Law Commons^™

System Adjustments, Brendan S. Maher

Faculty Scholarship

This invited Essay considers the future of law data and system reform.

Alternative Strategies For Addressing The Presence And Effects Of Pharmaceutical And Personal Care Products In Fresh Water Resources, Gabriel Eckstein, George William Sherk

Faculty Scholarship

In recent years, new information has arisen to challenge this assumption. Chemicals from a wide variety of pharmaceutical and personal care products ("PPCPs"), their byproducts and endocrine disrupting compounds ("EDCs") have received growing attention from the water treatment and wastewater treatment community because of the ability of PPCPs to persist, or only partially degrade, in water and during wastewater treatment.

Several federal agencies, including the EnvironmentAl Protection Agency ("EPA"), the Food and Drug Administration ("FDA"), the U.S. Department of Agriculture ("USDA"), the U.S. Geological Survey ("USGS"), and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ("CDC"), have the potential to be …

Social Media And The Rise In Consumer Bargaining Power, Wayne R. Barnes

Faculty Scholarship

Consumers are constantly entering into form contracts, both offline and online. They do not read most of the terms, but the duty to read says the contracts are nevertheless fully enforceable. Moreover, consumers lack any real bargaining power when assenting to such contracts with merchants. Not only that, but if the products malfunctions, or they are somehow damaged by it, they will likely face the prospect of being limited in their available remedies because of boilerplate terms which are favorable to the merchant. In the “old days,” the consumer had no real recourse but to call a 1-800 number, and …

Denial And Concealment Of Unwanted Pregnancy: "A Film Hollywood Dared Not Do", Susan Ayres, Prema Manjunath

Faculty Scholarship

The actual cases and two films examined in this essay challenge stock narratives of mothers who deny or conceal unwanted pregnancy as a monster, or a victim, and also challenge "legal norms, logic and structures" pertaining to unwanted pregnancy and neonaticide. This essay draws on films because of their influential power to "reach enormous audiences by combining narratives and appealing characters with visual imagery and technological achievement, ... stir deep emotions and leave deep impressions." For these reasons, Orit Kamir asserts that films are more compelling than "theoretical legal texts or even judicial rhetoric."

The two films examined -- Stephanie …

Silent Spring At 50, Roger Meiners, Pierre Desrochers, Andrew P. Morriss

Faculty Scholarship

This introduction from the book Silent Spring at 50 describes the various contributors’ insights into Rachel Carson’s landmark work. The authors come from a variety of disciplines, including conservation biology, English, law, and economics, and offer critical assessments of Silent Spring and its legacy. The first part has three chapters that put the book into the context of its time, examining it in light of Carson’s previous books on the sea (Wallace Kaufman); the larger tradition of authors warning against human hubris in environmental matters (Pierre Desrochers & Hiroko Shimizu); and the contest between “environmental religion” and “economic religion” that …

Agricultural Revolutions And Agency Wars: How The 1950s Laid The Groundwork For "Silent Spring", Roger E. Meiners, Andrew P. Morriss

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter from the book Silent Spring at 50 analyzes the 1950s struggle over US food policy between USDA and FDA and how that struggle set the stage for the impact of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Using a public choice/interest group analysis, the chapter examines how the two agencies reacted to the large scale transformation of US agriculture and food production during and following World War II. Just as agriculture underwent a dramatic productivity revolution that changed the face of American farming, marketing, new home appliances, and increased participation in the labor force by women radically changed the kinds of …

The Law And Economics Of Fluctuating Criminal Tendencies And Incapacitation, Murat C. Mungan

Faculty Scholarship

Economic analyses of criminal law are frequently and heavily criticized for being unable to explain many criminal law rules and doctrines that people find intuitively just. Existing economic models cannot properly explain, for instance, why criminal law distinguishes between (i) repeat offenders and first-time offenders, (ii) murder and voluntary manslaughter, and (iii) remorseful and non-remorseful offenders.

In this Article, I propose a new and richer economic theory of crime that captures the rationales behind these practices, and potentially behind many other important criminal law principles and doctrines. Unlike an overwhelming majority of previous economic analyses, my theory accounts not only …

Wrongful Convictions Do Lower Deterrence, Nuno Garoupa, Matteo Rizzolli

Faculty Scholarship

The conventional result of the theory of the public enforcement of law is that wrongful convictions of innocents are detrimental to deterrence. This proposition has been challenged recently. In some cases, wrongful convictions do not jeopardize deterrence, because they influence equally the innocent and the guilty. Therefore deterrence does not change. We show that, in general, wrongful convictions do lower deterrence. We prove that wrongful convictions do not jeopardize deterrence only in very limited circumstances or under unlikely assumptions.