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Deliberative democracy in the face of irrationality and distrust
Frank Fischer’s Democracy and Expertise: Reorienting Policy Inquiry argues that the public in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has increasingly gown critical and distrustful of the professions and their practices.
June 2012 / 5 min.
Nineteenth-century America was not a libertarian utopia
There is a commonly held perception that the United States in the nineteenth century lacked rules and regulations that we today commonly associate with intrusive “big government.”
May 2012 / 4 min.
Benefits of viewing the right to privacy as a property right
There are many approaches to protecting privacy, but many of them run into conflicts, either with existing protections (perhaps especially the First Amendment) or with those who are suspicious of government regulation. But privacy rights do not necessarily need to be protected in a novel new form as a new right – one could instead leverage existing theories of property to do it.
April 2012 / 7 min.
Four planning rules to avoid project disasters
One key reason to study history? To learn from the past: (1) take small steps. (2) favor reversibility, (3) plan on surprises, and (4) plan on human inventiveness.
April 2012 / 3 min.
Freedom to contract at the end of the nineteenth century
In Kermit Hall’s words, the nineteenth century saw the “triumph of contract” over property, tort, and equity, as the law came “to ratify those forms of inequality that the market system produces.”
March 2012 / 3 min.
Post-war contract law in the nineteenth century
In many respects, the so-called “black codes” put in place in the South immediately after the Civil War exemplify the potential extremes of nineteenth-century contract law. Although these laws only lasted for a few years before the Republican Congress – dominated by Northerners after the secession of the South – stepped in and forced the South to accept new […]
March 2012 / 3 min.
Reforming government regulations: Stephen Breyer’s technocratic solutions
In Breaking the Vicious Circle, Justice Stephen Breyer tackles the problem of regulation and risk in the American context.
March 2012 / 8 min.
Is everything old new again? Learning from the history of technology
Peter Decherney, Nathan Ensmenger, and Christopher S. Yoo recently published an article, Are Those Who Ignore History Doomed to Repeat it?, on Tim Wu’s book, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires.
March 2012 / 3 min.
Revisiting copyright claims against Westlaw and LexisNexis: Does selling access to court-filed attorney briefs violate copyright law?
Edward L. White, a Oklahoma City, Okla., lawyer, and Kenneth Elan, claim WestLaw and LexisNexis have engaged in “unabashed wholesale copying of thousands of copyright-protected works created by, and owned by, the attorneys and law firms who authored them” – namely publicly filed briefs, motions and other legal documents.
February 2012 / 3 min.
The irrelevance of blog advertisements: a publisher’s lament
After running a (horribly unscientific) poll on my law & technology blog for several months, I discovered that less than 15% of people voting found any of the Google-served advertisements to be relevant (not unwanted… irrelevant). This is a problem. Google has always claimed their ads are contextual and targeted to the content of your […]
February 2012 / 2 min.