The 1958 debate in the pages of the Harvard Law Review between Lon Fuller and H.L.A. Hart is one of the landmarks of modern jurisprudence. And although much of the debate was about the relative merits of Hart's version of legal positivism and Fuller's brand of natural law theory, the debate also contained the memorable controversy about the fictional rule prohibiting vehicles from the park. By examining this debate, and by largely removing it from the surrounding controversy over positivism and natural law, we can still gain valuable insights about legal rules, legal interpretation, and the nature of legal language.
We live in a golden age of student surveillance. Some surveillance is old school: video cameras, school resource officers, and tip lines. Old-school...
Supreme Court opinions involving race and the jury invariably open with the Fourteenth Amendment, the Civil Rights Act of 1875, or landmark cases like...
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...
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...
In the years since the publication of our book, How Constitutional Rights Matter, many scholars from around the world have engaged with our research...
The conventional wisdom is that the Commander-in-Chief Clause arms the President with a panoply of martial powers. By some lights, the Clause not only...
Recent decades have seen a sharp rise in constitutional provisions regulating core aspects of democracy, including the rules about parties, voting...