Legal philosophy
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The Best and the Rest
A friend has drawn my attention to what seems like an interesting book, Laughing at the Gods: Great Judges and How They Made the Common Law by Allan C. Huntchinson, a professor at Osgoode Hall. I haven’t had a chance to start reading it yet but I will eventually, because prof. Hutchinson’s topic is directly… Continue reading
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Can the Viceroy Do Wrong?
Radio-Canada reports that Québec’s former Lieutenant-Governor, Lise Thibault, is trying to avoid having to stand trial on charges of fraud, forgery, and breach of trust, by invoking the common law rule that the Queen can do no wrong. As her lawyer puts it, criminal proceedings oppose the sovereign and the subject, and the sovereign cannot… Continue reading
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Law Like Love
“What is law like? What can we compare it with in order to illuminate its character and suggest answers to some of the perennial questions of jurisprudence?” That’s the opening of Jeremy Waldron’s “Planning for Legality,” 109 Mich. L. Rev. 883 (2010), a review of Scott Shapiro’s book Legality. When I read it recently, it immediately reminded me of… Continue reading
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Drop That Gun! (But Keep the Bullets)
The Superior Court of Ontario has recently delivered its decision in The Queen v. Montague, 2012 ONSC 2300, an interesting case at the intersection of the topics property rights, and gun rights, about which I wrote here and here. In fact, in the latter post, I had mentioned a previous decision in this case, by the… Continue reading
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A Pull Towards Goodness?
WARNING: This post is an adapted version of a passage in my “candidacy paper,” which is meant eventually to be part of the first chapter of my dissertation. Caveat lector. *** Explaining their decisions is an important part of the judges’ work. It is valuable for all sorts of reasons. It forces judges to be… Continue reading
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What Makes a Judge Great?
Most students of law – not just law students – probably have a favourite judge, or judges. Someone whose judicial performance – his or her decisions and opinions – we regard as outstanding and exemplary. But what is it that makes a judge great? Or, more modestly, what makes a judge good? There several ways… Continue reading
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A Person Yoda Is?
In today’s Legal Theory Lexicon entry on “Persons and Personhood”, Larry Solum suggests that if an intelligent alien species were to arrive on Earth … [and] the members of the aliens displayed evidence of human-like intelligence and could communicate with us (e.g. were able to master a human natural language, such as English), then we might… Continue reading
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Privacy in the Past, Present, and Future
Our own actions – individual and collective – set the upper limit of our privacy rights. We will never have more privacy rights than we care to have, although we often have fewer. One stark illustration of this idea comes in Isaac Asimov’s short story “The Dead Past,” in which a group of scientists build… Continue reading
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Purely Hypothetical Dragons
Everyone knows that dragons don’t exist. But while this simplistic formulation may satisfy the layman, it does not suffice for the scientific mind. … The brilliant Cerebron, attacking the problem analytically, discovered three distinct kinds of dragon: the mythical, the chimerical, and the purely hypothetical. They were all, one might say, nonexistent, but each nonexisted… Continue reading
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How to Argue about the Death Penalty
The NY Times has an interesting story today about two men who are leading a campaign in support of a ballot initiative that would abolish the death penalty in California – and who, in 1978, played key roles in the adoption of a ballot initiative that was meant to increase the use of the death… Continue reading
Double Aspect 