Legal & Moral Philosophy Principles

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Abstractions about legal doctrines and philosophical arguments concerning rights, responsibility and justice, including doctrinal legal principles such as at-will employment, privity of contract and presumption of innocence, philosophical thought experiments like Frankfurt cases and Kavka's toxin puzzle, and jurisprudential theories such as law in action and Rechtsstaat.

16 abstractions in this family — domain-specific abstractions that sit near one another in structural-signature space (k-means over structural-signature embeddings). Each is shown with its short description.

• At-will employment — In United States labor law, at-will employment is an employer's ability to dismiss an employee for any reason (that is, without having to establish "just cause" for termination).
• Bad tendency — In United States law, the bad tendency principle was a test that permitted restriction of freedom of speech by government if it was believed that a form of speech had a sole tendency to incite or cause illegal activity.
• Blackstone's ratio — In criminal law, Blackstone's ratio is the ratio between letting guilty go unpunished (error of impunity) and convicting innocent people, two forms of miscarriage of justice.
• Cognitive liberty — Cognitive liberty, or the "right to mental self-determination", is the freedom of an individual to control their own mental processes, cognition, and consciousness.
• Frankfurt cases — Frankfurt cases (also known as Frankfurt counterexamples or Frankfurt-style cases) were presented by philosopher Harry Frankfurt in 1969 as counterexamples to the principle of alternate possibilities (PAP), which holds that an agent is morally responsible for an action only if that person could have done otherwise.
• Hicklin Test — The Hicklin test is a legal test for obscenity established by the English case R. v Hicklin (1868).
• Jus Post Bellum — Jus post bellum ( ; Latin for "justice after war") is a concept that deals with the morality of the termination phase of war, including the responsibility to rebuild.
• Kavka's toxin puzzle — Kavka's toxin puzzle is a thought experiment about the possibility of forming an intention to perform an act which, following from reason, is an action one would not actually perform.
• Law in action — Law in action is a legal theory, associated with legal realism, that examines the role of law, not just as it exists in the statutes and cases, but as it is actually applied in society.
• Natural rights and legal rights — Natural rights are claimed to hold independently of particular institutions, whereas legal rights are created, recognized, and alterable within a specific legal system.
• Presumption of innocence — The presumption of innocence is a legal principle that every person accused of any crime is considered innocent until proven guilty.
• Privity of contract — The doctrine of privity of contract is a common law principle which provides that a contract cannot confer rights or impose obligations upon anyone who is not a party to that contract.
• Rechtsstaat — Rechtsstaat (; lit. "state of law"; "legal state") is a doctrine in continental European legal thinking, originating in German jurisprudence.
• Skepticism in law — Skepticism in law is a school of jurisprudence that was a reaction against the idea of natural law, and a response to the formalism of legal positivists.
• Trial penalty — In the United States, the trial penalty refers to the difference between the smaller sentence offered to a defendant in a plea bargain prior to a criminal trial versus the larger sentence the defendant could receive if they elect to go to trial.
• Violinist Thought Experiment — Granting for the sake of argument that the fetus has a right to life, Thomson uses thought experiments to argue that the right to life does not include, entail, or imply the right to use someone else's body to survive and that induced abortion is therefore morally permissible.