A Re-Evaluation of Scholarly Explanations for the Rise of the Elective Judiciary in Antebellum America

Although research suggests that countries' colonial experiences are associated with a range of contemporary outcomes, the link between colonial...

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...

Supreme Court opinions involving race and the jury invariably open with the Fourteenth Amendment, the Civil Rights Act of 1875, or landmark cases like...

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...

“Dignity” is a rallying cry of social and political movements worldwide. It also appears in legal doctrine and scholarship. But the meaning of dignity...

St. George Tucker is commonly regarded as the most important commentator on American law in the first half of the nineteenth century, and the first...

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...

This paper, prepared for the 2023 Clifford Symposium on “New Torts” at DePaul Law School, addresses the tort of offensive battery. This is an ancient...

This paper describes the response of George Washington's administration to a plea for emergency war financing from French colonists who were trying to...

On March 1, 2024, the University of Richmond Law Review hosted a symposium entitled Vestiges of the Confederacy: Reckoning with the Legacy of the...

In DeTreville v. Smalls, an 1879 case from Port Royal, South Carolina, the Supreme Court declared that titles to land that had been sold in...

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...