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Full-Text Articles in Public Law and Legal Theory

The Dynamic Analytics Of Property Law, Michael A. Heller Jan 2001

The Dynamic Analytics Of Property Law, Michael A. Heller

Articles

The standard property trilogy of private, commons, and state has become so outdated that it now impedes imagination and innovation at the frontiers of ownership. This essay suggests two approaches - creating new ideal types and synthesizing existing ones - that may help update our static property metaphors. Using these dynamic approaches to property analytics, legal theory can move beyond polarizing oppositions that have made jurisprudential debates unsolvable and rendered concrete problems invisible.


The Foreign Affairs Of Federal Systems: A National Perspective On The Benefits Of State Participation, Daniel Halberstam Jan 2001

The Foreign Affairs Of Federal Systems: A National Perspective On The Benefits Of State Participation, Daniel Halberstam

Articles

In recent years, the constitutional law of foreign relations has come under intense academic scrutiny, and with it the traditionally accepted constitutional balance between the federal government and the States. In the course of this renewed debate, revisionist scholars have challenged the previously dominant view that States have no place in foreign affairs.


America, Defender Of Democratic Legitimacy?, James C. Hathaway Jan 2000

America, Defender Of Democratic Legitimacy?, James C. Hathaway

Articles

American exceptionalism - a belief that the United States has a unique mission to lead the world, but ought logically to be exempt from the rules it promotes - is at the root of much of the American academy's effort to rationalize the US government's increasing rejection of multilateralism as the cornerstone of modern public international law. Even American scholars who disagree fundamentally on the problems with multilateralism (Kenneth Anderson arguing that it favours anti-democratic intervention by unelected NGOs, Michael Reisman asserting that it privileges elitist state-based lawmaking in the face of more democratic non-state 'lawmaking' processes) can agree on …


Three Faces Of Private Property, Michael A. Heller Jan 2000

Three Faces Of Private Property, Michael A. Heller

Articles

Private property is a rather elusive concept. Any kid knows what it means for something to be mine or yours, but grownup legal theorists get flustered when they try to pin down the term. Typically they, actually we, turn to a familiar analytic toolkit: including, for example, Blackstone's image of private property as "sole and despotic dominion"; Hardin's metaphor of the "tragedy of the commons"; and, more generally, the division of ownership into a trilogy of private, commons, and state forms. While each analytic tool has a distinguished pedigree and certain present usefulness, each also imposes a cost because it …


Phoebe's Lament (Symposium: Empirical Research In Commercial Transactions), James J. White Jan 2000

Phoebe's Lament (Symposium: Empirical Research In Commercial Transactions), James J. White

Articles

Assume a bright hypothetical social scientist - call her Phoebe - who is completely ignorant of legal research as it is practiced in today's law schools. Phoebe might speculate about legal research as follows. First, she would note that the law schools are joined with and are the exclusive source of the practitioners of a profession. Second, she would note that commercial and legal actors rub up against and are influenced by the law in countless ways every day. Third, she might remark that this interaction occurs practically on the doorsteps of our law schools. Unlike anthropologists, who may have …


Uncoupling The Law Of Takings, Michael A. Heller, James E. Krier Jan 2000

Uncoupling The Law Of Takings, Michael A. Heller, James E. Krier

Articles

The law of takings couples together matters that should be treated independently. The conventional view, shared by courts and commentators alike, has been that any takings case can be resolved in one of two ways: either there is a taking and compensation is due, or there is no taking and no compensation is due. These results are fine as long as one holding or the other serves the two central concerns of the Takings Clause - eficiency and justice. But a problem arises when the two purposes behind the law of takings come into cordhct, as they readily might. It …


A Presumption Of Innocence, Not Of Even Odds, Richard D. Friedman Jan 2000

A Presumption Of Innocence, Not Of Even Odds, Richard D. Friedman

Articles

Now I know how the Munchkins felt. Here I have been, toiling in the fields of Evidenceland for some years, laboring along with others to show how use of Bayesian probability theory can assist in the analysis and understanding of evidentiary problems.' In doing so, we have had to wage continuous battle against the Bayesioskeptics-the wicked witches who deny much value, even heuristic value, for probability theory in evidentiary analysis.2 Occasionally, I have longed for law-and-economics scholars to help work this field, which should be fertile ground for them.3 So imagine my delight when the virtual personification of law and …


Religion And The Law In The Clinton Era: An Anti-Madisonian Legacy, Marci A. Hamilton Jan 2000

Religion And The Law In The Clinton Era: An Anti-Madisonian Legacy, Marci A. Hamilton

Articles

No abstract provided.


Constitutions And Spontaneous Orders: A Response To Professor Mcginnis, Adam C. Pritchard, Todd J. Zywicki Jan 1999

Constitutions And Spontaneous Orders: A Response To Professor Mcginnis, Adam C. Pritchard, Todd J. Zywicki

Articles

Professor John McGinnis has written a perceptive and provocative comment on our economic analysis of the role of tradition in constitutional interpretation.1 A brief summary of our areas of agreement and disagreement may help set the stage for this response. It appears that Professor McGinnis substantially agrees with the two central propositions of our article. First, he appears to agree with our definition of efficient traditions as those evolving over long periods of time from decentralized processes.2 Second, he explicitly agrees that Justices Scalia and Souter have adopted sub-optimal models of tradition because they rely on sources that lack the …


Finding The Constitution: An Economic Analysis Of Tradition's Role In Constitutional Interpretation, Adam C. Pritchard, Todd J. Zywicki Jan 1999

Finding The Constitution: An Economic Analysis Of Tradition's Role In Constitutional Interpretation, Adam C. Pritchard, Todd J. Zywicki

Articles

In this Article, Professor Pritchard and Professor Zywicki examine the role of tradition in constitutional interpretation, a topic that has received significant attention in recent years. After outlining the current debate over the use of tradition, the authors discuss the efficiency purposes of constitutionalism--precommitment and the reduction of agency costs--and demonstrate how the use of tradition in constitutional interpretation can serve these purposes. Rejecting both Justice Scalia's majoritarian model, which focuses on legislative sources of tradition, and Justice Souter's common-law model, which focuses on Supreme Court precedent as a source of tradition, the authors propose an alternative model--the "finding model"-- …


Making Something Out Of Nothing: The Law Of Takings And Phillips V. Washington Legal Foundation, Michael A. Heller, James E. Krier Jan 1999

Making Something Out Of Nothing: The Law Of Takings And Phillips V. Washington Legal Foundation, Michael A. Heller, James E. Krier

Articles

Phillips v. Washington Legal Foundation held that interest on principal amounts deposited into IOLTA accounts is the property of the various clients who handed over the money but expressed no view as to whether the Texas IOLTA program worked a taking, or, if it did, whether any compensation was due. The debates among the justices about the meaning of private property, argued in terms of contextual and conceptual severance, are unlikely to prove fruitful. We elaborate a better approach in terms of the underlying purposes of just compensation. We conclude that efficiency and justice are best served by uncoupling matters …


Deterrence And Distribution In The Law Of Takings, Michael A. Heller, James E. Krier Jan 1999

Deterrence And Distribution In The Law Of Takings, Michael A. Heller, James E. Krier

Articles

Supreme Court decisions over the last three-quarters of a century have turned the words of the Takings Clause into a secret code that only a momentary majority of the Court is able to understand. The Justices faithfully moor their opinions to the particular terms of the Fifth Amendment, but only by stretching the text beyond recognition. A better approach is to consider the purposes of the Takings Clause, efficiency and justice, and go anew from there. Such a method reveals that in some cases there are good reasons to require payment by the government when it regulates property, but not …


The Tentative Case Against Flexibility In Commercial Law, Omri Ben-Shahar Jan 1999

The Tentative Case Against Flexibility In Commercial Law, Omri Ben-Shahar

Articles

Well-rooted in modern commercial law is the idea that the law and the obligations that it enforces should reflect the empirical reality of the relationship between the contracting parties. The Uniform Commercial Code ("Code") champions this tradition by viewing the performance practices formed among the parties throughout their interaction as a primary source for interpreting and supplementing their explicit contracts. The generous recognition of waiver and modifications, as well as the binding force the Code accords to course of performance, course of dealings, and customary trade usages, effectively permits unwritten commercial practices to vary and to erode explicit contractual provisions.


The Gift Of Language, Joseph Vining Jan 1998

The Gift Of Language, Joseph Vining

Articles

Style and substance cross-are genetically related as we now might want to say. Each draws on and is implied by the other. One point at which they cross is our sense of the nature of human language, what language is and can be, what it is not and can never be. The language of law is part of human language. Law is a distinctive form of thought, but it lives in human language. "Rule" might be thought synonymous with "law," but for all its talk of rules, the practice of law does not begin with a descriptive statement, or a …


Up From Individualism (The Brennan Center Symposium On Constitutional Law)." , Donald J. Herzog Jan 1998

Up From Individualism (The Brennan Center Symposium On Constitutional Law)." , Donald J. Herzog

Articles

I was sitting, ruefully contemplating the dilemmas of being a commentator, wondering whether I had the effrontery to rise and offer a dreadful confession: the first time I encountered the countermajoritarian difficulty, I didn't bite. I didn't say, "Wow, that's a giant problem." I didn't immediately start casting about for ingenious ways to solve or dissolve it. I just shrugged. Now I don't think that's because my commitments to either democracy or constitutionalism are somehow faulty or suspect. Nor do I think it's that they obviously cohere. It's rather that the framing, "look, these nine unelected characters can strike down …


Logic And Elements. (Premises And Conclusions: Symbolic Logic For Legal Analysis)." , Richard D. Friedman Jan 1998

Logic And Elements. (Premises And Conclusions: Symbolic Logic For Legal Analysis)." , Richard D. Friedman

Articles

We may happily agree with Holmes that logic is not the life of the law' and yet contend that logic should play a significant role in legal discourse. Logic cannot demonstrate the truth of premises, and so by itself it cannot demonstrate the merits of a legal argument. Moreover, even given the premises, it may be that a leap of faith, or intuition, has an irreducible role at least in some good legal arguments.2 But at least a sound legal argument will not be an illogical one. An argument will not be persuasive if it appears to violate basic principles …


The Tragedy Of The Anticommons: Property In The Transition From Marx To Markets, Michael A. Heller Jan 1998

The Tragedy Of The Anticommons: Property In The Transition From Marx To Markets, Michael A. Heller

Articles

Why are many storefronts in Moscow empty, while street kiosks in front are full of goods? In this Article, Professor Heller develops a theory of anticommons property to help explain the puzzle of empty storefronts and full kiosks. Anticommons property can be understood as the mirror image of commons property. By definition, in a commons, multiple owners are each endowed with the privilege to use a given resource, and no one has the right to exclude another When too many owners hold such privileges of use, the resource is prone to overuse - a tragedy of the commons. Depleted fisheries …


The Takings-Puzzle Puzzle, James E. Krier Jan 1997

The Takings-Puzzle Puzzle, James E. Krier

Articles

My aim here is to unpack the regulatory takings problem in a way that suggests why it is intractable. The idea is to reveal some of the different types of ambiguity necessarily entailed in takings cases. Seeing these ambiguities, we readily can understand why the doctrine in this area is so confused and confusing; why there is, in short, a "takings puzzle." To my mind, it is much more difficult to understand why anyone would expect matters to be otherwise. This oddity I call the "takings-puzzle puzzle."


Theorists' Belief: A Comment On The Moral Tradition Of American Constitutionalism, Jospeh Vining Jan 1996

Theorists' Belief: A Comment On The Moral Tradition Of American Constitutionalism, Jospeh Vining

Articles

The Moral Tradition of American Constitutionalism is one of those rare works that leads us to face, at the center of law and legal thought, the largest questions about human life and human purpose. There is a special reader's shudder, a certain gestural shift in the chair, reserved for that moment of realizing where one is being led-not to the edge, but to the center, so that the questions become insistent, and whatever we and others say and do in the face of them becomes our response to them.


Sanctuary, Redlight Districts, And Washington, D.C.: Some Observations On Neuman's Anomalous Zones (Symposium: Surveying Law And Borders), William I. Miller Jan 1996

Sanctuary, Redlight Districts, And Washington, D.C.: Some Observations On Neuman's Anomalous Zones (Symposium: Surveying Law And Borders), William I. Miller

Articles

The claim is often made that boundaries obviate disputes if they are clear. But boundaries are inseparable from disputes; they seem to invite them as much as obviate them. Note how natural the collocations "disputed boundary" and "boundary dispute" are. The conventional view that one hears a lot in law schools is that once a bright line is drawn then a boundary is "settled." But that supposes that a clear boundary need not be defended or continually justified or that internal changes in the entity it circumscribes and in some ways defines do not affect the integrity of the boundary. …


Bioethics With A Human Face, Carl E. Schneider Oct 1994

Bioethics With A Human Face, Carl E. Schneider

Articles

This Article and the successor article I will shortly publish grow out of one reaction I have had to years of reading bioethical and legal literature. Let me begin by putting the point in its simplest, even crudest, form: That literature too often discusses the problems of health care in so disembodied and denatured a way that the patients and physicians, the family and friends, the dread and the disease are quite abstracted from the scene. The result is a literature that critically limits itself and that crucially oversimplifies the issues it confronts. There are, of course, reasons bioethical and …


Bioethics In The Language Of The Law, Carl E. Schneider Jul 1994

Bioethics In The Language Of The Law, Carl E. Schneider

Articles

What happens when the language of the law becomes a vulgar tongue? What happens, more particularly, when parties to bioethical discourse are obliged to borrow in their daily controversies the ideas, and even the language, peculiar to judicial proceedings? How suited are the habits, taste, and language of the judicial magistrate to the political, and more particularly, the bioethical, questions of our time? We ask these questions because, as the incomparable Tocqueville foresaw, Americans today truly do resolve political-and moral--questions into judicial questions. As Abraham Lincoln hoped, the Constitution "has become the political religion of the nation," and many Americans …


Democratic Credentials, Donald J. Herzog Jan 1994

Democratic Credentials, Donald J. Herzog

Articles

We've made a mistake, urges Bruce Ackerman. We've failed to notice, or have forgotten, that ours is a dualist democracy: ordinary representatives passing their statutes are in fact the democratic inferiors of We the People, who at rare junctures appear on the scene and affirm new constitutional principles. (Actually, he claims in passing that we have a three-track democracy.)' Dwelling lovingly on dualism, Ackerman doesn't quite forget to discuss democracy, but he comes close. I want to raise some questions about the democratic credentials of Ackerman's view. Not, perhaps, the ones he anticipates. So I don't mean to argue that …


Property And Pragmatism: A Critique Of Radin's Theory Of Property And Personhood, Stephen J. Schnably Jan 1993

Property And Pragmatism: A Critique Of Radin's Theory Of Property And Personhood, Stephen J. Schnably

Articles

No abstract provided.


Harry Edward's Nostalgia, Paul D. Reingold Jan 1993

Harry Edward's Nostalgia, Paul D. Reingold

Articles

Until fairly recently, the work of people who thought and wrote about the law in its broadest cultural sense, and the work of those who thought and wrote about the law as it was practiced, did not intersect very much. The broad cultural issues tended to be the province of philosophers or political theorists or other academic social critics, while traditional legal scholarship - as it appeared in law school journals - remained firmly rooted in lawyers' questions. This is not to suggest that legal academics wrote nothing but practice manuals, but it is true that until the last twenty …


State-Interest Analysis And The Channelling Function In Family Law, Carl E. Schneider Sep 1992

State-Interest Analysis And The Channelling Function In Family Law, Carl E. Schneider

Articles

I want to develop some themes I advanced in my article entitled State-Interest Analysis in Fourteenth Amendment "Privacy" Law: An Essay on the Constitutionalization of Social issues. In that article I noted that while courts and commentators have lavished effort on the fundamental-rights side of privacy law, they have scanted the state-interest side, thereby producing crucial weaknesses in that law. I felt that state~interest discussions in privacy cases often seemed to me unsatisfying. This is an attempt to see why. A major difficulty is that states tend to advance and courts tend to accept quite narrow specifications of a statute's …


Toward A Partial Economic, Game-Theoretic Analysis Of Hearsay, Richard D. Friedman Jan 1992

Toward A Partial Economic, Game-Theoretic Analysis Of Hearsay, Richard D. Friedman

Articles

In this Article, I offer a fundamentally different and nondoctrinaire way of approaching hearsay questions. In brief, I take the view that the resolution of a hearsay dispute, when the declarant is not on the stand, is essentially a matter of deciding who should bear the burden of producing the declarant, or more precisely, how courts should allocate that burden. Adopting a simple procedural improvement, concerning the examination of the declarant if she is produced as a witness, allows the court to allocate the burden optimally. If live testimony by the declarant would be more probative than prejudicial, then most …


Infinite Strands, Infinitesimally Thin: Storytelling, Bayesianism, Hearsay And Other Evidence, Richard D. Friedman Jan 1992

Infinite Strands, Infinitesimally Thin: Storytelling, Bayesianism, Hearsay And Other Evidence, Richard D. Friedman

Articles

David Schum has long been one of our keenest commentators on questions of inference and proof. He has been particularly interested in, and illuminating on, the subject of "cascaded," or multi-step, inference.' This is a subject of importance to lawyers, because most evidence at trial can be analyzed in terms of cascaded inference. Usually, the proposition that the fact finder2 might immediately infer from the evidence is not itself an element of a crime, claim, or defense. Most often, an extra inference would be required to jump from that proposition to a proposition that the law deems material. Thus, inference …


Authority And Responsibility: The Jurisprudence Of Deference, Joseph Vining Jan 1991

Authority And Responsibility: The Jurisprudence Of Deference, Joseph Vining

Articles

he connection between authority and responsibility is such that the one cannot be thought of without the other. In legal method, close reading and rereading of a text marks it as an authoritative text; the presupposition of mind which is necessary to close reading is presupposition of a responsible mind. In the working of institutions that embody authority, the disposition to follow the decisions and statements of a person responsible for a matter inevitably rests upon a presupposition that the decisions and statements followed are those of the responsible person. As that presupposition fades with bureaucratization of decision and writing, …


Improving The Procedure For Resolving Hearsay Issues, Richard D. Friedman Jan 1991

Improving The Procedure For Resolving Hearsay Issues, Richard D. Friedman

Articles

In this article, I propose two changes in the way hearsay issues are usually resolved. First, in some circumstances courts should divide the burdens of producing the declarant-for example, by imposing the physical burden on the proponent and the financial burden on the opponent. Second, no matter how the declarant is produced as a witness, she should ordinarily testify as part of the proponent's case, subject to cross-examination by the opponent. If the declarant does become a witness, the admissibility of her out-of-court statement should not be resolved until her current testimony about the underlying events is received.