The Philosophy of Law: Classic and Contemporary Readings with Commentary

We live in a golden age of student surveillance. Some surveillance is old school: video cameras, school resource officers, and tip lines. Old-school...

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

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...

There is one group that the court does not put into an identity straitjacket—those claiming religious exemptions.

This special issue of the Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities contains papers presented at a March 2022 conference at Yale Law School marking the...

Across multiple national surveys sampling more than 12,000 people, we have found that a majority of Americans, more than 60 percent, consider false...

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...

Sometimes a police officer can only stop a fleeing suspect by striking or shooting him. When is it morally justified to use such force rather than let...

Philosophers have debated whether the advance directives of Alzheimer’s patients should be enforced, even if patients seem content in their demented...

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

In the years since the publication of our book, How Constitutional Rights Matter, many scholars from around the world have engaged with our research...

Recent decades have seen a sharp rise in constitutional provisions regulating core aspects of democracy, including the rules about parties, voting...

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...

This Essay was prepared for a Symposium at the Yale Law School, celebrating the one-hundredth anniversary of The Nature of the Judicial Process, the...