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Full-Text Articles in Law
Rethinking The Principal-Agent Theory Of Judging, Rafael I. Pardo, Jonathan Remy Nash
Rethinking The Principal-Agent Theory Of Judging, Rafael I. Pardo, Jonathan Remy Nash
Scholarship@WashULaw
This Essay offers new insights into understanding the relationship between higher and lower courts and responds to the extant literature that has characterized the relationship as one involving a principal and an agent. We challenge the underpinnings of the principal-agent understanding of judicial hierarchies and identify problems with the theory’s applicability in this context. While principals ordinarily select their agents, higher court judges usually do not select lower court judges. Moreover, while lower court judges may cast votes with an eye to the possibility of elevation to a higher court, the higher court judges who review the lower court’s decisions …
Economic Theory Lost In Translation: Will Behavioral Economics Reshape The Compelled Commercial Speech Doctrine, Kyle Rozema
Economic Theory Lost In Translation: Will Behavioral Economics Reshape The Compelled Commercial Speech Doctrine, Kyle Rozema
Scholarship@WashULaw
This Article consolidates the economic and legal theory needed to properly analyze the impact of salience measures on the commercial speech doctrine. By walking through various First Amendment scenarios, this Article describes and differentiates between the two main governmental interests motivating graphic image requirements on cigarette labels: reducing smoking and informing consumers. The Article then sets up a game-theoretic model of the compelled commercial speech doctrine and uses Bayesian inference to make assumptions about how the Supreme Court would rule if it eventually rules on similar graphic images placed on cigarette labels. Solving the model by way of forward induction …
American Gangsters: Rico, Criminal Syndicates, And Conspiracy Law As Market Control, Benjamin Levin
American Gangsters: Rico, Criminal Syndicates, And Conspiracy Law As Market Control, Benjamin Levin
Scholarship@WashULaw
In an effort to re-examine legal and political decisions about criminalization and the role of the criminal law in shaping American markets and social institutions, this Article explores the ways in which criminal conspiracy laws in the United States have historically been used to subdue non-state actors and informal markets that threatened the hegemony of the state and formal market. To this end, the Article focuses primarily on the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) as illustrative of broader trends in twentieth century criminal policy. Enacted in 1970, RICO provides criminal sanctions for individuals engaged in unacceptable organized activities …
De-Naturalizing Criminal Law: Of Public Perceptions And Procedural Protections, Benjamin Levin
De-Naturalizing Criminal Law: Of Public Perceptions And Procedural Protections, Benjamin Levin
Scholarship@WashULaw
In this essay, I examine and challenge the rhetorical trope of the guilty going free by emphasizing the institutional and political intricacies that comprise the criminal justice system and necessarily under-gird a determination of “guilt”. My goal, at its essence, is to de-naturalize the criminal law and discussions of the criminal justice system in the context of this symposium. I aim to emphasize that a guilty verdict is the result of a series of (politically-inflected) decisions about how to draft criminal statutes, how to structure a trial, and how to select a jury. De-naturalizing criminal law is, of course, a …