In Battered Women and Sleeping Abusers: Some Reflections, Professor Joshua Dressler offers cogent criticism of the application of self-defense to battered women who kill their abusers under “nonconfrontational” circumstances, such as when the abuser is asleep. Dressler is critical of using evidence that the defendant suffered from “Battered Woman Syndrome” (“BWS”) to establish the requisite def...

Plaintiff instituted an action under the Federal Employers' Liability Act,' alleging that defendant was negligent in that it "should have known of the [defective mechanism and] . . . failed to make proper repairs." 2 The plaintiff at no time explicitly mentioned the doctrine of res ipsa loquitur; the defendant limited its defense to the question of damages. The district court instructed the jur...

in descartes theological writing, he promotes two jointly puzzling theses: t1) god freely creates the eternal truths (i.e. the creation doctrine) and t2) the eternal truths are necessarily true. according to t1 god freely chooses which propositions to make necessary, contingent and possible. however the creation doctrine makes the acceptance of t2 tenuous for the creation doctrine implies that ...

ideas bars the patenting of a claim that is too broad because its scope is defined only by an abstract idea. For example, in O’Reilly v. Morse, Morse’s famous claim eight impermissibly sought to privatize all “use of . . . electro-magnetism, however developed for marking or printing intelligible characters, signs, or letters, at any distances.” 56 U.S. (15 How.) 62, 129 (1853). Every individual...

Consider a type of argument that is familiar in legal scholarship, such a commonplace in fact that its structure may lurk unnoticed in the background by the reader. The argument proceeds like this: (1) Here is some legal doctrine or rule; (2) courts and scholars (or at least my rivals) tend to think that its point, rationale, purpose, or function is X—that is, the doctrine is “all about” X; (3)...

A recent consensus has emerged within peace operations doctrine validating “robust” or “assertive” peacekeeping as an effective mechanism to intervene in complex and volatile intrastate conflicts. The assertion of the validity of “robust peacekeeping” is problematic due to a lack of empirical evidence supporting the application of this management tool. Yet the similarity between the context and...

The state action doctrine receives relatively little attention in the Federal Trade Commission/Department of Justice 2004 report on competition in the health care sector. Not surprisingly, the report focuses primarily on urging states to reconsider specific laws that tend to restrict competition in health care markets but that are clearly shielded by the state action doctrine. Relatively little...

We can observe and measure how legal decision makers use formal legal authorities, but there is no way to empirically test the determinative capacity of legal doctrine itself. Yet discussions of empirical studies of judicial behavior sometimes conflate judges’ attention to legal rules with legal rules determining outcomes. Doctrinal determinacy is not the same thing as legal predictability. The...

is the language of religion the same as the common language? various doctrines have been presented. meanwhile، wittgenstein offered two different doctrines in two different time periods. during the first period، he accepts the theory of common and visual language. but during the second period، he criticized his previous doctrine and offered the doctrine of “language games”، which means language...