Law Commons^™

Webs Of Faith As A Source Of Reasonable Disagreement, Gregory Brazeal

Gregory Brazeal

Contemporary political theorists and philosophers of epistemology and religion have often drawn attention to the problem of reasonable disagreement. The idea that deliberators may reasonably persist in a disagreement even under ideal deliberative conditions and even over the long term poses a challenge to the common assumption that rationality should lead to consensus. This essay proposes a previously unrecognized source of reasonable disagreement, based on the notion that an individual's beliefs are rationally related to one another in a fabric of sentences or web of beliefs. The essay argues that an individual's beliefs may not form a single, seamless web, …

Expectations From Technology And The Indian State: Comparing Interventions And The Judiciary, Nupur Chowdhury, Nidhi Srivastava

Nupur Chowdhury

The Indian State’s expectations from technology in terms of its role in economic development has been an important factor, in shaping public policy in India. Post-independence the government through its five year plans laid the essential groundwork for sustained public investment in technology development in specific sectors, like agriculture. Since the early eighties, the interventions were more forthright – departments were set up to channel public research investment and promote technologies like biotechnology and information technology. This illustrated a shift from purposive technology towards embracing an all-encompassing technology vision that formed the core of the economic development agenda, considered a …

Willful [Color-] Blindness: The Supreme Court's Equal Protection Of Ascription, Aaron J. Shuler

Aaron J Shuler

Rogers Smith in his "Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America," warns of novel legal systems reconstituting ascriptive American inequality. The post-Warren Courts' approach to Equal Protection, specifically their unwillingness to consider disparate impact and the difference between invidious and benign practices, betrays an "ironic innocence" as described by James Baldwin to a history of racial discrimination and domination, and a disavowal of a hiearchy that the Court perpetuates.

Grumpy Old Men: A Correlation Between Irritation And Intolerance For Marriage Equality, Aaron J. Shuler

Aaron J Shuler

The Gay Equality Movement has made expeditious strides in the last few decades. Most progress in accepting attitudes toward homosexuals has been made in groups that are traditionally associated with liberal views toward minority groups: the young, the educated, and, to a lesser extent, women. This paper seeks to use membership in those groups as control variables to determine whether another less understood independent variable bears on tolerance. Specifically, this paper uses data from the American National Election Survey from 2008-09 and Alan Gerber’s work on the “Big Five” personality traits to determine whether irritated or less agreeable citizens are …

Mental Budget: Inefficient Clauses Or Consumer Choices?, Enrico Baffi

enrico baffi

In this paper I aim to demonstrate that due the phenomenon of consumer mental accounting, it's not possible to consider money as fungible. Consumers decide to spend a certain amount of money for a kind of good and they are not willing to take some extra money from the jars that contain the money to spend for other goods. But consumers seem to have a sort of reserve which encompass efforts, time, and the possibility to bear risk that they use to save money and obtain a lower price for a good. To explain, a good can be delivered at …

The Problem Of Internalization Of Social Costs And The Ideas Of Ronadl Coase, Enrico Baffi

enrico baffi

In this paper, I try to show that, although some arguments elaborated by Coase do not have a great practical importance, and that it seems that the most important one against a system of remedies for each externalities (if we are able to define this concept) is difficult to create, Coase has understood many problems that they have been at the basis of later studies in tort and property law; but, what is more important here, is to underline that a system of remedies for every externalities have been refused by eminent scholars after Coase The work of the English …

Contracting I The -Modern Woerld, Enrico Baffi

enrico baffi

In this paper I want to show that the change that we observe in the way of contracting do not depend by the market powers that firms would have obtained, but it is a phenomenon due to the change in relative costs of activities. There are activities that are labor intensive that must be abandoned in favor of activities that capital intensive, and there are activities that are time consuming that the people do not want to bea, as reading all the contract clauses of a standard form contract, that determine the necessity, probably, if there is not a state …

Contracting In Modern World, Enrico Baffi

enrico baffi

In this paper I try explore some of the basic features of modern mass contracting. In my opinion, there are basically four characteristics of modern mass contracting: a)he reduced negotiations; b) the dissemination of standard form contracts; c) the presence of abusive clauses; d) and the recapitulation of the contract and its execution in a single act of stipulation. All the changes are the consequences in the changes of relative costs of activities: a) The reduction in negotiations is the result first of all of the costs that this activity requires and of the costs required to manage personalized contracts; …

Efficient Penalty Clauses With Debiasing: Lessons From Behavioral Law And Economics, Enrico Baffi

enrico baffi

This paper builds upon the findings of cognitive psychology to revisit the prescriptive solutions proposed in the legal literature with respect to efficient penalty clauses. While refraining from generalizations regarding human behaviour, generalizations that might lead to positions quite removed from reality and in part ideological, as was the case with rational choice theory, the paper instead seeks to distinguish one situation from another in order to identify the existence of decision debiasing mechanisms capable of justifying - in the case of the set of rules in question - hypotheses in which lesser control over the penalty clause would be …

Mental Budget And Inefficient Clauses: A Lesson From Behavioral Law Nand Economics, Enrico Baffi

enrico baffi

This paper is an attempt to highlight how clauses, which are traditionally considered to be inefficient, may actually be desired by consumers. This anomaly originates in the fact that each individual builds a mental budget by dividing the money he has among the needs he intends to satisfy. According to consumers’ reasoning, money is not fungible, in the sense that amounts cannot be transferred from one expenditure to another. Consumers who behave in this way may sometimes find that they have depleted the amount they budgeted for an item while wanting to buy more of it. Since additional time, efforts …

Casev. Pigou: A Still Difficult Debate, Enrico Baffi

enrico baffi

This paper examine the positions of Coase and Pigou about the problem of the externalities. From the reading of their most two important works it appears that Coase has a more relevant preference for a evaluation of efficiency at the total, while Pigou, with some exception, is convinced that is possible to reach marginal efficiency through taxes or compensation. It’s interesting that Coase, who has elaborated the famous theorem, is convinced that is not important to reach the efficiency at the margin every time and that sometimes is necessary a valuation at the total, that tells us which solution is …

Judicial Mindsets: The Social Psychology Of Implicit Theories And The Law, Victor D. Quintanilla

Victor D. Quintanilla

This article introduces Dr. Carol Dweck’s seminal and significant line of psychological research on the phenomenon of implicit theories and draws on this research as a lens through which we might better understand judicial decision-making. In particular, the article focuses on the implications of two types of implicit theories—whether people believe that phenomena are static and fixed versus dynamic and malleable. By introducing this research, this article aims to forward a research agenda designed to examine how social, contextual, and situational forces influence judicial behavior.

An entity theory reflects the mindset that phenomena are fixed and unlikely to change. An …

Cultura De La Legalidad. La Participación Ciudadana En La Transparencia, Norma E. Pimentel

Norma E Pimentel

No abstract provided.

Approaching Rule Of Law In Post-Revolution Egypt, Ahmed Eldakak

Ahmed Eldakak

Partial absence of rule of law was a central reason for the Egyptian Revolution in 2011, and the Revolution provides a golden opportunity to establish full rule of law in Egypt. Using a substantive approach to interpreting the rule of law doctrine, this Article analyzes the aspects of absence of rule of law before the Revolution. The former regime disregarded the rule of law by amending the constitution to promote the rule of the president, issuing laws that served the interests of the president’s entourage, not enforcing judicial decisions, restricting freedom of speech, and concentrating the power in the hands …

Where Did Mill Go Wrong? Why The Capital-Managed Rather Than The Labor-Managed Enterprise Is The Predominant Organizational Form In Market Economies, 73 Ohio State L.J. 219 (2012, Justin Schwartz

Justin Schwartz

In this Article, I propose a novel law and economics explanation of a deeply puzzling aspect of business organization in market economies. Why are virtually all firms organized as capital-managed and -owned (capitalist) enterprises rather than as labor-managed and -owned cooperatives? Over 150 years ago, J.S. Mill predicted that efficiency and other advantages would eventually make worker cooperatives predominant over capitalist firms. Mill was right about the advantages but wrong about the results. The standard explanation is that capitalist enterprise is more efficient. Empirical research, however, overwhelmingly contradicts this. But employees almost never even attempt to organize worker cooperatives. I …

Rio+20 - An Analysis Of The Zero Draft And The Final Outcome Document “The Future We Want”, Vicki-Ann Assevero, Sonali P. Chitre

Sonali P Chitre

Rio 20 the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD) was held June 20-22, 2012 to allow world leaders as well as participants from governments, civil society, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and other groups to come together to draft a roadmap detailing how the world should promote sustainable development. The Final Outcome Document (FOD) of Rio 201 is more detailed and stronger than the initial Zero Draft. The Zero Draft of January 10, 2012 by the Secretariat was purposely general and left many areas to be filled in by specific country proposals. The FOD was finalized and agreed upon by 192 …

Implicit Bias In Employment Litigation, Melissa R. Hart

Melissa R Hart

Judges exercise enormous discretion in civil litigation, and nowhere more than in employment discrimination litigation, where the trial court’s “common sense” view of what is or is not “plausible” has significant impact on the likelihood that a case will survive summary judgment. As a general matter, doctrinal developments in the past two decades have quite consistently made it more difficult for plaintiffs to assert their claims of discrimination. In addition, many of these doctrines have increased the role of judicial judgment – and the possibility of the court’s implicit bias – in the life cycle of an employment discrimination case. …

Chasing Ghosts: On The Possibility Of Writing Cultural Histories Of Tax Law, Assaf Likhovski

Assaf Likhovski

This Article discusses the use of arguments about “culture” in two debates about the imposition, application and abolition of income tax law: A debate about the transplantation of British income taxation to British-ruled Palestine in the early twentieth century, and a debate about tax privacy in late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century Britain. In both cases, “culture,” or some specific aspect of it (notions of privacy) appeared in arguments made by opponents of the tax. However, it is difficult to decide whether the use of cultural arguments in these debates simply reflected some “reality” that existed prior to these debates, whether …

Back To The Future: Introducing Constructive Feminism For The Twenty-First Century: A New Paradigm For The Family And Medical Leave Act, Arianne Renan Barzilay Dr.

Arianne Renan Barzilay Dr. (J.S.D., New York University School of Law)

Abstract: At least ninety percent (90%) of American parents, mothers and fathers, say they are experiencing an acute shortage of time spent with family and an intense work-family conflict. This article provides a history and a theory that should inform our conceptualization of work-family regulation. It points to the neglected history of working-class social feminism. It shows how working-class social feminists at the beginning of the twentieth century advocated for “constructive feminism”—government support, by way of labor regulation, of what this article terms “multidimensionalism”—a life enriched by meaningful dimensions of work, family, civic participation, and culture. The Article extends this …

Labor Regulation As Family Regulation: Decent Work And Decent Families, Arianne Renan Barzilay Dr.

Arianne Renan Barzilay Dr. (J.S.D., New York University School of Law)

It is due time that we understood that regulating the family has been a longstanding goal of labor regulation. This article presents the trajectory of labor regulation as family regulation. It provides a history of the "decent standards" discourse pertaining to wage and hour regulation, and reveals its double meanings: to provide "decent work" and to promote "decent families. " It terms the goal of providing decent standards of work and wages as "productive decency" and the goals pertaining to family decency, proper gender norms, and sexual purity as "repressive decency. " It shows how labor regulation surprisingly began in …

Drept Privat Într-O Societate Post-Naţională: De La Reglementarea Ex Post La Reglementarea Ex Ante, Jan M. Smits

Jan M Smits

This contribution (in Romanian) shows how the role of law is changing as a result of globalisation and technological progress. It demonstrates how the traditional view of law as being produced by different nation-state legal orders, each claiming exclusive jurisdiction for a limited territory, is gradually making place for alternative types of ordering. The ex post reliance on the law to provide appropriate rules, enforcement and dispute resolution is replaced by a situation in which actors proactively avoid as much as possible the applicability of laws. This development towards delivering ‘legality’ without law is much more important in understanding the …

Conceptualizing The Right Of Children To Adaptable Education, Shulamit Almog, Lotem Perry-Hazan

Dr. Lotem Perry-Hazan

The contention put forward here is that conceptualization of the right to adaptable education, derived from international human rights law, may be a key factor in interpreting and reviving the notion of multiculturalism in education. We will begin by analyzing three interrelated dimensions of the right to adaptable education: adaptability to the children's circles of cultural affiliations, adaptability to the children’s preferences, and adaptability to the changes of time. We will continue by describing the need to balance between the right to adaptable education and other features of the right to education - available education, accessible education and acceptable education …

The Right To Education: Its Changing Faces In A Constitutional Revolution Era, Lotem Perry Dr.

Dr. Lotem Perry-Hazan

Almost two decades after the constitutional revolution, the Supreme Court of Justice ruled in the Tebeka case that the right to education is a constitutional right, which is interrelated with the right to dignity. My article analyzes the norms that shaped the right to education in Israel during the last two decades in order to explore whether and how the Tebeka case reflected the processes that characterized the education policy. The discussion is divided according to four features of the right to education, whose definition is based on a normative framework outlined by the UN Committee on Economic, Social and …

The (Re-) Constitution Of The Public, Gianluigi Palombella

Gianluigi Palombella

This article deals with the prospect of public law in global governance. It analyses firstly the foundations of modern public law and considers what is left of them in the global setting. Are they still holding through States’ de-centering practices, detached from the legitimating grounds of the modern ‘idea of publicness’? What is called here the duality of public law (in its State-related political and juridical strands) fades and decouples in the sphere where inherently ‘global’ legalities originate of a deracinated type: the distinctively global ‘public’ only provides a ‘suspended public law’ and politically unsaturated. The Constitution of the Public …

Imbrication Of Legal And Expert Discourses On Monoparental Adoptive Processes, Raquel Medina Plana

Raquel Medina Plana

Long and complex, international adoption processes can be seen as constituting a set of performative practices which involve strategies of transmission/ incorporation of culture, implying the construction of relational identities or subjectivities. With an “educational” drive, and a strong uniformity aspiration, the relevant institutions would be constructing a unified kind of adoptive parenthood, not just in their public dimension but also on the more intimate identity configuration level: the emotional life, affections, expectations, personal history… (Borrillo and Pitois-Etienne, 2004). When confronted with “non-traditional” family projects (as it is the case with monoparental adoption), adoptive processes perform a strong governmental control …

Godsdienst Als Hype, Wouter H. De Been

Wouter H. de Been

No abstract provided.

Leaking By The Bucketload: The Nature Of Database Leaks, Wouter H. De Been, Khaibar Sarghandoy

Wouter H. de Been

The British expense account scandal, the revelations by Wikileaks, and the Palestine papers are all database leaks. Such leaks were not impossible before, but they have become much simpler. Through global communication networks everybody can now leak on an industrial scale. The question addressed in this paper is: How to understand and regulate such database leaks? The notion that they will empower democratic publics is problematic. Databases, typically, are not easily intelligible. At best they provide the raw data for an understanding of an institutional culture or attitude. Experts and specialists remain essential intermediaries for the interpretation of the raw …

"Because That's Where The Money Is": A Theory Of Corporate Legal Compliance, William Bradford

william bradford

Upon his capture in 1934, the legendary bank robber Willie Sutton was asked by FBI agents, Why do you rob banks, Willie? Sutton, who believed the question to be rhetorical, replied, dryly, Because that's where the money is. In other words, Sutton understood his interrogator to be inquiring as to why he robbed banks rather than, say, homes, or gas stations, or church offering plates. Had he understood the query as intended - i.e., what was it about Willie Sutton the impelled Willie Sutton to crime when many others, struggling to survive the Great Depression, were not? - Sutton could …

Reciprocal Antidiscrimination Arguments, Yofi Tirosh

Yofi Tirosh

This Article addresses a common characteristic of antidiscrimination law: To what extent should one antidiscrimination campaign be held accountable for other, related, discriminatory structures that it does not and cannot purport to correct? Plaintiffs in antidiscrimination cases are sometimes expected to account for the larger social context in which their claim is made. Defendants invoke this larger context as a way of rebutting the discrimination claim, by arguing that the plaintiff’s claim has “discriminatory residue” that would exacerbate related discriminatory structures. For example, in a case in which same-sex couples seek the right to contract with surrogate mothers, the defendant …

Translation To Portuguese Of "The Construction Of Constitutional Rights", By Robert Alexy, Silvio Roberto Oliveira De Amorim Junior

Silvio Roberto Oliveira de Amorim Junior

It is a translation made as a conclusion work for the discipline “Direito Administrativo, Constitucionalismo e Cidadania”, offered in the Masters in Law´s Course at “Universidade Federal de Sergipe”, and presented by Ph. D. Henrique Ribeiro Cardoso. The translation is about an article written by jurisconsult and philosopher Robert Alexy, published in The Berkeley Electronic Press, in the year of 2010, by means of which comment the construction of constitutional rights and its characteristic eminently related to principles. The article alludes, as well, to the use of proportionality, with special approach to the Weight Formula and to the happening of …