Yale Law Research Articles

Expressive Law and Escalating Penalties: Accounting for the Educational Function of Punishment

Abstract The pervasiveness of law enforcement schemes that prescribe harsher penalties for repeat offenders continues to challenge scholars who seek an economic explanation for criminal justice policies. The current paper formalizes an explanation suggested by Dana, D. (2001. Rethinking the puzzle of escalating penalties for repeat offenders. Yale Law J. 110: 733–783), which is based on the role of the law in educating people about wrongful behavior—the so-called “expressive function” of law. The analysis shows that an escalating structure that imposes a lenient sanction on all first-timers and a harsh sanction on repeaters represents a compromise solution that is (second best) optimal if the fraction of unknowing offenders in the population of potential offenders (as opposed to rational calculators) is sufficiently large.

LEGAL REVOLUTIONARIES AT YALE IN A TIME OF POLITICAL AND SOCIAL CHANGE

My comment on the fascinating personal accounts of experiences with the Yale Law and Modernization program will be in part personal. My own career and research interests are part of the ripple effect of that program and of the scholars who participated in it. After offering that personal account, I will try to look at the context for the Law and Modernization initiative in relation to the changing role of law and lawyers in the US and the way in which that role was exported as part of Cold War strategies. I will suggest that the battles around the Law and Modernization Program provide strong evidence of the crisis during an era of relative idealism (not inconsistent with US hegemonic designs abroad and social control policies at home) connected to modernization and what Trubek and Galanter termed liberal legalism.[1] What’s more, the program nurtured leaders in producing scholarship designed to update or replace liberal legalism, legal missionaries, and legal imperialism. Much of what we know as Law and Society, Critical Legal Studies, and other critical approaches came from these scholars and the events around Law and Modernization. I was a freshman undergraduate at Yale at the time of the beginnings of the Law and Modernization program in the Law School in 1968, although I had no sense of the program then. My undergraduate experience was all about the left, the critique of pluralism, European critical theory, and US critical histories. I told my historian advisor that I was thinking of law school (after he told me there were no positions in history), and he warned me about the conservatism, telling me among other things that law faculty tended to drive American cars. When there were demonstrations and strikes around the Bobby Seale trial in New Haven in 1970, followed by the demonstrations and strikes against the Cambodian invasion, I remember a forum where a law student said they could not strike because of the importance of their legal education for solving social problems. In retrospect, there was a sense among non-law students and activists, I think, that elite law was not very relevant to what was going on outside.[2] From the perspective of those within the law school, however, the accounts of the Law and Modernization cohort suggest that the students were nevertheless way in front of the general faculty.

Ethical Issues with Simulating the Bridge Problem in VR.

We aim to generate a dilemma for virtual reality-based research that we motivate through an extended case study of Thomson's (Yale Law J 94(6):1395-1415, 1985) Bridge variant of the trolley problem. Though the problem we generate applies more broadly than the Bridge problem, we believe it makes a good exemplar of the kind of case we believe is problematic. First, we argue that simulations of these thought experiments run into a practicality horn that makes it practically impossible to produce them. These problems revolve around concepts that we call "perspectival fidelity" and "context realism." Moral dilemmas that include features present in the Bridge variant will, as a result, be practically impossible to simulate. We also argue that, should we be wrong about the practical impossibility of creating a VR simulation of Bridge, such a simulation must face an ethical horn which renders these simulations ethically impermissible to develop or use. For these reasons, we argue that it is virtually impossible to simulate the bridge problem (and other thought experiments with similar features) both practically and ethically in VR.

How to Raise Voluntary Giving for Nonprofit Sports Clubs: An Analysis of Factors Influencing Donations

Nonprofit sports clubs generate revenue from a variety of sources. One of the main income categories is donations. Previous research only analyzed the amount of money generated through donations, but not the influencing factors. The purpose of this study is to investigate determinants of donations for nonprofit sports clubs. The study is based on the public goods theory (Weisbrod in “The economics of nonprofit institutions.” “Studies in structure and policy.” Oxford University Press, New York, pp 21–44, 1986) and the contract failure theory (Hansmann in Yale Law J 89(5):835–902, 1980) and makes use of an unbalanced panel data set from a nationwide online survey of nonprofit sports clubs in Germany (n = 41,343). The results show that particularly the provision of elite sport and the promotion of young talents positively influence the reception of donations. Moreover, sports clubs caring for social aspects, companionship, and conviviality as core values are able to generate higher revenues from donations. The same applies to clubs employing paid staff. Contrary, a commercial orientation was found to have a negative effect.

Deportation Process Penalizes Mentally Ill Immigrants

Deportation Process Penalizes Mentally Ill Immigrants

“A Horse of a Different Color”: The Struggle for Equality at the University of Michigan

64^To More Bushit, an expression JL'I coined by Ann Arbor poet, Ken Mikolowski, dominated the plethora of signs hoisted above the protestors gathered in front of the U. S. Supreme Court in Washington, D. C. on 1 April 2003 to support affirmative action and the University of Michigan's admissions programs. Others carried expressions more representative of their particular political perspective or sardonic wit: Angry White Men for Affirmative Action and Yale Law

A Process Analysis of the 1971 Quadripartite Agreement on Berlin

Negotiation JournalVolume 6, Issue 4 p. 353-367 A Process Analysis of the 1971 Quadripartite Agreement on Berlin Peter H. Oppenheimer, Peter H. Oppenheimer Peter H. Oppenheimer is a second-year student at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, Medford, Mass. 02155. He is also a candidate for a J.D. degree at Yale Law School.Search for more papers by this author Peter H. Oppenheimer, Peter H. Oppenheimer Peter H. Oppenheimer is a second-year student at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, Medford, Mass. 02155. He is also a candidate for a J.D. degree at Yale Law School.Search for more papers by this author First published: October 1990 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1571-9979.1990.tb00590.xCitations: 1AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume6, Issue4October 1990Pages 353-367 RelatedInformation