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In Memoriam: Hans, Cass R. Sunstein

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No abstract provided.

In Memoriam: Hans, Cass R. Sunstein

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No abstract provided.

Informing America: Risk, Disclosure, And The First Amendment, Cass R. Sunstein

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No abstract provided.

On Analogical Reasoning Commentary, Cass R. Sunstein

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Property And The Politics Of Distrust, Richard A. Epstein

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A Common Lawyer Looks At Constitutional Interpretation, Richard A. Epstein

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The Politics Of Women's Wrongs And The Bill Of 'Rights': A Bicentennial Perspective, Mary E. Becker

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Mandatory Penalties, Michael Tonry

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To many public officials, promotion and enactment of mandatory penalty laws are important symbols of their concern for public safety and citizens' fear of crime. In practice, mandatory minimum-penalty laws accomplish few of their stated objectives and produce unwanted consequences. Their deterrent effects range from nonexistent to short-lived. When they call for short mandatory prison terms for serious crimes, they are often irrelevant because longer sentences are generally imposed. When they mandate longer terms (five, ten, twenty years), they are often circumvented by lawyers and judges. They reduce defendants' incentives to plead guilty, reduce guilty plea rates, and lengthen case …

Salvaging The Sentencing Guidelines In Seven Easy Steps, Michael Tonry

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Light Thoughts And Night Thoughts On The American Family, Judith T. Younger

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His To Give; His To Receive; Hers To Trust: A Response To Carol M. Rose, Mary Louise Fellows

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The Upc's New Survivorship And Antilapse Provisions, Edward C. Halbach Jr., Lawrence W. Waggoner

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Law governing transfers of family property has long struggled with questions of survivorship in their many and varied forms. Important results can and regularly do turn on how such issues are resolved.

Settling For A Judge: A Comment On Clermont And Eisenberg, Samuel R. Gross

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Trial by Jury or Judge: Transcending Empiricism,1 by Kevin Clermont and Theodore Eisenberg, is not only an important article, it is unique. To most Americans, trial means trial by jury. In fact, over half of all federal trials are conducted without juries2 (including 31% of trials in cases in which the parties have the right to choose a jury3), and the proportion of bench trials in state courts is even higher.4 And yet, while there is a large literature on the outcomes of jury trials and the factors that affect them,5 nobody else has systematically compared trials by jury to …

The Tragedy Of The Commons, Part Two, James E. Krier

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This symposium is about the idea of "free market environmentalism" in general and the book Free Market Environmentalism, by Terry Anderson and Donald Leal,1 in particular. While I focus chiefly on Anderson and Leal's book, the discussion will necessarily involve the general idea of free market environmentalism as well. The conceit of my tide, which obviously derives from Garrett Hardin's celebrated essay on The Tragedy of the Commons,2 is this: Superficial differences aside, Hardin's essay and Anderson and Leal's book address the same fundamental problem of coordinating human behavior as it affects environmental quality. But both the essay and the …

Reforming The Law Of Gratuitous Transfers: The New Uniform Probate Code, John H. Langbein, Lawrence W. Waggoner

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In the mid-1980s the Uniform Law Commission undertook a landmark revision of the American law of gratuitous transfers. These reforms culminated in a drastically revised Uniform Probate Code ("UPC"). The revisions inspired the Albany Law Review to organize this symposium issue for the purpose of examining the 1990 UPC. In this introductory paper, we point to the main themes of the reform movement, discuss some of the traits and constraints of the uniform law process, and comment on some of the suggestions and insights that appear in the symposium articles.

On Remembering Judge Eugene P. Spellman: A Different Vision, Ira J. Kurzban, Irwin P. Stotzky

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On Integrated Pollution Control, James E. Krier

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Integrated pollution control, or IPC, can be defined for now as an approach to environmental regulation that "seeks particularly to link air, water, and waste programs. Its concern is institutional changes that reduce total risk to the environment from pollutants." 8 This sounds remarkably appealing, which perhaps explains IPC's recurring popularity. As we shall see, it enjoyed a brief celebrity about twenty years ago, and it is once again in vogue-especially within the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Is the Agency's recent interest in IPC a good thing? We worry that it is not. First of all, IPC has an …

Marital Property Rights In Transition, Lawrence W. Waggoner

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The subject of "marital property rights" is very timely because those rights are in a state of transition. The term "marital property rights" covers a vast multitude of rights or interests conferred by law on persons who occupy the status of spouse. This lecture is divided into four discrete, yet related segments. The first segment addresses how the law allocates original ownership between spouses in a marriage. The second segment turns to the intestate share of the surviving spouse. This is not a topic that high-powered estate planners get involved in very much because intestate estates are usually fairly small. …

Tax Policy And Panda Bears, Douglas A. Kahn, Jeffrey S. Lehman

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In this article. Professors Kahn and Lehman argue that the concept of tax expenditure is flawed as a tool for measuring the propriety of tax provisions. It assumes the existence of on true and correct standard of federal income taxation that applies to all circumstances. To make that a assumption, the proponents of the concept implicitly make a particular moral claim about the relative importance of a wide range of values, including efficiency, consumption/savings neutrality, privacy, distributional equity, administrabiliy, charity, and pragmatism. They then measure a tax provision's "normalcy" exclusively by how it conforms to their Platonic concept of income. …

Tax Expenditure Budgets: A Critical View, Douglas A. Kahn, Jeffrey S. Lehman

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During the past few months, Tax Notes has featured an extended discussion about the "normalcy" (or lack thereof) of accelerated depreciation. Two contributions to that discussion came from Professor Calvin Johnson of the University of Texas Law School, who disagreed with certain aspects of an article that Professor Kahn wrote in 1979. And the debate shows no sign of slowing down. The interchange over the details of accelerated depreciation offers a useful backdrop against which to consider a more general issue: the intellectual coherence of the tax expenditure budgets. The larger concept of tax expenditures was what motivated Kahn to …

Toward A Partial Economic, Game-Theoretic Analysis Of Hearsay, Richard D. Friedman

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In this Article, I offer a fundamentally different and nondoctrinaire way of approaching hearsay questions. In brief, I take the view that the resolution of a hearsay dispute, when the declarant is not on the stand, is essentially a matter of deciding who should bear the burden of producing the declarant, or more precisely, how courts should allocate that burden. Adopting a simple procedural improvement, concerning the examination of the declarant if she is produced as a witness, allows the court to allocate the burden optimally. If live testimony by the declarant would be more probative than prejudicial, then most …

Standards Of Persuasion And The Distinction Between Fact And Law, Richard D. Friedman

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The invitation to respond in these pages to Gary Lawson's very interesting article, Proving the Law, was tempting enough. But what made it irresistible was Professor Lawson's comment that he is "addressing, with a brevity that borders on the irresponsible, subjects well beyond [his] depth." Now, that's the kind of debate I really like. Let me jump right in. A principal question raised by Lawson, which I find quite interesting, may be phrased in general, and purposefully ambiguous, terms as follows: Before an actor treats a proposition as a valid2 proposition of law, what standard of persuasion should that proposition …

Evidentiary Rules And Rulings: The Role Of Treatises, Richard D. Friedman

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I have devoted large gobs of time to work on a multi-author treatise on the law of evidence.' And before even one volume is published, I will devote further multiple gobs of time to the project-which, perhaps audaciously and perhaps merely foolishly, but with heredity and precedent on our side,2 we are calling The New Wigmore. Accordingly, I found the question posed by this symposium-Does Evidence Law Matter?-rather disquieting. If it is doubtful even whether the law of evidence matters, then how much can a treatise on the law of evidence matter, and how worthwhile can such a work be? …

An Asymmetrical Approach To The Problem Of Peremptories?, Richard D. Friedman

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The Supreme Court's decision in Batson v. Kentucky, and the extension of Batson to parties other than prosecutors, may be expected to put pressure on the institution of peremptory challenges. After a brief review of the history of peremptories, this article contends that peremptories for criminal defendants serve important values of our criminal justice system. It then argues that peremptories for prosecutors are not as important, and that it may no longer be worthwhile to maintain them in light of the administrative complexities inevitable in a system of peremptories consistent with Batson. The article concludes that the asymmetry of allowing …

Infinite Strands, Infinitesimally Thin: Storytelling, Bayesianism, Hearsay And Other Evidence, Richard D. Friedman

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David Schum has long been one of our keenest commentators on questions of inference and proof. He has been particularly interested in, and illuminating on, the subject of "cascaded," or multi-step, inference.' This is a subject of importance to lawyers, because most evidence at trial can be analyzed in terms of cascaded inference. Usually, the proposition that the fact finder2 might immediately infer from the evidence is not itself an element of a crime, claim, or defense. Most often, an extra inference would be required to jump from that proposition to a proposition that the law deems material. Thus, inference …

The Benevolent Paternalism Of Japanese Criminal Justice, Daniel H. Foote

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Models for a criminal-justice system based on an ethos of rehabilitation and reintegration-such as Llewellyn's "parental" and Griffiths' "family" models-have been regarded as idealistic but unworkable in the real world, except perhaps in totalitarian or primitive societies. Professor Foote, however, has found in Japan just such a model, which he labels "benevolent paternalism." The Japanese criminal-justice system is benevolent in that its goal is to achieve reformation and reintegration into society through lenient sanctions tailored to the offender's particular circumstances. The system is paternalism in that it allows substantial discretion to the state in both gathering and using information about …

Law Librarianship: A Forum, Bob Berring, Mark Estes, Penny Hazelton, Kathie Price, Joanne Zich

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Law librarianship is a profession that has a proud history and a bright future, yet it is not without its problems and concerns. For this issue of Law Library Lights, we have gathered together a number of luminaries in the field and asked them a number of questions related to the most important issues facing our community: professional image, additional roles, education and training, ethics, minority recruitment, budget crunch, technology, vendors, and the future.

This exchange was published in volume 35, issue number 5, May/June 1992.

A Superfund Trivia Test: A Comment On The Complexity Of Environmental Laws, William H. Rodgers, Jr.

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Professor Rodgers examines the reasons for the American obsession with trivia. While unable to determine the cause of the obsession, he does provide some insight on the usefulness and need for the information in the study of environmental law.

Legal Scholarship: Insiders, Outsiders, Editors Symposium On Legal Scholarship, Richard Delgado

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Rodrigo's Second Chronicle: The Economics And Politics Of Race 1993 Survey Of Books Relating To The Law, Richard Delgado

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