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Review of Philosophical Foundations of Labour Law, edited by Hugh Collins, Gillian Lester, and Virginia Mantouvalou
Get PDFIlliberalism and Authoritarianism in the American States
Get PDFFederalism contemplates subnational variation, but in the United States the nature and significance of that variation has long been contested. In light of the recent turn, globally and nationally, toward authoritarianism, and the concurrent sharp decline in public support not merely for democracy but for the philosophical liberalism on which democracy rests, it is necessary to discard or to substantially revise prior accounts of the nature of state-to-state variation in the U.S. All such accounts implicitly presuppose a common commitment, across the political spectrum, to the core tenets of democratic liberalism, and consequently that subnational variations in policy preferences and modes of self-governance reflect nothing more than disagreements within the shared American liberal tradition. That assumption, if it was ever valid, may be no longer. As in other federal states in which subnational “illiberal enclaves” have persisted over time, the United States may be witnessing a replication at the subnational level of what appears to be happening at the national level: a growing chasm along a cleavage between democratic liberalism and illiberal authoritarianism, in which some states remain committed to inherited forms of democratic liberalism while others cling to (or develop, or resurrect) patterns of illiberal authoritarianism.
The paper examines both the “large-C” formal constitutions of the states and their “small-c” informal constitutions and behavior for evidence of such a development. The evidence shows that North Carolina and Wisconsin have advanced the farthest down the road to subnational authoritarianism, with Florida, Texas, Kansas, Arizona, and Alabama not far behind. Disturbing initial signs of democratic backsliding may be seen as well in Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee. Although subnational authoritarianism in the United States is at this point far less severe than that found elsewhere in the world, the evidence suggests considerable cause for concern
The Mindful Lawyer
Get PDFThe American Bar Association’s (ABA) National Taskforce on Lawyer Well-Being released the The Path to Lawyer Wellbeing Report in 2017. The report begins, “To be a good lawyer, one has to be a healthy lawyer. Sadly, our profession is falling short when it comes to well-being.” The report cites studies that reveal the high rates of chronic stress, depression and substance abuse among lawyers and law students, what they describe as the toxicity of the profession, and the stigma associated with help seeking behaviors. The report held as its central guiding principle that well-being is an indispensable part of a lawyer\u27s duty of competence
John Henry Schlegel and David A. Westbrook discuss “the adventure of thinking”
No full textFrom the heights of his long tenure at the University at Buffalo School of Law, in Episode 21 of The Baldy Center Podcast, Distinguished Professor John Schlegel discusses US economic history, American Legal Realism, and his lived experience with legal education over the last half century, in particular, Critical Legal Studies. In this extemporaneous conversation, Del Cotto Professor David Westbrook affectionately provokes Schlegel to grapple with the necessary and complex ongoing negotiations between our concepts of adventure and stability, serious and fun, the endeavor of intellectual freedom... and the Borg
Matthew Dimick, Using Legal Rules to Reduce Income Inequality
Get PDFThe United States has experienced a disturbing expansion of income and wealth inequality in the past three or four decades. We only fully recognized this yawning divide in the material fortunes of Americans after the 2008 financial crisis, which did little to change the direction of the trend. The Coronavirus pandemic has only added fuel to the inequality fire in a particularly grave way. Income inequality might be condemned on its own terms and for its political (erosion of democracy) and economic (financial instability) consequences. These worrisome trends in economic inequality have caused scholars to look for policy solutions. For legal scholars, in particular, the question arises: can legal rules do anything about income inequality? A long-standing position within law-and-economics scholarship gives a clear answer to this question: No
Topology of the Closet
Get PDFDespite the closet’s centrality to queer culture and theory, the metaphor’s various meanings have yet to be disaggregated and defined. Following Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s identification of the closet with a “crisis of homo/heterosexual definition, indicatively male, dating from the end of the nineteenth century,” the present article uses an array of late-Victorian sources—especially The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds and Teleny, a pornographic novel sometimes attributed to Oscar Wilde—to describe and distinguish: (1) so-called latent homosexuality (“the unconscious closet”); (2) deliberate strategies of suppression, abstention, and reformation (“the conscious closet”); (3) clandestine pursuits of gay sex and sociability (“the double life”); and (4) performances of a heterosexual persona (“the mask”). This article’s sources further attest to the late-Victorian advent of “closet consciousness”—a recognition among certain homosexually-inclined men that the closet’s multiple modalities, for all their variety, are phenomenologically and ideologically linked
Antitrust Law’s Harm to Competition: A New Understanding of Exclusivity
Get PDFOne of the long-accepted axioms of antitrust law is that the competitive danger posed by exclusivity agreements increases as the market share foreclosed by these arrangements increases. The larger the market share foreclosed by an exclusivity agreement, the less likely the arrangement is to be upheld by courts. And exclusivity arrangements foreclosing extremely large market shares are practically never upheld. The business community has responded by forsaking such arrangements (or concealing them). This Article challenges this very intuitive axiom. It shows that due to an unobserved feature of exclusivity, when extremely large market shares are foreclosed, the competitive danger posed by these arrangements decreases. Exclusivity arrangements foreclosing market shares of 85% and higher should be presumed competitively benign, and therefore legal. Several illustrative examples of industries, in which widespread exclusivity should be allowed in contradiction to the current understanding, are provided. The analysis developed in this Article suggests that for decades antitrust law has been decreasing welfare by forcing businesses to steer clear of a welfare-enhancing practice. The Article calls for a change of this paradigm
