150 research outputs found
A chart of the ocean between South America and Africa with the tracks of Dr. Edmund Halley in 1700 and Monsr. Lozier Bouvet in 1738 [cartographic material] /
No full textMap of the South Atlantic Ocean flanked by South America on the left and Africa on the right. The map features the time-dated sea-tracks of 18th century explorers Edmund Halley in command of HM Pink Paramore and later Lozier Bouvet in command of the Eagle and the Mary.; Imprint on map: Published according to Act of Parliament, April 1769.; Prime meridian: Greenwich.; From: A collection of voyages chiefly in the South Atlantick Ocean / Alexander Dalrymble. London : Printed for the author; sold by J. Nourse, 1775.; Also available in an electronic version via the Internet at: http://nla.gov.au/nla.map-rm461
Platypus insulin : structural analysis, chemical synthesis and physico-chemical properties
No full textTwo Kinds of Plain Meaning
No full textIs plain meaning so plain? This is not meant to be a philosophical question, but one deserving serious legal analysis. The plain-meaning rule claims to provide certainty and narrow statutes\u27 domains. The author agrees with, as a relative claim, comparing plain meaning with purposivism. She does not agree that plain-meaning analysis is as easy as its proponents suggest. In this piece, the author teases out two very different ideas of plain meaning--ordinary/popular meaning and expansive/legalist meaning--suggesting that doctrinal analysis requires more than plain-meaning simpliciter. Perhaps more importantly, she argues that plain meaning, as legalist meaning, can quite easily expand a statute\u27s scope, relative to a baseline of ordinary meaning or the status quo ex ante
Making Constitutional Doctrine in a Realist Age
No full textIn this article the author considers three examples of modern constitutional doctrine that show how judges have stolen bits and pieces from popularized skepticisms about the job of judging and have molded this stolen rhetoric into doctrine. In the first example, she asks whether constitutional law\u27s recent penchant for doctrinal rules based on clear law could have existed without the modern age\u27s obsession with legal uncertainty. In the second, the author considers whether our contemporary rhetoric of constitutional interests and expectations reflects modern critiques of doctrine as failing to address social needs. In the third, she asks how an offhand reference to the term fundamental could come to describe a legal category defined by courts\u27 own fears of illegitimacy except in an age self-conscious of the judiciary\u27s institutional weaknesses. If the author is right about these examples, it may be that what was once said of modern painting\u27s abstraction--that whatever else it was about, it was about painting --is true of modern doctrine\u27s abstraction as well: that it is about doctrine and doctrine\u27s struggle in an age self-conscious of the possibility of doctrinal failure
A. De la Motraye's travels through Europe, Asia, and into part of Africa; with proper cutts and maps. [electronic resource] : Containing a great variety of geographical, topographical, and political observations on those parts of the world; especially on Italy, Turky, Greece, Crim and Noghaian Tartaries, Circassia, Sweden, and Lapland. A curious collection of things particularly rare, both in nature and antiquity; such as remains of ancient cities and colonies, inscriptions, idols, medals, minerals, &c. With an historical account of the most considerable events which happen'd during the space of above 25 years; such as a great revolution in the Turkish Empire, by which the emperor was depos'd; the engaging of the Russian and Turkish armies on the banks of the Pruth; the late King of Sweden's reception and entertainment at bender; his transactions with the porte, during his stay of above four years in Turky; his return into his dominions, compaigns in Norway, death, &c. His sister, the princess Ulrica's accession to the throne, her generous resignation of it to her consort the present King; and, in fine, all the chief transactions of the senate and states of Sweden, &c.
No full textThe titlepage to vol.3 reads: 'The voyages and travels of A. de la Motraye', London: printed for E. Symon; J. Newton, and J. Oswald; L. Gilliver; J. Nourse, and T. Payne.Former pressmark of 567.i.26: 567.k.5Electronic reproduction.English Short Title Catalog,Reproduction of original from British Library
Decision Theory and \u3ci\u3eBabbitt v. Sweet Home\u3c/i\u3e: Skepticism About Norms, Discretion, and the Virtues of Purposivism
No full textIn this writing, the author applies a “decision theory” of statutory interpretation, elaborated recently in the Yale Law Journal, to Professor William Eskridge’s illustrative case, Babbitt v. Sweet Home Chapter of Communities for a Great Oregon. In the course of this application, she takes issue with the conventional wisdom that purposivism, as a method of statutory interpretation, is inevitably a more virtuous model of statutory interpretation. First, the author questions whether we have a clear enough jurisprudential picture both of judicial discretion and legal as opposed to political normativity. Second, she argues that, under decision theory, Sweet Home is a far easier case than either Justice Stevens’s or Justice Scalia’s opinions reveal. Finally, the author critiques both opinions for failing to rely on norms borrowed from Congress’s actual decisions in the 1982 Endangered Species Act Amendments. The question then, is not “norms or not,” but whose norms, Congress’s or the courts’, should apply
Self-Defense and Subjectivity
No full textThe law of self-defense has rarely produced as much academic or popular heat as it has in the past two decades. Widely publicized trials, such as the Goetz and Menendez cases, have generated deep-seated fears of a law unmoored from principle. Those fears have generated a standard public critique--that the criminal law has become too soft and subjective, too wedded to syndrome science and prone to weak-kneed affection for defendants. The criminal law has lost its objectivity, so the argument goes. The poster child, and even the alleged cause of this development, is the battered woman.
In this article, the author presents evidence that much of this public debate is misdirected: the charge of subjectivity and abuse, if not a deception, is a diversion. The problem with the law of self-defense is neither new nor limited to the battered woman; it is as old and as persistent as the law\u27s search for an objective meaning for necessity. Based on a survey of twenty years of self-defense cases, the author sought to test claims of objectivity by focusing on what purports to be one of the most objective of self-defense rules: the requirement that the threat must have been imminent for the defendant\u27s response to have been permissible. Time is not something legal scholars generally study. The author chose to study imminence, however, because it seems the quintessential definition of objectivity, the hard case. Perhaps more importantly, there is no more controversial element in the law of self-defense. As George Fletcher has put it: The central debate in the theory of self-defense for the last decade has been whether we should maintain a strict requirement of imminence.
Part I of this article explains the legal issues of imminence and the law of self-defense as well as the construction of the legal debate as a question of subjectivity. Part II presents the results of the author’s survey and its method. Part III argues that the so-called objectivity of contemporary doctrine is belied by its content; that doctrine we call objective leaves open many questions and risks the embrace of contradictions. This Part traces these failures to a basic theoretical disagreement about the meaning of necessity in the law of self-defense. Part IV argues that subjectivity cannot resolve these questions. It argues that even the apparently most subjective aspects of self-defense law--such as battered woman syndrome--may rest on objective legal propositions. Finally, Part V questions whether a discourse of objectivity and subjectivity really helps us understand the criminal law, in self-defense or the many other places it may be found. The author argues that if there is a problem with the law of criminal defenses today, it is not with syndromes or subjectivity, but with a criminal law that purports to be neutral and precise but remains full of contested meanings
The Constitution and Legislative History
No full textIn this article, the author provides an extended analysis of the constitutional claims against legislative history, arguing that, under textualists’ own preference for constitutional text, the use of legislative history should be constitutional to the extent it is supported by Congress’s rulemaking power, a constitutionally enumerated power.
This article has five parts. In part I, the author explains the importance of this question, considering the vast range of cases to which this claim of unconstitutionality could possibly apply—after all, statutory interpretation cases are the vast bulk of the work of the federal courts. She also explains why these claims should be of greater concern to a variety of constitutional theorists, particularly those who embrace theories of popular and common law constitutionalism, but as well to originalists.
In part II, the author considers the textualist arguments against the constitutionality of legislative history. Article I, Section 7 provides that any bill must pass the House and the Senate and be presented to the President for veto or signature. As a number of textualists have argued, legislative history is not passed by both houses or signed by the President. Call this the “bicameralism argument.” Her answer to the bicameralism argument lies in a constitutional text that statutory textualists seem to have forgotten: Article I, Section 5 gives explicit power to Congress to set its own procedures, a power that gives legitimacy to legislative history created pursuant to those procedures. In fact, new developments in statutory interpretation theory (decision process theory) suggest that, in some cases, the only way to resolve textual conflict is to consider legislative procedure.
In part III, the author considers a second prominent argument against the constitutionality of legislative history: non-delegation. Critics argue that Congress may not delegate the “legislative power” granted under the Constitution to members or committees, as only the entire Congress may constitutionally exercise that power. Call this the “non-delegation” argument. Again, her response is based on constitutional text: Article I, Section 5 specifically sanctions delegation to less than the whole of Congress; more importantly, there is no general norm against self-delegation stated explicitly or even implicitly in the Constitution. Finally, the author suggests that there is a certain inconsistency in the assertion of these claims: the non-self-delegation and bicameralism arguments can both be used to indict canons of construction, which textualists offer as the leading alternative to legislative history, but which have no supporting text comparable to Article I section 5 in the Constitution.
In part IV, she considers arguments that judges’ use of legislative history violates the separation of powers because it allows the legislature to exceed the bounds of the “judicial power.” This argument can rather easily be turned on its head: in the quotations offered at the beginning of this article, members of Congress argue that judges are exercising the “legislative power” when they rewrite statutes without considering legislative history. As has been argued at length elsewhere, the use of “adjectival” argument in structural controversies—relying upon the terms “legislative, executive, and judicial”—perpetuates a weak understanding of the separation of powers, and one that the Constitution’s own text belies. The separation of powers does not prevent recourse to legislative history; in fact, as the article explains, blindness to legislative history may create different kinds of structural risks—risks to federalism, rather than risks to the separation of powers.
Finally, in part V, the author concludes by suggesting that we should retire the strong form of the legislative history unconstitutionality argument, by which she means the claim that the constitution bars any and all legislative history. Instead, we should far more actively interrogate serious questions about the use of legislative history in particular cases. Can it really be wise—or even constitutional—for a judge to impose a meaning on an ambiguous statute with reference to the state-ments of a filibustering minority, or privilege some texts in ways that violate Congress’s rules? Fidelity to Congress, and the importance of Congress’s constitutional rules—what Francis Lieber once called the “common law” of the Congress—has yet to be theorized within this more pressing, but particular, sphere
The Cytoplasmic Domain of the T-Cell Receptor zeta Subunit Does Not Form Disordered Dimers
No full textThe Intrinsically Disordered Cytoplasmic Domain of the T-Cell Receptor Zeta Subunit Does not Form Disordered Dimers
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