Download of the Week
-
The Download of the Week is What is a Tort? by Ketan Ramakrishnan . Here is the abstract: According to the Palsgraf perspective, today’s dominant philosophical picture of tort law, torts are relational wrongs: violations of legal directives that forbid mistreating other people in certain ways. On this view, each cause of action in tort law –…
-
The Download of the Week is Legal Internalism: A Behavioral Theory by Shyamkrishna Balganesh & Taisu Zhang. Here is the abstract: This Article argues that legal systems, regardless of socioeconomic, political, cultural, or ideological context, naturally drift towards jurisprudential internalism. We define “legal internalism” as a behavioral paradigm in which legal actors treat legal rules as normative, epistemologically…
-
The Download of the Week is The Written Constitution of Enumeration by Gary Lawson. Here is the abstract: While originalists disagree among themselves about many things, most agree that the proper object of constitutional interpretation is the written Constitution and that the Constitution enumerates the powers of federal institutions, such as Congress. These propositions, while not universally shared…
-
Michael D. Ramsey (University of San Diego School of Law) has posted Birthright Citizenship Re-Examined on SSRN. Here is the abstract: In 2020, I argued in Originalism and Birthright Citizenship that the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause guaranteed U.S. citizenship to almost everyone born in the United States apart from the children of…
-
The Download of the Week is Are There Any Substantive Canons of Interpretation? by Charles F. Capps. Here is the abstract: Since the late 1980s, scholars have distinguished between two kinds of canons of statutory interpretation: linguistic canons, which judges invoke on the ground that they track the legislature’s intended meaning, and substantive canons, which judges invoke…
-
The Download of the Week is The Dismantling of Civil Rights Protections and Thoughts on Rebuilding by Samuel R. Bagenstos & Ellen D. Katz. Here is the abstract: Over a few months in 2025, the second Trump Administration dismantled the infrastructure for federal civil rights enforcement in the United States. In this paper, we describe key elements of…
-
The Download of the Week is The Origins of Statutory Stare Decisis by Christian R. Burset. Here is the abstract: Federal courts apply stare decisis with extra force to decisions that interpret statutes. Critics contend that this “supercharged” deference to statutory precedents lacks a legitimate pedigree. But that charge rests on conjecture, since scholars have paid little…
-
The Download of the Week is A Functionalist Theory of Legal Persons by Mala Chatterjee. Here is the abstract: This Article defends a functionalist theory of legal persons that substantively unifies individuals, corporations, and other constructed or juridical persons, and then canvasses revisionary implications for law. In more words, I argue that, because the law has (and ought…
-
The Download of the Week is Justice as Law’s Constitutive Virtue: A Functional Reassessment by Emad H. Atiq.. Here is the abstract: Some kinds can succeed or fail on their own terms. A clock that loses minutes is defective as a clock; a university that abandons teaching and research becomes deficient as a university. Pebbles and numbers,…
-
The Download of the Week is Redistricting Without Tradeoffs by Nicholas Stephanopoulos. Here is the abstract: The law of redistricting is built on the assumption that tradeoffs among line-drawing criteria are pervasive. This view helps explain crucial elements of partisan gerrymandering, racial vote dilution, and racial gerrymandering doctrine. This Article is the first to rigorously analyze the existence…