Law & Society Blog

Because the decisionmaker will always have more information about her theory of value than about the other considerations relevant to optimal deterrence, her theory of value will always dominate her analysis. So although it’s thereafter possible for her to reconstruct her conclusions in deterrence terms, those conclusions will in fact be derivative from the decisionmakers’ intuitions about what crimes are more reprehensible than others.

This article on law.com focuses on the background of one of the new top priorities of the U.S. Attorney General’s office, which is the prosecution of “purveyors of obscene materials.”
With the rapid growth of Internet pornography, stamping out obscene material has become a major concern for the Bush administration’s powerful Christian conservative supporters. The Mississippi-based […]

David Law and Larry Solum ( of Legal Theory Blog fame) have posted an excellent paper on judical selection on SSRN, entitled Pivotal Politics, Appointments Gridlock, and the Nuclear Option. Here is the abstract:
In this paper, we employ simple formal models drawn from political science to explain the occurrence of gridlock in the federal […]

Robert Justin Lipkin in his working paper entitled The Harm of Same-Sex Marriage: Real or Imagined? argues that yes, same-sex marriage causes harm to those who deprecate it. He is quick to add that “this sense of harm cannot be the basis for law or social policy in a democracy.” But why?
Lipkin, while at […]

I am remiss in pointing out that Jeffrey Lipshaw has posted a new draft of his Freedom, Compulsion, Compliance and Mystery: Reflections on the Duty Not to Enforce a Promise. I offered some thoughts on this interesting piece, which have been rendered moot in part. In particular, Lipshaw’s conception of compliance seems less at […]

According to this survey, New Yorkers strongly support the random bag searches in the subway system.
In a Quinnipiac University survey of 1,601 voters, 72 percent favored the searches while 25 percent opposed them. That support was solid among blacks, whites and Hispanics. […] “Even in a city touchy about civil rights, New Yorkers pick a […]

I posted a draft review article of Michael Pawlik’s book Person, Subjekt, B??rger (Person, Subject, Citizen) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
It is a hallmark of modernity that the protection of individual freedom, however defined, has replaced justice as the primary criterion for the legitimacy of government. Criminal punishment, as one of the most drastic […]

Following one of Larry Solum’s links, I came across an interesting article, by Jeffrey M. Lipshaw entitled Freedom, Compulsion, Compliance and Mystery: Reflections on the Duty Not to Enforce a Promise. The article undertakes to draw an arc from contract theory to Kelsen, Kant, and Dworkin. Lipshaw asks this question: Is there, in some circumstances, […]

As a clarification to my previous post on Predicting Judicial Decisions, note that the idea is not to have judges participate in surveys, but rather to create a predictive framework on the basis of existing large-scale surveys, such as the world value survey or Kahan’s and Braman’s survey of 1,800 Americans. My point was that […]

Values are sets of normative principles and resulting cognitive beliefs that guide the acquisition of human knowledge and provide criteria to judge human actions and emotions. The empirical study of values provides, among other things, fascinating insights into which beliefs tend to occur in clusters. For example, respondents who answer the question “Is God very […]