offers a preliminary legal history of the white supremacist and anti-Semitic violence that took place in my hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia on...

Why Can’t We Take Secession Seriously?

Cynthia L. Nicoletti

Sandy Levinson has always taken secession arguments seriously. This is, in my eyes, one of his great virtues. There are very few scholars who would be...

'Our Experiences Make Us Who We Are': Lessons from Thomas Ruffin and Dirk Hartog

Jessica Lowe

It was 1804, and Thomas Ruffin, future Chief Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, was having doubts about slavery. Ruffin was a young student...

How an Old Tort Became New: The Case of Offensive Battery

G. Edward White

Kenneth S. Abraham

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...

Immunity Rules

John C. Harrison

Analysis based on Hohfeld’s analytical system shows that liability rules, as defined by Guido Calabresi and A. Douglas Melamed, are a false category...

Hohfeld on Legal Language

Frederick Schauer

Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld is well-known for maintaining that various terms in law – “rights,” most prominently – confusingly designate a number of quite...

Co Authoring in Legal Academia

G. Mitu Gulati

Co authoring saved me. Literally. But for the fact that my senior colleagues at UCLA did not care whether I ever wrote anything sole authored, I don't...

Alexander Hamilton, the Nondelegation Doctrine, and the Creation of the United States

Aditya Bamzai

In the period immediately preceding the Constitution’s adoption, New Yorkers engaged in a spirited debate over whether a proposed delegation from the...

Risa Goluboff: Response to Dirk Hartog’s “Four Fragments” In a Flow Chart and Three Venn Diagrams

Risa Goluboff

After reading “Four Fragments,” I returned to the journal I kept as a requirement of Dirk’s course. There, in the very first entry dated February 6...

The Hope of Ketanji Brown Jackson's Nomination

Kimberly J. Robinson

For two surreal days this week, I sat next to the family of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson during hearings on her nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court...

Soccer in American Culture: The Beautiful Game’s Struggle for Status

G. Edward White

In Soccer in American Culture: The Beautiful Game's Struggle for Status , G. Edward White seeks to answer two questions. The first is why the sport of...

Foreword: Interrogating Legal Pedagogy and Imagining a Better Way to Train Lawyers

Risa Goluboff

This symposium about the future of legal pedagogy could not be more timely. Its four thought-provoking papers raise a constellation of questions about...

The Small and Diversifying Network of Legal Scholars: A Study of Co-Authorship from 1980-2020

Andrew Hayashi

This Essay reports the first comprehensive network analysis of legal scholars connected through co-authorship. If legal scholarship was ever a...

Liberalism Without Theodicy

Micah J. Schwartzman

About twenty-five years ago, in the introduction to his book Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality, Jerry Cohen described encountering an unfamiliar...

Continuity and Change at UVA Law

Risa Goluboff

Carlos M. Brown

At the University of Virginia School of Law, we have recently commemorated the bicentennial of our founding, the centennial of coeducation and the...

The Global Evolution of Foreign Relations Law

Kevin Cope

Pierre-Hugues Verdier

Mila Versteeg

The constitutional rules that govern how states engage with international law have profound implications for foreign affairs, yet we lack...

Tort Law and the Construction of Change: Studies in the Inevitability of History

G. Edward White

Kenneth S. Abraham

Tort Law and the Construction of Change studies the interaction of law and social change in American history. Tort law—civil law made by judges, not...