Law and Economics Commons^™

The Situational Character: A Critical Realist Perspective On The Human Animal, Jon Hanson, David Yosifon

Faculty Publications

This Article is dedicated to retiring the now-dominant "rational actor" model of human agency, together with its numerous "dispositionist" cohorts, and replacing them with a new conception of human agency that the authors call the "situational character." This is a key installment of a larger project recently introduced in an article titled

The Situation: An Introduction to the Situational Character, Critical Realism, Power Economics, and Deep Capture. That introductory article adumbrated, often in broad stroke, the central premises and some basic conclusions of a new approach to legal theory and policy analysis. This Article provides a more complete version of …

The New Moralizers: Transforming The Conservative Legal Agenda, David A. Super

Faculty Scholarship

The essential elements of a wide range of social policies can be described in terms of responses to three basic questions. First, what burdens must the innocent carry? Second, what burdens must the blameworthy bear? And third, how does society assess blame? This Essay examines the increasingly successful efforts of a faction of social conservatives, called here the new moralizers, to reshape the resolution of each of these three issues and with them a wide range of social policies. Although the relative importance of these three questions has varied over time, the twentieth century saw a movement away from costly …