Commentary: Beyond Historical Precedent

Ernest Starling and 'Hormones': an historical commentary.

One hundred years ago Ernest Starling (1866-1927), almost surreptitiously, slipped the word 'hormone' into the English language. This review, beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, attempts to trace the growth of ideas in endocrinology up to this important moment.

Unit precedent

Precedent in the Making

Beyond Consumerism: New Historical Perspectives on Consumption

If there is one agreement between theorists of modernity and those of post-modernity, it is about the centrality of consumption to modern capitalism and contemporary culture. To thinkers as different as Werner Sombart, Emile Durkheim and Thorstein Veblen at the turn of the twentieth century, consumption was a decisive force behind modern capitalism, its dynamism and social structure. More recen...

Informative Precedent and Intrajudicial Communication

We develop an informational model of judicial decision-making in which deference to precedent is useful to policy-oriented appellate judges because it improves the accuracy with which they can communicate legal rules to trial judges. Our simple model yields new implications and hypotheses regarding conditions under which judges will maintain or break with precedent, the constraining effect that...