Precedent and Analogy in Legal Reasoning

L. Song Richardson is the Dean and Chancellor’s Professor of Law at the University of California, Irvine School of Law with joint appointments in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society and in the Department of Asian American Studies. Her interdisciplinary analysis makes use of lessons from cognitive and social psychology to check determination-making and judgment in a variety of contexts. Her scholarship has been printed by legislation journals at Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Duke and Northwestern, among others. Her co-edited e-book, The Constitution and the Future of Criminal Justice in America, was printed by Cambridge University Press in 2013. She is a co-editor of Criminal Procedure, Cases and Materials published by West Academic Publishing.

Public health companies, policymakers and lawmakers, and others should have entry to science-based data about effective public well being legal guidelines. The indispensable role of law is clear throughout the whole historical past of U.S. public well being—from early colonialists’ must defend against infectious threats to right now’s revolutionary legislation-based approaches to preventing continual ailments, injuries, and other issues (Table 2). The U.S. expertise with smallpox illustrates how, at some points in historical past, law-primarily based interventions had been implemented even before science elucidated the nature of the general public health risk and the basis of the intervention. The authorized-epidemiologic technique of quarantine to forestall the spread of smallpox was employed on Long Island as early as 1662 .

Legal validity is determined by morality, not because of the interpretative …