Normative Legal Theory
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Mike Rappaport has some personal observations about a clerkship from hell. Read it!
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J.B. Ruhl has a really great post on Jurisdynamics entitled The Hierarchy of Legal Scholarship. He ranks categories of scholarship from 0 (least significant) to 10 (most significant). Here are his categories: 0 – Blog posts 1 – Publication of what are essentially blog posts with footnotes: 2 – Doctrinal review of the state of…
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Over at Opinion Work Product, Justin Cox has a nice post entitled A Critique of Cass Sunstein on Risk. Here’s a taste: The short form of Sunstein’s argument is that risk and regulation evaluations ought to be handed to technocrats insulated from political and public pressure because the public is bad at making accurate risk…
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Over at Law & Society Blog, Brian has a nice post entitled Democracy and Civil Disobedience responding to The Ethics of Activism by Richard Chappell at Philosophy, et cetera. From Chappell’s post, which starts with a description of action by animal rights activists: Such hubris is what repels me from radical politics more generally. These…
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Richard Posner’s post at the Becker-Posner Blog is Extending Life, which discusses the very high cost of medical treatment near the end of life. Here is a taste: The only solution to the problem that I can think of, brutal as it sounds, is to reduce Medicare benefits. If the slack is taken up by…
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I posted recently on Scott Soames’s marvelously compact essay on "Analytic Philosophy in America." My post quoted from his description of the revival of normative ethics, but I had nothing to say about Soames’s quite peculiar description of analytic philosophy of law in the United States. Brian Leiter has some very astute and acute comments…
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Check out Martha Nussbaum on shame punishment by Thom Brooks on The Brooks Blog. Here’s a taste: In her Hiding from Humanity, Martha Nussbaum claims that society should not impose shame punishments. I will argue that she correctly directs our attention to the fact that emotions are integral to any proper understanding of our laws.…
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Updated! Scroll down for the new material. Josh Wright has a wonderful post titled Economists’ Indifference, Straw Men, and the Costs of Regulating Inequality at Truth on the Market. Here’s an extended quote: [T]he claim that economics is indifferent to market structures is something that any undergraduate economics student knows is wrong. To the extent…
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Dan Farber has a nice post entitled Designing Institutions for a Complex World at Jurisdynamics. Here’s a taste: In a world characterized by complexity, we have to begin by admitting the impossibility of perfecting what we are doing. Perfection requires stability –- the notes in a Beethoven score never change, so it is possible to…
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Harry Brighouse writes such interesting stuff. You should really surf over to Crooked Timber and read his marvelous comments on school chocie–Trading Places. The post discusses tradeable rights to admit highly qualified students, but I was thrilled when I followed the link to an earlier post, Lotteries in Admissions to Academies, which has a fascinating…