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Wednesday, March 04, 2009
More on Calhoun
Sandy Levinson
James Read, the author of the new University of Kansas Press book on John Calhoun, Majority Rule versus Consensus, has asked me to post the following comment, which I am happy to do: Tuesday, March 03, 2009
Does Calhoun still live?
Sandy Levinson
I was originally going to post what follows as a contribution to the discussion of my post below on the filibuster, but I decided to give it more prominence. One of the complaints (offered courteously, I might add) was that I am insufficiently attentive to the fact that we are intended to be a "republic," not a "democracy," and that my animus to the Senate (and then to the filibuster) denies this. I have addressed some of these complaints before, but it may be worthwhile to do so once more. The beginning of the end of DOMA?
Andrew Koppelman
Today, the legal organization GLAD (Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders) filed a lawsuit challenging the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which, in pertinent part, denies same-sex married couples every single Federal benefit related to marriage. The suit, brought on behalf of eight married couples and three widowers, is the first concerted, multi-plaintiff to Section 3 of the Act, which denies spousal protections in Social Security, federal income tax, federal employees’ and retirees’ benefits, and the issuance of passports. It is also the first suit in which plaintiffs who were married in their state of residence applied for federal benefits and were denied them. Go Big or Go Home
JB
This article from Politico gives several reasons why Obama has decided to drop an enormous agenda in Congress's lap in the form of his budget proposals. As it turns out, the strategy is overdetermined: several factors point in the same direction. The rhetoric of emergency allows Obama to insist that drastic times call for revolutionary measures; his influence is at its height and will only decrease over time; throwing everything at Congress allows him to delegate the details to the political process, so that Congress can take some credit (and blame); and finally, rather than bargaining with himself by offering more modest proposals, Obama increases the chances of significant change: he wins if only a portion of what he proposes makes it through. The End of the Yoo Doctrine
JB
The Office of Legal Counsel has just released a series of previously secret opinions from the Bush Administration. Perhaps equally important, it has issued two remarkable opinions, one from October 6th, 2008 and one from January 15th, 2009 which essentially disown the extreme theories of Presidential power offered during the crucial period between 2001 and 2003 when John Yoo was at the OLC. Monday, March 02, 2009
Jeff Tulis on presidential constructions of emergency
JB
In response to my previous post comparing how Bush and Obama have both used of (and constructed) emergency as a political strategy, Jeff Tulis (of the University of Texas Government Department) writes: Government of the filibuster and by filibuster: Ever more thoughts on our defective Constitution
Sandy Levinson
Jean Edward Smith has posted an interesting piece on "Filibusters: The Senate's Self-Inflicted Wound," correctly noting "the trivialization of the filibuster in the Senate" and the reality of what can only be called minority tyranny. Smith notes that whatever rationale once justified the filibuster with regard to protecting some identifiable state institutional interests from the ravages of the national government went out the windoow with the 17th Amendment. "But with the direct popular election of senators, all of that changed. Senators no longer represented state governments, they represented the people. The rationale for providing states a veto through the use of the filibuster no longer obtained." Indeed, as I have argued repeatedly, the rationale for equal voting power in the Senate no longer obtains either; it has turned into the nation's most important affirmative action program, where the beneficiaries are the residents of small states with inordinate power to block legislation or to seek self-serving rents (see, e.g., Maine Senators Snowe and Collins). Smith concludes as follows: "In the great legislative reapportionment cases of the 1960s, the Supreme Court defined democratic government as majority rule based on the principle of one person, one vote. It is time to apply that standard to the Senate." But, of course, if we applied that standard to the Senate, far, far, far more than the filibuster would fall. Saturday, February 28, 2009
George W. Obama and Barack Hussein Bush: Some Notes on the Presidential Politics of Emergency
JB
You may have noticed that Barack Obama, like George W. Bush before him, is taking advantage of the opportunities presented by emergency. Or, more correctly, he is taking advantage of the President's first mover advantage to define the situation before him as an emergency and to assert that bold, decisive action is necessary to avert the particular sort of crisis that he claims the nation now faces. Friday, February 27, 2009
“This Is No Picnic for Me Either, Buster”: Obama and Outliers
Ian Ayres
Crosspost from Freakonomics: My favorite Obama quotation is not one of his most poetic: He had me at “buster.” I love these words because they seem so clearly not to be his voice. He is letting his mom’s voice be heard. Even now, I find myself crying when I watch this clip: Maybe part of my emotional reaction is that, like Obama’s mother, I have forced my kids to get up at ungodly hours to study in the morning. We have been doing “daddy school” in the morning and during the summer for years. When my 7-year-old daughter said she desperately wanted a dog, I told her (in a twist on another Obama story) she could have one if she published an article in a peer-reviewed journal. And then we worked together on a family statistical project for more than two years to make it happen. Our dog is named Cheby (Shev) in honor of a statistician. Obama’s “buster” story came back to me as I was reading Malcolm Gladwell’s excellent new book, Outliers: The Story of Success. Gladwell writes beautifully, and I like this book even more than Blink or The Tipping Point. In story after story, he destroys the simplicity of the raw-genius explanations for personal success that we love to tell. Gladwell insists that there are always background conditions of opportunity and good luck that are equally, if not more, important. Many of these opportunities come from parents, but some come from cultural advantages. For example, he tells about the linguistic advantage that Chinese speakers have in math. Fourteen and 23 are hard to add in English (because linguistically, 4 comes before 10 in 14, but 3 comes after 20 in 23). But in contrast, Chinese has a much less idiosyncratic linguistic system, as Gladwell explains in the book: Gladwell also argues that the crushing difficulty of maintaining successful rice paddies has tended to make hard work a more central part of Chinese culture than many Western cultures. He points to this Chinese proverb: No one who can rise before dawn 360 days a year fails to make his family rich. (p. 238) What scares me a bit about the book (and myself) is the normative gloss that Gladwell puts on the hard-work ethic. He doesn’t renounce the 360-day proverb; he seems to embrace it. He openly extols the Bronx KIPP Academy, where school starts early and goes half the day on Saturdays, and for several weeks in the summer. (KIPP’s plan actually sounds a lot like my “daddy school,” which I wrap around my kids’ traditional school day.) Gladwell wants society to open up opportunities to work hard — with programs like KIPP — so that many more people have the chance to succeed. To be clear, the book is about the many different contextual elements that are prerequisites to success — and practicing some skill for 10,000 hours is only one of them. In the very last sentence of the book, harkening back to the factors that led to his mom’s rise from poverty in Jamaica, Gladwell poetically asks: [I]f the resources of that grocer, the fruits of those riots, the possibilities of that culture, and the privileges of that skin tone had been extended to others, how many more would live a life of fulfillment, in a beautiful house high on a hill? (p. 285) For Gladwell, the answer is pretty clearly “A lot more.” But the book, in hinting at this normative thesis, fails to consider the wisdom of Robert Frank. In The Winner-Take-All Society, Frank and coauthor Philip Cook argue that changes in the productive technology in many fields have concentrated the benefits from success in a smaller and smaller set of winners. When you can listen to a Kathleen Battle CD, why would you buy any other soprano’s recording? Frank would argue that if we subsidize the opportunities for a million more people to study voice, we would probabilistically produce a better winner. But most of the gains would still go to the winner. We would still just have one beautiful house on the hill. I’m taking such an active part in my kids’ education mostly because I want to imprint on them my idea of the good life, but partly because (even before reading Outliers) I have bought into Gladwell’s thesis that opportunities are crucially important. What gives me pause, though, is that I also accept Frank’s thesis that there are a limited number of houses on the hill. I selfishly want to increase my kids’ chances of success. But a less selfish part of me is attracted to Frank’s idea that society should do just the opposite of what Gladwell wants and dampen the rat-race incentives to get up before dawn 360 days a year. Thursday, February 26, 2009
Put Your Money Where Your B-Tush Is
Ian Ayres
Crosspost from Freakonomics: Thanks to The Times’s nice writeup (“Dieting? Put Your Money Where Your Fat Is”), an Internet company that I helped found, www.stickK.com, has been getting a spike in commitment contracts. As readers of this blog know, stickK (shameless plug) is a commitment store that helps you stick to your goals. We’ll elicit support from your friends. We’ll nag you if you want. And most uniquely, we’ll let you put your own money at stake. It’s still hard for me to believe that in just over a year, people have been willing to put at risk more than $1 million in their contractual commitments. Readers of this blog shouldn’t be surprised at the power of incentives. But The Times recently ran a piece that is also near and dear to my heart — emphasizing the power of peer pressure to change behavior. Positive Energy has been working with the Sacramento Municipal Utility District to test the impact of giving customers a different kind of information on their energy bill: Last April, it began sending out statements to 35,000 randomly selected customers, rating them on their energy use compared with that of neighbors in 100 homes of similar size that used the same heating fuel. The customers were also compared with the 20 neighbors who were especially efficient in saving energy. Customers who scored high earned two smiley faces on their statements. “Good” conservation got a single smiley face. Customers … in the “below average” category got frowns, but the utility stopped using them after a few customers got upset. The exciting news is that “customers who received the personalized report reduced energy use by 2 percent more than those who got standard statements.” This isn’t a surprise to Robert Cialdini (the author of the classic book Influence), who back in 2004 published a small, randomized study of 290 households in San Marcos, California — again looking at the impact of emoticons (those smiley and frowny faces) on energy consumption. The following figure summarizes the core results: Peer information alone led to a reversion to the mean. The households that consumed above the average reduced their consumption, while the below-average households responded to the good news that they were consuming less by increasing their energy consumption. But look what happens in the right-hand columns where peer information is paired with the emoticons. The above-average energy consumers again conserved, without the perverse energy increases from the households that started below average. It looks as if these conserving households act to keep their gold star of approval. There is also a great writeup of this study as a prime example of choice architecture in the book Nudge. The independent power of the emoticons shows that what’s going on is not just the dissemination of information; it’s about how the information is framed. In Sacramento, Positive Energy ultimately discontinued sending out the emoticons after a few complaints. But an intermediate strategy would be to discontinue the frowny faces to the energy hogs but continue sending out smiley faces to the “good” conservationist households. I should add that Cialdini has a financial interest in these outcomes, as he owns a stake in Positive Energy. I also have more than a passing interest. I’m working with Positive Energy to analyze future data on the power of both peer information and commitment contracts. I’ve also been promoting the value of peer information for the last few years. Back in 2005, Barry Nalebuff and I published an article in Forbes, arguing for something right in line with Positive Energy’s core mission: Why not have the heating bill tell you if you’re using too much energy? Most heating bills report how much gas or electricity you used last month compared with a year ago. A lot of them also report heating degree days (how far and how long the temperature veered below 65 degrees over the course of the month). But this pair of numbers isn’t very helpful. Together they don’t tell you whether you need to upgrade your insulation. There’s a better way to answer this question. Just tell people how much energy they used that month compared with other people in similar-size homes. In many cities (including our own New Haven), the square footage of each house is publicly available — so the gas company could calculate the energy per square foot for each house and display the information on each month’s bill. Further helping you out by doing the math, it could report energy consumed (in BTU) per square foot per degree day. We’ll call this measure B-Tush (BTU per square foot per heating degree day). The key here is to report how folks did relative to their neighbors. According to a 1997 Department of Energy survey, the U.S. average B-Tush is 10. If you are up to 25, then you are among the worst 10 percent. You should invest in better insulation — or else turn down the thermostat and buy some sweaters. Economists tend to think of information and incentives as the core drivers of human behavior. But Cialdini and Positive Energy have me thinking that smiley faces may also play a useful role. P.S. stickK.com hasn’t quite gone so far as to include emoticons in its messaging to help people stick to their commitments, but we are enhancing the behavioral support features. We’ve just launched several new communities (concerning things like “health and lifestyle,” “green initiatives,” and “money and finance”) to help people better connect with others who have similar goals. Cyber Civil Rights
Frank Pasquale
I just wanted to put up a note of congratulations to Danielle Citron, whose work Cyber Civil Rights was just published by the B.U. Law Review. I've seen Citron present the piece at a conference, and I think it really breaks new ground in applying venerable laws to the online environment. As recent controversies have shown, it's easy for online mobs to inflict real injuries on their victims--and women bear a disproportionate share of the abuse. Citron argues that "acting against these attacks . . . helps preserve vibrant online dialogue and promote a culture of political, social, and economic equality." Collateral Damage: Reforming the National Fugitive Operations Program
Guest Blogger
Margot Mendelson Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Why it's fallacious to compare the stimulus bill to, say, reforming the medical care system
Sandy Levinson
It is obviously tempting to assert that the quick passage of the stimulus bill (after paying tribute to the unholy threesome of Collins, Snowe, and Specter) adequately disproves my reiterated argument that we have a system that makes it difficult, if not impossible, to confront adequately the challenges that face us, such as getting a handle on our inefficient and unjust system of delivering medical care to those who need it. My view is that it is a big mistake to take much comfort in the quick passage of the stimulus bill (putting to one side whether one approves of everything that was in it, a discussion I have no desire to get into). In many ways, it was an "easy" bill to pass, for at least a number of reasons: a) (almost) everyone recognizes that there is a crisis and that something needs to be done, and fast; b) although the bill no doubt has a lot of consequences, both for good and for ill, in creating incentives for a variety of behaviors, it does not in itself constitute a serious attempt to significantly reform of any important aspect of the American political or economic system; and c) as critics of the bill point out endlessly, it's quite easy to get legislators to vote for programs that shovel money to their constituents and place the burden of paying for the programs on future generations. A Voucher System for Investigative Reporting
Ian Ayres
Crosspost from Freakonomics: Dozens of proposals are floating around suggesting different ways to fix what seems to be the broken business model for newspapers. Michael Kinsley’s Op-Ed, working backwards from the gross numbers, provides a devastating critique of the claim that micropayments on the Internet could save the industry: Micropayment advocates imagine extracting as much as $2 a month from readers. The Times sells just over a million daily papers. If every one of those million buyers went online and paid $2 a month, that would be $24 million a year. Even with the economic crisis, paper and digital advertising in The Times brought in about $1 billion last year. Circulation brought in $668 million. Two bucks per reader per month is not going to save newspapers. But the same result is strongly suggested by theory. There’s no guarantee that private demand will produce the socially optimal quantity of investigative political reporting. Muckraking is a public good, and rational consumers would rather benefit from having the other guy pay for it. The same impulse that underlies the “rational ignorance” of voters may undercut the private market’s provision of political information. Investigative reporting in the old days seemed like it was a loss-leader in the information bundle to which we subscribed. As a kid, I read the newspaper for the funnies, movie times, the sports scores, and for the classified ads. I still value this info, but I never get it from the printed page. Even a few years ago, I can remember feeding money into New Haven Register newspaper dispensers to learn the local movie times. But with an Internet-enabled cell phone, I almost never buy the Register anymore. The bottom line is that we may need to publicly subsidize investigative reporting if we’re going to get enough of it. But the problem with subsidies lies in this question: who is going to decide what kinds of issues get investigated? It’s scary to think of having politicians decide the targets of journalism. Bruce Ackerman and I have a solution (just published in the Guardian): We urge democracies throughout the world to consider the creation of national endowments for journalism that are carefully designed to confront the impending collapse of investigative reporting. The real concern is not the newspaper, but news coverage. It’s not clear that print news is a viable technology. Classified ads are more efficiently delivered by websites. Nobody under 50 waits to read all about stock prices or scores in the morning edition. The government should sit back and let the market decide the right way to distribute the news. But there are huge costs to losing a vibrant core of investigative reporters covering local, national, and international stories. The Internet is well suited to detect scandals that require lots of bloggers to spend a little bit of time searching for bits of incriminating evidence. But it’s no substitute for serious investigative reporting that requires weeks of intelligent inquiry to get to the heart of the problem. Without Woodwards and Bernsteins, there will be even more Nixons and Madoffs raining mayhem and destruction. It will take decades to revitalise investigative journalism if we allow the present corps of reporters to disintegrate. This is happening at an alarming rate. … The problem with a BBC-style solution is clear enough. It is one thing for government to serve as one source of investigation, but quite another for it to dominate the field. A near-monopoly would mean the death of critical inquiry. There are serious problems with private endowments as well. For starters, there is the matter of scale. Pro Publica, an innovative private foundation for investigative reporting, is currently funding 28 journalists. It is hard to make the case for a massive increase in private funding when university endowments are crashing throughout the world, imperiling basic research. More fundamentally, a system of private endowments creates perverse incentives. Insulated from the profit motive, the endowments will pursue their own agendas without paying much attention to the issues that the public really cares about. Here is where our system of national endowments enters the argument. In contrast to current proposals, we do not rely on public or private do-gooders to dole out money to their favorite journalists. Each national endowment would subsidize investigations on a strict mathematical formula based on the number of citizens who actually read their reports on news sites. Some might find this prospect daunting. Readers may flock to sensationalist tabloids that will also qualify for grants for their “investigations”. But common sense, as well as fundamental liberal values, counsels against any governmental effort to regulate the quality of news. So long as the endowment only subsidizes investigative expenditures, in-depth reporting will get a large share of the fund — provided that it generates important stories that generate broad interest. The government provides the subsidy, but “the people” decide how it will be distributed. You vote with your eyes and ears. Bruce and I, in Voting With Dollars, suggest an analogous system called “Patriot Dollars” that would allow individual voters to decide how campaign-finance subsidies would be distributed. But here the voucher scheme is implemented by a less obtrusive choice architecture. The ordinary act of reading or listening to a piece of journalism tells government that this is the organization that should be subsidized. Instead of influencing the content of what will be reported on, government can empower readers by subsidizing the news organizations that have succeeded in the past. Silverstein, LAW'S ALLURE
Mark Graber
Law’s Allure: How Law Shapes, Contrains, Saves and Kills Politics provides an original and compelling analysis of the complex relationships between law and politics. Professor Silverstein’s insights that juridification in the United States is on the rise, that juridification is more than government by judiciary, and that this escape from politics has numerous hidden costs are interesting and important. The case studies are well written and informative, the research is solid, and the conclusions likely to provoke a good deal of conversation both within and without political science. Readers of such classics as Rosenberg, The Hollow Hope and McCann, Rights at Work, will want to add Law’s Allure to their bookshelves and syllabi. Lawyers in both government and public interest litigation should take the work’s proscriptions seriously. Tuesday, February 24, 2009
It may be morning in America, but we still have the same defective Constitution
Sandy Levinson
I'm still elated by the results of the election and the fact that, at long last (and several weeks late) Barack Obama was finally inaugurated. But no one should doubt that among the problems we face in this country is a political system that is structured to create, if not out-and-out gridlock--some legislation does in fact get passed, after all--then a structured incapacity to confront serious problems head-on, especially if any proposed solutions involve serious sacrifice by one's own constituents. When Tip O'Neil so memorably said that "all politics is local," he was offering a profound statement about the polity generated by the Constitution, in which ever single member of Congress is indeed a parochial local representative when push comes to shove. "People want the basic stuff fixed," said state Rep. Vernon Sykes, a Democrat who chairs the Finance and Appropriations Committee in the Ohio House. "They don't have a romantic notion of bipartisanship. They just want people to come together to solve problems." Monday, February 23, 2009
Redux: Does Broadband Belong in the Economic Stimulus Package?
Neil Netanel
The economic stimulus bill provides for $7.2 billion in grants, loans, and loan guarantees for construction of rural broadband internet. In a February 11th post, I questioned whether that sizable government expenditure truly serves the job-creation goals of the stimulus package, as opposed to those of telecommunications law and policy generally. Articles in the Washington Post (Skepticism Arises Over Rural Broadband Stimulus) and New York Times (Rural Broadband: No Job Creation Machine) over the last couple days have posed the same question. Both articles refer to a study co-authored by Raul Katz, Director of Business Strategy Research at Columbia Business School's Institute for Tele-Information. Watching the Watchmen
Stephen Griffin
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? This question posed by the Latin satirist Juvenal is familiar to anyone who has read a basket of books on judicial review. I’ve seen it translated as “Who will guard those selfsame guardians” in the context of asking: if the Supreme Court is the guardian of the Constitution, who will ensure the Court follows that supreme law? In the next few weeks, you are more likely to see it translated as “Who will watch the Watchmen?” as we move toward the opening of the film based on Watchmen, a famous graphical novel. Fragments of this question appear throughout the story as the “superhero” vigilante characters (all but one lack superhuman abilities) grapple with various moral dilemmas. Watching for Stimulus Abuses
Guest Blogger
Martha Minow The fall of Qi Yuling
Lauren Hilgers
Quietly, in a batch of other laws and rulings being thrown out at the end of 2008, China recently abolished the Qi Yuling ruling, nullifying what has long been considered by many the seminal constitutional law ruling in PRC history. The case was the first to indicate that China’s constitution could be applied in civil litigation. Many hoped it would set the scene for the integration of constitutional law into China’s existing judicial system. Friday, February 20, 2009
Money in Crisis: Revisiting the Legal Tender Cases
Frank Pasquale
Despairing at the stimulus package, some voices on the right have launched a first principles attack on the borrowing it entails. In the Wall Street Journal, Judy Shelton says "let's go back to the gold standard," claiming that "Fiat money -- i.e., currency with no intrinsic worth that government has decreed legal tender -- loses its value when government creates more than can be absorbed by the productive real economy." Thomas E. Woods at the contrarian The American Conservative notes the intellectual roots of today's gold bugs: Thursday, February 19, 2009
An Offer Republican Governors Can Refuse
JB
News reports suggest that Governors Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Rick Perry of Texas are contemplating turning down billions of dollars to their states in the new stimulus package because they don't like the conditions attached. A few other Republican governors have raised similar objections to accepting money from the stimulus. Wednesday, February 18, 2009
The Bush Presidency and Theories of Constitutional Change (Part II)
Stephen Griffin
In my earlier post on this subject, I posited that the Bush presidency poses a challenge for theories of constitutional change. How should that change be met? After the jump, I provide a sample of the analysis in my article of the title above, just posted on SSRN. The analysis does differ from the kind scholars have absorbed from the theories put forward by Bruce Ackerman and Keith Whittington. It does not focus on constitutional moments or constructions. Beyond Innovation: The Many Goals of Internet Law and Policy
Frank Pasquale
Innovation has been the central focus of internet law and policy. While they sharply divide on the best way to promote innovation, commentators across the political spectrum routinely elevate its importance. Academics and public interest groups have celebrated search engines, social networks, and start-ups as model corporations in a new service economy. For example, Lawrence Lessig has proposed eliminating the Federal Communications Commission and replacing it with a streamlined entity with a single mission: to promote innovation and reduce the type of monopoly power that stifle innovation. Is the Office of Legal Counsel Constitutional? Some notes on the American Conseil Constitutionnel
JB
I wanted to use the occasion of the OLC's rejuvenation with very high quality lawyers to say a few words about this incredibly important body that is comparatively little known to the public. Card Counting in a Casino Society
JB
The Financial Times reports that, concerned that the U.S. government is rewarding bad behavior and throwing good money after bad some conservative Republicans (and even noted Ayn Rand-admirer Alan Greenspan) are now open to the possibility of nationalization (or as FT spells it "nationalisation") of U.S. banks while Representative Michelle Bachmann (previously worried that Barack Obama and other members of Congress might secretly be anti-American) warns that "we're running out of rich people in this country." California teeters on the brink of financial collapse while others compare our nation to a casino society in which government policies have encouraged overly risky economic behavior and moral hazard from the richest capitalist to the ordinary consumer. Meanwhile the actual operators of casinos are worried about the latest iPhone application: a card counter for the iPhone that can be operated in "stealth mode" when the iPhone appears to be turned off. Sunday, February 15, 2009
Kozinski and Reinhardt on DOMA
Andrew Koppelman
The Defense of Marriage Act of 1996 (DOMA) provides in pertinent part: Saturday, February 14, 2009
More on Reforming the Supreme Court
David Stras
Like Jack, I am a signatory to one of the four proposals to reform the Supreme Court that have been advanced by Paul Carrington, Roger Cramton, and a distinguished group of other legal academics, practitioners, and former judges. Unlike Jack, I did not agree to support any of the proposals that would have forced senior status on Supreme Court Justices after eighteen years of active service. To be sure, the most recent set of proposals is substantially better than previous attempts as it would at least permit senior Supreme Court Justices to sit when there is a vacancy on the Court or one or more of the Justices is otherwise disqualified from hearing the case. Nonetheless, for many of the reasons I have stated in a prior co-authored article addressing other term limit proposals, see here, I view the current proposal as suffering from serious constitutional problems. In short, any statutory attempt to alter life tenure is, in my view, inconsistent with Article III’s command that federal judges shall hold their office during “good Behaviour.”
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Books by Balkinization Bloggers Mary Dudziak, Exporting American Dreams: Thurgood Marshall's African Journey (Oxford University Press 2008) Neil Netanel, Copyright's Paradox (Oxford Univ. Press 2008) David Luban, Legal Ethics and Human Dignity (Cambridge Univ. Press 2007) Ian Ayres, Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers is the New Way to be Smart (Bantam 2007) Jack M. Balkin, James Grimmelmann, Eddan Katz, Nimrod Kozlovski, Shlomit Wagman and Tal Zarsky, eds., Cybercrime: Digital Cops in a Networked Environment (N.Y.U. Press 2007) Jack M. Balkin and Beth Simone Noveck, The State of Play: Law, Games, and Virtual Worlds (N.Y.U. Press 2006) Andrew Koppelman, Same Sex, Different States: When Same-Sex Marriages Cross State Lines (Yale University Press 2006) Brian Tamanaha, Law as a Means to an End (Cambridge University Press 2006) Sanford Levinson, Our Undemocratic Constitution (Oxford University Press 2006) Mark Graber, Dred Scott and the Problem of Constitutional Evil (Cambridge University Press 2006) Jack M. Balkin, ed., What Roe v. Wade Should Have Said (N.Y.U. Press 2005) Sanford Levinson, ed., Torture: A Collection (Oxford University Press 2004) Balkin.com homepage Bibliography Conlaw.net Cultural Software Writings Opeds The Information Society Project BrownvBoard.com Useful Links Syllabi and Exams |