Category Archives: General
Deumier and Devinat, ‘Civil Code Reforms and Sources of Law: The French and Quebec Experience Compared’
ABSTRACT Can civil codes be reformed ‘like any other piece of legislation?’ A comparison of the French and Quebec experiences illustrates the methodological challenges that arose from civil code reform projects for the Civil Code of Québec during the last two Centuries. It also reveals the complex relationship that jurists have with ‘their’ own civil […]
Dagan and Dorfman, ‘The Work and Values of Relational Justice’
ABSTRACT In Relational Justice we lay out a new approach to understanding some of society’s most important building blocks, arguing that private law should, and to a significant degree already does, abide by the fundamental commitment to reciprocal respect for self-determination and substantive equality. The generous and rigorous book reviews of Aditi Bagchi, Marija Bartl, […]
Martha McCluskey, ‘Autonomy’
ABSTRACT This essay discusses the theme of autonomy in Martha A Fineman’s analysis of the human condition, written for a volume of essays on the development and key contributions of Fineman’s Vulnerability Theory. Over several decades, Fineman has critically examined individual autonomy as a foundational myth that impedes democracy and social justice. This myth remains […]
Thomas Smith, ‘Persons Real and Feigned: A Metaphysics of the Legal Person’
ABSTRACT This essay asks what a legal person is, and argues that the law’s many nonhuman persons answer to a single account with three terms and no fourth. A legal person is either a rational substance, an individual being whose own nature is rational, which is what a human being is and the person in […]
‘Why so few cases in the Inner House?’
How much business is there in the Inner House of the Court of Session? This can be looked at in more than one way. The official Civil Justice Statistics tend to measure activity by the number of cases initiated or disposed of. This blog, being interested in court decisions as a source of law, has […]
Cass Sunstein, ‘Paternalism and Autonomy’
ABSTRACT Some of the most intuitive and deeply held objections to paternalism point to autonomy. A central claim is that paternalism is objectionable even if it improves people’s lives, because it does not treat people as adults or with respect. To know whether paternalism violates autonomy, we need to specify what kind of paternalism is […]
Bartosz Biskup, ‘Is analytic legal philosophy capitalist?: Hart, Raz, and Shapiro on the (private) nature of law’
ABSTRACT Mainstream analytic legal philosophy is tacitly supporting capital while presenting itself as neutral conceptual analysis. That is the charge of this paper. My charge is not normative, but methodological. Hart (2012), but also Raz (2009) or Shapiro (2011), argued for what I call an ‘enabler theory’. It argues that law is an empty vessel: […]
‘You Didn’t Earn That’
Some workers are paid much more than others. In the United States, many white-collar professionals make several hundred thousand dollars per year, post-tax. That is on the order of ten times what fast food workers, janitors, and home health aides make. Global labor inequality is worse. A product manager at Apple might make thirty times […]
‘Changes in the provision of civil legal aid in England and Wales’
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY …. This report examines how civil legal aid provision in England and Wales has evolved since the introduction of these reforms. While criminal legal aid changed too, that is not the focus of this report. Drawing on Ministry of Justice administrative data and Census-linked information on deprivation, the analysis tracks changes in the […]
Bar-Gill and Sunstein, Algorithmic Harm: Protecting People in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (Jerusalem Review of Legal Studies)
X-Hacking Algorithmic Harm (Talia B Gillis) Those Elusive Algorithmic Harms: A Comment on Bar-Gill and Sunstein, Algorithmic Harm (Omri Ben-Shahar) Comment on: Oren Bar-Gill and Cass Sunstein, Algorithmic Harm: Protecting People in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (David Gilo) Algorithmic Repression (Roy Kreitner) Algorithmic Harm: A Response to Critics (Oren Bar-Gill and Cass R Sunstein) […]