Law in Contemporary Society

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ThoughtsonHolmesCalabresi 3 - 28 Jan 2009 - Main.KahlilWilliams
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 -- KahlilWilliams - 27 Jan 2009 In the Path of the Law, Justice Holmes distills the calculation of damages in tort law down to a calculation of “how far it is desirable that the public should insure the safety of one whose work it uses.” His analysis forecasts the work of scholars like Guido Calabresi, a 2nd Circuit Judge and Yale Law Professor, whose theory of the “cheapest cost avoider” takes much the same tack. Calabresi’s theory assigns liability by weighing the relative cost of each person exercising an additional unit of caution: the actor who can do so more cheaply (in a BPL context, the one with the smaller “B”) is assigned liability.
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 In reading criticisms of the efforts of legal science, I can’t help but think that there’s a funny circularity to the study of law. For scholars to take hard-line scientific approaches to the law 100 years seems pretty funny, given what we know about the relative fruitlessness of their efforts (Wile E. Coyote comes to mind). But it’s a bit discomforting to see legal study evolve in this way today, with full awareness of the legal science movement’s earlier failures. Are lawyers incapable of accepting the complexity of society and social interaction without axiomatic principles? Further, are there actually principles left to find, or are legal scholars just coming up with new law talk to describe the principles lawyers and jurists have employed for centuries?

Kahlil Williams - 1.27.2009

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Revision 3r3 - 28 Jan 2009 - 13:23:25 - KahlilWilliams
Revision 2r2 - 27 Jan 2009 - 18:16:17 - KahlilWilliams
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