Law & Society Blog

Ben Barros, Professor at Widener University Law School, posted his prepared remarks to the Pennsylvania House of Representatives State Government Committee on SSRN. His main point is that homes deserve special protection from government takings, because
homes are different from other types of property. People become personally attached to their homes. Homes tie people […]

Even jurisprudes (analytic legal philosophers), in addition to other legal theorists, are coming to the slow and painful realization that something has gone terribly wrong in legal philosophy. Anglo-American legal philosophy is littered with circular, repetitive and quite esoteric discussions. Things have gotten so bad that some recent articles have resorted to personal attacks. […]

We are pleased to welcome a new member to the Law & Society Weblog, who will be blogging as Nico Artzi. Nico is (among other things) a young, successful law & philosophy scholar, writing about jurisprudential issues that are near and dear to our hearts, such as positivism, moral philosophy, and social philosophy.

For all practical purposes, law is a reason to do or to refrain from doing something. It is a reason for claiming payment under a contract, for invoking the Fifth Amendment right to remain silent, and for the corporate executive to terminate a program that would have increased profits but run afoul of the antitrust […]

Ordinary people - myself emphatically included - have no way to determine the truth of all but the most simplistic factual claims, which does not keep anyone from having strong opinions. Let’s take the evolution v. creationism (or “intelligent design”) debate. Suppose that you argue in favor of creationism. I claim in response:
“The theory of […]

Here is a very brief, highly readable explanation of the critical insight underlying the Coase theorem, courtesy of Larry Solum.