Leshem on Law's Shifting Circles

Ela A. Leshem, Fordham University School of Law, is publishing Law's Shifting Circles in volume 114 of the Georgetown Law Journal (2026). Here is the abstract.

This Article undermines two myths in American legal history: first, that the law’s circle of moral concern has steadily expanded; and second, that legal protections have always centered on human persons. As to the first, the law contains multiple, shifting circles of moral concern—expanding along some dimensions and contracting along others. As to the second, U.S. law and the English common law on which it was based have long attributed moral status to nonhuman beings and inanimate objects. The Article reaches these insights by showing that U.S. legislators, judges, and advocates have for centuries treated a wide range of entities as deserving of moral concern and legal protection. Historically, three kinds of entities stood at the center of this legal universe: Man, Country, and God. U.S. lawmakers treated these entities as “superpersons,” enjoying such elevated moral status and legal protection that even objects falling into their penumbras received moral consideration. These penumbra objects included corpses and effigies, flags and national monuments, religious artifacts and sacred sites. Lawmakers protected these objects as extensions of superpersons and, in so doing, treated them at times as “epipersons.” Although the law’s protection of these nonhuman and inanimate persons has waned, it has not disappeared. A broad range of laws, either directly or indirectly, continue to protect and reinforce the moral status and dignity of superpersons and epipersons. Among them are sovereign immunity doctrines, corpse abuse statutes, and laws prohibiting the desecration of venerated objects, to name just a few. Uncovering the law’s historical universe of moral persons allows us to see more clearly the ongoing shifts in who or what the law deems deserving of moral concern and legal protection. Opening our eyes to these shifts, as this Article shows, can enable us to resist a simplistic narrative of moral progress, and to approach future status determinations with a greater sense of both agency and humility. The historical precedents unearthed in this Article also offer a constructive lens on contemporary legal battles over abortion, environmental protection, and artificial intelligence. They allow us to see that personhood debates in these contexts have a longer prehistory than is often realized, based in centuries of contested legal protections for superpersons and their penumbra objects. This prehistory points to a largely overlooked middle position between treating entities such as first-trimester fetuses, trees and lakes, and nonsentient AI systems as either persons or property—namely, treating them as epipersons with legally enforceable dignity interests and limitations on their property status, but without full-fledged rights.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Sherwin on Chorological Jurisprudence and Liberal Democratic Flourishing @RKSherwin @NYLawSchool

Richard K. Sherwin, New York Law School, has published Chorological Jurisprudence and Liberal Democratic Flourishing as NYLS Legal Studies Research Paper No. 4764287. Here is the abstract.

These days, it is difficult not to be preoccupied with calamity. Profound crises surround us on many fronts: climate change and ecological catastrophe, the dark shadow of viral pandemics, and dire threats to liberal democracy and the rule of law. In dark times, paralysis and despair can pull us further into the dark. To make our way back to the light we need to marshal every cultural, cognitive, affective, and spiritual resource at our disposal. Global challenges call for global responses. But are our resources sufficient? Is our collective moral imagination up to the task of renewing state and global institutions? Do we have the intellectual as well as the moral resources to build societies where governance is for the benefit of the governed, not the governors? Legal theory, doctrine, and practice presuppose basic assumptions about human nature as well as the nature of the social and natural world around us. We can only resolve conflicts within the horizon of our perception and knowledge, which is to say, within a universe of familiar categories and tools for thinking, feeling, and communicating with others. We create everyday tools for thinking and our tools, in turn, create us. Locked into habituated patterns of thought and feeling, we often forget not only that we can know more, but also that we can know differently.

The full text is not available for download from SSRN.

Havasy, Macey, and Richardson on Against Political Theory in Constitutional Interpretation @Maceyjoshua @VandLRev @Harvard_Law @CornellLaw

Christopher Havasy, Harvard Law School; Harvard University, Department of Government, Joshua Macey, University of Chicago Law School, and Brian Richardson, Cornell Law School, are publishing Against Political Theory in Constitutional Interpretation in the Vanderbilt Law Review. Here is the abstract.

Judges and academics have long relied on the work of a small number of Enlightenment political theorists—particularly Locke, Montesquieu, and Blackstone—to discern meaning from vague and ambiguous constitutional provisions. This Essay cautions that Enlightenment political theory should rarely, if ever, be cited as an authoritative source of constitutional meaning. There are three principal problems with constitutional interpretation based on eighteenth-century political theory. First, Enlightenment thinkers developed distinct and incompatible theories about how to structure a republican form of government. That makes it difficult to decide which among the conflicting theories should possess constitutional significance. Second, the drafters did not write the Constitution in the image of the philosophy of Montesquieu, Locke, or Blackstone. Instead, they developed a new form of government to meet what they perceived to be the needs of a nascent republic. And third, the Constitution itself departs from the dominant strands of Enlightenment political theory in crucial respects. For example, while some Enlightenment theorists advocated for precisely divided federal powers, the drafters favored a system of procedural checks, not formal separation. Thus, while Enlightenment works can be normatively persuasive or act as a guide to historical meaning, they should be treated as presumptively irrelevant in constitutional interpretation. Unless the party who would invoke an Enlightenment political theorist can produce evidence of consensus or common ground about that theory from an episode of American constitutional debate, the theorist’s prescriptions are no more probative than any other work of normative political theory.

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Golia on The Critique of Digital Constitutionalism @AJrGolia @MPILheidelberg

Angelo Golia, Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, has published The Critique of Digital Constitutionalism as Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law & International Law (MPIL) Research Paper No. 2022-13. Here is the abstract.

This article analyses the critical potential of digital constitutionalism using the instruments provided by societal constitutionalism. The central argument is that, in order to address the challenges posed by new technologies, digital constitutionalism should embrace a more explicitly critical discourse, questioning several assumptions of liberal, state-centred constitutional theory. Digital constitutionalism could then be framed as a theory for the digital age and as an opportunity for a reckoning with the inner contradictions of modern constitutional theory. This article has three goals. First, linking different discourses within digital constitutionalism while highlighting its own critical potential. Second, offering some preliminary proposals based on such reflection. Third, bringing digital constitutionalism closer to the broader galaxy of global constitutionalism. After the introduction, section II offers an overview of societal constitutionalism, highlighting the elements of critique toward liberal, state-centred constitutionalism. Section III reconciles societal constitutionalism and digital constitutionalism, focusing on the latter’s definition and three functionally differentiated systems: politics, economy, law. For each of them, it highlights analytical and normative gains and points at proposals to be further developed. Section IV concludes.

 

 

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Levinson and Graber on Justice Accused at 45: Reflections on Robert Cover's Masterwork @TouroLawReview @UTexasLaw @mgraber_ @UMDLaw

Sanford Levinson, University of Texas Law School, and Mark Graber, University of Maryland School of Law, have published Justice Accused at 45: Reflections on Robert Cover's Masterwork at 37 Touro Law Review 1851 (2022). Here is the abstract.

We raise some questions about Robert Cover’s Justice Accused, not to criticize magnificent and audacious scholarship motivated by the most pressing moral concerns, but to consider the timeliness and timelessness of certain themes explored in that masterwork. Our concern is how the issues Cover raised when exploring the ways antislavery justices decided fugitive slave cases played out in the antebellum United States, played out in the United States when Cover was writing, and play out in the United States today. Cover’s opus was a work of the Great Society, even if the text discusses the American judiciary of more than a century before. The moral-formal dilemma faced by the justices Cover studied when adjudicating cases arising from the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850 was whether judicial decision-makers should interpret the law in light of the antislavery values of many northern constituencies or defer to laws that reflected the moral values of politicians eager to compromise on slavery to preserve a bisectional consensus. As times change, so does the moral-formal dilemma. The civil rights movement and, for many, the anti-War movement, at least as viewed from the academy in the 1960s, presented the moral-formal dilemma in pure form. Jim Crow laws were unjust. Young men were being drafted to fight an immoral war. Every respectable ethicist and every decent lawyer, at least as defined by the bulk of the academy, understood that morality and law were opposed. The sole question in the academy was whether laws widely agreed to be immoral should be respected and obeyed. One feature of much contemporary civil disobedience—consider illegal protests at abortion clinics or a public willingness to disobey state bans on abortion—is that the moral debate is marked by good faith disagreement on both sides. Pro-choice and pro-life activists in this environment face the same more-formal dilemma, as each decides the extent to which the Constitution reflects the values they cherish and the extent to which they have obligations to respect the Constitution or official decisions interpreting the Constitution that either fail to protect all women from exercising their fundamental right to reproductive choice or fail to prevent the wholesale slaughter of the unborn. Donald Trump and the contemporary Republican party may be providing Americans with a new variation on the moral-formal dilemma grappled with by nineteenth century justices in fugitive slave cases and twentieth century justices in civil rights cases. The moral-formal dilemma many Americans in institutions far remote from courts are facing is whether to follow the letter of the law and retain the basic structure of constitutional law in the United States even when following and maintaining the letter of the law threatens to warp the constitutional fabric, undermine the political regime, and risk an environmental catastrophe that could easily leave humans near extinction.

Download the article from the Touro Law Review website at the link.

Malloy on Law and the Invisible Hand: A Theory of Adam Smith's Jurisprudence (Draft Chapter 1) @SUCollegeofLaw

Robin Paul Malloy, Syracure University College of Law, has published Law and The Invisible Hand: A Theory of Adam Smith's Jurisprudence (Draft Chapter 1) (as part of Robin Paul Malloy, Law and the Invisible Hand: A Theory of Adam Smith's Jurisprudence (Cambridge University Press 2021). Here is the abstract.

Fundamentally, law is to society as gravity is to the solar system, it is the invisible force that holds it together and keeps it operating smoothly and productively. Law enhances social cooperation, facilitates trade, and extends the market. In these ways, law functions like Adams Smith’s invisible hand, guiding and facilitating the progress of humankind. This paper outlines the elements of understanding Smith's theory of jurisprudence, and introduces the theory developed in my book.

Download the draft from SSRN at the link.

Berge on Ancient Greek Nomos and Modern Legal Theory @berge_lukas

Lukas van den Berge, Utrecht University Faculty of Law, is publishing Ancient Greek Nomos and Modern Legal Theory: A Reappraisal in the Netherlands Journal of Legal Philosophy (2021). Here is the abstract.

Recently, two books have appeared that venture to re-investigate modern legal theory's ancient Greek underpinnings. In both books, the notion of nomos plays a central role. Firstly, Thanos Zartaloudis has published a remarkable study in which he delves into the manifold meanings of that ancient Greek word. Zartaloudis offers us an extraordinarily rich analysis of the polyvalent forms and uses of nomos from the age of Homer up to the days of Socrates – the classical period in which nomos would finally come to acquire its sense of an enacted legal norm (‘law’) or binding social convention (‘custom’). Secondly, nomos is of central importance in Johan van der Walt’s recent book on the intertwined modern notions of liberal democracy and the rule of law – referred to by Van der Walt as the concept of liberal democratic law. For Van der Walt, the analysis of ancient Greek nomos and its long and tortuous reception history in western thought is crucial for a proper understanding of what the modern concept of liberal democratic law entails and how it could be saved for the future.

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Giuliani on Legal Historians as Designers

Adolfo Giuliani, Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, has published Legal Historians as Designers. Here is the abstract.

One of the features of information societies is the importance acquired by design. When we turn to the legal field, we see this tendency reflected in the increasing role of legal professionals as legal designers. This observation applies to legal historians too. Their growing function is not only to be diggers of historical facts but also designers of the explanatory keys to make them understandable.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Stern on Proximate Cause in Legal Historiography @ArsScripta @theory_history

Simon Stern, University of Toronto Faculty of Law, has published Proximate Cause in Legal Historiography at 60 History & Theory 363 (2021). Here is the abstract.

The variety of legal history published in general-interest law journals tends to differ from the variety published in history journals. This study compares the two varieties by examining footnote references in five general-interest law journals and footnote references in two journals of legal history. In the law journals, cases and statutes accounted for the single largest group of footnotes (approximately 35%), followed by references to other law journal articles (nearly 25%). In the legal history journals, these two categories accounted for less than 20% of all references; primary and secondary historical materials predominated in the footnotes. To be sure, legal decisions and law journal articles can also be historical sources: rather than being used as evidence of what the law is, they might be studied for what they reveal about legal reasoning or rhetoric in an earlier age. However, in most legal historical research that attends primarily to cases and statutes, these materials figure as evidence of the state of the law at that time. When the analysis relies on legal sources to trace the development of a certain doctrine and treats them as sufficient to account for that development, the result is the distinctive style of research that I seek to contrast against approaches that cast the net of historical inquiry more widely. To account for these different approaches, I suggest that law professors rely on a notion of proximate causation as a historiographic method. According to this approach, legal developments are proximately caused by other developments in the legal sphere, and other social and cultural developments play more attenuated roles, such that their influence is less significant. By proposing this explanation, I hope to draw more attention to assumptions about causation in legal historiography and to question their persuasive force.

Davis on Legal Ethics, Legal Dualism, and Fidelity to Law @usflaw

Joshua P. Davis, University of San Francisco School of Law, has published Legal Ethics, Legal Dualism, and Fidelity to Law. Here is the abstract.

This Article argues that there is an important relationship between the nature of law and legal ethics. A crucial claim in support of this thesis is that the nature of law varies with the purpose for which it is being interpreted. In particular, the Article contends that natural law provides the best account of the nature of law when an interpreter seeks moral guidance from the law, and legal positivism provides the best account when an interpreter seeks instead to describe the law or to predict how others will interpret it. This philosophical position it labels “legal dualism.” Legal dualism has a significant implication for legal ethics: to the extent the law serves as a source of moral guidance for interpreters, they must act as natural lawyers. The Article tests legal dualism and its corollary for legal ethics against Bradley Wendel’s justly lauded book, LAWYERS AND FIDELITY TO LAW. Wendel pairs legal positivism and the moral legitimacy of law, commitments that legal dualism suggests are incompatible. The Article argues that, while Wendel makes many important contributions, his argument is not fully successful to the extent it conflicts with legal dualism. It concludes that he—and others—should acknowledge and address the need for ethical attorneys to act as natural lawyers. That means lawyers sometimes must make moral judgments in saying what the law is.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Johns on Songs and Static: Legalities of White Noise @FleurEJ

Fleur Johns, University of New South wales Faculty of Law, has published Songs and Static: Legalities of White Noise. Here is the abstract.

This paper was delivered as a keynote talk at the 13th Annual Doctoral Forum on Legal Theory, 'Sirens + Silences: Law in Lockdown', co-hosted by Melbourne Law School and UNSW Law. Responding to the convenors' invitation to reflect on "a year marked by upheaval and stasis", it explores how legal scholars in various settings might plan a route out of the global COVID-19 pandemic that is not simply a return home. Five legal and political "songs" in broad circulation are identified – songs of salvation, separation, suspension, stagnation, and absurdity – and arguments made for resisting some of their appeals. Instead, the paper suggests, legal scholars might do well to look to the commonplace normativity of survival: the ceaseless static of making do and getting by. By planning and organizing around some of the ways that people have lived the pandemic, legal scholars might perhaps become attuned to possible ways of living lawfully without casting sectors of the population into surplus.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Asgerisson on Authority, Communication, and Legal Content @hartpublishing

Hrafn Asgerisson, University of Surrey School of Law, is publishing Authority, Communication, and Legal Content in The Nature and Value of Vagueness in the Law (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2020). Here is the abstract.

Sample chapter from H. Asgeirsson, The Nature and Value of Vagueness in the Law (Hart Publishing, 2020), in which I present and partially defend a version of what has come to be called the communicative-content theory of law. Book abstract: Lawmaking is – paradigmatically – a type of speech act: people make law by saying things. It is natural to think, therefore, that the content of the law is determined by what lawmakers communicate. However, what they communicate is sometimes vague and, even when it is clear, the content itself is sometimes vague. The monograph examines the nature and consequences of these two linguistic sources of indeterminacy in the law with the aim of providing plausible answers to three related questions: In virtue of what is the law vague? What might be good about vague law? How should courts resolve cases of vagueness?

Download the chapter from SSRN at the link.

Lloyd on How To Do Things With Signs: Semiotics in Legal Theory, Practice, and Education @LloydEsq

Harold Anthony Lloyd, Wake Forest University School of Law, has published How To Do Things With Signs: Semiotics in Legal Theory, Practice, and Education. Here is the abstract.

Discussing federal statutes, Justice Scalia tells us that “[t]he stark reality is that the only thing that one can say for sure was agreed to by both houses and the president (on signing the bill) is the text of the statute. The rest is legal fiction." How should we take this claim? If we take "text" to mean the printed text, that text without more is just a series of marks. If instead we take "text" (as we must) to refer to something off the page such as the "meaning" of the series of marks at issue, what is that meaning and how do we know that all the legislators "agreed" on that "meaning"? In seeking answers here, we necessarily delve into semiotics (i.e., the “general theory of signs”) by noting that meaningful ink marks ("signifiers) signify a meaning beyond themselves (the "signified.") Thus, understanding how signs function is integral to lawyers' textual and linguistic analysis. Additionally, as this article demonstrates, legal analysis and rhetoric are much impoverished if lawyers ignore nonverbal signs such as icons, indices, and nonverbal symbols. In providing a broad overview of semiotics for lawyers, this article thus (1) begins with a general definition of signs and the related notion of intentionality. It then turns to, among other things, (2) the structure and concomitants of signs in more detail (including the signifier and the signified), (3) the possible correlations of the signifier and the signified that generate signs of interest to lawyers such as the index, the icon, and the symbol; (5) the expansion of legal rhetoric through use of the index, the icon, and the non-verbal as well as the verbal symbol, (6) the nature of various semiotic acts in public and private law (including assertives, commissives, directives, and verdictives); (7) the interpretation and construction of semiotic acts (including contracts as commissives and legislation as directives); (8) the role of speaker or reader meaning in the interpretation and construction of semiotic acts; (9) the semiotics of meaning, time, and the fixation of meaning debate; (10) the impact of signifier drift; (11) the distinction between sense and understanding; and (12) some brief reflections on semiotics and the First Amendment. This article also provides an Appendix of further terms and concepts useful to lawyers in their explorations of semiotics.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Lehtimäki on Necessary Connection Between a Theory of Law and Theory of the State

Mika Lehtimäki, University of Oxford, Faculty of Law, has published Necessary Connection between a Theory of Law and Theory of the State. Here is the abstract.

Legal theory is essentially an inquiry into the nature of law, its fundamental features and institutions. Such theories are also inherently linked with human communities and especially communities that have acquired institutionalised features and practices that we commonly call ‘legal’. As such, law and legal system is often an aspect of a political system. Theories of the state, on the other hand, deal essentially with questions on the possibilities of legitimate structure of domination in our political societies, often in territorial states centralized for collective and exclusive exercise of power over our lives and fortunes. This paper evaluates two apparently opposing views on the necessary connections of theories of law and state. I argue in the paper that the question is a fundamental one and results directly from the underlying objectives a legal or a political theorists sets as his or her agenda. For example setting as the fundamental objective of law as providing normative reasons for action of its subjects, remaining true to the agenda does not require inquiry into moral or equivalent justifications. The opposite is true is if the fundamental objective of law were constraining the government from atrocities against its subjects.

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Adeyemi on Modern Trends in Legal Thoughts: A Jurisprudential Outline

Babatunde Ajani Adeyemi, Babcock University, has published Modern Trends in Legal Thoughts: A Jurisprudential Outline. Here is the abstract.

The subject matter of this paper – Modern Trends in Legal Thoughts – connotes new thinking in Legal theory. Themes like; the current trends in analytical and normative jurisprudence, theories of justice, critical legal studies movement, feminist jurisprudence, critical race theory, and post-modernist jurisprudence, among others, constitute strands of the ‘new’ jurisprudential thoughts to be examined in this paper. ‘New’ in this context does not mean ‘novel’, because every product of law in the real sense, may be no more than the product of its time and place. This point is further illustrated by the comments of Freeman, M.D.A, that ‘contemporary thinking and contemporary questions have often rekindled interest in, and thrown new lights upon classical writers. It is the intention of this writer to approach the subject as a genealogical exercise, with the hope that at the end of the paper, a modest attempt to build a kind of bridge between theory and practice of law, would at least have been discernible.

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Kortvelyesi on Game of Norms: Law, Interpretation, and the Realms in Game of Thrones

Zsolt Kortvelyesi, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Institute for Legal Studies, Centre for Social Sciences, has published Game of Norms: Law, Interpretation, and the Realms in Game of Thrones as MTA Law Working Paper No. 2019/3. Here is the abstract.

In this paper I will use Game of Thrones (the TV series) and its oath of the Night’s Watch to discuss some basic questions related to the nature and functioning of law. This will serve a dual goal: assessing the concept of law used in the series (making the paper part of a long-thriving academic field, law and literature, or law and film), but, more importantly, also to present theoretical questions in a friendly way – something I also tested in introduction to law classes. It is not easy to draw students into discussing questions of the right interpretation or functionalist understandings, but by driving them to a friendly (if deadly) territory, one can engage with them and show how the discussion is intimately related to fundamental dilemmas of legal theory.

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Bassok on The Mysterious Meeting Between Carl Schmitt and Josef Redlich

Or Bassok, University of Nottingham, Faculty of Law and Social Sciences, has published The Mysterious Meeting between Carl Schmitt and Josef Redlich. Here is the abstract.

In 1934, Carl Schmitt, then the crown jurist of the Third Reich, writes in an essay titled National Socialist Legal Thought about “[a] conversation with a world-famous, world travelled, experienced scholar of more than seventy years of age from the United States [which] belongs to the major experiences and encounters I have had as a jurist in the service of National Socialism.” Schmitt never revealed the identity of the scholar whom he met. Based on Schmitt’s diaries, I reveal that the scholar whom Schmitt met was Josef Redlich. Born to a Jewish family in 1869, Redlich was the Fairchild Professor of Comparative Public Law at Harvard Law School at the time he met Schmitt in 1931. According to Schmitt’s 1934 essay, the conversation focused on insights relating to the indeterminacy of legal norms as well as on a nihilist understanding of the era. Yet Schmitt drew conclusions from the encounter which hardly correspond to Redlich’s views. My essay first puts the ideas that Schmitt adopted from his encounter with the “American scholar” in the context of the era. Second, I examine Schmitt’s diaries as well as other relevant materials in order to prove that Redlich is the scholar whom Schmitt met. In the process, I exclude Roscoe Pound, the Dean of Harvard Law School at that time, who was the previous “prime suspect” for this encounter with Schmitt. Even after my discovery of the identity of the scholar to whom Schmitt refers in his essay, the story of Schmitt and Redlich’s encounter remains mysterious: the ideas of a scholar of Jewish decent, who believed in an Austrian multi-national, federal state, inspired and played a profound role in the formulation of a blatantly antisemitic essay promoting National Socialist legal thought by the crown jurist of the Nazi regime. After examining the contradictions between Redlich and Schmitt’s positions, I offer an explanation for why Schmitt viewed this encounter as so influential on his road to National Socialism.

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Flores on Law as an Artefact @imerbflores

Imer B. Flores, Instituto de Investigaciones Juridicas, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM), has published Law as an Artefact. Here is the abstract.

In this paper, I aim to explore the claim that law is an artefact and the implications to our understanding of law and legal entities. For that purpose, I intend to review the general theory of artefacts and to revisit the artefactual nature of law to determine what sort of sub-kind law is. I argue that the relevant authorial intention is not the productive but the reproductive one, i.e. the collective recognition. Finally, I conclude that law and other legal entities are indeed artefacts broadly speaking, but they are much more than mere artefacts, i.e. complex institutions and institutional practices, comprising different sub-institutions, which require not only recognition, but also (re)evaluation and (re)interpretation, as I suggest by pointing to the forms of government, in general, and to democracy, in particular.

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Rutherglen on Reconstruction in Legal Theory

George A. Rutherglen, University of Virginia School of Law, has published Reconstruction in Legal Theory as Virginia Public Law and Legal Theory Research Paper No. 2019-20. Here is the abstract.

Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Era did not make a significant appearance in legal theory until the eve of Brown v. Board of Education. The reconstruction accomplished by legal theory was internal to legal theory itself, as it was in philosophy as a whole. Methods of judicial review and processes of legal reasoning came in for criticism and revision, just as the aims and methods of philosophy did so. Legal theory took a turn towards legal positivism and legal realism, neither of which had much patience with the normative claims underlying civil rights. Nor did philosophy as it fell under the influence of logical positivism and its skepticism of normative claims generally. This essay describes this historical pattern, in which the neglect of civil rights in legal theory paralleled the neglect in constitutional law, only to be suddenly transformed by Brown v. Board of Education. Civil rights went from the status of a neglected stepchild in legal theory to the heir apparent of judicial review. Legal theories could no longer ignore principles of racial equality but instead had to take them as axiomatic.

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European Award For Legal Theory: Call For Submissions By April 1, 2020 @hartpublishing

From The Netherlands Association for Philosophy of Law/Vereniging voor Wijsbegeerte van het Recht and Hart Publishing:

         The European Award for Legal Theory

The European Award for Legal Theory is presented to the author of the best doctoral thesis in the area of legal theory and philosophy of law, successfully defended at a university in Europe.

The award entails publication of the thesis by Hart Publishing Ltd. (Oxford), and offers the opportunity to deliver a seminar on the LL.M. in Legal Theory at Frankfurt.

The award will be granted once every two years, the next to be in 2020.
Authors should submit their thesis before April 1, 2020.
 

More information here.