Center for Law & Philosophy

In theoretical linguistics the word “pragmatics” refers to the roles of context and communicative intentions in the production of meaning. Those roles...

This Article develops a new way of understanding the law in order to address contemporary debates about judicial practice and reform. The...

A large segment of the political left identifies as “progressive,” but what does a belief in progress entail? This short essay, written for a...

Our perceptions of what we owe each other turn somewhat on whether we consider “another” to be “an other”—a stranger and not a friend. In this essay...

Constitutional theory is a mess. Disagreements about originalism and living constitutionalism have become intractable. Constitutional theorists make...

Moore v. United States raises the question whether unrealized gains, such as an increase in property value or a stock portfolio, constitute “incomes...

Although ethical critiques of markets are longstanding, modern academic debates about the “moral limits of markets” (MLM) tend to be fairly limited in...

Many analyses of law take an unsentimental, perhaps even cynical view of regulated actors. On this view, law is a necessity borne of people’s selfish...

How should judges decide hard cases involving rights conflicts? Standard debates about this question are usually framed in jurisprudential terms...

This article argues that the fact that an action will compound a prior injustice counts as a reason against doing the action. I call this reason The...

At first blush, the debate between Stanley Fish and Ronald Dworkin that took place over the course of the 1980s and early 90s seems to have produced...

Given that no two acts, events, situations, and legal cases are identical, precedential constraint necessarily involves determining which two...

This chapter examines the intellectual and social contexts in which the American Law Institute (ALI) has operated and how they have influenced the...

This short essay considers Benjamin Zipursky’s intriguing effort to identify a tradition of “American natural law theory” that links Benjamin Cardozo...

In the United States, a long line of Supreme Court decisions, of which Ashwander v. TVA (1936) is most prominent, purports to establish the principle...

Although Lon Fuller’s importance and reputation among those who practice general jurisprudence remains contested, it is clear that he remains a major...

Both statutory and constitutional law prohibiting discrimination forbid actions taken on the basis of certain traits. But rarely are those traits...

“Original public meaning” has become increasingly important in constitutional discourse. This Article investigates the nature of original public...

In Common Good Constitutionalism, Professor Adrian Vermeule articulates a conception of the common good. Vermeule has much to say about the common...

In this review of Jamal Greene’s How Rights Went Wrong, we raise a series of questions about proportionality review as a model for adjudicating rights...

This article examines the complaint that arbitrary algorithmic decisions wrong those whom they affect. It makes three contributions. First, it...

Judicial reasoning and rhetoric should be mutually reinforcing, but they often end up at odds. Edwards v. Vannoy offers an unusually rich opportunity...

A commitment to nondiscrimination at times appears to require both that one not act in particular ways and that one not believe certain things. This...

The theoretical side of the law of evidence has long been dominated, at least since Jeremy Bentham, by debates between the so-called free proof...