Law Commons^™

Law And Biology: Toward An Integrated Model Of Human Behavior, Owen D. Jones

Owen Jones

As first year law students unhappily discover, the meaning of "law" is frustratingly protean, shifting by usage and user. Depending on whom you ask, law is a system of rules, a body of precedents, a legislative enactment, a collection of norms, a process by which social goals are pursued, or some dynamic mixture of these. Law's principal purpose is to define and protect individual rights, to ensure public order, to resolve disputes, to redistribute wealth, to dispense justice, to prevent or compensate for injury, to optimize economic efficiency, or perhaps to do something else. And yet one thing is irreducibly …

Law, Responsibility, And The Brain, Owen D. Jones, Hakwan C. Lau, Dean Mobbs, Christopher D. Frith

Owen Jones

This article addresses new developments in neuroscience, and their implications for law. It explores, for example, the relationships between brain injury and violence, as well as the connections between mental disorders and criminal behaviors. It discusses a variety of issues surrounding brain fingerprinting, the use of brain scans for lie detection, and concerns about free will. It considers the possible uses for, and legal implications of, brain-imaging technology. And it also identifies six essential limits on the use of brain imaging in courtroom procedures.

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 …

Behavioral Genetics And Crime, In Context, Owen D. Jones

Owen Jones

This Article provides an introduction to some of the key issues at the intersection of behavioral genetics and crime.

It provides, among other things, an overview of the emerging points of consensus, scientifically, on what behavioral genetics can and cannot tell us about criminal behavior. It also discusses a variety of important implications (as well as complexities) of attempting to use insights of behavioral genetics in legal contexts.

Guantánamo Bodies: Law, Media, And Biopower, Cary Federman, Dave Holmes

Cary Federman

The idea of the Guantánamo detainee as a Muselmann, the lowest order of concentration camp inmates, contains within it important implications for the new understanding of sovereignty in the era of Guantánamo, in an age of exception. The purpose of this article is to explain the status of those who are detained at Guantánamo Bay. Stated broadly, in assessing that status, we will emphasize the connection between the altered meaning of sovereignty that has accompanied the placing of prisoners in an American penal colony in Cuba and the biopolitical status of the prisoners who reside there. More particularly, we …

Hidden Law: Taking The Comments More Seriously, Melissa T. Lonegrass

Melissa T. Lonegrass

No abstract provided.

Legal Burdens Of Proof Under U.S. Law, Tsion Chudnovsky

Tsion Chudnovsky, JD

Practical Equality, Robert L. Tsai

Robert L Tsai

The Origins Of The Modern Mugshot, Tsion Chudnovsky

Tsion Chudnovsky, JD

The 200,000 Cards Of Dimitri Yurasov: Further Reflections On Scholarship And Truth, Daniel A. Farber, Suzanna Sherry

Suzanna Sherry

No abstract provided.

The Brandeis Human Rights Advocacy Program: Advancing The Human Rights Of The Immigrant, Noncitizen And Refugee Community, Enid Trucios-Haynes

Enid F. Trucios-Haynes

The Human Rights Advocacy Program (HRAP or the Program) at the Brandeis School of Law, University of Louisville, represents a unique collaboration of law faculty and students providing critical resources to the local immigrant, noncitizen and refugee community in Louisville, Kentucky, as well as local service providers to this community. The Program, established in Spring 2014, is distinctive because of its non-hierarchical internal model and the participatory action research and policy focus of its work. The Program is a distinguished from the typical law school clinical model in its focus on community engaged research, policy advocacy, and service, as well …

The Accidental Crit Iii: The Unbearable Lightness Of Being ... Pedro?, Pedro A. Malavet

Pedro A. Malavet

Building A Regime Of Restrictive Immigration Laws, 1840-1945, Felice Batlan

Felice J Batlan

Signature And Illusion: Lessons From The Baroque For 'Truth' In Law, Arts And Humanities, Richard Mohr

Richard Mohr

Basic to contemporary problems in the disciplines of representation and interpretation is a split between a naïve acceptance of bare facts, presumed to exist in their own ‘objective’ world of objects, and the actions of subjects who interpret an intersubjective world. The solution is sought in some ‘new’ epistemologies: Martín Alcoff, Grosz, Kristeva, Butler, as well as in Benjamin and Gadamer, who look back to older ways of knowing. The methodology is an archaeology of these ways of knowing, focussed on a crucial transition in the understanding of representation between the renaissance and the baroque. It uses quintessential methods of …

California Brn Nursing License Complaint Process Infographic, Tsion Chudnovsky

Tsion Chudnovsky, JD

Plastic Injuries, Anne Bloom

Anne Bloom

Perceptions of injuries are culturally mediated, mutable, plastic. In tort litigation, however, the cultural plasticity with which we perceive and experience injuries is often ignored. This Article explores the cultural plasticity with which we perceive injuries through the lens of plastic surgery litigation. It argues that determinations of injury in plastic surgery litigation turn on the culturally biased — and highly mutable — perceptions of medical professionals. More broadly, the Article argues that culture shapes perceptions of injuries in tort litigation as a whole. To make these points, the Article examines a prototypical plastic surgery case and surveys a range …

A Fresh Look At Title Vii: Sexual Orientation Discrimination As Sex Discrimination, Anthony Michael Kreis

Anthony Michael Kreis

Law’S Facilitating Role In The Field Of Social Enterprise., Evelyn Brody

Evelyn Brody

Convergence And Divergence In International Economic Law And Politics, Sungjoon Cho, Jürgen Kurtz

Sungjoon Cho

Athletes, Veterans, And Neuroscience: A Symposium On Traumatic Brain Injury And Law, Jane Campbell Moriarty

Jane Campbell Moriarty

Beyond Greed Is Good: Pop Culture In The Business Law Classroom, Felice Batlan, Joshua Bass

Felice J Batlan

No abstract provided.

In Search Of The Final Head Ball: The Case For Eliminating Heading From Soccer,, N. Jeremi Duru

N. Jeremi Duru

Scaffolding On Steroids: Meeting Your Students Where They Are Is Harder Than Ever ... And Easier Than You Think, Kari L. Aamot Johnson

Kari L. Aamot Johnson

No abstract provided.

Tactful Inattention: Erving Goffman, Privacy In The Digital Age, And The Virtue Of Averting One's Eyes, Elizabeth De Armond

Elizabeth De Armond

No abstract provided.

Martin's March, David B. Oppenheimer

David B Oppenheimer

Discusses the significance of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Role of Martin Luther King Jr. in desegregation demonstrations; Historical overview of the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. INSET: More to be done..

Congress And The Supreme Court's Conflict Over Antidiscrimination Law, David B. Oppenheimer

David B Oppenheimer

In 1968, in the days following King's assassination, Congress passed the Fair Housing Act, prohibiting most housing discrimination based on race, color, religion, or national origin. [...] later that same year, the Supreme Court found that the long-dormant 1866 and 1867 Civil Rights Acts, prohibiting private racial discrimination, which had been ignored since the end of Reconstruction, remained valid. Since 1968, Congress has passed several laws intended to broaden federal civil rights, either to include more groups or, with increasing frequency, simply to reverse Supreme Court decisions.\n (California's statute applies to employers of five or more employees and prohibits harassment …

Freedoms Of Collective Speech: A Theory Of Protected Communications By Organizations, Communities, And The State, Meir Dan-Cohen

Meir Dan-Cohen

Corporations' first amendment rights have received considerable judicial and scholarly attention in recent years. However, corporate speech cannot be studied adequately in isolation; rather, it is more fruitfully investigated within the broader context of collective speech. The author accordingly presents a theoretical framework for dealing with communications by different types of collectivities. The main distinction is between two paradigm collective entities: organizations and communities. Although it makes sense to ascribe speech to both, the grounds for extending constitutional protection are fundamentally different. Whereas communal speech has in and of itself expressive value that raises the first amendment's primary concerns, organizational …

Teaching International Law: Beyond The Law School Experience, Charlotte Ku

Charlotte Ku

As teachers, it is perhaps natural for us to think about teaching in the classroom context, although this panel is demonstrating the teaching opportunities that may exist outside of a single course or courses in international law.

News Media As Mediators, Carol Pauli

Carol Pauli

Journalism thrives on conflict, a classic "news value," which can make a story newsworthy. As a result, the normal routines of reporters and editors tend to emphasize extreme voices and combative themes, triggering the criticism that news coverage of an event is "more likely to escalate a conflict than to pacify it."

Even so, journalism has made some legendary journeys into conflict resolution. In 1977, for example, CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite conducted separate interviews with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, which led directly to Sadat's historic visit to Jerusalem. In 1985, Ted Koppel, in …