Tags: ADR, Civil Procedure, discovery, Erie, federal rules of civil procedure, litigation process, personal jurisdiction, pleadings, subject matte jurisdiction, summary judgment, Twombley
Posted in: Civil Procedure, Education, Law Practice, Law School (Teaching), Legal Theory, Teaching
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Voting as Veto
posted by Michael Kang
It’s been great to guest blog at Concurring Opinions, but unfortunately for me, my stint here has come to a close. I’ve enjoyed it. Thanks to Dan Solove, Danielle Citron, and their colleagues for hosting me during the last couple months.
I thought that I would use my last post to introduce a work-in-progress, titled Voting as Veto (forthcoming early next year in the Mich. L. Rev.). The article began long ago with a simple observation: When my wife and I (pre-baby) had to decide where to go out for dinner, I realized that I rarely had an affirmative preference for a particular restaurant or type of food on a given night. Instead, I found myself acting almost exclusively on what I call “negative preferences,” or preferences against certain outcomes. I mainly preferred not to visit a particular restaurant or have a particular type of food on a given night. Besides the desire to reserve a veto against certain outcomes, I was reasonably indifferent most of the time about where to go otherwise. It struck me that this type of negative preference was probably common in more formal, less mundane contexts for voting that I study in my research. Although there are many forms of voting that implicitly account for negative preferences in various ways, I found very little in the legal and political science literature developing the notion of negative preferences, or systematically assessing a conception of voting as veto. Voting as Veto is my attempt at both.
In addition, I am currently working on a related essay that applies the insights of Voting as Veto to corporate shareholder voting, the subject of public attention in recent months. Unfortunately, I haven’t posted a draft of either piece on SSRN quite yet. Voting as Veto is further along and currently in the middle of the citechecking process, but as a result, it is in many pieces at the moment. However, I plan to post drafts as soon as I can, so please feel free to email me if you have any questions or comments. Thanks again.
September 22, 2009 at 5:43 am
Posted in: Corporate Law, Legal Theory, Politics
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Post on Legal Scholarship
posted by Frank Pasquale
Yale announced today that Robert Post will succeed Harold Koh as Dean of its Law School. I am thrilled to hear the news. I read Post’s book Constitutional Domains: Democracy, Management, Community while I was in college, and it helped convince me to go to law school. During my recent visit at Yale, Post struck me as one of the most intellectually interesting and friendly faculty members. Virtually every student I talked to who worked with him described him as an outstanding mentor.
Many of our readers might be interested in Post’s take on legal scholarship.
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June 22, 2009 at 12:50 pm
Posted in: Law and Humanities, Legal Theory, Philosophy of Social Science
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Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, Who is the Most Activist of Them All?
posted by Corey Yung
In my last post, I gave some results based upon collective groupings of appellate judges. In this post, I want to focus on the performance of individual judges. The primary reason that I am working to create a relatively large dataset is to allow for individual judge assessments. That has not been possible with the existing appellate court databases.
So, while I cannot yet tell you who the most activist judge was in 2008 because I have only reviewed data from five circuits, I can share my preliminary results for a few higher profile judges, including the most recent nominee to the United States Supreme Court. Here are the activism scores based upon my preliminary data for some of the highest profile judges in the Second, Third, Fourth, Seventh, and Eighth Circuits ranked from most activist to least activist:
June 4, 2009 at 8:07 pm
Posted in: Empirical Analysis of Law, Legal Theory
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Applying My Measure of Judicial Activism
posted by Corey Yung
In my previous post, I finally got around to explaining my measure of judicial activism. In this post, I will give some of the results based upon my preliminary data.
One of the most remarkable things I have found so far is that, although each of the circuits has a relatively consistent reversal rate, the activism scores vary by significant margins. The chart below shows the reversal rates and activism differentials for each of the five circuits that I have examined:
The activism scores are negative numbers with the higher numbers indicating a higher degree of activism. Thus, the 3rd Circuit is the most activist and the 4th Circuit is, by far, the least activist.
Of course, one thing that is always interesting to look at is which President’s appointees are the most activist. Here are the results I have so far:
This chart should be taken with a very large grain of salt. Although in some senses, I already have a large amount of data, in others I have very limited sample sizes. When I start analyzing data that uses the judge as a unit of measure, I only have 52 judges with adequate sample sizes. So, there are few representatives for some presidents. That is also why I am not including any regression analysis in these posts. I include this chart simply to show one of variables that I will explore in regards to activism. Other examples of variables I will examine include background experience (district court, private practice, prosecutor, law professor, etc.), conditions at the time of the appointment (election year, unified government, etc.), and other assorted factors (law school attended, activism in particular areas of law, ABA ratings, etc.).
As this project is still ongoing, I welcome any comments and/or suggestions. In my next, and probably last, post, I will give some information about some high profile judges including Judge Sotomayor.
Update: Based upon popular demand, I have changed the second graph to a bar chart.
June 2, 2009 at 9:25 pm
Posted in: Empirical Analysis of Law, Legal Theory
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Measuring Judicial Activism by Federal Appellate Judges
posted by Corey Yung
In my last post, I briefly described the major approaches to studying activism. In this post, I will outline my measure for the concept as well as the contours of my dataset.
Since judicial activism at its core is about substituting judgment of other constitutional actors, for federal appellate courts it makes the most sense to study where they do most of their work: reviewing the judgments of district courts. That ensures large sample sizes, wide coverage of different areas of law, and decisions that are still restrained so some non-activist baseline can be derived.
To that end, standards of review offer a powerful tool to understand judicial decision making at the federal appellate level. There are deferential (i.e. clear error) and non-deferential (i.e. de novo) reviews of district court judgments. As you can see from the chart below derived from my dataset, standards of review do affect reversal rates.
May 30, 2009 at 9:15 pm
Posted in: Empirical Analysis of Law, Legal Theory
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Studying Judicial Activism by Federal Appellate Judges
posted by Corey Yung
In my last post, I offered a new definition of judicial activism as applied to federal appellate judges. In this post, I will discuss some of the existing research on the subject.
The existing empirical scholarship is largely focused on two things: activism by the U.S. Supreme Court and judicial review of the other federal branches. While there is a lot of interesting work within those studies, I think the focus on Supreme Court review of other branches offers an extremely narrow view of judicial activism.
The Supreme Court is an unusual body in American courts. It is not subject to any higher review. The Justices are largely free to decide a case however they feel. As a result of the unrestrained nature of the Court, “activism” is a hard concept to measure. There is difficulty in finding a baseline against which to measure the Justices. A Justice who is an outlier on one Court might have regularly been in the majority during a different era. The problem of measuring activism is compounded by the Court’s very small docket. Because there are so few cases, the sample sizes are not large. Further, because the docket is self-selected, the cases are not random and are concentrated in just a few areas of law.
May 30, 2009 at 7:31 am
Posted in: Empirical Analysis of Law, Legal Theory, Uncategorized
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Defining Judicial Activism by Federal Appellate Judges
posted by Corey Yung
First off, I wanted to thank Dan and the rest of the Concurring Opinions bloggers for having me back so soon. My last stint was cut a bit short by some unexpected family issues. As it turns out the subject I wanted to blog about then, judicial activism by federal appellate judges, is more timely now because of the Sotomayor nomination. She is already being attacked as an activist judge as a basis for rejecting her nomination (even if those attacks are just part of some inevitable game we play). For some time, I have been working on a project that attempts to provide an effective measure of judicial activism by federal appellate judges like Sotomayor. Over the next few posts, I will explain my measure and show some preliminary results. However, I need to do a bit of work defining the concept first.
May 29, 2009 at 7:34 pm
Posted in: Empirical Analysis of Law, Legal Theory
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Ethics and Government Lawyers Redux: Jeff Powell’s Happy Constitution
posted by Andrew Taslitz
In an earlier post, I noted that two recent books had important things to say relevant to the ethics of government lawyers. That first post reviewed one of those books. This post reviews the second, H. Jefferson Powell’s beautifully written and spiritually uplifting new book, Constitutional Conscience: The Moral Dimension of Judicial Decision (2008). Despite what the book’s title might suggest, Powell’s lessons concern the ethics that should guide all constitutional decisionmakers, not only government lawyers. Indeed, his lessons explicitly apply to such lawyers as well, including a chapter-length illustration. Here I simply summarize his ethical theory, leaving it to the reader to imagine applications.
I note one preliminary point: while much constitutional law scholarship is depressing, either foolishly pretending law to be a mechanical enterprise divorced from politics or a cynical one masking politics, Jeff Powell offers a third, happier way ignored by fools and cynics alike: that of virtue. Those embracing the first two approaches may see Powell’s way as hopelessly idealistic, but Powell himself sees it as highly realistic, and his extended examples, which I do not have space to recount here, strongly support the pragmatic viability of his suggestions. Read the rest of this post »
May 19, 2009 at 9:16 am
Posted in: Articles and Books, Book Reviews, Constitutional Law, Legal Ethics, Legal Theory, Politics, Supreme Court, Uncategorized
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What Is Empathy? Obama’s Philosophy of Law and the Next Supreme Court Justice
posted by Daniel Solove
There has been a lot of discussion on what President Obama meant when he said he wanted to choose a person who would judge with “empathy” for the U.S. Supreme Court. When articulating his decision to vote against Chief Justice John Roberts, Obama noted that 95 percent of cases would be relatively straightforward where most justices would agree, but “what matters on the Supreme Court is those 5 precent of cases that are truly difficult.” Obama further explained:
In those 5 percent of hard cases, the constitutional text will not be directly on point. The language of the statute will not be perfectly clear. Legal process alone will not lead you to a rule of decision. In those circumstances, your decisions about whether affirmative action is an appropriate response to the history of discrimination in this country or whether a general right of privacy encompasses a more specific right of women to control their reproductive decisions or whether the commerce clause empowers Congress to speak on those issues of broad national concern that may be only tangentially related to what is easily defined as interstate commerce, whether a person who is disabled has the right to be accommodated so they can work alongside those who are nondisabled — in those difficult cases, the critical ingredient is supplied by what is in the judge’s heart.
Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, Orin Kerr has a very thought-provoking post examining what Obama means by “empathy.” He writes:
What makes the issue interesting, I think, is that the broad divide over the role of ambiguity in legal decisionmaking is quite real, and yet not often explicitly drawn out. But to those who take the first approach to legal ambiguity, Obama’s view of empathy is just asking for a judge who is lawless. From that perspective, Obama wants a judge who will ignore the law: He wants a judge who might look at the precedents and text, weigh the merits as 70/30, and then vote for the weaker “30″ side only because that furthers his political agenda. To those who see legal ambiguity as inviting a careful judicial weighing — indeed, who think that the critical role of a judge is to engage in that careful judicial weighing — emphasizing the need for “empathy” is an invitation to replace law with politics.
Orin’s post reminds me of the debate between H.L.A. Hart and Ronald Dworkin.
In The Concept of Law, H.L.A. Hart famously observed:
May 13, 2009 at 7:50 pm
Posted in: Constitutional Law, Jurisprudence, Law and Humanities, Legal Theory, Politics, Supreme Court, Uncategorized
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UCLA Law Review 56:4 (April 2009)
posted by UCLA Law Review
Volume 56, Issue 4 (April 2009)
Articles
A Constitutional Birthright: The State, Parentage, and the Rights Of Newborn Persons (pdf)
James G. Dwyer
“Which Is To Be Master,” The Judiciary or the Legislature? When Statutory Directives Violate Separation Of Powers (pdf)
Linda D. Jellum
Normative Methods for Lawyers (pdf)
Joseph William Singer
Comment
Sex Outside of the Therapy Hour: Practical and Constitutional Limits on Therapist Sexual Misconduct Regulations (pdf)
S. Wesley Gorman
April 19, 2009 at 5:11 pm
Posted in: Constitutional Law, Family Law, Law Rev (UCLA), Law Rev Forum, Legal Theory, Teaching
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Chicago Cubs and the Curse of Legal Formalism
posted by Howard Wasserman
On Saturday night, Deven’s Los Angeles Dodgers beat the Cubs 3-1, completely a dominating three-game sweep in the National League Division Series in which they outscored the Cubs 20-6. Thus will it be more than 100 years between world championships for the Cubs, who famously last won in 1908. This century of losing has been blamed on everything from billy goats to black cats to twenty-something fans in head phones to the refusal to install lights at Wrigley Field. I want to suggest a new source: legal formalism.
In addition to being the centennial of the Cubs’ last championship, 1908 also was the centennial of one of the game’s most infamous gaffes, by Fred “Bonehead’ Merkle. Some detailed history. On September 23 of that year, the Giants and Cubs, tied for first place, played at New York’s Polo Grounds. Tied 1-1 with two outs and runners at first (Merkle, then a rookie first-baseman) and third, the Giants’ Al Bridwell singled, scoring the runner from third, and apparently winning the game.Giant fans immediately ran onto the field, a common practice in those days, both to celebrate and to head to the stadium exit in right field that was closest to the trains and streetcars home. To get out of the crowd, Merkle turned right and headed for the clubhouse, which was located behind centerfield (the Polo Grounds remains my favorite of the now-deceased ballparks), without touching second base. That left the force at second base in effect. Amid the chaos, Cubs second baseman Johnny Evers got a ball (no one knows for sure whether it was the actual ball that had been hit on the play and that fact never has been established; some stories have a Giants player throwing the actual batted ball into the stands) and tagged second base and umpire Hank O’Day called Merkle out on the force, which nullified the run and ended the inning. The game then was called because of darkness and declared a tie. The teams finished the season tied, so the tie game was replayed; the Cubs won 4-2, winning the pennant and then the World Series–their last.
October 5, 2008 at 3:10 pm
Posted in: Culture, Current Events, Legal Theory
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Cardozo and Posner on Contracts and Torts
posted by Lawrence Cunningham
Several recent inquiries (for example, here and here) investigate aspects of judicial decision making, including empirical studies of influence, reputation and productivity.
A decade ago, I wrote an article inquiring into the comparative contributions to Contract law of Judges Cardozo and Posner. This was inspired by the former’s dominance of Contracts casebooks and the latter’s ascendency. Ranking judges by the frequency with which their opinions were reproduced in Contracts casebooks, Cardozo was firmly number one, followed by Traynor, with Posner a close third, beating out Hand, Holmes, Swan, Peters and other luminaries.
This affirmed Judge Posner’s enormous influence. It also suggested a small bit of formal evidence of a shift from legal analysis characterized by thickly textured doctrinalism to one consciously focused on instrumental and pragmatic method (although Cardozo showed hints of a proto-pragmatist). Notably, Cardozo’s and Posner’s reproduction frequency shared a couple of similarities. Each had an aggregate of 13 opinions reproduced in the casebooks and 6 of each of these had appeared in just 1 casebook apiece. On the other hand, Cardozo had 2 opinions that were clearly canonical, being reproduced in nearly every casebook, while Posner’s most frequently reproduced opinion appeared in only 2/3 of the books.
This summer, I’m beginning a like inquiry on comparative judicial contributions to Torts. Some similarities and some differences from the Contracts study appear in the preliminary data (being ably developed by my research assistants, Matt Albanese, Dana Parsons and Paul Stepnowsky).
July 1, 2008 at 10:50 am
Posted in: Contract Law & Beyond, Economic Analysis of Law, Empirical Analysis of Law, History of Law, Jurisprudence, Law School (Teaching), Legal Theory, Tort Law
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Summer Reading
posted by Deven Desai
As the summer slips away there may still be time to read. For that matter if one is in academia, one should find time to read no matter what. Dan’s first bit of advice to me was read, read, and oh yeah read. Now I entered the field in part because I missed reading and writing. I love the fact that when I say I worked on the weekend, people think “Oh, too bad,” while I think I just enjoyed what I was doing, but it happens to be part of my work. As I tell my students, lawyering is a nerdy profession. Don’t fight it; EMBRACE THE NERD WITHIN. One way to do that is, you guessed it, to read. So what should one read? That depends on the topic of interest of course. Nonetheless, one person has started a great project that merits a nod.
Patrick O’Donnell’s list of biblographies at Ratio Jurist is a great public service. Take a look. Given the number of topics he wishes to cover in the future, he needs some sense that people care. Checking out his lists and perhaps even sending him a thank you note is nice way to do that. Who knows? Perhaps you can convince him to post his list on capital punishment or science and technology just in time for you to start that super cool article.
One last note to non-academics and students: although practice may seem isolated from outside reading, I found that the best attorneys I knew read voraciously about their area of the law and about how to excel in writing or oral argument. In addition, if one feels that the job is boring or not a fit, read about the area you want to be in. That way when the opportunity to enter that field of your dreams arises, you will at least show that you really do know the area and are dedicated to it. Experience in an area matters of course but so does evidence that you love the field and wish to excel in it.
June 26, 2008 at 2:06 pm
Posted in: Legal Theory
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“For Every Three Judges, Two Are in the Fire”: Richard Posner and the Usul al-Fiqh
posted by Nate Oman
I’ve been reading Richard Posner of late, and it strikes me that there is an odd analogy between the his vision of the pragmatic judge and the position of the judge under the classical usul al-fiqh of Islamic law. It seems to me that ultimately Judge Posner’s theory of adjudication rests on a radical rejection of the ex post perspective. On his view all judicial decisions are — and ought to be — forward looking, focusing solely on the consequences for the future that will come from deciding one way rather than another. Of course, a concern for future consequences needn’t preclude a certain respect for past practices, expectations, and rule of law values, but none of this stuff has any force in and of itself. It only matters in so far as it impacts the future. One of the implications of this theory is that the judge can never hide behind the “the law” as a way of distancing him or herself from moral responsibility for her decisions. The law does not dictate particular results in any case. Rather, it is always a matter of the judge making an individual — albeit practically constrained — judgement about what would — all things considered — be best. One doesn’t get any sense that Judge Posner spends much time thinking about the personal moral status of the judge, but it seems to me his theory makes the judge into a radically responsible moral agent. If the consequences of one of Judge Posner’s decisions is really bad, it really is Judge Posner’s fault.
Where Judge Posner’s theory of law is radically ex ante, the theory of law (usul al-fiqh) proposed by the classical Islamic jurists purported at any rate to be radically ex post. In theory, all human legislation is a denial of the sovereignty of God, a kind of blasphemy. Rather, a righteous society follows God’s law. This law, however, is finished and complete, indeed according to the dominant theological approach in Islam it is uncreated, a co-eternal emanation of the divine mind. The task of a jurist is to discover the divine law as revealed in the Qur’an and the example of the Prophet Muhammed. Put in more concrete terms, the classical Islamic jurists claimed that every rule necessary for the proper government of society could be discovered — not deduced from or promulgated in accordance with — with the sacred texts of Islam. At this point in their theory, however, the jurists came up against the ultimately unsystematic and ad hoc nature of the Islamic revelation. The Qur’an is not a legal code. Rather it is a collection of “recitations” — often in the form of religious poetry — given by God to the Prophet, often in response to concrete questions or problems raised by the early Islamic community. It was only in the generation after his death that these “recitations” were collected into the Qur’an. Not surprisingly, it takes some nimble exegetical gymnastics to transform this religious ur-stuff into a functioning body of substantive law. What haunted the classical jurists was that they might be wrong in their exegesis. As Marshall Hodgson has written, for a Muslim “every person, as such with no exceptions, was summoned in his own person to obey the commands of God: there could be no intermediary, no group responsibility, no evasion of any sort from direct confrontation with the divine will.” Hence, there was no sense in which a jurist could hide behind some abstraction like office or “the law” to shield himself from full responsibility for his judicial decisions. He was to apply the law of God, and if he got it wrong he was responsible for that mistake.
According to one Muslim legal aphorism, “For every three judges, two are in the fire.” The fire in question here is the hell reserved by God for judges who do not apply His law. Indeed, there are stories of great classical legal scholars who fled from Baghdad at the prospect of being made an actual judge by the Caliph. The reason was that once one moved from exegetical speculation to deciding actual cases, one’s eternal soul was on the line. I don’t think that Judge Posner is much worried about hell fire, but ironically his radically ex ante approach leaves him in a similar moral position personally to the radically ex post approach of the ulema.
June 10, 2008 at 12:37 pm
Posted in: Articles and Books, History of Law, International & Comparative Law, Jurisprudence, Legal Ethics, Legal Theory, Religion
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Neuroeconomics and Innovation
posted by Dave Hoffman
I’m in LA for the next few days, at the Law, Economics and Neuroscience Conference: Implications for Innovation, sponsored by The Southern California Innovation Project, Theoretical Research in Neuroeconomic Decision-making (TREND) and The Center for Communication Law & Policy. As the press-release says, the idea is to bring together neuroscience researchers, economists, and ordinary law professors and see if the whole is greater than the sum of their parts.
[Gillian] Hadfield [who is organizing the conference on the law side] hopes the symposium will lead to more collaboration among scholars who may appear to have very different goals and backgrounds.“You don’t usually find scientists, economists and lawyers talking together about the same topic,” Hadfield said. “I think people will find that we can enrich the research agenda of all these disciplines with this kind of cross pollination.”
I hope to blog the conference, or at least my parts in in, over the next few days. I’ll be commenting on Mat McCubbins’ co-authored paper, The Effect of Institutions on Behavior and Brain Activity: Insights from EEGs and Timed-Response Experiments. In the paper, on Boudreau, Coulson, and McCubbins found that identical cooperative behavior in a trust game seems to arise from distinct neurological mechanisms, depending on whether trust in others arose from incentives or penalties. After the session tomorrow I’ll post some of my comments, which intend to connect this paper to the large law review literature on trust.
May 13, 2008 at 8:15 pm
Posted in: Behavioral Law and Economics, Contract Law & Beyond, Corporate Law, Current Events, Law Rev (S Cal), Law School (Scholarship), Law and Psychology, Legal Theory, Securities
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The To-Be-Blogged Pile
posted by Frank Pasquale
As the semester draws to a close, I’ll be adding a couple features to my blogging here. First, there’s always a big pile of stuff each week I’d like to blog on, but don’t get around to. So I’ll just post links to the articles, ala Tyler Cowen. Second, I’ll be trying to do a series on art & politics this season. Having lamented the press repeatedly, I think I owe it to readers to comment on people who are thinking more creatively about the political scene. . . including Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung, Timothy Donnelly, MIA, and Paul Chan. Without further adieu:
1. Have a tough time memorizing things? Check out this software program by Piotr Wozniak (which I’m definitely consulting if I try to re-learn Spanish).
2. Patrick S. O’Donnell both comments incisively on the food crisis and rounds up posts from around the blawgosphere. O’Donnell and Paul Horwitz have an interesting discussion on sustainability here. My own take would begin by comparing an article on the new living standards of very poor persons, and one on a “Club Med for Dogs.”
3. China’s new weapon: Low executive pay. Over to you, Todd Henderson.
4. Yale U. Press leads the way in opening access to books on internet topics. [Full disclosure: they do advertise here.]
Have a great weekend.
May 2, 2008 at 4:32 pm
Posted in: Blogging, Legal Theory, Tax
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Torture for Tots
posted by Alice Ristroph
Readers of Larry Solum’s Legal Theory Blog might have noticed yesterday abstracts for several new papers from heavy hitters in the legal academy. My favorite of these April 1 abstracts was the Cass Sunstein-Adrian Vermeule paper on “Unrestricted Interrogation of Minors Not Yet Shown to Have Engaged in Culpable Behaviors.” “Given our assumptions, there is a moral obligation for the state to engage in the torture of innocent children.” Download that while it’s hot!
A good April Fool’s joke has to be plausible, and I think this abstract fits the bill. The same arguments that have been advanced to argue that executions might be morally required and that torture is at least permissible, if not required, can be used to require torture for tots. All you need is the right hypothetical.
And yet, I think Larry Solum is right that torture for tots is a proposal that most will view as a joke. Indeed, it’s a prospect that might help test the claim that we torture when, and if, and only if, necessity demands it. In a seminar discussion a few months ago, I suggested that contemporary support for torture might be driven by a presumption that those who are tortured deserve to be treated thus. Some of those present resisted this characterization, claiming that the arguments were based strictly on necessity, so I offered a hypothetical in which the only way to find the location of the ticking bomb is to torture the terrorist’s innocent young child. As I recall, none of my fellow seminar attendees wanted to defend torture under those circumstances.
A previously unreleased torture memo penned by John Yoo became available yesterday. Marty Lederman links to Part 1 and Part 2 and discusses the memo. David Luban addresses torture for tots, and other weaknesses of ticking bomb arguments, in a new paper available here. And in “Professors Strangelove,” available here, I offer some thoughts on torture, national security tough talk, and one of my favorite movies.
UPDATE: My soon-to-be colleague Frank Pasquale points out this Salon piece, which includes a link to a fascinating Youtube clip on the question of torturing children.
April 2, 2008 at 11:37 am
Posted in: Culture, Current Events, Legal Ethics, Legal Theory
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Law Talk: A Roundtable on Justice and Insturmentalism in Private Law
posted by Nate Oman
Over the weekend, the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities held their annual conference at Boalt Hall. This podcast episode is a recording of a roundtable discussion on justice and insturmentalism in private law, which was organized for the conference by Jeff Lipshaw. The participants include Pete Alces (William & Mary), Robin Kar (Loyola LA), Alan Calnan (Southwestern), and Nate Oman (that’s me). The discussion focuses on the philosophy of tort law and contract law, with Pete sounding a skeptical note using evolutionary biology. Enjoy!
You can subscribe to “Law Talk” using iTunes or Feedburner. You can also visit the “Law Talk” page at the iTunes store. For previous episodes of Law Talk at Co-Op click here.
April 1, 2008 at 11:01 am
Posted in: Contract Law & Beyond, Law Talk, Legal Theory
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The Constitution as Ritual
posted by Bruce Boyden
One of the attractive features of originalism, I think, derives from the belief that sentences simply mean what they originally meant, either to the speaker or to the audience. This is a definitional argument: the definition of “to mean” is “what was originally meant,” and thus, by definition, if the Constitution does not mean what it originally meant it does not mean anything at all (in the same way that the set of all square circles is an empty set). I think this argument is mistaken. I think there are other sorts of sentences out there that have legitimate meanings that are not those necessarily assigned by either speakers or audiences (actual or potential) at the time.
Definitional originalism is usually argued for by analogizing the Constitution’s sentences to ordinary English sentences spoken in a quotidian context. For example, suppose you’re given a map with instructions written on it by a pirate telling you how to find his treasure. (OK, that may not be quotidian, but you could easily change the hypo to make it so: say it’s a grocery list.) If you want to find the treasure, you need to know what the words would have meant to the pirate’s likely audience. Fail to do that, and you fail to find the treasure.
Of course, if you really want to find the treasure, you need to know what the pirate actually intended, not just how audiences at the time would likely have interpreted the words. This is the point made by Stanley Fish recently in the Cardozo Law Review: the marks and sounds that ordinarily connote meaning are not “communications” at all unless and until they are communicating an intelligent being’s intended message. This, of course, is the old, disreputable “original intent originalism.” Fish argues, however, that whatever the practical difficulties it may pose, interpretation simply is the search for original intent. For example, if one knows that an alarm bell in a building is being rung by a monkey, it doesn’t mean “fire;” it means nothing at all. To paraphrase Hilary Putnam, Fish’s theory is that meanings just are in the head. And for the treasure map, it appears Fish is correct, at least if you want the treasure.
The problem with definitional arguments is that there is no good way to argue for them. If one’s interlocutors don’t buy the premise, then there is little to do but repeat it, perhaps while jumping up and down and waving one’s arms around. And it is particularly difficult if the proposed definition doesn’t cover the universe of possibilities.
March 16, 2008 at 2:12 am
Posted in: Constitutional Law, Legal Theory
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