Causal Comparisons

Focusing on the multiple meanings of the statement A was a more important cause of C than was B, Professor Strassfeld considers the feasibility of comparative causation as a means of apportioning legal responsibility for harms. He concludse that by combining two different interpretations of more important cause --judgments of comparative counterfactual similarity and the Uniform Comparative Fault Act approach of comparative responsibility--we can effectively make causal comparisons and avoid the effort to compare such incommensurables as the defendant\u27s fault under a strict liability standard and the plaintiff\u27s failt for failure to exercise reasonable care

Taking Another Ride on Flopper: Benjamin Cardozo, Safe Space, and the Cultural Significance of Coney Island

This article examines the history and cultural meaning of Coney Island and its amusement parks, as well as Cardozo\u27s biography, in an effort to discover the basis for that feeling of contempt. It shows that a variety of attributes of Coney Island, most notably its embrace of what was, for its day, a robust and open sexuality and carnival spirit, were alien and threatening to Cardozo\u27s Victorian values. It also shows how this clash of values would have naturally inclined Cardozo to think of Coney Island as a dangerous place and led him to Murphy\u27s assumption of risk analysis. It further shows, however, that Steeplechase might have been thought of in a very different way, as a safe space in which park goers were invited to let down their guard and take apparent risks in a safe setting. In so doing, the article explores both the hidden history of the Murphy case and the suppressed alternative reading of law and facts that is similarly hidden by Cardozo\u27s opinion

Vietnam War on Trial: The Court-Martial of Dr. Howard B. Levy

This Article examines the history of a Vietnam War-era case: the court-martial of Dr. Howard B. Levy. The U.S. Army court-martialled Dr. Levy for refusing to teach medicine to Green Beret soldiers and for criticizing both the Green Berets and American involvement in Vietnam. Although the Supreme Court eventually upheld Levy\u27s conviction in Parker v. Levy, its decision obscures the political content of Levy\u27s court-martial and its relationship to the war. At the court-martial Levy sought to defend himself by showing that his disparaging remarks about the Green Berets, identifying them as killers of peasants and murderers of women and children, were true and that his refusal to teach medicine to Green Beret soldiers was dictated by medical ethics, given the ways in which the soldiers would misuse their medical knowledge. Ultimately, Levy put the war itself on trial by arguing that had he trained the soldiers he would have abetted their war crimes. This Article seeks to recapture the history of the Levy case as a case about the Vietnam War. Yet the case was also about much more. The Article shows how imagery evoking beliefs about race and racial difference, war, frontier violence, and medicine and healing all came into play in the Levy case. It also explores the manner in which the court-martial became a forum in which the Vietnam War and aspects of U.S. Army policy and conduct were debated, and in which that debate was eventually suppressed. Ultimately, this Article begins the exploration of how American legal institutions coped with the crisis of political and moral legitimacy that they confronted in the late 1960s