Search results

The Virginia Law Review is a scholarly journal devoted to legal and law-related issues of interest to judges, practitioners, teachers, legislators, students, and others interested in the law. The Review also publishes articles on interrelated subjects of more general concern, ranging from economics and finance to sociology and psychology. ; The Virginia Law Review is a scholarly journal devoted to legal and law-related issues of interest to judges, practitioners, teachers, legislators, students, and others interested in the law. The Review also publishes articles on interrelated subjects of more general concern, ranging from economics and finance to sociology and psychology. ; Mode of access: Internet. ; Vols. 1 (1913)-8 (1922) in v. 8; vols. 1 (1913)-20 (1934). 1 v.

Law teachers and researchers are inveterate seekers of metaphors. The metaphor, even if glib and obvious, invariably suggests further parallels and relationships, the conjoinder of phenomena. This is the road to uncovering unsuspected linkages and building simple descriptive models. Theory building, in administrative law as elsewhere, begins with the capture and expression of the convincing metaphor. Extracting metaphors from the natural sciences to account for social happenings begins with a figure of speech and often ends there. Legislatures now are squeezing fat out of administrative agencies, an apt biological picture of a weight watcher's rigor being imposed on flabby, middle-aged institutions. Some agencies are considered senile (the ICC), others appeared on this planet stillborn (the Department of Energy), still others are going through an identity crisis or are in hibernation (the EPA). Yet others survive by establishing parasitic or symbiotic relationships with supporting institutions. Is the Corps of Engineers a leech or a virus? Those water projects are buried so deeply in the body politic that the Reagan cutbacks cannot reach them; they are cancers immune from cosmetic surgery. And so on. We draw our metaphors from horticulture: a little pruning here will concentrate growth over there. From navigation: "midcourse corrections" (the Clean Air and Water Acts), "fogbound and foundering." From paleontology: the dinosaur (the Bureau of Land Management) is ill-suited to survival under contemporary conditions. The important step, of course, is to move beyond the mere figure of speech to the convincing metaphor that has some explanatory and organizing persuasiveness.

Introduction -- The comparative legal method -- Common law and civil law -- Mapping the world's legal systems -- The diffusion of legal traditions -- Postmodern comparative law -- Socio-legal comparative law -- Numerical comparative law -- Empirical comparative law -- Legal transplants and convergence -- Comparative regional and international law -- From transnational law to global law -- Comparative law and development -- Implicit comparative law -- Reflections and outlook.

"An effective system of law must be able to authoritatively specify what the law is, and then get its subjects to follow it. Skeptics of international law have long questioned its ability to meet this standard, wondering, for instance, why a global superpower like the United States would bow to a rule of international law that disserved its interests, rather than changing, disregarding, or interpreting it away. We might equally wonder, however, why a President of the United States would choose to abide by constitutional limitations rather than dismiss them as "parchment barriers." While constitutionalists have paid less attention to these kinds of questions than their internationalist counterparts, the answers available to them are, not surprisingly, similar. This chapter describes how law for states can achieve some measure of settlement and compliance even in the absence of a crown-wearing, sword-wielding Leviathan standing above"--