Law Commons^™

Following the highly publicized deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown at the hands of white local law enforcement officers, along with the subsequent failure of the justice system to address this repugnant state of affairs, it has become essential for left-legal activists and advocates of social justice to begin crafting a model of criminal justice that is capable of withstanding the bias of perceived class, gender, and racial supremacy.  Further, it seems necessary to express these ideas in a manner that is amenable to implementation, rather than conveyed in the abstract terms of bourgeois ideology.  Such a design of …

This paper follows the law and norms literature in arguing that policymakers can use social norms to support or even replace regulation. Key to the approach offered here is the idea — borrowed from the folk theorem in game theory — that cooperative order can arise in circumstances where parties repeatedly interact. This paper proposes that repeated interaction between the same agents, specifically the intensity of it, may be used as a yardstick with which to gauge the potential to scale back regulation and use social norms as a substitute for law. Where there are very high levels of repeated …