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Articles 1 - 19 of 19
Full-Text Articles in Law
The Inevitability Of Theory, Richard O. Lempert
The Inevitability Of Theory, Richard O. Lempert
Articles
I wrote this Article in response to an invitation to deliver the keynote address at Berkeley Law School’s Jurisprudence and Social Policy conference Building Theory Through Empirical Legal Studies. Lauren Edelman, the intellectual mother of the conference, gently brushed aside my suggestion that I present one of my own attempts to synthesize the results of empirical research to generate theory, and asked that I directly address the conference topic. I am glad that she did.
Nudge, Choice Architecture, And Libertarian Paternalism, Pierre Schlag
Nudge, Choice Architecture, And Libertarian Paternalism, Pierre Schlag
Michigan Law Review
By all external appearances, Nudge is a single book-two covers, a single spine, one title. But put these deceptive appearances aside, read the thing, and you will actually find two books-Book One and Book Two. Book One begins with the behavioral economist's view that sometimes individuals are not the best judges of their own welfare. Indeed, given the propensity of human beings for cognitive errors (e.g., the availability bias) and the complexity of decisions that need to be made (e.g., choosing prescription plans), individuals often make mistakes. Enter here the idea of the nudge-the deliberate effort to channel people into …
Why Care About Mass Incarceration?, James Forman Jr.
Why Care About Mass Incarceration?, James Forman Jr.
Michigan Law Review
Advocates for less punitive crime policies in the United States face long and dispiriting odds. The difficulty of the challenge becomes clear if we compare our criminal justice outcomes with those of other nations: We lock up more people, and for longer, than anyone else in the world. We continue to use the death penalty long after Europe abandoned it, we are the only country in the world to lock up juveniles for life, and we have prisoners serving fifty-year sentences for stealing videotapes from Kmart. Our courts offer little relief: the German Constitutional Court prohibits a sentence of life …
The Future Of Books Related To The Law?, Eugene Volokh
The Future Of Books Related To The Law?, Eugene Volokh
Michigan Law Review
People have been reading books for over 500 years, in more or less the same format. Book technology has changed in some measure during that time. Fonts have become more readable. Books have become more affordable. Still, the general form of the book has remained much the same. But the arrival of e-readers, such as the Kindle and the Sony eBook, offers the possibility of a major change. First, people may shift to reading existing books on those e-readers. Second, the shift may lead them to change the way they use books, for instance by letting people have many reference …
Rationalism In Regulation, Christopher C. Demuth, Douglas H. Ginsburg
Rationalism In Regulation, Christopher C. Demuth, Douglas H. Ginsburg
Michigan Law Review
Retaking Rationality: How Cost-Benefit Analysis Can Better Protect the Environment and Our Health, by Richard L. Revesz and Michael A. Livermore, aims to convince those who favor more government regulation-in particular environmental groups-that they should embrace cost-benefit analysis and turn it to their purposes. Coauthored by a prominent law school dean and a recent student with a background in environmental advocacy, the book is a jarring combination of roundhouse political polemics and careful academic argument. Sweeping pronouncements are followed by qualifications that leave the sweep of the pronouncements in doubt- rather like the give-and-take of the law school classroom …
Misunderstanding Lawyers' Ethics, Monroe H. Freedman, Abbe Smith
Misunderstanding Lawyers' Ethics, Monroe H. Freedman, Abbe Smith
Michigan Law Review
The title of Daniel Markovits's book, A Modern Legal Ethics, gives the impression that it is a comprehensive treatise on contemporary lawyers' ethics. The contents of the book, however, are both more limited and more expansive than the title suggests. Markovits's treatment of lawyers' ethics concerns itself with what he conceives to be the pervasive guilty conscience of practicing lawyers over their "professional viciousness" (p. 36), and how lawyers can achieve a guilt-free professional identity "worthy of ... commitment" (p. 2). Markovits's goal in the book is to "articulat[e] a powerful and distinctively lawyerly virtue" (p. 2), one that …
Can Criminal Law Be Controlled?, Darryl K. Brown
Can Criminal Law Be Controlled?, Darryl K. Brown
Michigan Law Review
It is a bizarre state of affairs that criminal law has no coherent description or explanation. We have standard tropes to define criminal law, but they obscure as much as they clarify and are honored in the breach as much as the rule. Crimes, for instance, are defined by wrongdoing and culpability; to be guilty, one must do a wrongful act in a blameworthy manner, that is, as a responsible agent without excuse or justification. And crimes define public wrongs, which are distinct from private wrongs. Further, we criminalize only harmful conduct, or risk-creating conduct, or immoral conduct, or conduct …
A Planet By Any Other Name…, Kimberly Kessler Ferzan
A Planet By Any Other Name…, Kimberly Kessler Ferzan
Michigan Law Review
In case you haven't heard, Pluto isn't a planet anymore (and maybe it never was). In grade school, we all memorized the planets, giving little thought to what made something a planet besides revolving around the Sun and being part of some familiar mnemonic. However, scientific discoveries about Pluto and other parts of space led scientists to question Pluto's planetary status and ultimately, to strip Pluto of its standing among the planets. This leads to the inevitable question-what is a planet?-which turns out to be a more difficult and fascinating question than one might think. The Pluto Files grapples with …
Our Not-So-Great Depression, Craig Green
Our Not-So-Great Depression, Craig Green
Michigan Law Review
A Failure of Capitalism by Richard Posner is not a great book, and it does not pretend to be one. Posner summarizes the economic crisis of 2008-09 and considers proposals to reduce current suffering and avoid future recurrence (p. xvi). But when the book's final edits were made in February 2009, it was still too soon for authoritative solutions or full accounts of what had happened. Instead, Posner wrote a conspicuously contemporary-and thus incomplete-description of the crisis as it looked to him at the time (p. xvii). Now one year later, readers may need a reminder about the value of …
The Price Of Conflict: War, Taxes, And The Politics Of Fiscal Citizenship, Ajay K. Mehrotra
The Price Of Conflict: War, Taxes, And The Politics Of Fiscal Citizenship, Ajay K. Mehrotra
Michigan Law Review
This Review proceeds in four parts, paralleling the chronological organization of War and Taxes. It focuses mainly on the book's analysis of the leading modern American wars, from the Civil War through the global conflicts of the twentieth century, up to the recent war on terror. Part I contrasts the tax policies of the Union and Confederacy during the Civil War to show how the Lincoln Administration was able to overcome Yankee resistance to wartime tax hikes to wage a war against a Southern Confederacy that resolutely resisted any type of centralized taxation until, of course, it was too late. …
A Portrait Of The Internet As A Young Man, Ann Bartow
A Portrait Of The Internet As A Young Man, Ann Bartow
Michigan Law Review
In brief, the core theory of Jonathan Zittrain's 2008 book The Future of the Internet-And How to Stop It is this: good laws, norms, and code are needed to regulate the Internet, to prevent bad laws, norms, and code from compromising its creative capabilities and fettering its fecund flexibility. A far snarkier if less alliterative summary would be "We have to regulate the Internet to preserve its open, unregulated nature." Zittrain posits that either a substantive series of unfortunate Internet events or one catastrophic one will motivate governments to try to regulate cyberspace in a way that promotes maximum stability, …
Do Liquidated Damages Encourage Breach? A Psychological Experiment, Tess Wilkinson-Ryan
Do Liquidated Damages Encourage Breach? A Psychological Experiment, Tess Wilkinson-Ryan
Michigan Law Review
This Article offers experimental evidence that parties are more willing to exploit efficient-breach opportunities when the contract in question includes a liquidated-damages clause. Economists claim that the theory of efficient breach allows us to predict when parties will choose to breach a contract if the legal remedy for breach is expectation damages. However, the economic assumption of rational wealth-maximizing actors fails to capture important, shared, nonmonetary values and incentives that shape behavior in predictable ways. When interpersonal obligations are informal or underspecified, people act in accordance with shared community norms, like the moral norm of keeping promises. However, when sanctions …
Preserving A Racial Hierarchy: A Legal Analysis Of The Disparate Racial Impact Of Legacy Preferences In University Admissions, Kathryn Ladewski
Preserving A Racial Hierarchy: A Legal Analysis Of The Disparate Racial Impact Of Legacy Preferences In University Admissions, Kathryn Ladewski
Michigan Law Review
Many public and private universities around the country employ legacy admissions preferences in order to give children of alumni special consideration in the admissions process. Such preferences disproportionately benefit white applicants at the cost of their nonwhite counterparts, because past generations of college students were less diverse than today's applicant pool. However, universities argue that their legacy preferences are justified because they assist in alumni fundraising efforts. This Note presents a statistical analysis to argue that legacy preferences are prohibited by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because they have a discriminatory effect on minority college applicants and have not …
Review Of Understanding Labor And Employment Law In China, By Ronald C.Brown, Nicholas C. Howson
Review Of Understanding Labor And Employment Law In China, By Ronald C.Brown, Nicholas C. Howson
Reviews
Any attempt to analyze China’s comprehensive labor reform over the past three decades faces at least two dilemmas. First, the analyst must confront the task of describing how the Chinese state has dismantled the “work unit” (or danwei)- based “iron rice bowl” employment and entitlements system, replacing that comforting but low-production employment and social security scheme with formally-proclaimed legal rights and institutions apparently designed to protect employees in a functioning labor market. Second, the analyst must track how the state’s commitment (at all levels of government) to implementation of proclaimed legal and institutional protections has waxed and waned, based upon …
Leaps And Bounds, Nestor M. Davidson
Leaps And Bounds, Nestor M. Davidson
Michigan Law Review
Imagine how stunted our understanding of the federal government would be without any detailed scholarly examination of the U.S. Constitution itself. As remarkable as that sounds, that is essentially the problem that Gerald Frug and David Barron have set out to remedy for local governments in their superb City Bound. In the book, Frug and Barron take a comprehensive, empirical look at the legal frameworks under which cities and other local governments operate, providing an invaluable roadmap for understanding the hidden architecture of legal constraints that-largely without notice-are shaping America's urban future. Why this kind of analysis has rarely been …
Visionary Pragmatism And The Value Of Privacy In The Twenty-First Century, Danielle Keats Citron, Leslie Meltzer Henry
Visionary Pragmatism And The Value Of Privacy In The Twenty-First Century, Danielle Keats Citron, Leslie Meltzer Henry
Michigan Law Review
Part I of our Review discusses the central premises of Understanding Privacy, with particular attention paid to Solove's pragmatic methodology and his taxonomy of privacy. We introduce his pluralistic approach to conceptualizing privacy, which urges decision makers to assess privacy problems in context, and we explore his view that meaningful choices about privacy depend on an appreciation of how privacy benefits society as a whole. We also describe how Solove's taxonomy aims to account for the variety of activities that threaten privacy. In Part II, we analyze the strengths of Solove's pragmatism by demonstrating its functionality and flexibility in …
A Review Of Richard A. Posner, How Judges Think (2008), Jeffrey S. Sutton
A Review Of Richard A. Posner, How Judges Think (2008), Jeffrey S. Sutton
Michigan Law Review
I was eager to enter the judiciary. I liked the title: federal judge. I liked the job security: life tenure. And I could tolerate the pay: the same as Richard Posner's. That, indeed, may have been the most flattering part of the opportunity-that I could hold the same title and have the same pay grade as one of America's most stunning legal minds. Don't think I didn't mention it when I had the chance. There is so much to admire about Judge Posner-his lively pen, his curiosity, his energy, his apparent understanding of: everything. He has written 53 books, more …
The Vitality Of The American Sovereign, Todd E. Pettys
The Vitality Of The American Sovereign, Todd E. Pettys
Michigan Law Review
The proposition that "the people" are the preeminent sovereign in the United States has long been a tenet of American public life. The authors of the Declaration of Independence characterized the American people's sovereignty as a "self-evident" truth when announcing the colonies' decision to sever their ties with Great Britain, the delegates to the Philadelphia Convention in 1787 invoked the people's sovereignty when framing the nation's Constitution, and Americans today exercise their sovereignty each time they cast their ballots on Election Day. Yet what prerogatives, precisely, does the people's sovereignty entail? In modern America, where neither a bloody revolution nor …
If I Had A Hammer: Can Shepardizing, Synthesis, And Other Tools Of Legal Writing Help Build Hope For Law Students?, Edward R. Becker
If I Had A Hammer: Can Shepardizing, Synthesis, And Other Tools Of Legal Writing Help Build Hope For Law Students?, Edward R. Becker
Articles
Are lawyers mechanics? In 1920, photographer Lewis Hines took a striking photo of a powerhouse mechanic sure-handedly wielding a large wrench to tighten bolts on a steam pump. This picture may bring to mind many things, but I suspect that many legal writing professors in our (past or present) incarnations as practicing attorneys would not look at this image and think, "My job is a lot like that." Similarly, I assume that many of our students do not think of a lawyer's role in this way. Indeed, many of our students might have chosen to pursue a career in law …