Law Commons^™

A Strategy For Mercy, Robert L. Misner

William & Mary Law Review

No abstract provided.

Expressive Theories Of Law: A Skeptical Overview, Matthew D. Adler

Faculty Scholarship

An "expressive theory of law" is, very roughly, a theory that evaluates the actions of legal officials in light of what those actions mean, symbolize, or express. Expressive theories have long played a role in legal scholarship and, recently, have become quite prominent. Elizabeth Anderson, Robert Cooter, Dan Kahan, Larry Lessig, and Richard Pildes, among others, have all recently defended expressive theories (or at least theories that might be characterized as expressive). Expressive notions also play a part in judicial doctrine, particularly in the areas of the Establishment Clause and the Equal Protection Clause.

This paper attempts to provide a …

What We Do When We Do What We Do And Why We Do It, Leo Katz

San Diego Law Review

But what exactly am I talking about when I speak of symmetry and asymmetry in law and ethics? It may be clear enough what those notions mean in geometry, but how are they to be understood in law, or

for that matter in ethics, more generally? Let me start with symmetry- its meaning and the benefits of exploring it. Rather than try to define the

term, however, I will offer what I think is a pretty self-explanatory example of the phenomenon as it arises in law and ethics. It is an example that has fascinated me for quite some time: …

Beyond Efficiency And Procedure: A Welfarist Theory Of Regulation, Matthew D. Adler

Faculty Scholarship

Normative scholarship about regulation has been dominated by two types of theories, which I term "Neoclassical" and "Proceduralist." A Neoclassical theory has the following features: it adopts a simple preference-based view of well-being, and it counts Kaldor-Hicks efficiency as one of the basic normative criteria relevant to the evaluation of regulatory programs. A Proceduralist theory is concerned, not solely with the quality of regulatory outcomes, but also with the governmental procedures that produce these outcomes: it gives intrinsic significance to the procedures that regulatory bodies follow. (One example of a Proceduralist theory is the civic republican theory of regulation advanced …