Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™
Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 30 of 35
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Keeping Our Distinctions Straight: A Response To “Originalism: Standard And Procedure”, Mitchell N. Berman
Keeping Our Distinctions Straight: A Response To “Originalism: Standard And Procedure”, Mitchell N. Berman
All Faculty Scholarship
For half a century, moral philosophers have distinguished between a “standard” that makes acts right and a “decision procedure” by which agents can determine whether any given contemplated act is right, which is to say whether it satisfies the standard. In “Originalism: Standard and Procedure,” Stephen Sachs argues that the same distinction applies to the constitutional domain and that clear grasp of the difference strengthens the case for originalism because theorists who emphasize the infirmities of originalism as a decision procedure frequently but mistakenly infer that those flaws also cast doubt on originalism as a standard. This invited response agrees …
How Practices Make Principles, And How Principles Make Rules, Mitchell N. Berman
How Practices Make Principles, And How Principles Make Rules, Mitchell N. Berman
All Faculty Scholarship
The most fundamental question in general jurisprudence concerns what makes it the case that the law has the content that it does. This article offers a novel answer. According to the theory it christens “principled positivism,” legal practices ground legal principles, and legal principles determine legal rules. This two-level account of the determination of legal content differs from Hart’s celebrated theory in two essential respects: in relaxing Hart’s requirement that fundamental legal notions depend for their existence on judicial consensus; and in assigning weighted contributory legal norms—“principles”—an essential role in the determination of legal rights, duties, powers, and permissions. Drawing …
Rethinking Copyright And Personhood, Christopher S. Yoo
Rethinking Copyright And Personhood, Christopher S. Yoo
All Faculty Scholarship
One of the primary theoretical justifications for copyright is the role that creative works play in helping develop an individual’s sense of personhood and self-actualization. Typically ascribed to the writings of Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, personhood-based theories of copyright serve as the foundation for the moral rights prominent in European copyright law and mandated by the leading intellectual property treaty, which give authors inalienable control over aspects of their works after they have been created. The conventional wisdom about the relationship between personhood and copyright suffers from two fatal flaws that have gone largely unappreciated. First, in …
Judge Posner’S Simple Law, Mitchell N. Berman
Judge Posner’S Simple Law, Mitchell N. Berman
All Faculty Scholarship
The world is complex, Richard Posner observes in his most recent book, Reflections on Judging. It follows that, to resolve real-world disputes sensibly, judges must be astute students of the world’s complexity. The problem, he says, is that, thanks to disposition, training, and professional incentives, they aren’t. Worse than that, the legal system generates its own complexity precisely to enable judges “to avoid rather than meet and overcome the challenge of complexity” that the world delivers. Reflections concerns how judges needlessly complexify inherently simple law, and how this complexification can be corrected.
Posner’s diagnoses and prescriptions range widely—from the Bluebook …
Privacy Law: Positive Theory And Normative Practice, Anita L. Allen
Privacy Law: Positive Theory And Normative Practice, Anita L. Allen
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
The Normativity Of Copying In Copyright Law, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
The Normativity Of Copying In Copyright Law, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
All Faculty Scholarship
Not all copying constitutes copyright infringement. Quite independent of fair use, copyright law requires that an act of copying be qualitatively and quantitatively significant enough or “substantially similar” for it to be actionable. Originating in the nineteenth century, and entirely the creation of courts, copyright’s requirement of “substantial similarity” has thus far received little attention as an independently meaningful normative dimension of the copyright entitlement. This Article offers a novel theory for copyright’s substantial-similarity requirement by placing it firmly at the center of the institution and its various goals and purposes. As a common-law-style device that mirrors the functioning of …
Foreseeability And Copyright Incentives, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
Foreseeability And Copyright Incentives, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
All Faculty Scholarship
Copyright law’s principal justification today is the economic theory of creator incentives. Central to this theory is the recognition that while copyright’s exclusive rights framework provides creators with an economic incentive to create, it also entails large social costs, and that creators therefore need to be given just enough incentive to create in order to balance the system’s benefits against its costs. Yet, none of copyright’s current doctrines enable courts to circumscribe a creator’s entitlement by reference to limitations inherent in the very idea of incentives. While the common law too relies on providing actors with incentives to behave in …
Preemption In The Rehnquist Court: A Preliminary Empirical Assessment, Michael S. Greve, Jonathan Klick
Preemption In The Rehnquist Court: A Preliminary Empirical Assessment, Michael S. Greve, Jonathan Klick
All Faculty Scholarship
The federal preemption of state law has emerged as a prominent field of study for legal scholars and political scientists. This rise to prominence of a technical and often dull field of jurisprudence is due to a number of developments-increasingly frequent federal statutory preemptions; the states' unprecedented aggressiveness in regulating business transactions, the expansion of corporate liability under state common law and the increased resort of corporate defendants to federal preemption defenses; and, not least, the Rehnquist Court's discovery of federalism and states' rights.
Unfortunately, the preemption debate has been marred by misperceptions and a lack of reliable data. Extravagant …
The Virtues Of Uncertainty In Law: An Experimental Approach, Tom Baker, Alon Harel, Tamar Kugler
The Virtues Of Uncertainty In Law: An Experimental Approach, Tom Baker, Alon Harel, Tamar Kugler
All Faculty Scholarship
Predictability in civil and criminal sanctions is generally understood as desirable. Conversely, unpredictability is condemned as a violation of the rule of law. This paper explores predictability in sanctioning from the point of view of efficiency. It is argued that, given a constant expected sanction, deterrence is increased when either the size of the sanction or the probability that it will be imposed is uncertain. This conclusion follows from earlier findings in behavioral decision research and the results of an experiment conducted specifically to examine this hypothesis. The findings suggest that, within an efficiency framework, there are virtues to uncertainty …
What Do We Mean By "Judicial Independence"?, Stephen B. Burbank
What Do We Mean By "Judicial Independence"?, Stephen B. Burbank
All Faculty Scholarship
In this article, the author argues that the concept of "judicial independence" has served more as an object of rhetoric than it has of sustained study. He views the scholarly literatures that treat it as ships passing in the night, each subject to weaknesses that reflect the needs and fashions of the discipline, but all tending to ignore courts other than the Supreme Court of the United States. Seeking both greater rigor and greater flexibility than one usually finds in public policy debates about, and in the legal and political science literatures on, judicial independence, the author attributes much of …
Shareholder Value And Auditor Independence, William W. Bratton
Shareholder Value And Auditor Independence, William W. Bratton
All Faculty Scholarship
This Article questions the practice of framing problems concerning auditors’ professional responsibility inside a principal-agent paradigm. If professional independence is to be achieved, auditors cannot be enmeshed in agency relationships with the shareholders of their audit clients. As agents, the auditors by definition become subject to the principal’s control and cannot act independently. For the same reason, auditors’ duties should be neither articulated in the framework of corporate law fiduciary duty, nor conceived relationally at all. These assertions follow from an inquiry into the operative notion of the shareholder-beneficiary. The Article unpacks the notion of the shareholder and tells a …
Method And Principle In Legal Theory, Stephen R. Perry
Method And Principle In Legal Theory, Stephen R. Perry
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
The Roles Of Litigation, Stephen B. Burbank
The Roles Of Litigation, Stephen B. Burbank
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Mary Joe Frug's Postmodern Feminist Legal Manifesto Ten Years Later: Reflections On The State Of Feminism Today·, Regina Austin, Elizabeth M. Schneider
Mary Joe Frug's Postmodern Feminist Legal Manifesto Ten Years Later: Reflections On The State Of Feminism Today·, Regina Austin, Elizabeth M. Schneider
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
When The Rule Swallows The Exception, Claire Oakes Finkelstein
When The Rule Swallows The Exception, Claire Oakes Finkelstein
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
The Inefficiency Of Mens Rea, Claire Oakes Finkelstein
The Inefficiency Of Mens Rea, Claire Oakes Finkelstein
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Why The Successful Assassin Is More Wicked Than The Unseccessful One, Leo Katz
Why The Successful Assassin Is More Wicked Than The Unseccessful One, Leo Katz
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Coercing Privacy, Anita L. Allen
Preempting Oneself: The Right And The Duty To Forestall One's Own Wrongdoing, Leo Katz
Preempting Oneself: The Right And The Duty To Forestall One's Own Wrongdoing, Leo Katz
All Faculty Scholarship
Economists and philosophers working on problems of rational choice have for some time been concerned with various puzzles raised by so-called "Ullysean" configurations: actors who rationally cause themselves to act irrationally. (e.g., the person who swallows Thomas Schelling's famous irrationality pill to preempt an attempted robbery). What has attracted less attention is that these configurations present fascinating problems for morality, most especially for non-consequentialist morality. This article undertakes the exploration of some of these problems and the implications they hold for the morality of preemptive detention, preemptive self-defense, the creation of prophylactic crimes (like our drug laws) and a variety …
Crazy Reasons, Stephen J. Morse
The New Etiquette Of Federalism: New York, Printz, And Yeskey, Matthew D. Adler, Seth F. Kreimer
The New Etiquette Of Federalism: New York, Printz, And Yeskey, Matthew D. Adler, Seth F. Kreimer
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Threats And Preemptive Practices, Claire Oakes Finkelstein
Threats And Preemptive Practices, Claire Oakes Finkelstein
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Retroactivity And Legal Change: An Equilibrium Approach, Jill E. Fisch
Retroactivity And Legal Change: An Equilibrium Approach, Jill E. Fisch
All Faculty Scholarship
In this Article, Professor Fisch assesses currrent retroactivity doctrine and proposes a new framework for retroactivity analysis. Current law has failed to reflect the complexity of defining retroactivity and to harmonize the conflicting concerns of efficiency and fairness that animate retroactivity doctrine. By drawing a sharp distinction between adjudication and legislation, the law has also overlooked the similarity of the issues that retroactivity raises in both contexts. Professor Fisch's analysis, influenced by the legal process school, uses an equilibrium approach to connect retroactivity analysis to theories of legal change. Instead of focusing on the nature of the new legal rule, …
The Jurisprudence Of Jane Eyre, Anita L. Allen
The Jurisprudence Of Jane Eyre, Anita L. Allen
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Tort Law As A Comparative Institution, Claire Oakes Finkelstein
Tort Law As A Comparative Institution, Claire Oakes Finkelstein
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
The World In Our Courts, Stephen B. Burbank
The World In Our Courts, Stephen B. Burbank
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Government "Largesse" And Constitutional Rights: Some Paths Through And Around The Swamp, Seth F. Kreimer
Government "Largesse" And Constitutional Rights: Some Paths Through And Around The Swamp, Seth F. Kreimer
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
The Costs Of Complexity, Stephen B. Burbank
The Costs Of Complexity, Stephen B. Burbank
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Interjurisdictional Preclusion, Full Faith And Credit And Federal Common Law: A General Approach, Stephen B. Burbank
Interjurisdictional Preclusion, Full Faith And Credit And Federal Common Law: A General Approach, Stephen B. Burbank
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Interjurisdictional Preclusion And Federal Common Law: Toward A General Approach, Stephen B. Burbank
Interjurisdictional Preclusion And Federal Common Law: Toward A General Approach, Stephen B. Burbank
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.