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Full-Text Articles in Law

A New Agenda For The Cultural Study Of Law: Taking On The Technicalities, Annelise Riles Jul 2005

A New Agenda For The Cultural Study Of Law: Taking On The Technicalities, Annelise Riles

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

This article urges humanistic legal studies to take the technical dimensions of law as a central focus of inquiry. Using archival and ethnographic investigations into developments in American Conflict of Laws doctrines as an example, and building on insights in the anthropology of knowledge and in science and technology studies that focus on technical practices in scientific and engineering domains, it aims to show that the technologies of law - an ideology that law is a tool and an accompanying technical aesthetic of legal knowledge - are far more central and far more interesting dimensions of legal practice than humanists …


It's The Aggregation, Stupid! [Book Review], Josh Chafetz Apr 2005

It's The Aggregation, Stupid! [Book Review], Josh Chafetz

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

This Comment reviews James Surowiecki's book, The Wisdom of Crowds (2004). It first situates Surowiecki's arguments with respect to traditional ideas of crowd stupidity, on the one hand, and Hayekian arguments about spontaneously ordering systems, on the other. Surowiecki notes that crowds can be both much smarter and much stupider than their component parts. The Comment examines Surowiecki's criteria for distinguishing smart crowds from stupid ones. It then applies those criteria to juries and theories of deliberative democracy, and makes several suggestions as to how we can structure deliberative institutions so as to make them wiser than their members.


The Fate Of Firms: Explaining Mergers And Bankruptcies, Clas Bergström, Theodore Eisenberg, Stefan Sundgren, Martin T. Wells Mar 2005

The Fate Of Firms: Explaining Mergers And Bankruptcies, Clas Bergström, Theodore Eisenberg, Stefan Sundgren, Martin T. Wells

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Using a uniquely complete data set of more than 50,000 observations of approximately 16,000 corporations, we test theories that seek to explain which firms become merger targets and which firms go bankrupt. We find that merger activity is much greater during prosperous periods than during recessions. In bad economic times, firms in industries with high bankruptcy rates are less likely to file for bankruptcy than they are in better years, supporting the market illiquidity arguments made by Shleifer and Vishny (1992). At the firm level, we find that, among poorly performing firms, the likelihood of merger increases with poorer performance, …


Death Sentence Rates And County Demographics: An Empirical Study, Theodore Eisenberg Jan 2005

Death Sentence Rates And County Demographics: An Empirical Study, Theodore Eisenberg

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The number of murders in a state largely determines the size of a state's death row. The more murders, the larger the death row. This fundamental relation yields surprising results, including the newsworthy finding that Texas's death sentencing rate is not unusually high. Recent state-level research also underscores the importance of race in the demography of death row. Death penalty research has long emphasized race's role, and with good reason--a racial hierarchy exists in death sentence rates. Black defendants who murder white victims receive death sentences at the highest rate; white defendants who murder white victims receive death sentences at …


Brown V. Board Of Education, Footnote 11, And Multidisciplinarity, Michael Heise Jan 2005

Brown V. Board Of Education, Footnote 11, And Multidisciplinarity, Michael Heise

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.


Education And Interrogation: Comparing Brown And Miranda, John H. Blume, Sheri Lynn Johnson, Ross Feldmann Jan 2005

Education And Interrogation: Comparing Brown And Miranda, John H. Blume, Sheri Lynn Johnson, Ross Feldmann

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Although the Warren Court had its share of grand decisions, perhaps it should be known instead for its grand goals--particularly the goals of ending America's shameful history of segregation and of providing a broad array of constitutional rights to persons accused of committing crimes. Brown v. Board of Education and Miranda v. Arizona, the two most well-known decisions of the Warren Court (and possibly the two most well-known decisions in the history of the Supreme Court), best capture the Court's labor in the rocky fields of our nation's legal, political, and cultural life. In this Article, we explore certain parallels …