Law Commons^™

Norming "Moderation" In An "Iconic Target": Public Policy And The Regulation Of Religious Anxieties In Singapore, Eugene K. B. Tan

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The maintenance of a “moderate mainstream” Muslim community as a bulwark against the fraying of harmonious ethnic relations has become a key governance concern post-September 11. In light of the global concern—and often paranoia—with diasporic Islam, Islamic religious institutions and civil society have been portrayed in the popular media as hotbeds of radicalism, promoters of hatred, and recruiters for a “conflict of civilization” between the Muslim world and the modern world. Having declared itself a terrorist's “iconic target,” Singapore has taken a broad-based community approach in advancing inter-religious tolerance, including a subtle initiative to include the “Muslim civil society” in …

Tradable Patent Rights, Ian Ayres, Gideon Parchomovsky

All Faculty Scholarship

Patent thickets may inefficiently retard cumulative innovation. This paper explores two alternative mechanisms that may be used to weed out patent thickets. Both mechanisms are intended to reduce the number of patents in our society. The first mechanism we discuss is price based regulation of patents through a system of increasing renewal fees. The second and more innovative mechanism is quantity based regulation through the establishment of a system of Tradable Patent Rights. The formalization of tradable patent rights would essentially create a secondary market for patent permits in which patent protection will be bought and sold.

Paying To Save: Tax Withholding And Asset Allocation Among Low- And Moderate-Income Taxpayers, Michael S. Barr, Jane Dokko

Law & Economics Working Papers Archive: 2003-2009

We analyze the phenomenon that low- and moderate-income (LMI) tax filers exhibit a “preference for over-withholding” their taxes, a measure we derive from a unique set of questions administered in a dataset of 1,003 households, which we collected through the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan. We argue that the relationship between their withholding preference and portfolio allocation across liquid and illiquid assets is consistent with models with present-biased preferences, and that individuals exhibit self-control problems when making their consumption and saving decisions. Our results support a model in which individuals use commitment devices to constrain their consumption. …

Lawyers And Great Expectations In Pakistan, Shubhankar Dam

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

No abstract provided.

The Origins Of Shared Intuitions Of Justice, Paul H. Robinson, Robert O. Kurzban, Owen D. Jones

All Faculty Scholarship

Contrary to the common wisdom among criminal law scholars, the empirical evidence reveals that people's intuitions of justice are often specific, nuanced, and widely shared. Indeed, with regard to the core harms and evils to which criminal law addresses itself – physical aggression, takings without consent, and deception in transactions – the shared intuitions are stunningly consistent, across cultures as well as demographics. It is puzzling that judgments of moral blameworthiness, which seem so complex and subjective, reflect such a remarkable consensus. What could explain this striking result? The authors theorize that one explanation may be an evolved predisposition toward …

International Law's Lessons For The Law Of The Lakes, Joseph W. Dellapenna

Working Paper Series

The eight Governors of the Great Lakes States signed a proposed new compact for the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence basin on December 13, 2005, and they joined with the Premiers of Ontario and Québec in a parallel agreement on the same topic on the same day. Neither document is legally binding—the proposed new compact because it has not yet been ratified by any state nor consented to by Congress; the parallel agreement because it is not intended to be legally binding. Both documents are designed to preclude the export of water from the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence basin apart from …

The Impossibility Of A Prescriptive Paretian, Robert C. Hockett

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Most normatively oriented economists appear to be “welfarist” and Paretian to one degree or another: They deem responsiveness to individual preferences, and satisfaction of one or more of the Pareto criteria, to be a desirable attribute of any social welfare function. I show that no strictly “welfarist” or Paretian social welfare function can be normatively prescriptive. Economists who prescribe must embrace at least one value apart from or additional to “welfarism” and Paretianism, and in fact will do best to dispense with Pareto entirely.

Face To Face With “It”: And Other Neglected Contexts Of Health Privacy, Anita L. Allen

All Faculty Scholarship

“Illness has recently emerged from the obscurity of medical treatises and private diaries to acquire something like celebrity status,” Professor David Morris astutely observes. Great plagues and epidemics throughout history have won notoriety as collective disasters; and the Western world has made curiosities of an occasional “Elephant Man,” “Wild Boy,” or pair of enterprising “Siamese Twins.” People now reveal their illnesses and medical procedures in conversation, at work and on the internet. This paper explores the reasons why, despite the celebrity of disease and a new openness about health problems, privacy and confidentiality are still values in medicine.

Norming "Moderation'' In An "Iconic Target'': Public Policy And The Regulation Of Religious Anxieties In Singapore, Eugene K. B. Tan

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The proposed research will examine Singapore’s response to terrorism post September 11, in particular the maintenance of a “moderate mainstream” Muslim community as a bulwark against the fraying of harmonious ethnic relations. In light of the global concern—and often paranoia—with diasporic Islam, Islamic religious institutions and civil society have been portrayed in the popular media as hotbeds of radicalism, promoters of hatred, and recruiters for a ‘conflict of civilization’ between the Muslim world and the modern world. Islamist attacks in Madrid and London have since brought increased urgency to the question of how to contain or moderate Islamic radicalism among …

Separating Contract And Promise, Aditi Bagchi

All Faculty Scholarship

Contract has been conceptualized as a species of promise. Treating contractual promise as a kind of promise highlights certain important aspects of contracting, but it also obscures essential differences between legally binding and everyday, or what I will call “private,” promises. The moral character of a private promise depends on the fact that it is not only freely made but also freely kept. Most contractual promises are not intended to have and (by definition) do not have this voluntary character. A promisor essentially opts out of the private practice of promising when she assigns to a third party the authority …

Is Open Source Software The New Lex Mercatoria?, Fabrizio Marrella, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

Early Internet scholars proclaimed that the transnational nature of the Internet rendered it inherently unregulable by conventional governments. Instead, the Internet would be governed by customs and practices established by the end user community in a manner reminiscent of the lex mercatoria, which spontaneously emerged during medieval times to resolve international trade disputes independently and autonomously from national law. Subsequent events have revealed these claims to have been overly optimistic, as national governments have evinced both the inclination and the ability to exert influence, if not outright control, over the physical infrastructure, the domain name system, and the content flowing …

Well-Being, Inequality And Time: The Time-Slice Problem And Its Policy Implications, Matthew D. Adler

All Faculty Scholarship

Should equality be viewed from a lifetime or “sublifetime” perspective? In measuring the inequality of income, for example, should we measure the inequality of lifetime income or of annual income? In characterizing a tax as “progressive” or “regressive,” should we look to whether the annual tax burden increases with annual income, or instead to whether the lifetime tax burden increases with lifetime income? Should the overriding aim of anti-poverty programs be to reduce chronic poverty: being badly off for many years, because of low human capital or other long-run factors? Or is the moral claim of the impoverished person a …

Concordance & Conflict In Intuitions Of Justice, Paul H. Robinson, Robert O. Kurzban

All Faculty Scholarship

The common wisdom among criminal law theorists and policy makers is that the notion of desert is vague and the subject to wide disagreement. Yet the empirical evidence in available studies, including new studies reported here, paints a dramatically different picture. While moral philosophers may disagree on some aspects of moral blameworthiness, people's intuitions of justice are commonly specific, nuanced, and widely shared. Indeed, with regard to the core harms and evils to which criminal law addresses itself – physical aggression, takings without consent, and deception in transactions – people's shared intuitions cut across demographics and cultures. The findings raise …

Introduction To Regulation And Regulatory Processes, Cary Coglianese, Robert Kagan

All Faculty Scholarship

Regulation of business activity is nearly as old as law itself. In the last century, though, the use of regulation by modern governments has grown markedly in both volume and significance, to the point where nearly every facet of today’s economy is subject to some form of regulation. When successful, regulation can deliver important benefits to society; however, regulation can also impose undue costs on the economy and, when designed or implemented poorly, fail to meet public needs at all. Given the importance of sound regulation to society, its study by scholars of law and social science is also of …

Why De Minimis?, Matthew D. Adler

All Faculty Scholarship

De minimis cutoffs are a familiar feature of risk regulation. This includes the quantitative “individual risk” thresholds for fatality risks employed in many contexts by EPA, FDA, and other agencies, such as the 1-in-1 million lifetime cancer risk cutoff; extreme event cutoffs for addressing natural hazards, such as the 100-year-flood or 475-year-earthquake; de minimis failure probabilities for built structures; the exclusion of low-probability causal models; and other policymaking criteria. All these tests have a common structure, as I show in the Article. A de minimis test, broadly defined, tells the decisionmaker to determine whether the probability of some outcome is …

Super Size Me And The Conundrum Of Race/Ethnicity, Gender, And Class For The Contemporary Law-Genre Documentary Filmmaker, Regina Austin

All Faculty Scholarship

According to director Morgan Spurlock, the idea for "Super Size Me," the hugely popular documentary that explored the health impact of fast food, originated from a news report about Pelman v. McDonald’s, one of the fast food obesity cases. Over the course of his month-long McDonald’s binge, Spurlock became the literal embodiment of fast-food’s ill-effects on the seemingly generic American adult physique. Spurlock’s take on the subject, however, ignores the circumstances that contributed to the overweight conditions of the Pelman plaintiffs who were two black adolescent females who ate their fast food in the Bronx. One of them was homeless …

The Role Of Moral Philosophers In The Competition Between Deontological And Empirical Desert, Paul H. Robinson

All Faculty Scholarship

Desert appears to be in ascendence as a distributive principle for criminal liability and punishment but there is confusion as to whether it is a deontological or an empirical conception of desert that is or should be promoted. Each offers a distinct advantage over the other. Deontological desert can transcend community, situation, and time to give a conception of justice that can be relied upon to reveal errors in popular notions of justice. On the other hand, empirical desert can be more easily operationalized than can deontological desert because, contrary to common wisdom, there is a good deal of agreement …

The Right Of Access To Justice: Judicial Discourse In Singapore And Malaysia, Gary Chan

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

This is an essay on judicial discourse in Singapore and Malaysia pertaining to the nature and scope of the right of access to justice, including access to justice for the poor. We will examine the statements and pronouncements by the Singapore and Malaysia judiciary in case precedents and extra-judicial statements. Some of the issues explored include the legal status of this right of access to justice (namely, whether it is a right enshrined in the constitution or merely a right derived from the common law and whether it is qualified by economic and other interests) and the associated rights of …

Reflections On Hope, Erica J. Hashimoto

Scholarly Works

This is an article from a Symposium In Honor of Professor Milner S. Ball. This article describes Professor Ball's dedication towards public interest law and encourages others to join the the fight for justice.

Fighting for a more just society-a society that treats all of its members with dignity and respect-calls for courage, passion, and vision. People with those qualities who choose to work in the public interest will discover the joy of having a "job" that many days is exhilarating and rewarding and often is just plain fun.' There will also, however, be difficult days. Surviving those days and …

The Non-Problem Of Free Will In Forensic Psychiatry And Psychology, Stephen J. Morse

All Faculty Scholarship

This article demonstrates that there is no free will problem in forensic psychiatry by showing that free will or its lack is not a criterion for any legal doctrine and it is not an underlying general foundation for legal responsibility doctrines and practices. There is a genuine metaphysical free will problem, but the article explains why it is not relevant to forensic practice. Forensic practitioners are urged to avoid all usage of free will in their forensic thinking and work product because it is irrelevant and spawns confusion.

Weak Democracy, Strong Information: The Role Of Information Technology In The Rulemaking Process, Cary Coglianese

All Faculty Scholarship

Techno-optimists advocate the application of information technology to the rulemaking process as a means of advancing strong democracy -- that is, direct, broad-based citizen involvement in regulatory policy making. In this paper, I show that such optimism is unfounded given the obstacles to meaningful citizen deliberation posed by the impenetrability of current e-rulemaking developments, the prevailing level of citizen disengagement from politics and policy making more generally, and most citizens’ lack of the requisite technical information about and understanding of the issues at stake in regulatory decision making. As such, a more realistic goal for the application of new technology …

The Supreme Court And The Hamiltonian Dilemma, Shubhankar Dam

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

No abstract provided.

Pakistani Supreme Court And Constitutional Space, Shubhankar Dam

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

No abstract provided.

The Constitutionality Of The President To Hold Another Office Act, 2004: A View From India, Shubhankar Dam

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

No abstract provided.

In Defence Of The Supreme Court: A Conservative View, Shubhankar Dam

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

No abstract provided.

The Third Death Of Federalism, A. Christopher Bryant

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Federal drug laws proved a stumbling block to the Rehnquist Court's attempted federalism revival. In its final year, the Court's fragile federalism coalition splintered in a pair of cases arising under the Controlled Substances Act ("CSA"). Missing from the emerging legal literature concerning those two decisions is any substantive discussion of the Supreme Court's much earlier, ill-fated efforts to preserve both judicial enforcement of the enumerated powers doctrine and federal narcotics laws. This article fills that gap.

Ninety-odd years ago the Court arrived at the same jurisprudential juncture it now confronts. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the …

Cumberland County Jail 2005 Pre-Arraignments, George Shaler Mph

Maine Statistical Analysis Center

This brief addresses the following questions: 1. What do we know about bookings of arrested persons at the Cumberland County Jail? 2. What do we know about pre-arraignment bookings by Cumberland County law enforcement agencies? In 2006, Cumberland County hired the Muskie School of Public Service to help provide information for county planning purposes. The Muskie School examined the rates of all bookings¹ (including pre-arraignment bookings) originated by all county law enforcement agencies to the jail in 2005.

Over the last ten years the average population in county jails has increased dramatically in Maine. In 2003, the total in-house population …

Partially Odious Debts?, Omri Ben-Shahar, Mitu Gulati

Articles

The despotic ruler of a poor nation borrows extensively from foreign creditors. He spends some of those funds on building statues of himself, others on buying arms for his brutal secret police, and he places the remainder in his personal bank accounts in Switzerland. The longer the despot stays in power, the poorer the nation becomes. Although the secret police are able to keep prodemocracy protests subdued by force for many years, eventually there is a popular revolt. The despot flees the scene with a few billion dollars of his illgotten gains. The populist regime that replaces the despot now …

Interpreting Bills Of Rights: The Value Of A Comparative Approach, Jack Tsen-Ta Lee

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

In certain jurisdictions, among them Malaysia, Singapore, and the United States, the practice of consulting comparative legal materials in interpreting domestic bills of rights has been criticized as illegitimate. This article examines four main concerns: (1) the texts of bills of rights -- the argument that a bill of rights is to be interpreted within its own four walls and not in the light of analogies drawn from other jurisdictions; (2) national identity -- the argument that a bill of rights embodies the values of a nation's people, and it is wrong to refer to foreign experiences to determine such …

Race, Rights, And The Thirteenth Amendment: Defining The Badges And Incidents Of Slavery, William M. Carter Jr.

Articles

The Supreme Court has held that the Thirteenth Amendment prohibits slavery or involuntary servitude and also empowers Congress to end any lingering "badges and incidents of slavery." The Court, however, has failed to provide any guidance as to defining the badges and incidents of slavery when Congress has failed to identify a condition or form of discrimination as such. This has led the lower courts to conclude that the judiciary's role under the Thirteenth Amendment is limited to enforcing only the Amendment's prohibition of literal enslavement.

This article has two primary objectives. First, it offers an interpretive framework for defining …