Law Commons^™

Property's Morale, Nestor M. Davidson

Michigan Law Review

A foundational argument long invoked to justify stable property rights is that property law must protect settled expectations. Respect for expectations unites otherwise disparate strands of property theory focused on ex ante incentives, individual identity, and community. It also privileges resistance to legal transitions that transgress reliance interests. When changes in law unsettle expectations, such changes are thought to generate disincentives that Frank Michelman famously labeled "demoralization costs." Although rarely approached in these terms, arguments for legal certainty reflect underlying psychological assumptions about how people contemplate property rights when choosing whether and how to work, invest, create, bolster identity, join …

Hospitalizing The Mentally Ill, Henry Weihofen

Michigan Law Review

It is hard for lawyers and doctors to see eye to eye on the fundamental problem of how to eliminate needless legalistic formality in hospitalization procedures and at the same time maintain adequate legal safeguards against error and abuse.

Lawyers are inclined to emphasize the need to guard against "railroading" sane persons into institutions without giving them a chance to prove their sanity. They therefore stress the importance of a fair trial, with adequate notice and a chance to be heard before being deprived of one's liberty. As a special committee of the American Bar Association said a few years …