Law 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 …

Statutory Interpretation In Econotopia, Nathan B. Oman

Faculty Publications

Much of the debate in the recent revival of interest in statutory interpretation centers on whether or not courts should use legislative history in construing statutes. The consensus in favor of this practice has come under sharp attack from public choice critics who argue that traditional models of legislative intent are positively and normatively incoherent. This paper argues that in actual practice, courts look at a fairly narrow subset of legislative history. By thinking about the power to write that legislative history as a property right and legislatures as markets, it is possible to use Coase's Theorem and the concept …

What Law Schools Can Learn From Billy Beane And The Oakland Athletics , Rafael Gely, Paul L. Caron

Faculty Publications

In Moneyball, Michael Lewis writes about a story with which he fell in love, a story about professional baseball and the people that play it. A surprising number of books and articles have been written by law professors who have had long love affairs with baseball. These books and articles are a two-way street, with baseball and law each informing and enriching the other. For example, law professors versed in antitrust, labor, property, tax, and tort law have brought their legal training to bear on particular aspects of baseball. Law professors also have mined their passion for baseball in extracting …

Affirmative Refraction: Grutter V. Bollinger Through The Lens Of The Case "The Case Of The Speluncean Explorers", Rafael Gely, Paul L. Caron

Faculty Publications

What can a fifty year-old hypothetical about human cannibalism concocted by the late Lon Fuller teach us about the Supreme Court's recent foray into the affirmative action debate in twenty-first century America? Indeed, what can a tax law professor and a labor law professor add to the cacophony of voices of leading constitutional law scholars on the Court's most important pronouncement on race in a generation? We make a rather modest claim, based on teaching both of these cases in our one-week Introduction to Law classes for incoming first year students, that a helpful way to view Grutter v. Bollinger …

The Power Behind The Promise: Enforcing No Child Left Behind To Improve Education, Amy M. Reichbach

Faculty Publications

Despite the U.S. Supreme Court's recognition in 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education, that education is of paramount importance, six million middle and high school students are still in danger of being left behind. Less than seventy-five percent of eighth graders, fifty percent in urban schools, are graduating from high school within five years. Advocates for educational equity have appealed to the courts, achieving limited success. They have also turned to the legislature, which most recently enacted the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 ("NCLB"). Thus far, however, the federal government has not enforced NCLB adequately. This …

Taking Back The Law School Classroom: Using Technology To Foster Active Student Learning , Rafael Gely, Paul L. Caron

Faculty Publications

Law schools (and indeed all of higher education) have witnessed an explosive growth in the use of technology in the classroom. Many law teachers now deploy a wide array of technological bells and whistles, including PowerPoint slides, Web-based course platforms, in-class Internet access, and the like. Students, in turn, increasingly come to class armed with laptop computers to harvest the fruits of the classroom experience. Yet in recent years there has been something of a backlash, with various law teachers arguing that this technology is interfering with, rather than improving, pedagogy in the classroom. According to the critics, the technology …