Common Law and Common Sense

How Common-Sense Psychology Can Inform Law and Psycholegal Research

Common Sense

I like your columns, but they’re really all just common sense,” a client told me. He didn’t have a software background, and my columns were his first introduction to systematic ways of understanding software projects. To my chagrin, the net effect of a well-written column appeared to be that he thought software engineering was trivial! The idea that good software engineering “is all just common...

Common sense and "relevance"

Introduction The "relevance" logicians of North America and the "relevant" logicians of the Antipodes have long claimed that their logical systems are in better agreement with common sense than is classical logic. The present paper is a critical examination of such claims. Though it is part of an on-going debate between classical and relevantistic logicians, I have tried to keep my discussion o...

The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America

If Howard plays his cards right, he may be on the brink of creating his own intemal industry along the lines of Peters and Waterman's, "In Search of Excellence." There appears to be a broad range of acceptance of his views on the excesses of regulation. President Clinton recently shared the same stage with Howard when he aligned himself with the popular intention of reducing big govemment. Sena...

Core concepts of law: taking common sense seriously

In this paper we present LRI-Core, a core ontology for covering domains of law. After a decade of developing many ontologies for legal domains and applications, the need for a unifying core ontology that covers the main concepts that are common to all legal domains became very apparent. It can be argued that not only these domains have a predominant common-sense character – the law is still for...