Law & Society Blog

In my post Weaken the Court, Strengthen the Rule of Law, I argued that the hierarchical nature of the law does not require a similarly hierarchical structure of the courts. Now let me take this one step further: Why not eliminate the Supreme Court as a standing body altogether? Inevitable circuit splits would be resolved […]

Both Larry Solum and Brian Tamanaha have posted thoughtful comments regarding Justice O’Connor’s resignation. Both are concerned that we will soon witness an all-out war over her replacement, focused squarely on the ideology of the appointee, as opposed to, say, genuinely judicial virtues such as a demonstrated history of impartiality and fairness. And, of course, […]

Following up on drhfk’s comments, here are some further thoughts on the Pervasive Perils of Instrumentalism. According to Brian Tamanaha’s excellent article, there was a shift two hundred years ago, and law transformed from being formalist into been instrumentalist. I have two wrinkles to add: the role of constitutionalism and the historical resistance to […]

Read the instructions and follow them. In most instances, you should be fine. However, some combinations of MySQL, phpMyAdmin, and PHP seem to cause all sorts of mischief. The most common problems are misformed SQL commands upon import. For example, my source host (Globat, slow as molasses) exported the first SQL command of the Law […]

I am not saying that punishment should be justified in retributive terms, because retributivism captures some of our intuitions, an argument that would imply a norm, validating empirical evidence as support for a normative claim…. Retributive theories do in fact correctly capture and express certain common emotional reactions to crime and punishment, which explains ‚Äì not justifies ‚Äì their persistence.