Rawls
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By Lawrence B. Solum Introduction Some of the key conceptual tools deployed by legal theorists are likely to be familiar to many law students from their undergraduate education. One of these is the notion of the “social contract”–familiar from Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. But unless you were an undergraduate philosophy major or have some graduate…
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By Lawrence B. Solum Introduction Distributive justice is one of the central topics of political philosophy and plays a key role in contemporary debates about normative legal theory. Should contract law take distributive consequences into account? Should tort law aim at “risk spreading”? Should the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution be read…
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By Lawrence B. Solum Introduction “Legitimacy.” It’s a word much bandied about by students of the law. “Bush v. Gore was an illegitimate decision.” “The Supreme Court’s implied fundamental rights jurisprudence lacks legitimacy.” “The invasion of Iraq does not have a legitimate basis in international law.” We’ve all heard words like these uttered countless times,…
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By Lawrence B. Solum Introduction As law students become more sophisticated, they begin to notice that certain debates seem to repeat themselves over and over again. Disagreements about disparate subjects–in procedure, criminal law, torts, property, and constitutional law–frequently seem to turn on the really big questions of ethics and political theory. On the one hand,…
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By Lawrence B. Solum Introduction Some ideas seem to be endlessly debated. We might all agree that “justice” is a good thing, but some of us think that justice boils down to counting the utility of each individual equally, while others think that justice is a matter of respecting basic human rights. Utilitarians might all…
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By Lawrence B. Solum Introduction Recently, the Legal Theory Lexicon provided a very general entry on the topic of justice. The notion of justice can be analyzed in many ways, but one good place to start is with Aristotle. Aristotle divides the topic of justice into two main parts, corrective justice and distributive justice. Distributive…
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By Lawrence B. Solum Introduction The connection between law and justice is a deep one. We have “Halls of Justice,” “Justices of the Supreme Court,” and “the administration of justice.” We know that “justice” is one of the central concepts of legal theory, but the concept of justice is also vague and ambiguous. This post…
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By Lawrence B. Solum Introduction This installment of the Legal Theory Lexicon provides a very short introduction to the idea of “the rule of law,” aimed as usual at law students (especially first year law students) with an interest in legal theory. What is the Rule of Law? The ideal of the rule of law…
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By Lawrence B. Solum Introduction How should citizens in a modern pluralist democracy debate and discuss public affairs? What kinds of reasons are appropriate in the context of judicial opinions, legislative debate, or administrative decisionmaking? There is wide agreement that the government should not censor public debate about politics, at least not without very good…
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By Lawrence B. Solum Introduction This installment in the Legal Theory Lexicon is intended to introduce law students (especially first years) to “the veil of ignorance”–an idea from political philosophy that has had an important influence on legal theory. The veil of ignorance is a thought experiment–the philosophical equivalent of a hypothetical. From the…