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Hi, I have to write an essay that relates broadly to individual responsibility and the law. I was just wondering what are some interesting topics I could focus my essay on?

I was thinking of corporate criminal liability for the actions of employees but it doesn't really seem like a particularly interesting topic.

How about a paper about whether a Judge has a moral duty, a legal obligation, or both, to enforce an unjust law? Here are some sources.

http://www.amazon.com/Justice-Accused-A ... 0300032528

http://www.amazon.com/Laws-Empire-Ronal ... 674518365/

http://joshblackman.com/blog/2013/07/21 ... f-the-age/

http://www.law.yale.edu/documents/pdf/o ... tation.pdf

http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/ ... fss_papers

So, something like do judges have a responsibility to refuse to enforce an unjust law?

It does seem like quite an interesting topic, but wouldn't I first have to discuss whether there can be such a thing as an unjust law and if so, what criteria we should apply to determine that a particular law is unjust?

rokafella14 wrote:Hi, I have to write an essay that relates broadly to individual responsibility and the law. I was just wondering what are some interesting topics I could focus my essay on?

I was thinking of corporate criminal liability for the actions of employees but it doesn't really seem like a particularly interesting topic.

You could write about why it is an irresponsible choice to go to 90 percent of the law schools in America today.

I'm 2/3 of the way through law school and literally the only thing I could think of was contributory v. comparative negligence. You really don't learn anything after 1L.

Jury nullification.

rokafella14 wrote:So, something like do judges have a responsibility to refuse to enforce an unjust law?

It does seem like quite an interesting topic, but wouldn't I first have to discuss whether there can be such a thing as an unjust law and if so, what criteria we should apply to determine that a particular law is unjust?

You don't need a theory of language to use words. In the same way, you don't need to discuss whether unjust laws can exist nor do you need to discuss the criteria of justice to engage with the question.

Not to mention, what the heck do you mean "whether there can be such a thing as an unjust law"? Are you that much of a moral relativist/moral skeptic that you think that might even be possible? What about a law that says "be unjust"? In case you don't think laws that bald-faced can exist, consider Jews for Jesus v. LAX where the ordinance prohibited all "First Amendment activities" in the Los Angeles International Airport.

But seriously, you've never thought about Nazi germany, Slavery, Jim Crow, and wondered, "hmm, those laws, they seem like they must have been unjust"? Really? Never?

I also think the the tension between moral advocacy and legal integrity when it comes to certain laws is a really interesting topic. I think kritarch is talking about laws that are "unjust" in the sense that they are immoral. Perhaps laws themselves are always technically "just" as justice itself is defined by the law and not the other way around, but the laws in any society are still objectively flawed in-fact to some extent. Talk about how bad these flaws need to be before an individual has a duty to violate the law rather than obey it. Can a lawyer ever have a duty to violate a law, such as those in kritarch's examples? This is a good topic.

rokafella14 wrote:Hi, I have to write an essay that relates broadly to individual responsibility and the law. I was just wondering what are some interesting topics I could focus my essay on?

I was thinking of corporate criminal liability for the actions of employees but it doesn't really seem like a particularly interesting topic.

The Law & . . . Alcoholism and substance abuse running rampant in the legal profession.

You could write something about the tort arena, e.g. duty to warn. There's a lot of back-and-forth about this about responsibility lying with the consumer versus the manufacturer.