In 1930, Judge Learned Hand, widely regarded as one of the most distinguished judges in our nation's history, spoke to the Juristic Society at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. In his address, "Sources of Tolerance," he told his listeners "I venture to believe that it is as important to a judge called upon to pass on a question of constitutional law, to have at least a bowing acquaintance with Acton and Maitland, with Thucydides, Gibbon, and Carlyle, with Homer, Dante, Shakespeare and Milton, with Machiavelli, Montaigne and Rabelais, with Plato, Bacon, Hume and Kant, as with the books which have been specifically written on the subject." Hand's remarks assume three points that form the central focus of this essay. The first is that the study of law is either part of or is strongly connected to the humanities. The second is that the lawyer or legal scholar called upon to discuss and analyze legal questions cannot do so by looking merely within the confines of traditional legal materials: cases, statutes, and "books which have been specifically written on the subject" of law. Instead, he or she needs assistance and edification from other sources. The third is that those external sources of knowledge are to be found not in the natural sciences or the social sciences, but in subjects that we customarily call "the humanities." Hand is not merely assuming these things. He also presents himself to us as a wise jurist who has been influenced by the "great books" he has selected for our attention. Because he is himself familiar with each of the writers he mentions, he enjoys membership in a "republic of letters," the sort of membership that is necessary for anyone who wishes to "live greatly in the law." There was nothing particularly unusual about these assumptions in the early twentieth century, particularly coming from an elite member of the legal profession like Hand. Moreover, membership in the American republics of law and letters had run both ways. Robert Ferguson's important book, Law and Letters in American Culture, discusses the many late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century American writers who had been trained as lawyers (and in many instances, had actually practiced law), including Charles Brockden Brown, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Washington Irving, William Bryant, and James Fenimore Cooper. One might also think of Hand's contemporary, the Harvard Law School-educated poet Archibald McLeish, or, closer to our own time, writers ranging from Louis Auchincloss to Scott Turow and John Grisham.

One would be hard pressed to find a more controversial or nebulous human right than the "right to health"-a right that stems primarily, although not exclusively, from Article 12 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and requires governments to recognize "the right of everyone to the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health." While activists, nongovernmental organizations, and scholars have made significant progress in promoting a human rights approach to health and the field of health and human rights more generally, the question of a philosophical and conceptual foundation-a theory-for the right to health has fallen through the cracks that emerge from an interdisciplinary intersection of medical ethics, international relations, international human rights law, health policy, health law, and public health law. International human rights law scholars working in public health and health policy have typically focused on government's binding legal obligations to promote and protect both public health and human rights. They have drawn on human rights to address public health issues, especially the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Although scholars in this field have, in the words of one academic, "developed a sophisticated understanding of civil and political rights," they "have failed systematically to examine the meaning and enforcement of social and economic rights." And while General Comment No. 14, issued by the UN Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (CESCR), provides the most reliable report on the right to health, it too, by necessity and purpose, lacks a systematic philosophical grounding for the right to health. The few international relations scholars and practitioners who do focus on health issues have provided primarily three dominant frameworks for international health cooperation: national and security interests; domestic and global economic development; and international human rights. Human rights approaches have filled a "moral gap" in the international global health discourse left primarily by economic and geo-political governance frameworks for international health issues. But the human rights strategy has been only moderately effective, for example in efforts to control and mitigate the HIV/AIDS epidemic and to implement the constitution of the World Health Organization (WHO). Furthermore, international relations as an academic discipline has not focused on providing a theory-based in moral and political philosophy - of a right to health.

I have for some time been puzzled about the status of narrative in the law, and more particularly the status of talk about narrative in the law. On the one hand, there has been plenty of legal scholarship-starting more or less from the "storytelling" issue of Michigan Law Review in 1989 - on the uses (and the virtues) of "outsider" narratives in the law, and even before that there was Robert Cover's foundational Nomos and Narrative. It has become something of a commonplace - too much of one - that legal storytelling has the virtue of presenting the lived experience of marginalized groups or individuals in a way that traditional legal reasoning doesn't. This view has of course been criticized, and some of the more naïve assumptions about the moral benefits of storytelling have been questioned. On the other hand, I am not aware that all this story talk has made any difference to legal actors. Trial advocates tell stories - they have always told stories - and clinical training in advocacy includes some attention to construction of the story you will tell in the courtroom (which of course echoes the training in rhetoric given to lawyers in antiquity, when rhetoric and the law were inextricably interwoven). In particular, it is assumed that juries often decide verdicts on the basis of the more persuasive story presented at trial. Yet you search in vain for any explicit recognition by legal decisionmakers that how a story is told can make a difference in legal outcomes. That is not quite true: there are moments when the law notes that a story has been mis-told, or not told according to the rules (of evidence, for instance), or doesn't make sense as told. Appellate courts are to some degree the enforcers of rule-governed storytelling. Yet they don't talk narrative talk. They are conspicuously lacking in the analytic vocabulary and tools of literary "narratology," for instance. Narratology - which I shall discuss in more detail later on- distinguishes between events in the world and the ways in which they are presented in narratives. It pays attention to the parts of narrative and how they combine in a plot; to how we understand the initiation and completion of an action; to standard narrative sequences (stock stories, one might say); and to the movement of a narrative through a state of disequilibrium to a final outcome that reestablishes order. Narratology also studies perspectives of telling: who sees and who tells, the explicit or implicit relation of the teller to what is told, the varying temporal modalities between the told and its telling. I know of only one instance when the Supreme Court shows an explicit, quasi-narratological awareness of narrative as a category of thought and presentation of reality (I'll come back to it later), and it has not produced a sequel.

Throughout the last century, the modem welfare state has been widely considered a major source of rescue and relief for people with disabilities. By providing mechanisms of cure and care, so the common view goes, the welfare state has improved the social conditions of disabled people, rescuing them from a life of starvation and severe destitution. In this view, welfare provides a refuge, while the real responsibility for the persistent poverty of disabled people lies primarily with the structure of the market economy, with the existence of negative social attitudes, and with disability's "objective" and inherent limitations. In this Article, I challenge this view, arguing that although welfare has indeed provided some relief to people with disabilities, welfare laws and policies have also had a significant role in developing, furthering, and reinforcing the power hierarchies to which people with disabilities are subjected. Through an investigation of Israeli disability policy, I show how hierarchies of welfare benefits reflect national values and collective imageries but at the same time reinforce and re-constitute those values and modes of imagination. Although the particularities and contexts of these hierarchies differ from one country to another, the result, I contend, is the same: those at the top, usually disabled veterans and disabled workers, enjoy better compensation or social insurance schemes, but in fact suffer from similar patterns of ableism and power as other disabled persons, and these patterns eventually render them equally inferior to and of a lesser value than the non-disabled. This Article uses a critical perspective that I term Disability Legal Studies (DLS) in order to emphasize its commitment to the field of critical legal theory and its close association with disability studies. Disability studies, a relatively new academic field, investigates issues such as the social construction of disability, ableism and the power structure that supports and enhances the privileged status and conditions of non-disabled persons in relation to disabled persons, the genealogy of social categories such as normalcy, and the politics of bodily variations.2 The basic approach that all disability studies scholars share is that disability is not an inherent, immutable trait located in the disabled person, but a result of socio-cultural dynamics that occur in interactions between society and people with disabilities. Although disability studies' critique is not altogether new to some legal scholars, it has not yet gained adequate recognition in legal discourse. I maintain that the time has come to identify, introduce, and label the field of DLS, bring it to light, attend to its premises, and incorporate its lessons into legal theory and practice. I further suggest that attending to DLS would bring a shift in writing on disability and the law from a focus on doctrinal analysis or policy advocacy to a research regarding the constitutive role of law in the production of disability.

Consent-based searches are by far the most ubiquitous form of search undertaken by police. A key legal inquiry in these cases is whether consent was granted voluntarily. This Essay suggests that fact finders’ assessments of voluntariness are likely to be impaired by a systematic bias in social perception. Fact finders are likely to underappreciate the degree to which suspects feel pressure to comply with police officers’ requests to perform searches. In two preregistered laboratory studies, we approached a total of 209 participants (“Experiencers”) with a highly intrusive request: to unlock their password-protected smartphones and hand them over to an experimenter to search through while they waited in another room. A separate 194 participants (“Forecasters”) were brought into the lab and asked whether a reasonable person would agree to the same request if hypothetically approached by the same researcher. Both groups then reported how free they felt, or would feel, to refuse the request. Study 1 found that whereas most Forecasters believed a reasonable person would refuse the experimenter’s request, most Experiencers—100 out of 103 people—promptly unlocked their phones and handed them over. Moreover, Experiencers reported feeling significantly less free to refuse than did Forecasters contemplating the same situation hypothetically. Study 2 tested an intervention modeled after a commonly proposed reform of consent searches, in which the experimenter explicitly advises participants that they have the right to withhold consent. We found that this advisory did not significantly reduce compliance rates or make Experiencers feel more free to say no. At the same time, the gap between Experiencers and Forecasters remained significant. These findings suggest that decision makers judging the voluntariness of consent consistently underestimate the pressure to comply with intrusive requests. This is problematic because it indicates that a key justification for suspicionless consent searches—that they are voluntary—relies on an assessment that is subject to bias. The results thus provide support to critics who would like to see consent searches banned or curtailed, as they have been in several states. The results also suggest that a popular reform proposal—requiring police to advise citizens of their right to refuse consent—may have little effect. This corroborates previous observational studies that find negligible effects of Miranda warnings on confession rates among interrogees, and little change in rates of consent once police start notifying motorists of their right to refuse vehicle searches. We suggest that these warnings are ineffective because they fail to address the psychology of compliance. The reason people comply with police, we contend, is social, not informational. The social demands of police-citizen interactions persist even when people are informed of their rights. It is time to abandon the myth that notifying people of their rights makes them feel empowered to exercise those rights

Those who wish to control, expose, and damage the identities of individuals routinely do so by invading their privacy. People are secretly recorded in bedrooms and public bathrooms and “up their skirts.” Such images are used to coerce people into sharing nude photographs and filming sex acts under the threat of public disclosure. People’s nude images are posted online without permission. Machine-learning technology is used to create digitally manipulated “deep fake” sex videos that swap people’s faces into pornography. Each of these abuses is an invasion of sexual privacy—the behaviors, expectations, and choices that manage access to and information about the human body, sex, sexuality, gender, and intimate activities. Most often, women, nonwhites, sexual minorities, and minors shoulder the abuse. Sexual privacy, this Article contends, is a distinct privacy interest that warrants recognition and protection. It serves as a cornerstone for sexual autonomy and consent. It is foundational to human dignity and intimacy, and its denial results in the subordination of marginalized communities.

Imagine you apply to be a cashier at a supermarket. At the beginning of the interview, you sign an employment application. You don’t get the job, and your interviewer’s remarks make you suspect it’s because you are Muslim. You sue in federal court under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The supermarket moves to dismiss the suit because your employment application included an agreement to arbitrate all Title VII disputes. The court dismisses your case and compels arbitration.

This article explores the interface between copyright law and the Holocaust. The Holocaust's duration and scope, its occurrence in the midst of the twentieth century with photography and film technologies already available, and its setting at the heart of Europe, yielded countless documents, diaries, notes, memoirs, musical works, photographs, films, letters, and additional artifacts. On the victims' part, many of those items-including secret archives comprised at various ghettos, music composed in concentration camps, and personal diaries-manifest an explicit act of real-time historical documentation for future generations. On the perpetrators' side, some materials were produced as a result of organized documentation and others-such as Joseph Goebbels' diaries or Hitler's Mein Kampf--comprise records of prominent figures in the Nazi regime. Numerous Holocaust-related materials are still subject to copyright protection. Yet, the impact of copyright law on the memory of the Holocaust remains largely unexplored.

What is a country to do when international law presents it with two conflicting yet binding norms? This question has been haunting international law scholars for the past two decades. It has arisen with particular fervor in the context of the proliferation of international legal regimes and, specifically, international tribunals since the 1990s.