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Full-Text Articles in Jurisprudence
Direct (Anti-)Democracy, Maxwell L. Stearns
Direct (Anti-)Democracy, Maxwell L. Stearns
Faculty Scholarship
Legal scholars, economists, and political scientists are divided on whether voter initiatives and legislative referendums tend to produce outcomes that are more (or less) majoritarian, efficient, or solicitous of minority concerns than traditional legislation. Scholars also embrace opposing views on which law-making mechanism better promotes citizen engagement, registers preference intensities, encourages compromise, and prevents outcomes masking cycling voter preferences. Despite these disagreements, commentators generally assume that the voting mechanism itself renders plebiscites more democratic than legislative lawmaking. This assumption is mistaken.
Although it might seem unimaginable that a lawmaking process that directly engages voters possesses fundamentally antidemocratic features, this Article …
Sealand, Havenco, And The Rule Of Law, James Grimmelmann
Sealand, Havenco, And The Rule Of Law, James Grimmelmann
Faculty Scholarship
In 2000, a group of American entrepreneurs moved to a former World War II anti-aircraft platform in the North Sea, seven miles off the British coast, and launched HavenCo, one of the strangest start-ups in Internet history. A former pirate radio broadcaster, Roy Bates, had occupied the platform in the 1960s, moved his family aboard, and declared it to be the sovereign Principality of Sealand. HavenCo's founders were opposed to governmental censorship and control of the Internet; by putting computer servers on Sealand, they planned to create a "data haven" for unpopular speech, safely beyond the reach of any other …