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Leave Your Stereotypes at the Door: The Importance of Context in the Halls of Congress and the Garden of Torah
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Selling Sex: (More) Evidence for Decriminalization
Get PDFThis paper makes a case for decriminalization of sex work in response to recent legislation restricting sex workers’ access to online platforms and to the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a feminist economic lens, we summarize the current understanding of sex work markets and analyze how agency and stigma are affected by increasingly limited access to online platforms as well as by the social and economic restrictions of COVID-19. We analyze sex work from the point of view of the same labor economics that would be applied to any other industry, rather than as a romanticized or demonized group of sexual deviants, finding destigmatization of the sex work industry as central to the increased agency and well-being of sex workers and their clients.
This paper also employs the libertarian philosophy, according to which all acts should be legal except those that employ, or threaten, violence against innocent people. According to this perspective, murder, rape, theft, arson, kidnapping, and fraud, should be prohibited; but, everything else, certainly including sex work, should be decriminalized
Mercy in American Law: The Promise of the Adoption of the Outlook of Jewish Law
Get PDFUnder Jewish law, mercy and compassion are essential principles to ensure the presence of a just legal system. Not only do mercy and compassion in the law preserve traditional values of human dignity, implementing a more compassionate legal system has practical benefits in both the spheres of legal judgment and of legal punishment. This article will compare the Jewish legal system’s application of these necessary doctrines to how other modern legal systems, including the American legal system, implement mercy and compassion. As a result of this in-depth comparison, this article recommends that the American legal system, and other modern legal systems, should borrow from the Jewish legal system in order to place a greater importance on mercy by focusing more on rehabilitation of the offender rather than demanding strict adherence to harsh punishment policies that only end up doing more harm than good
Downtown Condos for the Rich: Not All Bad
Get PDFSome new condominiums in urban neighborhoods are too expensive for anyone but the very wealthy. Buyers of these high-cost units include not only wealthy city residents, but also nonresidents who wish to use housing as an investment rather than a residence. Some commentators use this apparent fact as an argument against new market-rate housing generally; they claim that new housing will be purchased by out-of-town investors rather than used by local residents and that those investors will leave housing units empty, rather than renting them out. A related argument is that, even if market-rate condos are purchased by local residents, any market-rate housing will increase housing costs by increasing the cost of land, regardless of its effects upon housing supply. This Article suggests that these fears are overstated. In particular, the article points out that such ultra-luxury housing units are a small part of the supply of new housing. More importantly, even the most expensive units may increase housing supply for local residents and thus reduce housing costs, because (1) at least some of these condos are purchased or rented by local residents; and (2) even if this was not the case, these condos might lower housing costs by shifting demand away from older housing units that might otherwise be purchased by out-of-town investors. The Article further demonstrates that even if out-of-town investment has increased housing demand, a vacancy tax would limit this demand more effectively than restrictive zoning
