Legal Theory Commons^™

Do My Rights Get In The Way Of My Freedom? An Examination Of The Role Of Rights In A Society Of Empowered People, John H. Morris Jr.

University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class

No abstract provided.

Repurposed Narratives: The Battle Of Ṣiffīn And The Historical Memory Of The Umayyad Dynasty, Aaron M. Hagler

Mathal/Mashal

The Battle of Ṣiffīn (36/657) is the flash point in the emergence of sects within Islam. The presentation of the Ṣiffīn story in Arabic historical writing therefore changed over time as the sectarian split among Sunnīs and Shīʿites became increasingly defined. This paper will trace the development of the presentation of the Ṣiffīn story in Arabic histories across developing Sunnī and Shīʿite identity crystallization and the region of origin of their authors, as well as literary and stylistic developments in the field of Arabic historical writing.

The specific historians examined have been chosen in part because they demonstrate a ...

Social Hierarchies And The Formation Of Customary Property Law In Pre-Industrial China And England, Taisu Zhang

Faculty Scholarship

Comparative lawyers and economists have often assumed that traditional Chinese laws and customs reinforced the economic and political dominance of elites and, therefore, were unusually “despotic” towards the poor. Such assumptions are highly questionable: Quite the opposite, one of the most striking characteristics of Qing and Republican property institutions is that they often gave significantly greater economic protection to the poorer segments of society than comparable institutions in early modern England. In particular, Chinese property customs afforded much stronger powers of redemption to landowners who had pawned their land. In both societies, land-pawning occurred far more frequently among poorer households ...

Globalization And Law: Law Beyond The State, Ralf Michaels

Faculty Scholarship

The chapter provides an introduction into law and globalization for sociolegal studies. Instead of treating globalization as an external factor that impacts the law, globalization and law are here viewed as intertwined. I suggest that three types of globalization should be distinguished—globalization as empirical phenomenon, globalization as theory, and globalization as ideology. I go on to discuss one central theme of globalization, namely in what way society, and therefore law, move beyond the state. This is done along the three classical elements of the state—territory, population/citizenship, and government. The role of all of these elements is shifting ...

Introduction To Marshall Digital Scholar/Everything You Thought You Knew About Copyright, Jingping Zhang, Monica Brooks, Paris E. Webb, Larry Sheret

MU IR Day: April 11, 2013

Copyright Primer: demystifying the law and best practices for librarians. Ignorance of the law is no longer acceptable and individuals can now be assessed astronomically high statutory damages per infringement. Join us for a frank and informative discussion regarding current copyright law and application in your library when working with digital publisher content. We don’t pretend to have all the answers but our team will share our MDS workflow for securing permissions for inclusion in the institutional repository for public access

Against Endowment Theory: Experimental Economics And Legal Scholarship, Gregory Klass, Kathryn Zeiler

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Endowment theory holds the mere ownership of a thing causes people to assign greater value to it than they otherwise would. The theory entered legal scholarship in the early 1990s and quickly eclipsed other accounts of how ownership affects valuation. Today, appeals to a generic “endowment effect” can be found throughout the legal literature. Recent experimental results, however, suggest that the empirical evidence for endowment theory is weak at best. Familiar early experiments, which used trades of mugs and candy bars or the sale or purchase of lottery tickets, employed procedures that did not rule out alternative explanations. By altering ...

Asymmetric Empirical Similarity, Joshua C. Teitelbaum

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The paper suggests a similarity function for applications of empirical similarity theory in which the notion of similarity is asymmetric. I propose defining similarity in terms of a quasimetric. I suggest a particular quasimetric and explore the properties of the empirical similarity model given this function. The proposed function belongs to the class of quasimetrics induced by skewed norms. Finally, I provide a skewness axiom that, when imposed in lieu of the symmetry axiom in the main result of Billot et al. (2008), characterizes an exponential similarity function based on a skewed norm.

Foreword: Academic Influence On The Court, Neal K. Katyal

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The months leading up to the Supreme Court’s blockbuster decision on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) were characterized by a prodigious amount of media coverage that purported to analyze how the legal challenge to Obamacare went mainstream. The nation’s major newspapers each had a prominent story describing how conservative academics, led by Professor Randy Barnett, had a long-term strategy to make the case appear credible. In the first weeks after the ACA’s passage, the storyline went, the lawsuit’s prospects of success were thought to be virtually nil. Professor (and former Solicitor General) Charles Fried stated that ...

Interpretation And Construction In Altering Rules, Gregory Klass

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay is a response to Ian Ayres's, "Regulating Opt-Out: An Economic Theory of Altering Rules," 121 Yale L.J. 2032 (2012). Ayres identifies an important question: How does the law decide when parties have opted-out of a contractual default? Unfortunately, his article tells only half of the story about such altering rules. Ayres cares about rules designed to instruct parties on how to get the terms that they want. By focusing on such rules he ignores altering rules designed instead to interpret the nonlegal meaning of the parties' acts or agreement. This limited vision is characteristic of economic ...