Law Commons^™

Free Speech And Intellectual Values, Lee C. Bollinger

Faculty Scholarship

In the preface to his book, The Negro and the First Amendment, Harry Kalven observed that the idea of free speech was marked by an unusually keen "quest for coherent general theory." Every area of the law, Kalven puzzled, was rife with inconsistency and ambiguity, yet inexplicably there was little tolerance· for anomalies in the field of free speech. As to why this was so, Kalven speculated that "free speech is so close to the heart of democratic organization that if we do not have an appropriate theory for our law here, we feel we really do not understand the …

Legality, Bureaucracy, And Class In The Welfare System, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

When lawyers confronted the welfare system in the 1960's, they charged it with oppressive moralism, personal manipulation, and invasion of privacy. They focused attention on the "man-in-the-house" rules that disqualified families on the basis of the mother's sexual conduct and the "midnight raids" in which welfare workers forced their way into recipients' homes searching for evidence of cohabitation.

When I represented welfare recipients from 1979 to 1981, the workers showed little interest in policing their morals or intruding on their private lives. The "man-in-the-house" rule and the practice of unannounced or nighttime visits had been repudiated. Yet the pathologies emphasized …

Commercial Arbitration In The Eighteenth Century: Searching For The Transformation Of American Law, Eben Moglen

Faculty Scholarship

Some recent writing on the history of American law, notably that of Morton Horwitz, has observed a "transformation" in the early years of the nineteenth century as a new legal culture replaced the pre-commercial regime and altered rules of law in favor of the commercially active founders of industrial capitalism. In the course of this transformation, Horwitz argues, merchants and lawyers identified possible grounds for an "alliance," in which the lawyers gained social status and a monopoly in adjudicative institutions, while the commercial classes gained a system of law which subsidized their interests at the expense of other classes in …

To Praise The Estate Tax, Not To Bury It, Michael J. Graetz

Faculty Scholarship

For several decades, total revenues raised by estate and gift taxes have roughly equaled those raised by excise taxes on alcohol and tobacco. Yet no law journal has ever asked me to write on alcohol or tobacco excise taxes. The law firms of America do not routinely have divisions devoted to excise tax planning. We do not hear of the suffering of widows and orphans (or even of farmers and small businesses) because of alcohol and tobacco taxes. Philosophers and economists do not routinely debate the merits of such taxes. Perhaps most significantly, increases in such excise taxes do not …