Law Commons^™

As A Matter Of Factions: The Budgetary Implications Of Shifting Factional Control In Japan’S Ldp, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Michael F. Thies

Faculty Scholarship

For 38 years, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) maintained single-party control over the Japanese government. This lack of partisan turnover in government has frustrated attempts to explain Japanese government policy changes using political variables. In this paper, we look for intraparty changes that may have led to changes in Japanese budgetary policy. Using a simple model of agenda-setting, we hypothesize that changes in which intraparty factions “control” the LDP affect the party’s decisions over spending priorities systematically. This runs contrary to the received wisdom in the voluminous literature on LDP factions, which asserts that factions, whatever their raison d’être, do …

Nature Of Rules And The Meaning Of Meaning, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

This essay addresses two problems in legal theory. What is the nature of rules, especially legal rules? What is the meaning of a legal rule?

My main concern is the relation between these two questions. I inquire whether a sensible view of how rules work commits one to any particular approach to meaning. For this inquiry, I focus on Frederick Schauer's illuminating treatment of rules in Playing by the Rules, which he says is linked to a particular view of meaning. I assert that the linkage is much less tight than he supposes, and that competing theories about meaning are …