Law Commons^™

Hunting Unicorns, Aaron Edlin

Aaron Edlin

Where Concerned Citizens Perceive Police As More Responsive To Troublesome Teen Groups: Theoretical Implications For Political Economy, Incivilities And Policing, Christopher Salvatore, Ralph B. Taylor, Christopher Kelly

Christopher Salvatore

The current investigation extends previous work on citizens' perceptions of police performance. It examines the origins of between-community differences in concerned citizens' judgments that police are responding sufficiently to a local social problem. The problem is local unsupervised teen groups, a key indicator for both the revised systemic social disorganization perspective and the incivilities thesis. Four theoretical perspectives predict ecological determinants of these shared judgments. Less perceived police responsiveness is anticipated in lower socioeconomic status (SES) police districts by both a political economy and a stratified incivilities perspective; more predominantly minority police districts by a racialized justice perspective; and in …

Regulation Of Government Agencies Through Limitation Riders, Neal Devins

Neal E. Devins

Congress often attaches limitation riders to appropriations bills to establish its policy directives. Professor Devins argues that the appropriations process is not the proper vehicle for substantive policymaking. In this article, he analyzes institutional characteristics that prevent the full consideration or articulation of policy in appropriations bills. Professor Devins also considers the extent to which Congress's use of limitation riders inhibits the effectiveness of the other branches of the federal government. Professor Devins concludes that, while Congress's use of limitation riders is sometimes necessary, Congress should be aware of the significant risks associated with policymaking through the appropriations process.

Price Theory And Vertical Restraints: A Misunderstood Relation, Alan J. Meese

Alan J. Meese

The Chicago School of antitrust analysis has exerted a strong influence over the law of vertical restraints in the past two decades, leading the Supreme Court to abandon much of its traditional hostility toward such agreements. Chicago's success has provoked a vigorous response from Populists, who support the traditional approach. Chicago, Populists claim, has improperly relied upon neoclassical price theory to inform the normative and descriptive assumptions that drive its analysis of trade restraints generally and of vertical restraints in particular. This reliance is misplaced, Populists assert, because the real world departs from that portrayed by price-theoretic models and, at …

Economic Theory, Trader Freedom And Consumer Welfare: State Oil Co. V. Khan And The Continuing Incoherence Of Antitrust Doctrine, Alan J. Meese

Alan J. Meese

No abstract provided.

Understanding Kaye Scholer: The Autonomous Citizen, The Managed Subject And The Role Of The Lawyer, Nancy Amoury Combs

Nancy Combs

The Office of Thrift Supervision's (OTS) unprecedented enforcement action against Kaye, Scholer, Fierman, Hays and Handler (Kaye Scholer) prompted howls of protest from the legal community. OTS, it was claimed, was using its excessive power to redefine the role of the lawyer. This Comment confirms that OTS sought to impose duties on Kaye Scholer that conflict with professional ethics rules. The Comment then goes on to suggest that the conflict over professional responsibility in the Kaye Scholer case reflects, more fundamentally, a conflict over the role of the citizen, and the citizen's relationship with the state. Our adversarial system of …

Naked And Covered In Monte Carlo: A Reappraisal Of Option Taxation, Eric D. Chason

Eric D. Chason

The market for equity options and related derivatives is staggering, covering trillions of dollars worth of assets. As a result, the taxation of these instruments is inherently important. Moreover, the importance is made even more acute by the use of options in creating more complex transactions and in avoiding taxes. Consider an equity call option, which entitles, but does not obligate, its holder to buy stock at a set price at a set time in the future. Option theory gives us a way to break the option down into more fundamental units. For example, an equity call option over 10,000 …

When Y2k Causes "Economic Loss" To "Other Property", Peter A. Alces, Aaron S. Book

Peter A. Alces

No abstract provided.

Avoiding Takings “Accidents”: A Torts Perspective On Takings Law, Eric Kades

Eric A. Kades

Viewing the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment as a form of insurance appeals to our intuition. The government, like fire, does not often "take" property, but when faced with extraordinary risk property owners naturally desire compensation. Recent scholarship, however, has dissolved the attractiveness of this perspective. This literature, through economic analysis, claims that the Takings Clause should be repealed and replaced with private takings insurance. This is the "no-compensation" result. This article argues that the insurance-based understanding of the just compensation requirement can be preserved without reaching the surprising no-compensation result. The intuitive appeal of understanding the Takings Clause …

Will Marriage Promotion Work?, Vivian E. Hamilton

Vivian E. Hamilton

No abstract provided.

Private Wealth And Public Goods: A Case For A National Investment Authority, Robert C. Hockett, Saule T. Omarova

Robert C. Hockett

Much American electoral and policy debate now centers on how best to reignite the nation’s economic dynamism and rebuild its competitive strength. Any such undertaking presents an extraordinary challenge, demanding a correspondingly extraordinary institutional response. This Article proposes precisely such a response. It designs and advocates a new public instrumentality--a National Investment Authority (“NIA”)--charged with the critical task of devising and implementing a comprehensive long-term development strategy for the United States.

Patterned in part after the New Deal-era Reconstruction Finance Corporation, in part after modern sovereign wealth funds, and in part after private equity and venture capital firms, the NIA …

Time-Shifted Rationality And The Law Of Law's Leverage: Behavioral Economics Meets Behavioral Biology, Owen D. Jones

Owen Jones

A flood of recent scholarship explores legal implications of seemingly irrational behaviors by invoking cognitive psychology and notions of bounded rationality. In this article, I argue that advances in behavioral biology have largely overtaken existing notions of bounded rationality, revealing them to be misleadingly imprecise - and rooted in outdated assumptions that are not only demonstrably wrong, but also wrong in ways that have material implications for subsequent legal conclusions. This can be remedied. Specifically, I argue that behavioral biology offers three things of immediate use. First, behavioral biology can lay a foundation for both revising bounded rationality and fashioning …

The Evolution Of Irrationality, Owen D. Jones

Owen Jones

The place of the rational actor model in the analysis of individual and social behavior relevant to law remains unresolved. In recent years, scholars have sought frameworks to explain: a) disjunctions between seemingly rational behavior and seemingly irrational behavior; b) the origins of and influences on law-relevant preferences, and c) the nonrandom development of norms. This Article explains two components of an evolutionary framework that, building from accessible insights of behavioral biology, can encompass all three. The components are: "time-shifted rationality" and "the law of law's leverage."

Endowment Effects In Chimpanzees, Owen D. Jones, Sarah F. Brosnan, Susan P. Lambeth, Mary Catherine Mareno, Amanda S. Richardson, Steven Schapiro

Owen Jones

Human behavior is not always consistent with standard rational choice predictions. The much-investigated variety of apparent deviations from rational choice predictions provides a promising arena for the merger of economics and biology. Although little is known about the extent to which other species also exhibit these seemingly irrational patterns of human decision-making and choice behavior, similarities across species would suggest a common evolutionary root to the phenomena.

The present study investigated whether chimpanzees exhibit an endowment effect, a seemingly paradoxical behavior in which humans tend to value a good they have just come to possess more than they would have …

Law, Biology, And Property: A New Theory Of The Endowment Effect, Owen D. Jones, Sarah F. Brosnan

Owen Jones

Recent work at the intersection of law and behavioral biology has suggested numerous contexts in which legal thinking could benefit by integrating knowledge from behavioral biology. In one of those contexts, behavioral biology may help to provide theoretical foundation for, and potentially increased predictive power concerning, various psychological traits relevant to law. This Article describes an experiment that explores that context.

The paradoxical psychological bias known as the endowment effect puzzles economists, skews market behavior, impedes efficient exchange of goods and rights, and thereby poses important problems for law. Although the effect is known to vary widely, there are at …

Law And Behavioral Biology, Owen D. Jones, Timothy H. Goldsmith

Owen Jones

Society uses law to encourage people to behave differently than they would behave in the absence of law. This fundamental purpose makes law highly dependent on sound understandings of the multiple causes of human behavior. The better those understandings, the better law can achieve social goals with legal tools. In this Article, Professors Jones and Goldsmith argue that many long held understandings about where behavior comes from are rapidly obsolescing as a consequence of developments in the various fields constituting behavioral biology. By helping to refine law's understandings of behavior's causes, they argue, behavioral biology can help to improve law's …