From 1938 to 1940 Karl Llewellyn worked on and substantially completed a book-length manuscript entitled The Theory of Rules. With the book almost completed, Llewellyn turned to other things, primarily his work on law and anthropology and his efforts relating to the Uniform Commercial Code. The book on rules remained uncompleted at his death, and is now to be published by the University of Chicago Press in 2010, edited and with an Introduction by Frederick Schauer, David and Mary Harrison Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Virginia. The Introduction situates The Theory of Rules within the corpus of Llewellyn’s work, within the Legal Realist perspective on legal rules, and within the jurisprudential and philosophical literature on rules in general.
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...
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...
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...
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...
This short essay considers Benjamin Zipursky’s intriguing effort to identify a tradition of “American natural law theory” that links Benjamin Cardozo...