The Price of (Perceived) Affordance: Commentary for Huron and Berec

It is argued that the symbolic objects in music and musical scores can permit affordances much as physical objects can. This construction of "affordance" places greater emphasis on cultural forms and human memory than the original idea proposed by James J. Gibson, and it aligns itself more closely with the refinements to "affordance" suggested by Donald Norman. For symbolic objects to permit strongly perceived affordances, it may be necessary for perceivers to have developed schematized perception in the course of over-learning culturally significant forms

Leonard B. Meyer

tribute to Leonard B. Meye

The Future of Legal Scholarship and the Search for a Modern Theory of Law

In this Article, Professor Gjerdingen argues that the current crisis in legal scholarship can be traced to a change in the dominant concept of American law. He argues that virtually all of the significant schools of American legal thought during the last century, from Langdellian orthodoxy to realism to the legal process school, were dominated by a concept of law that separated law and politics. This concept of law, which he terms conventionalism, presumed that law was an autonomous, apolitical discipline dominated by the study of adjudication and classical common law categories. In contrast, the new legal scholarship of the last decade-which includes not only critical legal studies but an as yet unrecognized group of centrist scholars, which he terms the legal theory movement-is implicitly based on a new, modern theory of law that offers an alternative to conventionalism. This theory recognizes that a central concern of legal scholarship must be to understand the relation between law and politics and the role of legal culture. To explain this phenomenon, Professor Gjerdingen offers prolegomena for a theory of legal consciousness and for the modern theory of law as well as an assessment of the future of the new scholarship

The Minnesota Recreational Use Statute: A Preliminary Analysis

In the past twenty-four years, Minnesota and forty-two other states in an effort to ease the growing burden on public parks and campgrounds have enacted recreational use statutes to encourage private landowners to open their land to the public for recreational use. As incentive, the statutes offer the landowners a limited form of tort immunity if they gratuitously allow entry for recreational use. Despite their simplicity, the possible ramifications of the statutes in the area of premises liability law are far-reaching. This Note analyzes the Minnesota recreational use statute and suggests a theoretical framework for its interpretation

Intergenerational Condemnation

Justice between generations is a growing concern in land use, particularly in the areas of environmental and historic preservation. In this Article, Professor Gerdingen addresses the effect of this development on contemporary takings clause doctrine. He argues that conventional takings doctrine is comprised of four different causes of action that merely focus on intragenerational conflicts over the use of resources. As a result, part of the reason why the law generates so many hard cases in the area of environmental and historic preservation is that the conventional takings doctrine is unable to accommodate the justice between generations component of preservation issues. In response, he proposes the recognition of a new takings cause of action-that of intergenerational condemnation. The final portion of the Article sets forth a modified utilitarian model for an intergenerational condemnation cause of action

The Minnesota Recreational Use Statute: A Preliminary Analysis

In the past twenty-four years, Minnesota and forty-two other states in an effort to ease the growing burden on public parks and campgrounds have enacted recreational use statutes to encourage private landowners to open their land to the public for recreational use. As incentive, the statutes offer the landowners a limited form of tort immunity if they gratuitously allow entry for recreational use. Despite their simplicity, the possible ramifications of the statutes in the area of premises liability law are far-reaching. This Note analyzes the Minnesota recreational use statute and suggests a theoretical framework for its interpretation