Showing papers by "Georgetown University Law Center published in 1985"
TL;DR: Goffman's theory of violent criminal behavior, which is based upon the complementary notions of "character contest" and "stake in conventional institutions", is relatively unique in that it makes p...
Abstract: Goffman's theory of violent criminal behavior, which is based upon the complementary notions of “character contest” and “stake in conventional institutions,” is relatively unique in that it makes p...
26 citations
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TL;DR: This article argued that recognizing the aesthetic dimension of legal debate frees us to realize our moral ideals, and applied Northrop Frye's categories to Anglo-American jurisprudential traditions and employed aesthetic principles to analyze influential legal theorists within these traditions.
Abstract: Recent legal scholarship has engaged in a growing dialogue tying literary criticism to jurisprudence. In this article, Professor Robin West adds her voice by advocating the reading of legal theory as a form of narrative. Drawing from Northrop Frye's "Anatomy of Criticism," Professor West first details four literary myths that combine contrasting world visions and narrative methods. She then applies Frye's categories to Anglo-American jurisprudential traditions and employs aesthetic principles to analyze influential legal theorists within these traditions. Finally, Professor West argues that recognizing the aesthetic dimension of legal debate frees us to realize our moral ideals.
17 citations
TL;DR: The "republican synthesis" as discussed by the authors proposes a post-revolutionary political theory according to which the government, structured to allow citizens to act as individualists in politics, nonetheless produced public policies that transcended individual or, in Madison's terms, factional interests.
Abstract: The past two decades have seen a major reinterpretation of the politics of the early Republic. The dominant view until the 1960s was that American political institutions in the postrevolutionary period displaced hierarchical and aristocratic social institutions relatively rapidly and put in their place the institutions of a dynamic individualist and capitalist society.' In this view, the Federalists after 1800 were trapped in a nostalgic yearning for a stable society of the sort they recalled from prerevolutionary times, while the Democrats accurately saw that democratic impulses had already transformed American society.2 The "republican synthesis" challenges this view.3 Instead of a break that occurred with the Revolution, it sees a continuous process in which a new theory of politics was gradually developed,4 came to its peak during the revolutionary era,5 and continued to dominate the politics of the early Republic. The earlier view saw American political theory, and the politics it both justified and produced, as irreducibly individualist. The republican synthesis sees a post-revolutionary political theory according to which the government, structured to allow citizens to act as individualists in politics, nonetheless produced public policies that transcended individual or, in Madison's terms, factional interests. To preserve their coherence, earlier theories of civic