This Essay challenges a central narrative in the history of Anglo-American business by questioning the importance of the corporate form. The Essay shows that the corporate form was not, as we have long believed, the exclusive historical source of powers such as limited liability, entity shielding, tradable shares, and legal personhood in litigation. These powers were also available throughout modern history through a little-studied, but enormously...
No. 8
Climate change represents, perhaps, the greatest challenge of the twenty-first century. As temperatures and sea levels rise, governments around the world will face massive and unprecedented human displacement that international law currently has no mechanism to address. While estimates vary, the scope of the migration crisis that the world will face in the coming decades is startling. In addition to losing their homes, climate change migrants,...
Economic analysis of law has traditionally assumed that legal rules are or ought to be designed to maximize social welfare taking as given that legal subjects are like Holmes’s “bad man”—rational, self-interested agents who care about complying with the law only insofar as noncompliance exposes them to the risk of sanctions. But while it is plausible to suppose that some legal subjects are, like Holmes’s bad man, “externalizers” of...
From Citizens United to Hobby Lobby, civil libertarian challenges to the regulation of economic activity are increasingly prevalent. Critics of this trend invoke the specter of Lochner v. New York. They suggest that the First Amendment, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and other legislative “conscience clauses” are being used to resurrect the economically libertarian substantive due process jurisprudence of the early...
Suicide is the leading cause of death in jails, yet many jails and municipalities have insufficient policies for preventing inmate suicide. One of the ways to lead jails and municipalities to change such policies would be through financial pressure from individual lawsuits for damages resulting from an inmate’s suicide; however, due to the legal structure surrounding custodial liability, it is often difficult for inmates’ estates to successfully...
Over the past two decades, legal protections for lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals have dramatically expanded. Simultaneously, meaningful access to reproductive choice for women has eroded. What accounts for the different trajectories of LGBTQ rights and reproductive rights?
This Piece argues that one explanation—or at least partial explanation—for the advance of LGBTQ rights relative to reproductive rights is the differing degree...