This collection contains book chapters authored by Cardozo Law faculty, including contributions to edited volumes and academic publications.
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Pictures as Precedents: The Visual Turn and the Status of Figures in Judgments
Peter Goodrich
Contemporary expansion of the use of images, photographs, film, animation and other visual media in legal argument has given rise to a practice and subdiscipline of visual advocacy. Less studied and commented on, this scopic dimension to legal practice has also resulted in an increasing use of images in judicial decisions. Recent case law provides examples of an image of an ostrich with its head buried purportedly remonstrating against failure to cite binding precedent, a smiling emoji in a decision relating to child custody, numerous splash pages and online order icons in cases relating to consumer purchases over the net, and many further instances of pictures coming to play the law. This chapter directly addresses the role of the eye and the impact of the visual upon the reasoning of judgments, as also on the status and import of precedents that include pictures.
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There’s No Such Thing as Interpreting a Text
Martin J. Stone
Positively, this chapter sets out various structural differences between literary and legal interpretation. Negatively, it criticizes views of legal and literary interpretation that attempt to derive their features from an account of interpretation-in-general. The thesis that a successful interpretation always recovers an author’s intention is specifically rejected. A “naïve” view of interpretation is defended—the one that appears when we are sunk in practical activity—as opposed to theories of interpretation (e.g., “postmodern” ones) that tend to picture it as ubiquitous and endless.
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Four Qualms About Legal Pragmatism
Martin J. Stone
An invitation from Professors Graham Hubbs and Douglas Lind to participate in a panel on “Legal Pragmatism” left me feeling gratefully surprised: surprised, because I have never called myself a “legal pragmatist” or found inspiration in the jurisprudential work that embraces that label; but grateful, too, because I welcomed the opportunity to formulate my sense of why “legal pragmatism” is mostly useless in thinking about law, and to do so, moreover, against the background of statements from colleagues I admire concerning what they find significant in pragmatist thought. The following remarks are the upshot of that occasion. I will try to identify my basic qualms about legal pragmatism under four headings: (1) empty eclecticism, (2) reductive instrumentalism, (3) “the primacy of practice,” and (4) the metaphysically preservative recoil.
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Tax Reform Paul McDaniel Style : the Repeal of the Grantor Trust Rules
Laura E. Cunningham and Noël B. Cunningham
