Law & Society Blog

Last month, while I was driving home at night, a big pick-up truck rear-ended my car at a red light. I got out of my car, but before I could survey the damage, the driver of the pick-up gunned his engine and drove off. I was left standing in the middle of a dark intersection […]

The district court for the Eastern District of California granted summary judgment for defendants in an important challenge to the California Financial Information Privacy Act, commonly known as “SB1″ (Senate Bill 1). The SB1 protections go far beyond those of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, requiring opt-out provisions for information sharing among affiliates (for example, banks and […]

The Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University offers free (as in beer), interactive tutorials for, among other things, economics, statistics, and causal reasoning. The economics module looks very promising. It emphasizes hands-on exercises (in a spreadsheet style format) over calculus. Definitely worth checking out.

In his excellent Legal Theory Blog, Lawrence Solum argues that (i) the Supreme Court has become increasingly dysfunctional; and (ii) that the reason for such dysfunctionality is a confluence of two factors: (a) close ideological division of the Court, giving undue weight to the justices at the margin (O’Connor and Kennedy); and (b) a prevailing […]

In a post titled Swing Votes, Making Things Come Out Right, and the Virtue of Justice, Lawrence Solum on the Legal Theory Blog has posted a very interesting analysis of what he perceives to be two factors producing a crisis in the current Supreme Court:
First, we have a closely divided court, and the division is […]

Any system can be defined by a pair of terms, by its code: lawful/unlawful for the law, good/evil for morality, beautiful/ugly for aesthetics. Just/unjust may be the code for some normative system, but (as my esteemed colleague drhfk insists), not of the legal system. This view, an extreme form of the positivist separation thesis, is […]

My brief account of normativity is (supposed to be) naturalistic, in that it attempts to explain what norms are, not what they ought to be. Hence, I agree with Bloomfield that my model of normativity does not provide for
justice as a concept against which to measure law vs. non-law, good law vs. bad […]

My esteemed colleague drhfk was recently heard to say:
Rather, punishment is the symbolic affirmation that continuing reliance on a normative expectation (for example, that of property) is not foolish but is what society expects me to keep expecting.

The world is chaos. The future is unknown. Reality is unreliable, and our sanity is fragile. We […]