The Decline of Natural Law:
How American Lawyers Once Used Natural Law and Why They Stopped


by stuart banner

oxford university press, 264 pages, $49.95


Dending on one’s perspective, natural law is either a dead letter or a pivotal issue. No contemporary lawyer or judge would cite natural law in a courtroom or judicial opinion. Few philosophers or theologians, on the other hand, would discuss moral law without highlighting natural law. That division has not always been so. Stuart Banner has done us a great service by charting the rise and fall of natural law in American jurisprudence alongside accompanying historical and cultural developments.

His thesis is simple: At the time of the American founding, natural law was an integral part of our social and legal culture and was regularly used by American lawyers, judges, and law professors through the mid-to late 1800s. After that time,

Read More

“There is no dispute that the Pulitzer Board’s award to those media outlets was based on false and fabricated information that they published,” he blustered. “The continuing publication and recognition of the Prizes on the Board’s website is a distortion of fact and a personal defamation that will result in the filing of litigation if the Board cannot be persuaded to do the right thing on its own.”

And this week he’s back, posting on his Dear Diary page:

The Russia, Russia, Russia hoax has been totally debunked. The fake news media covered it incorrectly—reporting exactly the opposite of what actually happened.

Yet, the Pulitzer Board has not rescinded the prizes they awarded for reporting that was inaccurate, inept, and corrupt.

In order to restore the credibility of the Pulitzer Prizes, the Pulitzer Board should take away prizes from all who got it wrong.

Additionally, it would be

Read More

Employment LawThe current case of McHugh v NCH Scotland 2006, concerned an allegation of incapacity discrimination. Employment law is the gathering of legal guidelines and rules that regulate relationships between employers and workers. Employment laws say when an employer can hire employees and when the workers can work. The legal guidelines cover what an employer must pay the employee for his or her work. They create minimum necessities for working circumstances for employees.

The British industrial revolution led to the introduction of employment laws in Britain. The reason for this was that, because of the introduction of industrialism and use of equipment for the primary time, staff were more and more being asked to work longer and longer hours. The average working day, prior to the revolution was between 11-14 hours, nevertheless this had risen, with some staff working as many as 16 hours a day.

The tribunal held that she …

Read More
CAPITAL CASE

The Supreme Court on Wednesday declined to block the execution of an Oklahoma man with schizophrenia, rejecting a claim from his legal team that he does not understand the reason for his execution. Benjamin Cole is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection on Thursday.

The court turned down Cole’s last-minute appeal in a brief order with no recorded dissents. Justice Neil Gorsuch did not participate in the decision. Gorsuch likely recused himself because he was a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit when Cole sought relief from that court during earlier litigation.

Cole was convicted and sentenced in 2004 for killing his nine-month-old daughter. He was later diagnosed with schizophrenia. According to his defense team, Cole has been unable to interact with his lawyers for years, and prison staff have confirmed he

Read More

Commentary

As voting in the midterm elections gets underway, crime and safety are the key issues. In cities across the country, the nightly news has endless scenes of store lootings, carjackings, and random attacks on innocents without consequences for the offenders.

Chicago stands out as a prime example in the current wave of lawlessness. Chicago Police Department (CPD) reports show murders in the first nine months of 2022 are up by 32 percent and all crimes are up by 22 percent since 2019. However, these numbers understate the actual number of crimes because, presumably, so many go unreported. Chicago’s police reports list only the most serious crime in any instance. Federal requirements will soon force the city to list all crimes.

In an emergency when seconds count, police recordings show that 911 calls often take two hours or more for police to respond. By that time, the damage is often

Read More

After many years with the same ‘look’, Lexis Library has updated its interface to a new and more streamlined version – Lexis+ UK.   From Thursday 15th September, when you go onto Lexis, this new platform will be ‘live’ and the old version will no longer be available.

Like with most new platforms,  the best way to learn is to go on and have a look around.  However to help with the basics, we have put a few pointers below.  We have also produced a 15 minute video to go through things in more detail for those that prefer to see it demonstrated rather than static screen shots.  It can be found  on the Law Bod 4 Students Canvas page, under Panopto Recordings here https://canvas.ox.ac.uk/courses/169355 or if you cannot access that site then it is also on YouTube here https://youtu.be/dcqnJ7yLIZs  (please note that we are still working on the closed captions

Read More

Today, President Biden signed an Executive Order on Enhancing Safeguards for United States Signals Intelligence Activities (EO) directing the steps that the United States will take to implement the US commitments under the European Union-US Data Privacy Framework (EU-US DPF) announced by President Biden and European Commission President von der Leyen in March of 2022.

Transatlantic data flows are critical to enabling the $7.1 trillion EU-US economic relationship. The EU-US DPF will restore an important legal basis for transatlantic data flows by addressing concerns that the Court of Justice of the European Union raised in striking down the prior EU-US Privacy Shield framework as a valid data transfer mechanism under EU law.

The Executive Order bolsters an already rigorous array of privacy and civil liberties safeguards for US signals intelligence activities. It also creates an independent and binding mechanism enabling individuals in qualifying states and regional economic integration organizations, as

Read More

By Marcelo Rodríguez

During this academic semester, I have told my students several times, whatever situations, phenomena or topics you choose for your research and countries/jurisdictions or institutions for your comparative legal research, please always keep in mind that they are not frozen in time. Perhaps for the purpose of your research, you might have chosen a particular period of time as a very specific boundary for your research project. However, I’d argue that current developments within a jurisdiction may have some major impact in delineated historical or previous events in terms of our understanding and analysis of those same events and phenomena. This does not mean we shouldn’t strive for specific time frames in research. It just means that a good grasp of current events related to the research topic, institutions and jurisdictions of your choice is crucial no matter the time frame you have selected for your research.

Read More

Sometimes I think of March 2, 2016, the day of the Supreme Court oral argument in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedtas the last truly great day for women and the legal system in America.

There are, to be sure, many such glorious moments to choose from, both before and after the election of President Donald Trump, but as a professional Court watcher, I had a front-row seat to this story, one that offered a sense that women in the United States had achieved some milestones that would never be reversed. Whole Woman’s Health represented the first time in American history that a historic abortion case was being heard by a Supreme Court with three female justices. Twenty-four years earlier, when the last momentous abortion case—Planned Parenthood v. Casey—had come before the Supreme Court, only one woman, Sandra Day O’Connor, sat on the bench. Go back a bit

Read More

2022 Mootcourt Spain

The Notre Dame Law School Moot Court Board started off the academic year strong with victories at the International Moot Court Competition in Law and Religion, hosted by the International Consortium for Law and Religion Studies. The competition took place at Córdoba Law School in Córdoba, Spain, on September 16 and 17, and served as the kickoff event to the 6th ICLARS Conference, which centered on the theme “Human Dignity, Law, and Religious Diversity: Designing the Future of Inter-Cultural Societies.”

The participating Moot Court Board members included Matt Delfino, Shannon Moore, Leo O’Malley, Michael Snyder, and Taylor Wewers. Oralists were split into two teams: Delfino and O’Malley argued a case as though it were before the United States Supreme Court, while Snyder and Wewers argued a case in front of the European Court of Human Rights. Moore served as a brief writer, while the Moot Court Board faculty advisor, Professor

Read More