THE MORALITY OF ADMINISTRATIVE LAW Sunstein, Cass R.; Vermeule, Adrian
Harvard law review,
05/2018, Volume:
131, Issue:
7
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
As it has been developed over a period of many decades, administrative law has acquired its own morality. An understanding of the morality of administrative law puts contemporary criticisms of the ...administrative state in their most plausible light. Reflected in a wide array of seemingly disparate doctrines, but not yet recognized as such, the morality of administrative law includes a set of identifiable principles, often said to reflect the central ingredients of the rule of law. Closely related to what Professor Lon Fuller described as the internal morality of law, the resulting doctrines do not deserve an unambiguous celebration, because many of them have an ambiguous legal source; because from the welfarist point of view, it is not clear if they are always good ideas; and because it is not clear that judges should enforce them.
Hermann Cohen (1842–1918) was a leading figure in the Neo-Kantian philosophical movement that dominated European thought before 1918. He is also the inaugural figure for what is meant by modern ...Jewish philosophy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This book explores Cohen’s striking claim that ethics is rooted in law – a claim developed in both his philosophical ethics and his philosophy of Judaism, in particular in his writings on love-of-neighbor, up to and including his well-known Religion of Reason.
Dana Hollander proposes that neither Cohen’s systematic philosophy nor his Jewish philosophy should be seen as the dominant framework for his oeuvre as a whole, but that his understanding of key philosophical questions takes shape in the passages between both corpuses, a trait that could be seen as paradigmatic for modern Jewish philosophy. Ethics Out of Law taps into one of the prime topics of current interest in the field of Jewish philosophy: the nature of Jewish political existence and the changing configurations of law that this entails.
What does it mean to be responsible for our actions? In this brief and elegant study, Giorgio Agamben traces our most profound moral intuitions back to their roots in the sphere of law and ...punishment. Moral accountability, human free agency, and even the very concept of cause and effect all find their origin in the language of the trial, which Western philosophy and theology both transform into the paradigm for all of human life. In his search for a way out of this destructive paradigm, Agamben not only draws on minority opinions within the Western tradition but engages at length with Buddhist texts and concepts for the first time. In sum, Karman deepens and rearticulates some of Agamben's core insights while breaking significant new ground.
What role does reason play in determining what, if anything, is morally right? What role does morality play in law? Perhaps the most controversial answer to these fundamental questions is that reason ...supports a supreme principle of both morality and legality. The contributors to this book cast a fresh critical eye over the coherence of modern approaches to ethical rationalism within law and reflect on the intellectual history on which it builds. The contributors then take the debate beyond the traditional concerns of legal theory into areas such as the relationship between morality and international law, and the impact of ethically controversial medical and technological innovations on legal understanding.
