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Spiritualism And Will(S) In The Age Of Contract, Christopher J. Buccafusco
Spiritualism And Will(S) In The Age Of Contract, Christopher J. Buccafusco
Christopher J. Buccafusco
Spiritualism was one of the most salient cultural phenomena of late-nineteenth-century American life. The belief of considerable numbers of respectable citizens that they could communicate with the dead via an entranced medium called into question both popular and scientific conceptions of rationality, volition, and freedom. In turn, these changing ideas about the mind challenged American law’s commitment to its belief in free and reasonable legal actors. This Article, the first to consider Spiritualism’s implications for American law, examines the legal reaction to the anxieties Spiritualism generated for the age of contract. Principally, it looks at the judicial response to cases …
Hedonic Adaptation And The Settlement Of Civil Lawsuits (With J. Bronsteen & J. Masur), Christopher J. Buccafusco
Hedonic Adaptation And The Settlement Of Civil Lawsuits (With J. Bronsteen & J. Masur), Christopher J. Buccafusco
Christopher J. Buccafusco
This paper examines the burgeoning psychological literature on happiness and hedonic adaptation (a person's capacity to preserve or recapture her level of happiness by adjusting to changed circumstances), bringing this literature to bear on a previously overlooked aspect of the civil litigation process: the probability of pre-trial settlement. The glacial pace of civil litigation is commonly thought of as a regrettable source of costs to the relevant parties. Even relatively straightforward personal injury lawsuits can last for as long as two years, delaying the arrival of necessary redress to the tort victim and forcing the litigants to expend ever greater …