Federal courts in the United States hear over 50,000 appeals a year and state courts hear approximately 300,000. Over 250,000 of these appeals are duds. Certainly a great amount of resources are wasted in these losing appeals, many of which likely had little chance of success. Professor Steven Shave...

Update: Audio of this talk is now available. Professor Omri Ben-Shahar spoke on the "Myths of Consumer Protection" at this year’s annual Ronald H. Coase lecture for first year law students. Ben-Shahar discussed why he believes the modern consumer protection movement is largely misguided. Consumer ...

According to researchers in Taiwan, the answer is “Yes.” The researchers (Ko & Kuo, 2009) administered a 43-item self-report survey to 596 college students who were mostly between ages 16 and 22 and female (71 percent). The college students were young adults who had blogging experie...

In the mid 90s, Nike ran a commercial extolling the virtues of letting high school girls play sports. “If you let me play, I will . . .� Many studies have backed up Nike’s commercial, showing that those who play sports make more money, receive more schooling, are more self confident, etc. Howe...

Professor Madhavi Sunder on IP law and those it leaves behind People love to complain about IP law, and not just in academia. From attempts to halt distribution of Danger Mouse's Grey Album to DMCA takedowns of YouTube videos of toddlers dancing along to Prince, many people think IP law is stifling ...

United States' cost-benefit analyses on global warming do not currently account for any loss Americans would feel if global warming harmed foreign countries. This may cause policymakers to underestimate the potential costs of global warming to American citizens. But including them raises a couple of...

What's the point of antitrust law? Is it to compensate those that are harmed by monopolistic practices? If so, current law isn't doing a very good job. Economists consider the true harm from monopoly to be deadweight losses arising from foregone consumption - that is, the utility lost when you don't...

A die-hard retributivist and an efficiency-obsessed utilitarian walk into a bar... and start discussing punishment theory. Beyond their propensity for the abstruse, what might these two philosophical opponents share in common? If anything, it will be the belief that the intentional harm (punishment)...

The Law and Philosophy Workshop started out winter quarter with Douglas Laycock’s presentation of his paper “Religious Liberty as Liberty.� As Laycock explained at the workshop, this paper was, in a way, a response to John Garvey’s statement that it is possible to imagine a society of skepti...

Last Monday, the Center for Law, Philosophy, and Human Values presented a talk by Stephen Stich related to some of his work on the psychology of norms. The preliminary reading was taken from a book that he co-edited, entitled The Innate Mind: Volume 2: Culture and Cognition. The piece, “A Framewor...