Law & Society Blog

Jonathan Wolff proposes the following:Suppose everyone is given the right to buy only a certain number of gallons of petrol/gasoline a month; somewhat less than average current usage. You can use your allowance, or if you would prefer, sell it in whole or part on the free market either to those who want more than the allowance, or to brokers.

Here’s a good, very personal post by David Schraub, titled Unheeded Innocence that’s worth quoting in full.I’ll lay it straight for you…. If for no other reason than to prevent horrors like this from happening, we must be ever-vigilent in making sure that our criminal justice system does everything possible to prevent an innocent man from being convicted.

Update your links to this must read blog.

If our only valid benchmarks are the past and the minimally extrapolated near-future, then we tend to see our world as the best of all worlds…. The courage to use an utopian benchmark, a long run ideal world, is something that has all but disappeared wherever economics is now used in the law as the naturalist basis for explanation and interpretation.

In the last couple of days, we (and other blogs) have come under massive comment spam attacks, which Askimet, our spam killer, is apparently unable to block.

This week in Ireland, five peace protesters were aquitted by jury verdict of the charge of criminal damage to property. In 2003, the protesters forced their way into an airplane hanger at Shannon airport and attacked a US Airforce transport plane, bashing the airplane’s nose and causing $2.5 million of damage.
The Dublin Criminal Circuit Court […]

Don’t miss Daniel Gilbert’s interesting Op-Ed over at the New York Times: He Who Cast the First Stone Probably Didn’t. Gilbert writes about recent experiments that show that (a) we tend to regard our own actions as consequences (of the actions of others) and the actions of others as causes, and (b) that we tend […]

As the BBC reports today, Germany has signed a Nazi-files accord, which will give access beyond victims to the files kept by the Nazis. The accord still has to be ratified by the eleven members of the ITS commission (Germany, Belgium, Britain, France, Israel, Italy, Greece, Luxembourg, Poland, the Netherlands and the US).
The 47 […]

After having (once again) missed a window of departure at Newark airport, because resulting in yet another two hour delay, I am glad to see that someone is thinking about alternative approaches to aircraft security.

/// What follows is a piece which presents a series of examinations of utilitarianism from Harwood’s seminal essay, “Eleven Objections to Utilitarianism”, along with my demonstrations of how these objections are unsound. Previous installments address such topics as integrity, justice, promise-keeping, supererogation, average and total utilitarianisms, and rule utilitarianism. As the objections get more and […]