This article is a response to an earlier posted piece by Jeanne C. Fromer: Claiming Intellectual Property.
Claiming intellectual property is an act of communication, but as with all communication not everything can be spelled out with exactitude all the time—far from it. By drawing out an additional distinction between… Read More »
This article is a response to an earlier posted piece by Richard Epstein: Protect Us, Lord, from Title VII: A Response to Gelbach, Klick, and Wexler.
We thank Richard Epstein for commenting on our online Article. He brings a unique perspective to the field of employment discrimination and pushes other scholars… Read More »
By writing a series of James Bond novels, Ian Fleming qualified for American copyright protection, pursuant to which works created by others without license and found by courts to be substantially similar to the novels would generally infringe his copyright. Imagine instead that Fleming would have had to draft a… Read More »
New findings in hedonic psychology have implications for punishment theory. Specifically, these findings suggest that criminals adapt surprisingly well to fines and even to incarceration, but that incarceration negatively affects post-prison life in ways that tend to be unadaptable. These results increase the difficulty of using adjustments in the size… Read More »
Professor Mitchell’s characteristically thoughtful and incisive comment makes many important points. I also agree with Professor Mitchell that a modernization approach gives political actors an incentive to behave strategically… Read More »
In this Editorial, we present a basic, one-period microeconomic model in which equilibrium occurs in both perfectly competitive labor markets and goods markets. This piece is a companion to our earlier Legal Workshop Editorial, Passive Discrimination, which was posted on June 22, 2009. Because all hypothesized workers are equally productive,… Read More »
In their recent article, Passive Discrimination, Jonah Gelbach, Jonathan Klick, and Lesley Wexler (hereafter “GKW”) offer yet another way to pile additional liabilities on hapless employers for race or sex discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Their article is ingenious because it identifies a mechanism—previously discussed… Read More »
In this Editorial, we present a distinct mechanism of employer discrimination largely ignored by scholars and regulators alike. What we term “passive discrimination” involves an employer’s use of wage and benefits packages that exploit observed, systematic group-level preference heterogeneity in order to induce worker sorting such that members of a… Read More »
The Supreme Court is frequently accused of declaring laws unconstitutional based on little more than the justices’ ideological preferences. This is an especially common criticism of the Court’s capital-punishment, equal-protection, and substantive-due-process jurisprudence, where the justices have made little effort to tie their decisions to anything resembling a neutral principle.
In… Read More »
Constitutional interpretation looks to the past: to an old text, to old precedents, to the views of the founding generations, to tradition. That is the conventional wisdom, at least. Judicial review, as it’s usually conceived, is a matter of using principles rooted in these sources to limit current popular majorities.… Read More »