SelectedWorks @ Chapman University Dale E. Fowler School of Law
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Legal Liability for Dam Failures
No full textAlthough major dams are not designed or intended to fail, the unexpected may occur with tragic consequences. In the unlikely event of such a tragedy, the legal system has a full panoply of remedies available to compensate the victims and their families for the losses incurred. While each state is a separate jurisdiction free to adopt its own legal rules, regulations and theories of relief, the states will generally utilize the common-law theories of negligence and strict liability in awarding relief. Many steps can be taken to minimize the risks of failure. Potential damages include the traditional common law compensatory awards for loss of life/wrongful death, personal injury, loss of earnings, medical expenses, emotional distress, and property damages. There is also an additional risk of punitive damages being awarded if defendant\u27s wrongful conduct is viewed as intentional, egregious, willful, wanton or reckless
The Scale of Consent
No full textWe often speak of consent in binary terms, boiling it down to yes or no. In practice, however, consent varies by degrees. We tend to afford expressly consensual transactions more respect than transactions backed by only implied consent, for instance, which we in turn regard as more meaningful than transactions justified by merely hypothetical consent. A mirror of that ordinal ranking appears in our judgments about unconsensual transactions. This working paper reviews how legal and other authorities regard consent, revealing that they treat consent as a matter of degree and a measure of justification. The scale described here plays a vital role in a larger project, one that will also explain consent\u27s importance and apply graduated consent theory to such longstanding puzzles as the enforceability of standard form agreements, the justifiability of political coercion, and the meaning of a constitution. As a preliminary to that project, this working paper explains how consent and justification vary by degree and covary in value
An Experimental Inquiry into the Social Construction of Property
No full textWe design a laboratory experiment to explore whether and how property rights emerge in a specialization and exchange environment where theft is costless. Additional treatments examine various enforcement mechanisms to determine whether private actions can produce agreement to respect property. We find that although an absence of exogenous enforcement does not hamper property’s emergence in all cases, private enforcement instruments tend to worsen outcomes. Property emerges when subjects form groups, understand potential gains from trade, convince group members that all benefit by avoiding theft, and display credible commitment to cooperation in their actions. In other words, as Hume argued in 1740, property is a convention
Pulling the Trigger: Separation Violence as a Basis for Refugee Protection for Battered Women
No full textFor over a decade, women seeking asylum from persecution inflicted by their abusive husbands and partners have found little protection in the United States. During that time, domestic violence-based asylum cases have languished in limbo, been denied, or occasionally been granted in unpublished opinions that have not provided a much-needed adjudicative standard. The main case setting forth the pre-Obama approach to domestic violence-based asylum is rife with misunderstanding of the nature of domestic violence and minimization of the role that society plays in the proliferation of domestic violence. Fortunately, however, a recent Obama-administration legal brief indicates that women fleeing countries where government are unable or unwilling to protect them from their abusive husbands finally may be able to avail themselves of U.S. asylum law. This article proposes a workable standard for adjudicating such claims. Based in part on psychological research on the dynamics of abusive relationships, particularly the phenomenon known as “separation violence,” this article formulates a particular social group that satisfies the various legal elements for political asylum: “women who have left severely abusive relationships.” This social group is based on research demonstrating that abusers strike out with increased violence when their partners leave the relationships, in many cases even killing them. This article explores the dynamics of abusive relationships, the failure of U.S. adjudicators to understand those dynamics, and the application of international human rights law to domestic violence survivors
Constructivist and Ecological Forms of Rationality: Experimental Economics and Housing Bubbles that Engulfed the Economy, 1997-2009, and 1920-1931
No full textAsset market bubbles occur dependably in laboratory experiments. They have also been frequent in economic history, yet they do not usually bring the global economy to its knees. The ongoing Crash of 2008 was caused by the bursting of a housing bubble of unusual size, fed by a massive expansion of mortgage credit. Mortgage credit was itself facilitated by the longest sustained expansionary monetary policy in the past 50 years. Much of this mortgage credit was extended to people with little net wealth and slender down payments so that when the bubble burst and housing prices declined their losses quickly exceeded their equity. The losses of these borrowers were then transmitted to the financial system, including banks, investments banks, insurance companies, and institutional and private investors who provided liquidity to the mortgage market through structured securities. To an uncertain extent many of these institutions became insolvent. The liquidity loss and solvency fears created a strong feedback cycle of diminished financing, reduced housing demand, falling housing prices, more borrower losses, and further damage to the financial system. Eventually distress spread to the stock market and an economy that had in many other respects been performing well. Evidence is reported suggesting important parallels with the housing and financial market boom in the 1920s leading up to the Crash of 1929, and the Great Depression
The President\u27s Brain (No, Not Karl Rove): How Bush’s Psyche Shaped His Decision-Making
No full textWe summarize the most systematic work on George W. Bush\u27s psyche. SAT scores and other available measures indicate that Bush has sufficient intelligence to serve as president. Yet the best studies, in which raters evaluate statements without being aware of their source, suggest that Bush lacks integrative complexity and thus views issues without nuance. The leading personality theory (the “5-Factor Model”), as measured by the NEO Personality Inventory, suggests that Bush is highly extroverted but not very agreeable or conscientious. He also scores low on “Openness to Experience. Similarly, using the Millon Inventory of Diagnostic Criteria, Bush fits the “Outgoing,” “Dominant (Controlling),” and “Dauntless” personality patterns, which together constitute a style given to lack of reflection, superficiality, and impulsivity. When compared to other presidents, Bush most closely resembles Jackson, Reagan, and Harding, but is very unlike his father, George H.W. Bush. We apply these findings to discussions of President Bush\u27s decision-making in the cases of his most notable success, education reform, and his most notable failure, the Iraq war. We argue that Bush\u27s psychological predispositions were particularly noteworthy in the latter, in part because greater presidential power in foreign policy magnifies the impacts of leader personality.