In these dog days of summer, I thought it might be entertaining (?) for readers of the blog to revisit the classic 1958 Hart-Fuller debate over the interpretation of rules. Hart asserted that rules have a core literal meaning that is determined without consideration of the purposes behind the rule. Fuller countered that purpose always factors into the interpretation of rules (though often implicitl...

I haven't been writing much about the day to day features of the political campaign this year. There are three reasons for this.One is that it isn't central to this blog's purpose, which is to provide a serious academic discussion of legal and constitutional issues, with a little philosophy and political theory on the side.The second is that I find most of the day-by-day elements of the campaign un...

The Human Rights Annual Report 2007 released Sunday by the UK House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee states that "the UK can no longer rely on US assurances that it does not use torture, and we recommend that the Government does not rely on such assurances in the future." (Hat tip: Jurist)From the report at p. 25:52. There appears to be a striking inconsistency in the Government's approach to t...

I've just posted a short essay, Media Access: A Question of Design on SSRN. Here is the abstract:This essay, written for a symposium in honor of Jerome Barron, asks what media access means in the age of the Internet. Twentieth century debates about media access presupposed a relatively small group of private media owners who tightly controlled access and who combined content delivery with content p...

. . . about legal interpretation in the Bush Administration:When Jay Bybee was confirmed to the federal bench in early 2003, Attorney General John Ashcroft sent no fewer than five names to the White House as possible replacements to be Assistant AG for the Office of Legal Counsel:Adam Ciongoli, Paul Clement, Brett Kavanaugh, Dan Levin and Ed Whelan.From the White House's perspective, none of these...