Law Commons^™

Parens Patriae: From Chancery To The Juvenile Court, Doug Rendleman

Doug Rendleman

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From Blame To Punishment: Disrupting Prefrontal Cortex Activity Reveals Norm Enforcement Mechanisms, Owen D. Jones, Justin W. Martin, Joshua W. Buckholtz, Michael T. Treadway, Katherine Jan, David H. Zald, Rene Marois

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The social welfare provided by cooperation depends on the enforcement of social norms. Determining blameworthiness and assigning a deserved punishment are two cognitive cornerstones of norm enforcement. Although prior work has implicated the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) in norm-based judgments, the relative contribution of this region to blameworthiness and punishment decisions remains poorly understood. Here, we used repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) and fMRI to determine the specific role of DLPFC function in norm-enforcement behavior. DLPFC rTMS reduced punishment for wrongful acts without affecting blameworthiness ratings, and fMRI revealed punishment-selective DLPFC recruitment, suggesting that these two facets of norm-based …

Copyright As Charity, Brian L. Frye

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Copyright and charity law are generally considered distinct and unrelated bodies of law. But they are actually quite similar and complement each other. Both copyright and charity law are intended to increase social welfare by solving market and government failures in public goods caused by free riding. Copyright solves market and government failures in works of authorship by providing an indirect subsidy to marginal authors, and charity law solves market and government failures in charitable goods by providing an indirect subsidy to marginal donors. Copyright and charity law complement each other by solving market and government failures in works of …

Abolish Anonymous Reporting To Child Abuse Hotlines, Dale Margolin Cecka

Catholic University Law Review

All states allow the public to anonymously report suspicions of child abuse or neglect to a toll free central phone number. An extensive examination of the policy and practices behind anonymous reporting hotlines indicates that they are widely unregulated and susceptible to abuse. The possible repercussions of an anonymous phone call create costs to the family and society which do not outweigh the potential benefit of allowing anonymous public reports. Under the guise of protecting children, the law has developed in such a way that it infringes on the fundamental rights of parents and children. At the same time, anonymous …

Equity By The Numbers: Measuring Poverty, Inequality, And Injustice, Matthew D. Adler

Faculty Scholarship

Can we measure inequity? Can we arrive at a number or numbers capturing the extent to which a given society is equitable or inequitable? Sometimes such questions are answered with a “no”: equity is a qualitative, non-numerical consideration.

This Article offers a different perspective. The difficulty with equity measurement is not the impossibility of quantification, but the overabundance of possible metrics. There currently exist at least four families of equity-measurement frameworks, used by scholars and, to some extent, governments: inequality metrics (such as the Gini coefficient), poverty metrics, social-gradient metrics (such as the concentration index), and equity-regarding social welfare functions. …

A Free Start: Community-Based Organizations As An Antidote To The Mass Incarceration Of Women Pretrial, Amber Baylor

Faculty Scholarship

In 1973, the feminist newsmagazine Off Our Backs featured a segment on women in jail awaiting trial in Washington, D.C. Many of the women faced minor charges, such as soliciting prostitution, but remained in detention because they could not afford to pay even very low amounts of monetary bail. The magazine interviewed Myrna Raeder, then a fellow at Georgetown, and other attorneys involved in a class action suit against D.C. corrections, who argued that low-income women were unjustly subjected to the punitive effects of pretrial detention, in violation of their due process rights. Raeder reported to the newsmagazine, “as a …