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293Legislative duty and the independence of lawLaw and Philosophy 6 (2). 1987.This essay considers the nature of duties incumbent on legislators in virtue of the office itself. I argue that there is no duty for a legislator to enact a criminal law based on morality; there is no duty to incorporate substantive moral conditions into the criminal law; and there is therefore no duty derivable from the nature of the legislative office itself to make conditions of culpability depend on those of moral responsibility. Finally, I argue that the relation between morality and the cr…Read more
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19Book Review:Affirmative Action and Justice: A Philosophical and Constitutional Inquiry. Michel Rosenfeld (review)Ethics 102 (4): 867-. 1992.
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219Commodification and Phenomenology: Evading Consent in Theory Regarding Rape: John H. BogartLegal Theory 2 (3): 253-264. 1996.In a recent essay, Donald Dripps advanced what he calls a “commodification theory” of rape, offered as an alternative to understanding rape in terms of lack of consent. Under the “commodification theory,” rape is understood as the expropriation of sexual services, i.e., obtaining sex through “illegitimate” means. One aim of Dripps's effort was to show the inadequacy of consent approaches to understanding rape. Robin West, while accepting Dripps's critique of consent theories, criticizes Dripps's…Read more
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110Review of Hugo Adam Bedau: Death is Different: Studies in the Morality, Law, and Politics of Capital Punishment (review)Ethics 99 (1): 167-168. 1988.
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38Review of Alan R. White: Grounds of Liability: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Law (review)Ethics 97 (3): 673-674. 1987.
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492Lockean Provisos and State of Nature TheoriesEthics 95 (4): 828-836. 1985.State of nature theories have a long history and play a lively role in contemporary work. Theories of this kind share certain nontrivial commitments. Among these are commitments to inclusion of a Lockean proviso among the principles of justice and to an assumption of invariance of political principles across changes of circumstances. In this article I want to look at those two commitments and bring to light what I believe are some important difficulties they engender. For nonpattern state of nat…Read more
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18Adjudication, Validity, and Theories of LawCanadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 2 (2): 163-70. 1989.Although Positivism and Natural Law theories seem to be mutually exclusive theories regarding the law, one might be able to salvage the attractive features of both theories by confining each theory to a different area of judicial life. The most promising line of demarcation is to confine Positivism to theories of validity, and to confine Natural Law to theories of adjudication. This strategy has been very ably outlined in a paper by David Brink, which I shall use as the springboard for this e…Read more
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353Reconsidering Rape: Rethinking the Conceptual Foundations of Rape LawCanadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 8 (1): 159-82. 1995.Argument about changes in the law of rape are logically dependent upon a prior definitional account. For any legal definition of an act, one can sensibly ask if that definition is right. To know whether the law is sound, one must first understand of what it is that the definition is a definition. For many parts of the criminal law, and the law of rape is one, the definitions on which the law moves are concepts perfectly accessible outside and apart from the law. I have two aims for this article…Read more