Law Commons^™

Defending A Mixed Economy, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

This essay reviews Jacob S. Hacker's and Paul Pierson's very engaging book, American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget what Made America Prosper (2016).

The "Rabbi's Daughter" And The "Jewish Jane Addams": Jewish Women, Legal Aid, And The Fluidity Of Identity, 1890-1930, Felice Batlan

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The "Rabbi's Daughter" And The "Jewish Jane Addams": Jewish Women, Legal Aid, And The Fluidity Of Identity, 1890-1930, Felice Batlan

All Faculty Scholarship

This symposium article discusses an unexamined area of legal aid and legal history—the role that late nineteenth and early twentieth century Jewish women played in the delivery of legal aid as social workers, lawyers, and, importantly, as cultural and legal brokers. It presents two such women who represented different types and models of legal aid—Minnie Low of the Chicago Bureau of Personal Service, a Jewish social welfare organization, and Rosalie Loew of the Legal Aid Society of New York. I interrogate how these women negotiated their identities as Jewish professional women, what role being Jewish and female played in shaping …

Women And Justice For The Poor: A History Of Legal Aid, 1863–1945, Felice J. Batlan

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Women's Legal History Symposium Introduction: Making History, Felice J. Batlan

All Faculty Scholarship

This essay introduces the Chicago-Kent Symposium on Women's Legal History: A Global Perspective. It seeks to situate the field of women's legal history and to explore what it means to begin writing a transnational women's history which transcends and at times disrupts the nation state. In doing so, it sets forth some of the fundamental premises of women's legal history and points to new ways of writing such histories.

Coase, Institutionalism, And The Origins Of Law And Economics, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

Ronald Coase merged two traditions in economics, marginalism and institutionalism. Neoclassical economics in the 1930s was characterized by an abstract conception of marginalism and frictionless resource movement. Marginal analysis did not seek to uncover the source of individual human preference or value, but accepted preference as given. It treated the business firm in the same way, focusing on how firms make market choices, but saying little about their internal workings.

“Institutionalism” historically refers to a group of economists who wrote mainly in the 1920s and 1930s. Their place in economic theory is outside the mainstream, but they have found new …

Choosing Justices: How Presidents Decide, Joel K. Goldstein

All Faculty Scholarship

Presidents play the critical role in determining who will serve as justices on the Supreme Court and their decisions inevitably influence constitutional doctrine and judicial behavior long after their terms have ended. Notwithstanding the impact of these selections, scholars have focused relatively little attention on how presidents decide who to nominate. This article contributes to the literature in the area by advancing three arguments. First, it adopts an intermediate course between the works which tend to treat the subject historically without identifying recurring patterns and those which try to reduce the process to empirical formulas which inevitably obscure considerations shaping …

Coasean Markets, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

Coase’s work emphasized the economic importance of very small markets and made a new, more marginalist form of economic “institutionalism” acceptable within mainstream economics. A Coasean market is an association of persons with competing claims on a legal entitlement that can be traded. The boundaries of both Coasean markets and Coasean firms are determined by measuring not only the costs of bargaining but also the absolute costs of moving resources from one place to another. The boundaries of a Coasean market, just as those of the Coasean business firm, are defined by the line where the marginal cost of reaching …

Revisiting Beccaria's Vision: The Enlightenment, America's Death Penalty, And The Abolition Movement, John Bessler

All Faculty Scholarship

In 1764, Cesare Beccaria, a 26-year-old Italian criminologist, penned On Crimes and Punishments. That treatise spoke out against torture and made the first comprehensive argument against state-sanctioned executions. As we near the 250th anniversary of its publication, law professor John Bessler provides a comprehensive review of the abolition movement from before Beccaria's time to the present. Bessler reviews Beccaria's substantial influence on Enlightenment thinkers and on America's Founding Fathers in particular. The Article also provides an extensive review of Eighth Amendment jurisprudence and then contrasts it with the trend in international law towards the death penalty's abolition. It then discusses …

Injustice Casts Shadow On History Of State Executions, John Bessler

All Faculty Scholarship

This article, published in the StarTribune of Minneapolis, discusses the history of lynchings and executions in the State of Minnesota. It specifically discusses miscarriages of justice that have taken place in Minnesota, along with highlighting other problems associated with capital punishment.

Conflicting Rights And The Outbreak Of The First World War, Leo Katz

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Professor Waller's Un-American Approach To Antitrust, Robert H. Lande

All Faculty Scholarship

Professor Waller asks an un-American question - what can the United States antitrust program learn from the rest of the world? This question is un-American because we in the United States rarely look to others for advice. Besides, we invented antitrust and we were practically alone in the world in enforcing antitrust for almost a century. Only during the current generation have many other nations had active and vigorous antitrust programs. Moreover, the United States is in the business of exporting our accumulated century of antitrust wisdom through a wide variety of methods, and we revel in playing this role. …

The Astonishing Year(S) Of 1996: A Confusion Of Tongues And Alphabetical Camels The First Time As Tragedy, Kenneth Lasson

All Faculty Scholarship

Such irreverence was nothing new to Nimrod. A half-century earlier he had encouraged [Abraham], who'd publicly renounced idolatry even though his father manufactured and sold graven images: how ridiculous, he reasoned, to worship clay figures that had been made the day before! Thus did Nimrod have Abraham thrown into a fiery furnace, from which, according to Midrashic legend, he emerged unscathed. Unlike Nimrod, Abraham eschewed power in favor of teaching ethics and morality to his people.

In the intervening years Nimrod concerned himself with the building of great cities as testimony to his own power and invincibility. And in 1996 …

The “Midnight Assassination Law” And Minnesota’S Anti-Death Penalty Movement, John Bessler

All Faculty Scholarship

This article traces the history of Minnesota's anti-death penalty movement and the 1889 Minnesota law - dubbed by contemporaries as the "midnight assassination law" - requiring private, nighttime executions. That law, authored by Minnesota legislator John Day Smith, restricted the number of execution spectators, prohibited newspapers from printing any execution details, and provided that only the fact of the execution could be lawfully printed. Also commonly referred to as the "John Day Smith law," this Minnesota statute was challenged as being unconstitutional by Minnesota newspapers after those newspapers printed details of a botched hanging and were charged with violating the …

The Public Interest And The Unconstitutionality Of Private Prosecutors, John Bessler

All Faculty Scholarship

This article discusses the history of private and public prosecution in the United States, including standards governing prosecutorial ethics. It argues that the use of private prosecutors is unethical and violative of defendants' constitutional rights. In particular, the article asserts that the use of such prosecutors violates due process principles and creates, at the very least, an unacceptable appearance of impropriety. The article contends that the public's interest in not having its members erroneously charged or convicted in the criminal process outweighs an interested party's right to retain a private prosecutor as set forth in some state laws. In addition …

The Roman Foundations Of European Law, William Ewald

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Our First Televised Genocide, Kenneth Lasson

All Faculty Scholarship

It is absolutely appalling that we have come so casually to observe the carnage, so passively to view the starvation over breakfast papers or dinnertime newscasts, so helplessly to watch these totally bereft human beings trudging barefoot over treacherous terrain toward the middle of nowhere.

There are other questions as well, of course, not as easily answered. Where are all their voices now, those demonstrators who so vociferously opposed war, ostensibly out of an overweening reverence for life? Is the latter-day holocaust being systematically perpetrated in northern Iraq any less horrifying than a direct hit on a camouflaged bomb shelter …

Free Exercise In The Free State: Maryland's Role In Religious Liberty And The First Amendment, Kenneth Lasson

All Faculty Scholarship

Maryland arguably holds the distinction of being the state whose early history most directly ensured, and whose citizenry was most directly affected by, the First Amendment's protection of religious freedom. Because of its relatively diverse religious population, Maryland stood out as both a champion of tolerance and a hotbed of discrimination for most of its colonial experience. Similarities have been pointed out between the first provincial government in St. Mary's, Maryland, and the American plan under the Constitution, particularly with respect to religious liberty.

This article offers a brief overview of the religious history of Maryland, focuses on important state …

A Framework For Evaluating The Antitrust Legacy Of The Reagan Administration, Robert H. Lande

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The End Of Antitrust—Or A New Beginning?, Joe Sims, Robert H. Lande

All Faculty Scholarship

Antitrust is in one of its periodic states of decline. Historically, it has rebounded from these valleys to rise to even higher peaks of enthusiastic public and political popularity. The first period of substantial antitrust activity began 15 years after the passage of the Sherman Act, and lasted into the 1920s. The Great Depression saw antitrust at its lowest, followed by Thurman Arnold's aggressive tenure, but World War II was hardly a period of great antitrust enthusiasm. The 1950 Celler-Kefauver amendment to section 7 began the golden age of antitrust, a period that lasted until the middle 1970s. So far, …

A Brief History Of Distinctions In Criminal Culpability, Paul H. Robinson

All Faculty Scholarship

The Model Penal Code identifies five levels of culpable states of mind significant to criminal liability. Professor Robinson reviews the evolution and refinement of those distinctions and considers current and future implications of viewing the Model Penal Code scheme as one stage in a continuing development.

A History Of Appalachian Coal Mines, Kenneth Lasson

All Faculty Scholarship

This portion of the study discusses the social and economic antecedents of today's Appalachian coal industry. The time covered includes from pre-history up to the date of the study (1972).

Abortion Reform, Richard D. Lamm, Steven A.G. Davison

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Part One: Historical Perspective (Of The Chesapeake Bay), Kenneth Lasson

All Faculty Scholarship

This study analyzes the legal problems in the development and management of Chesapeake Bay resources. There are threshold problems of definition - What is Chesapeake Bay? What are its resources? What role does law play in their development and management?

The "Historical Perspective" traces the political controversies that have involved the Bay since the colonies of Maryland and Virginia were first founded. In a rough sense, it defines the traditional resources of the Bay by isolating occasions when individuals, businesses and governmental bodies found themselves at cross-purposes as to how the Bay was to be used and shared.