Showing papers in "Notre Dame Law Review in 1996"

Property as the Keystone Right

Abstract: The collapse of socialist regimes has revived an interest in property rights allover the world, as once-statist nations consider privatization as a route to commercial and economic revitalization.1 Even here in the property-conscious United States, constitutional property rights have become a subject of renewed popular and political interest.2 But property rights have a somewhat uneasy place in a constitutional ordering. There are of course substantial libertarian arguments for property rights as an element of personal autonomy,3 but on the whole, the post-socialist enthusiasm for property seems to have been overwhelmingly economic: the allure of property is that it enhances wealth, both personal

Social Justice and Liberation

Abstract: Justice is the virtue we practice by giving people what is due them. Therefore, there is a problem of assignability when we consider an unjust social order: What is due from an individual beneficiary of that order to an individual victim? That question is answered by the concept of social justice: What all of us individually owe to each individual victim of the institutions now in place is our best efforts to reform those institutions. The first half of this paper analyzes the traditional arguments for and the conservative arguments against social justice as the answer to this problem of assignability. Within that framework, it highlights the need for combating and remedying injustices in society even though different, unknown, or more difficult problems may arise from doing so. The second half of the paper enters into an eschatological reflection on the principles of social justice from a Christian liberation theology perspective. It concludes that the demands of social justice from this Christian perspective are two-fold. First, that the members of every class have enough resources and enough power to live as befits human beings, and, second, that the privileged class be accountable to the wider society for the way they use their advantages.

The Electric Chair and the Chain Gang: Choices and Challenges for America’s Future

Abstract: The use of capital punishment in America today presents a number of fundamental moral issues about our society and our system of justice. It is fitting that we address those issues here at Notre Dame Law School, which has a well-deserved reputation for raising moral issues, for a deep commitment to justice, and for responding to human needs with compassion.Our society and the legal professional are failing to meet the need for legal services of many of those most desperately in need of such services in cases involving the highest stake, life itself. There are, of course, urgent needs in other areas besides capital punishment. Those accused of crimes which do not carry the death penalty, the poor, people of color, homeless people, people with mental impairments, people who are HIV positive, people in prisons and jails and many others are without lawyers to represent them in cases which involve their freedom, their shelter, their survival.Those needs will be greater when you graduate from law school than they are today. But there could be fewer jobs and less resources for those who respond. And, as you know, you will be saddled with enormous debts. This presents a challenge, but it should not deter you from responding. Indeed, my message to you is that you have no choice except to respond – the needs and the times demand it.