The Practice and Problems of Plain Meaning: A Response to Aleinikoff and Shaw

Scholarship

PUBLISHER

Vanderbilt Law Review

DATE

1992

Frederick Schauer

Frederick Schauer, The Practice and Problems of Plain Meaning: A Response to Aleinikoff and Shaw, 45 Vanderbilt Law Review, 715–742 (1992).

Big Data and Compounding Injustice
Deborah Hellman
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... MORE
Precedent and Similarity
Frederick Schauer

Barbara A. Spellman
Given that no two acts, events, situations, and legal cases are identical, precedential constraint necessarily involves determining which two... MORE
Is the Religious Liberty Tent Big Enough to Include the Religious Commitments of Jews?
Micah J. Schwartzman
One of the notable trends in the current Supreme Court’s religion jurisprudence is the shrinking of the establishment clause as the free exercise... MORE

The Proof: Uses of Evidence in Law, Politics, and Everything Else
Frederick Schauer
In the age of fake news, trust and truth are hard to come by. Blatantly and shamelessly, public figures deceive us by abusing what sounds like... MORE
The Politics of Proportionality
Micah J. Schwartzman
In this review of Jamal Greene’s How Rights Went Wrong, we raise a series of questions about proportionality review as a model for adjudicating... MORE
The Algorithmic Leviathan: Arbitrariness, Fairness, and Opportunity in Algorithmic Decision Making Systems
Deborah Hellman
This article examines the complaint that arbitrary algorithmic decisions wrong those whom they affect. It makes three contributions. First, it... MORE

Three ways of failing to treat others as equals: comments on Sophia Moreau's Faces of Inequality
Deborah Hellman
In Faces of Inequality, Sophia Moreau offers an intricate and nuanced account of the wrong of discrimination that is grounded in the real-world... MORE
Reason and Rhetoric in Edwards v. Vannoy
Richard M. Re
Judicial reasoning and rhetoric should be mutually reinforcing, but they often end up at odds. Edwards v. Vannoy offers an unusually rich opportunity... MORE
Social Science in Law: Cases and Materials
John T. Monahan
This title offers an engaging and comprehensive overview of how American courts use research and testimony from the social sciences in reaching their... MORE

Pragmatism, Logic and Law. By Kellogg, Frederick.
Charles Barzun
Professor Frederick Kellogg's recent book, Pragmatism, Logic and Law, is hard to describe. It lacks a clear over-arching argument or narrative... MORE
Kelsen, Kletzer, and the Differentiation of Law
Frederick Schauer
The differentiation of law is a pervasive and crucially important topic. Although H.L.A. Hart and others have stressed how law resembles games and... MORE
Statistical Evidence and the Problem of Specification
Frederick Schauer
As a number of modern sexual misconduct cases demonstrate, often there are multiple charges against a single individual under circumstances in which... MORE

Personal Responsibility in an Unjust World: A Reply to Eidelson
Deborah Hellman
In this reply to Benjamin Eidelson’s Patterned Inequality, Compounding Injustice and Algorithmic Prediction, I argue that moral unease about... MORE
The Role of Rules in the Law of Evidence
Frederick Schauer
The theoretical side of the law of evidence has long been dominated, at least since Jeremy Bentham, by debates between the so-called free proof... MORE
Remedies and Respect: Rethinking the Role of Federal Judicial Relief
Rachel Bayefsky
Plaintiffs bringing civil lawsuits often express sentiments like “I just wanted the defendants to admit they were wrong” and “we’re worth something... MORE

Quentin Skinner v. Charles Taylor: Explanation and Practical Reasoning in History, Philosophy, and Law
Charles Barzun
One can ask two different questions about a given social, political, or legal practice. First, how, if at all, do the ideas embodied in that practice... MORE
Normative Legal Positivism
Frederick Schauer
Schauer discusses normative positivism, explaining that this type of positivism comes in two main versions, namely, in the shape of a prescription to... MORE
The Tale of Two Harts; A Schlegelian Dialectic
Charles Barzun
This essay, written for a symposium honoring John Henry Schlegel, is part intellectual history, part philosophical polemic. It first briefly compares... MORE