A Dynamic Theory of Common Law Courts

Physician-assisted suicide: a common law roadmap for state courts.

Part I examines the development of the law legalizing passively hastening death and how this development relied significantly on distinguishing passively hastening death from actively hastening death. Part II subjects the arguments used to legitimate passively hastening death to a traditional criminal law analysis and demonstrates their weaknesses which were simple to conceal when there was lit...

Is tobacco a drug? Administrative agencies as common law courts.

Professor Cass Sunstein argues that the FDA has the authority to regulate tobacco products. He considers the text of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, which supports the FDA assertion, and the context of its enactment, which argues against the FDA. He resolves the tension between text and context in favor of FDA jurisdiction by turning to the emerging role of administrative agencies. ...

The Constitution, the Courts and the Common Law

LAW & ENTREPRENEURSHIP : Do COURTS MATTER ?

We briefly survey the economics literatures that relate to law and entrepreneurship, including the "law and finance" literature launched by the work of Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, Andrei Shleifer, and Robert Vishny ("LLSV"). Relying on the suggestive work of LLSV and other economists who have labored over the connections between entrepreneurship and law, we suspect that courts ...

Extraterritorial Courts for Corporate Law

A central goal in devising a system of courts is to make judicial services easily accessible. As a result, justice is usually administered in a geographically decentralized fashion: trial courts are distributed across the territory in which the jurisdiction’s law is applied. Corporate law, however, does not fit this pattern: courts are often located far away from the companies subject to their ...