Judicial opinion

About: Judicial opinion is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 5300 publications have been published within this topic receiving 64803 citations.

Local Government Legal Consciousness in the Shadow of Juridification

Abstract: For almost two decades, British local government has been subject to intensive legal restructuring. Statutes have reallocated municipal powers and duties, judicial decisions declared council practice ultra vires; new subjects have gained grievance rights and scrutinizing powers. Law, commentators argue, has colonized local government, re-forming its practices, procedures, culture, and agendas.2 But what impact have these changes had on legal consciousness? This raises two further questions. First, how do local government actors understand and experience law; second, to what extent is this a product of structural legal change, that is, of juridification? Exploring the relationship between legal consciousness and juridification poses difficulties. If juridification identifies structural shifts, to what extent can these be meaningfully explored through individual perceptions and responses? If legal understandings are varied and contradictory, does this negate the existence of a central determining condition, such as juridification? In this paper, my aim is not to use legal consciousness as a way of proving or disproving juridification. Nor do I aim to establish juridification as the conclusive determinate of current municipal legal understandings. Both ventures, I would suggest, are fraught with methodological and epistemological problems. My objective, in contrast, is more modest: to explore the character of legal consciousness within local government in the 1980s and early 1990s, and, in doing so, to consider its relationship to juridification.

Demystifying Legal Reasoning

Abstract: Part I. Law and its Function: 1. Moral controversy Part II. Common Law Reasoning: Deciding Cases When Prior Judicial Decisions Determine the Law: 2. Ordinary reason applied to law: natural reasoning and deduction from rules 3. The mystification of common-law reasoning 4. Common law practice Part III. Reasoning from Canonical Legal Text: 5. Interpreting statutes and other posited rules 6. Infelicities of the intended meaning of canonical texts and norms constraining interpretation 7. Non-intentionalist interpretation 8. Is constitutional interpretation different? Why it isn't and is 9. All or nothing.

Divisions of Opinion Among Justices of the U. S. Supreme Court, 1939–1941.

Abstract: “We are under a Constitution,” said Charles Evans Hughes when he was governor of New York, “but the Constitution is what the judges say it is …” Several theories of jurisprudence have arisen which attempt to take into account this personal element in the judicial interpretation and making of law. The so-called “realistic” school has argued that law is simply the behavior of the judge, that law is secreted by judges as pearls are secreted by oysters. A less extreme position was taken by the late Justice Holmes, who said: “What I mean by law is nothing more or less than the prediction of what a court will do.” While these views go rather far in eliminating any idea of law as a “normative, conceptual system of rules,” no one doubts that many judicial determinations are made on some basis other than the application of settled rules to the facts, or that justices of the United States Supreme Court, in deciding controversial cases involving important issues of public policy, are influenced by biases and philosophies of government, by “inarticulate major premises,” which to a large degree predetermine the position they will take on a given question. Private attitudes, in other words, become public law.