April Responses

PENNumbra’s featured works are now available at www.pennumbra.com. This issue contains responses to two articles from the print edition of the Law Review.

John Gardner and R.A. Duff both respond to Michael S. Moore’s Causing, Aiding, and the Superfluity of Accomplice Liability. In his article, Professor Moore rejects the notion that a separate desert basis must be created for accomplice liability, by focusing on the actus reus of accomplice liability and asking “what does one have to do in order to be an accomplice to someone else’s crime?”

Professor Gardner, in his Response, Moore on Complicity and Causality, notes that, though he and Professor Moore agree “that causal wrongs exist,” they “part company [when they] turn to the question of which moral and legal wrongs are causal wrongs.” Gardner argues that “the wrongs of accomplices are all causal wrongs,” in that “aiding, abetting, and counseling are all straightforward ways of making a causal contribution to the wrongs that are aided, abetted, or counseled.” Gardner argues for a view of accomplice liability that incorporates “causal pluralism,” or that “causing something is not the only way of making a causal contribution” to an outcome. Human agency, Gardner asserts, involves a causal complexity that is “not visible to the experimental sciences,” and that this difference “explains both the significance and the importance of causal contributions that are distinguished, causally distinguished, with respect to their directedness and indirectedness.” He concludes that “the types of causal contributions made by accomplices to and through the acts of their principals vary” in ways that Moore’s account fails to provide for.

Professor Duff, in his Response, Is Accomplice Liability Superfluous?, explores the “third and fourth desert bases Moore identifies” and argues “that there is still some room for a distinctive doctrine of complicity and thus for accomplice liability as a distinctive type of liability.” Duff focuses on the mens rea of accomplice liability, specifically that of intentionality and foresight, and ultimately claims “that, even if all that Moore says about the actus reus is right, it does not warrant his conclusion” that there is no unique desert basis for accomplice liability.

Responding to Barak D. Richman’s Antitrust and Nonprofit Hospital Mergers: A Return to Basics, James F. Blumstein examines Professor Richman’s account under the two different “ways of thinking about the product and the industry – the traditional professional/scientific and the market-oriented model.” Professor Blumstein, in his Response, Antitrust Enforcement in the Health Care Industry: A Battleground of Competing Paradigms, describes the history of the struggle between these two paradigms, in the industry and in the courts, and how the “[a]pplication of the antitrust laws to the greater healthcare marketplace has . . . contributed toward a greater emphasis on the market-oriented paradigm,” leading to “push back in antitrust doctrine . . . in the context of judicial hostility to applying traditional antitrust orthodoxy to some components of health care.” Recognizing that the health care industry developed according to the professional/scientific model, Blumstein emphasizes Richman’s assertion that antitrust doctrine can play a “constructive role” in the context of hospital mergers, by “build[ing] accountability into an economic sector that has inadequate accountability mechanisms.” Blumstein concludes that “[a]ntitrust doctrine does not necessarily stand in the way of nonprofit hospitals that seek to merge, but it imposes an analytical metric that focuses on competition and efficiency.”

As always, please click on the PENNumbra link to read previous Responses and Debates, or to check out pdfs of the Penn Law Review's print edition articles.

Posted by University of Pennsylvania Law Review at 04:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March Responses

PENNumbra's featured works are now available at www.pennumbra.com.

Susan A. Bandes, Peter H. Huang, and Michael Stocker each respond to Dan M. Kahan’s Two Conceptions of Emotion in Risk Regulation, 156 U. Pa. L. Rev. 741 (2008).  In his article, Professor Kahan mainly examines two competing theories of risk perception, the “irrational weigher” theory and the “cultural evaluator theory.” Kahan prefers the latter theory, which suggests, in part, that “individuals are cognitively motivated to reject information about risk when they perceive that accepting it would threaten their defining group commitments.” He argues that “[t]o avoid this reaction . . . information about risks must be framed in a way that affirms rather than denigrates recipients’ cultural identities . . . .”

Professor Bandes, in her Response, Emotions, Values, and the Construction of Risk, notes that when dealing with emotions and public policymaking “[t]he challenge is to encourage the helpful emotions, and discourage, educate, or cabin the unhelpful ones.” She argues that “Values and the emotions that animate them should be assessed in light of our democratic aspirations” and concludes that the “process of defining and acting upon our collective values . . . is . . . essential to the working of participatory democracy . . . .”

Professor Huang, in his Response, Diverse Conceptions of Emotions in Risk Regulation, adds to Kahan’s analysis by focusing on the role that positive emotions can play in affecting risk perceptions. He acknowledges that fear is a strong motivating factor in risk perception, but argues that we should not ignore the influence of positive emotions “including courage and pride.” Professor Huang also emphasizes the problem of heterogeneity in the audience and warns that “no single model of emotions in risk perception can accurately describe all roles that all emotions play for all people, in all situations, during all times, facing all risks.”

Finally, Professor Stocker, in his Response, Some Questions About Emotions and Risk Evaluation, examines Kahan’s account of the rational weigher, irrational weigher, and cultural evaluator theories and probes for weakness in each theory’s treatment of emotion and risk evaluation. He observes that the challenge in capturing the relationship between emotion and risk results from the fact that “the social values expressed by . . . emotions are typically available only in outline.” He asks us, in conclusion, to consider just “how difficult it is . . . to give a ‘full and final’ account of what patriotism, love, being a good lawyer, etc., [really] requires . . . .”

As always, please click on the PENNumbra link to read previous Responses and Debates, or to check out pdfs of the Penn Law Review's print edition articles.

Posted by University of Pennsylvania Law Review at 06:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Response: Setting the Bar Too High

PENNumbra's featured works are now available at the NEW AND IMPROVED www.pennumbra.com.

Frank I. Michelman responds to Youngjae Lee’s International Consensus as Persuasive Authority in the Eighth Amendment, 156 U. Pa. L. Rev. 63 (2007). 

Professor Michelman, in his Response, Setting the Bar Too High, critically examines Professor Lee’s attempt to establish “the negligible epistemic value . . . [of a] unanimous world-wide rejection of the death penalty for juveniles.” Professor Michelman supports Justice Kennedy’s reference in Roper v. Simmons to an international consensus against capital punishment for juveniles because while he admits that many countries “are surely not relevantly like-minded with us . . . some of them surely are.” Professor Michelman is confident that “the probability is strong that the number of the world’s relevantly like-minded societies . . . is large enough to sustain the instructiveness for us of the external world’s unanimous rejection of the juvenile death penalty.” Moreover, he argues that “however true it . . . is that any randomly selected country in the worldwide bunch ‘may’ think vastly differently than we do about the severity of death, . . . not a single one of them dissents from the flat rejection of death as a fitting punishment for juveniles.” Consequently, he concludes that “[t]he presumption of epistemic value in the face of worldwide unanimity holds.”

As always, please click on the PENNumbra link to read previous Responses and Debates, or to check out pdfs of the Penn Law Review's print edition articles.

Posted by University of Pennsylvania Law Review at 05:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Response: Law and the Market: The Impact of Enforcement

PENNumbra's featured works are now available at the NEW AND IMPROVED www.pennumbra.com.

Howell E. Jackson responds to John C. Coffee, Jr.’s Law and the Market: The Impact of Enforcement, 156 U. Pa. L. Rev. 229 (2007).

Professor Jackson, in his Response, The Impact of Enforcement: A Reflection, seeks to tease out the “not inconsiderable challenges” scholars might face in attempting to confirm or rebut Professor Coffee’s core argument—“that higher levels of enforcement in the United States provide a genuine benefit to U.S. financial markets.” For example, Professor Jackson points out that when comparing regulatory efforts at the international level, it is difficult to know the extent to which “resources allocated to regulatory agencies . . . [may] serv[e] as sinecures for cronies of political elites or positions from which to extract bribes.” After considering a number of other problems that complicate the comparison process, Professor Jackson suggest two alternative approaches that might help overcome the complexities he identifies: 1) “focus on technical measures of financial performance;” and 2) “examin[e] the behavior of market participants.”

As always, please click on the PENNumbra link to read previous Responses and Debates, or to check out pdfs of the Penn Law Review's print edition articles.

Posted by University of Pennsylvania Law Review at 08:10 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

PENNumbra's featured works are now available at the NEW AND IMPROVED www.pennumbra.com.

The Pentagon’s recent decision to try six Guantanamo detainees for capital crimes such as “terrorism and support of terrorism” made national headlines. William Glaberson, “U.S. Charges 6 With Key Roles in 9/11 Attacks,” N.Y. Times, Feb. 11, 2008, at A1. In this latest PENNumbra Debate, Professors Amos N. Guiora, of the University of Utah, and John T. Parry, of Lewis & Clark Law School, attempt to settle the question of what sort of forum is most appropriate to try the thousands of individuals in U.S. custody who are suspected of terrorism (Light at the End of the Pipeline?: Choosing a Forum for Suspected Terrorists).

Professor Guiora considers three forum options: treaty-based international terror courts, traditional Article III courts, and a “hybrid” option he calls domestic terror courts. Ultimately, Professor Guiora argues in favor of domestic terror courts, which he describes as being able to “balance[] the legitimate rights of the individual with the equally legitimate national security rights of the state.” He considers this option to be the most practical and expedient policy solution, necessitated by an untenable tension between the understanding “that some of the detainees present a genuine threat to American national security,” and an awareness “that indefinite detention violates constitutional principles and fundamental concepts of morality.”

Professor Parry agrees that current U.S. policy toward detainees has been “misguided,” but does not believe that innovations of the sort proposed by Professor Guiora are necessary. Rather, he suggests “that policymakers should choose Article III courts rather than hybrid courts for trials of suspected terrorists, with military courts as a fall-back option.” Professor Parry points to research that shows that “the federal government is often able to prosecute suspected terrorists in federal court,” and therefore considers alternative proposals to Article III courts to be “solution[s] in search of a problem.” Professor Parry realizes that “trial in federal court will not be possible for every suspected terrorist,” and concludes that, “[f]or people who pose a risk but whose conduct may not violate federal criminal law, prolonged preventive detention is the best choice.”

As always, please click on the PENNumbra link to read previous Responses and Debates, or to check out pdfs of the Penn Law Review's print edition articles.

Posted by University of Pennsylvania Law Review at 10:21 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

January Responses

PENNumbra's featured works are now available at www.pennumbra.com.

Elizabeth M. Glazer provides a fourth response (following in the wake of Professors Fennell, Garnett, and Underkuffler) to Eduardo Moisés Peñalver and Sonia K. Katyal’s Property Outlaws, 155 U. Pa. L. Rev. 1095 (2007). 

Professor Glazer, in her Response, Rule by (Out)Law: Property’s Contingent Right to Exclude, attempts to explain why Peñalver and Katyal’s “property outlaws” so successfully violate property owners’ exclusion rights when the right to exclude is seen “as property law’s most important or defining right.” Professor Glazer concludes that “the outlaw tells us[] that an owner cannot invoke [the right to exclude] if she wishes to invoke it in isolation. . . .” She believes that the right to exclude is only absolute “so long as its exercise is coupled with the exercise of another right in the property bundle.”

Shyamkrishna Balganesh responds to Sara K. Stadler’s Copyright as Trade Regulation, 155 U. Pa. L. Rev. 899 (2007). 

Balganesh examines Professor Stadler’s argument that “the copyright grant be reformulated to consist of no more than an exclusive right to distribute works publicly.” He agrees that “copyright law ought to be visualized as a doctrine of unfair competition,” but offers an alternative conception of “implementing this ideal.” Balganesh writes, “Since copyright is about generating incentives for creation, we might want to connect [a competitive] nexus requirement to copyright’s instrumental purpose through a test of foreseeability. Given that liability for infringement is premised on a showing of copying, such a test would place the burden on the plaintiff to show that the defendant’s copying was in a market and of a form reasonably foreseeable when the work was created.”

As always, please click on the PENNumbra link to read previous Responses and Debates, or to check out pdfs of the Penn Law Review's print edition articles.

Posted by University of Pennsylvania Law Review at 11:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Baze-d and Confused: What's the Deal with Lethal Injection?

PENNumbra's featured works are now available at www.pennumbra.com.

The Supreme Court recently heard oral arguments in the case of Baze v. Rees, which asks the Justices to examine the constitutionality of Kentucky’s lethal injection methodology. In this latest PENNumbra Debate Professors Alison J. Nathan, of Fordham University, and Douglas A. Berman, of The Ohio State University, tease out the legal, political, and practical issues that the Court faces as it addresses Baze.

In her Opening, Professor Nathan critiques the irrationality of the three-formula lethal injection procedure used by Kentucky and many other states. Professor Nathan writes that “lethal injection as pervasively practiced in the United States today is the result of a historical accident, not scientifically informed deliberation.” She contends that the sort of democratic reform that has been the catalyst for legislative changes in execution procedures in the past has been stymied by “lethal injection’s peculiar history, attendant secrecy, and protocol involving the use of [a] pain-masking paralytic drug.” She concludes by arguing that “[i]n this context of non-transparency, it is distinctly the role and responsibility of the judiciary, led by the Supreme Court, to scrutinize the practice of lethal injection and its history.”

Professor Berman agrees that “the development and administration of lethal injection protocols have been haphazard and sloppy.” However, his concern is principally focused on why the lack of a democratic reform movement has failed to raise the consciousness of the nation. He contends that “three critical practical and political realities” explain the absence of a national backlash: in sum, 1) no human-administered death penalty system can be perfect; 2) few Americans care to make a perfect system; and 3) most Americans are “blissfully ignorant” of any such “imperfections.” Through his “realpolitik” lenses, Professor Berman remains skeptical that the Justices will be able to rise above “the broader practical and political realities that surround the modern administration of capital punishment [and help] ensure that the machinations of death . . . persist.”

As always, please click on the PENNumbra link to read previous Responses and Debates, or to check out pdfs of the Penn Law Review's print edition articles.

Posted by University of Pennsylvania Law Review at 05:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Volume 156 Number 2

ARTICLES
Law and the Market: The Impact of Enforcement	John C. Coffee, Jr.
Structuring Judicial Review of Electoral Mechanics: Explanations and Opportunities	Christopher S. Elmendorf
Causing, Aiding, and the Superfluity of Accomplice Liability	Michael S. Moore
COMMENTS
Appended Post-Passage Senate Judiciary Committee Report: Unlikely "Legislative History" for Interpreting Section 5 of the Reauthorized Voting Rights Act	Erica Lai
The Constitutionality of Federal Restrictions on the Indemnification of Attorneys' Fees	Nishchay Maskay

Posted by University of Pennsylvania Law Review at 11:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Responses to Property Outlaws

PENNumbra's featured works are now available at www.pennumbra.com.

Lee Anne Fennell, Nicole Stelle Garnett, and Laura S. Underkuffler each respond to Eduardo Moisés Peñalver and Sonia K. Katyal’s Property Outlaws, 155 U. Pa. L. Rev. 1095 (2007).  In their article, Professors Peñalver and Katyal argue that the violation of property laws (by actors they call “property outlaws”) can enhance the social order. In their view, “the apparent stability and order that property law provides owe much to the destabilizing role of the lawbreaker, who occasionally forces shifts of entitlements and laws.”

Professor Fennell, in her Response, Order with Outlaws?, notes that “most property violations destabilize the social order without producing any significant offsetting benefits.” She argues that in order to maximize the “informational signal that [a property] violation sends,” liability rules, injunctive relief, and supercompensatory penalties can help to “harness the information generated by lawbreakers.”

Professor Garnett, in her Response, Property In-Laws, is skeptical of Peñalver and Katyal’s claim that property outlaws provide beneficial and necessary “shocks” to a system that “has a . . . tendency to become ossified and out of date.” Instead, her intuition is that “outlaws usually respond to instability in a property regime, not the ossified hyper-stability that Peñalver and Katyal fear.” Thus, she suspects that “the evolutionary sequence [of property law] generally proceeds from instability to stability, not from bad stability to instability to good stability as [Peñalver and Katyal] suggest.”

Finally, Professor Underkuffler, in her Response, Lessons from Outlaws, agrees with Peñalver and Katyal that, in a system which disfavors property violations, it is critical to “distinguish positive or desirable property lawbreaking from that which is not.” However, Professor Underkuffler does not believe that relying on efficiency and rectification analyses always provides the correct answer. She wonders whether the true reason for our tolerance of property outlaws is “because the lawbreakers are the losers under the existing regime of property and entitlements, while the targeted owners are winners under the same regime.”

As always, please click on the PENNumbra link to read previous Responses and Debates, or to check out pdfs of the Penn Law Review's print edition articles.

Posted by University of Pennsylvania Law Review at 01:50 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Debate: Collaberative Environmental Law

PENNumbra's featured works are now available at www.pennumbra.com.

Professors Eric W. Orts, of Penn's Wharton School, and Cary Coglianese, of Penn's Law School, discuss the benefits and disadvantages of collaborative public policy decision making in the environmental context.

Professor Orts argues that it is time to embrace a different policymaking approach—that of collaborative environmental lawmaking. Professor Orts's skepticism of the independence of political and other governmental actors in a world in which “lobbyists and campaign financiers . . . play large and often decisive roles in th[e public policymaking] process” leads him to conclude that “in many situations, it makes better sense to trust less in the traditional centralized process of environmental lawmaking and to consider more frequently the alternative of engaging in collaborative environmental law.”

Professor Coglianese responds that collaborative environmental law is “not at all feasible for making real-world decisions about major environmental problems,” and that this policymaking approach “introduces new types of predictable and serious problems.” Professor Coglianese contends that, by making agreement the primary aim of policymaking, collaborative environmental law actually conveys a willingness to give in to interested parties in pursuit of the “holy grail” of consensus. Instead, Professor Coglianese urges that public “engagement should be used with another goal in mind . . . mak[ing] the best possible decision [to] . . . best advance[] the overall public interest.”

As always, please click on the PENNumbra link to read previous Responses and Debates, or to check out pdfs of the Penn Law Review's print edition articles.

Posted by University of Pennsylvania Law Review at 04:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Volume 156 Number 1

ARTICLES
The Short and Puzzling Life of the “Implicit Minority Discount” in Delaware Appraisal Law	Lawrence A. Hamermesh & Michael L. Wachter
International Consensus as Persuasive Authority in the Eighth Amendment	Youngjae Lee
Antitrust and Nonprofit Hospital Mergers: A Return to Basics	Barak D. Richman
COMMENTS
Expanding the Scope of the Hatch-Waxman Act's Patent Carve-Out Exception to the Identical Drug Labeling Requirement: Closing the Patent Litigation Loophole	Julie Dohm
Third-Party Ratings as Modern Reputational Information: How Rules of Professional Conduct Could Better Serve Lower-Income Legal Consumers	Colleen Petroni

Posted by University of Pennsylvania Law Review at 02:28 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Responses: Plea bargaining

PENNumbra's featured November responses are now available at www.pennumbra.com.

This month, Frank O. Bowman, III, Michael M. O'Hear, and Daniel Richman each respond to Ronald F. Wright's article, Trial Distortion and the End of Innocence in Federal Criminal Justice, 154 U. Pa. L. Rev. 79 (2005). In his article, Professor Wright addresses the challenges to the judicial system from the rise of plea bargaining rates in the United States. He argues that reform is best accomplished through a “mid-level” regulatory strategy—what he calls the “trial distortion theory”—that neither condemns nor endorses the plea bargaining process, but asks if pleas are distorting the pattern of outcomes that would result from a “healthy” system in which trials were the norm.

Professor Bowman, in his Response, American Buffalo: Vanishing Acquittals and the Gradual Extinction of the Federal Criminal Trial Lawyer, picks up on one of Professor Wright's key findings: “the curious fact that the rate of acquittals in federal criminal cases has declined even faster than the rate of guilty pleas has increased.” Professor Bowman goes on to suggest that “acquittals may be vanishing in part because a once-common courtroom denizen—the true trial lawyer—is becoming an endangered species,” and worries that the system has created “ever-greater disincentives to trying the kind of cases in which acquittal is a live possibility.”

Professor O'Hear, in his response, What's Good About Trials?, questions whether trial distortion represents a significant problem. Professor O'Hear believes our main focus should be on “mak[ing] plea bargaining processes look more like trial processes.” According to Professor O'Hear, “The trick is to find ways of injecting the values of voice, neutrality, and respect into the plea bargaining process without robbing plea bargaining of its efficiency advantages over the trial process.”

Finally, Professor Richman, in his Response, Judging Untried Cases, applauds Professor Wright for attempting to determine whether “the inexorable reduction in trials actually reflects an impairment of the federal criminal system's truth-finding function.” However, he notes that Professor Wright overlooked one important factor in his analysis: the extent to which “the vanishing acquittal rate reflects an increase in the [federal] adoption of well-established ‘local’ cases.” Without more information, Professor Richman concludes, “aggregrate caseload statistics are . . . hard to interpret.”

As always, please click on the PENNumbra link to read previous Responses and Debates, or to check out pdfs of the Penn Law Review's print edition articles.

Posted by University of Pennsylvania Law Review at 09:54 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Debate: Voter ID: What's at Stake?

PENNumbra's featured works of November are now available at www.pennumbra.com.

As Lyle Denniston wrote earlier this fall on SCOTUSblog.com, “[f]ew cases the [Supreme] Court might have agreed to hear w[ill] be likely to have as much real-world political impact as the newly granted case[] of Crawford v. Marion County Election Board . . . , involving an Indiana voting requirement law that is said to be among the most demanding in the nation.” (see Analysis: An Election Issue for an Election Year.) Before the Justices themselves have an opportunity to delve into the case, Professors Bradley A. Smith, of Capital University Law School, and Edward B. Foley, of The Ohio State University, debate the major legal, political, and philosophical issues behind the controversial matter of voter ID in Voter ID: What's at Stake?

As always, please click on the PENNumbra link to read previous Responses and Debates, or to check out pdfs of the Penn Law Review's print edition articles.

Posted by University of Pennsylvania Law Review at 04:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Response: Just Following Orders

PENNumbra's featured works of October are now available at www.pennumbra.com.

The latest featured October Response on PENNumbra is Just Following Orders, by Roderick M. Hills, Jr. It is an analysis of Norman R. Williams's 2006 article, Executive Review in the Fragmented Executive: State Constitutionalism and Same-Sex Marriage. Professor Hills praises Professor Williams for recognizing that “whatever the merits of [the departmentalist and judicial supremacist] positions as interpretations of the U.S. Constitution, both are hopelessly unpersuasive when applied to state constitutions.” He then examines Professor Williams's defense of “a third method—‘the legislative model’—for determining when agencies should just follow orders from the legislature.” However, he ultimately concludes that “Professor Williams's theory ignores the facts about democratic accountability and expertise that most of us would regard as critical,” and argues that “this gap suggests a problem with his theory”—a gap that Professor Hills hopes Professor Williams fills in his next examination of executive review.

As always, please click on the PENNumbra link to read previous Responses and Debates, or to check out pdfs of the Penn Law Review's print edition articles.

Posted by University of Pennsylvania Law Review at 09:47 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Responses: The Disability Integration Presumption

PENNumbra's featured works of October are now available at www.pennumbra.com.

As the legal wrangling over the cost of disability education rages on, Professors Samuel R. Bagenstos and Mark C. Weber each provide unique responses to Professor Ruth Colker's 2006 article, The Disability Integration Presumption: Thirty Years Later.

Professor Bagenstos writes in Abolish the Integration Presumption? Not Yet, that while Professor Colker's arguments are compelling, “[h]er article fails to establish that the IDEA's individualized integration presumption imposes significant costs, and . . . downplay[s] significant benefits of that presumption.” He concludes that the “supposed failure[s] of integration . . . reflect [more on] the education system's refusal to provide true integration” than on the presumption's validity.

Professor Weber, in A Nuanced Approach to the Disability Integration Presumption, applauds Professor Colker for attempting to look at the integration presumption in a new way, but worries that her stance on the presumption is misplaced. Rather than abandoning the presumption, Professor Weber argues that integration can work well as long as educators focus on “which services and protections are being offered to educate a child within general education. . . . The way to equality is to provide extra services, technology, and accommodations in regular classes so that the children with disabilities do not fall behind.”

As always, please click on the PENNumbra link to read previous Responses and Debates, or to check out pdfs of the Penn Law Review's print edition articles.

Posted by University of Pennsylvania Law Review at 02:31 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Debate: Can Handguns Be Effectively Regulated?

PENNumbra's featured works of October are now available at www.pennumbra.com.

Recent reports on crime statistics published by the FBI show that violent crime has increased for the second straight year across the nation. In particular, the FBI's reports demonstrate that in major metropolitan areas, such as Philadelphia, homicides have increased by 6.7%.

In the midst of this upsurge in violent crime, Professors James B. Jacobs, of New York University, and David Kairys, of Temple University, reengage with America's long-running debate over the effectiveness of gun (specifically handgun) control regulation, in their debate, Can Handguns Be Effectively Regulated?

Both Professor Jacobs and Professor Kairys agree that the debate on handgun control "at its core is [related to] a personal, cultural, and political identification of guns with personal self-worth . . . , freedom, liberty, and . . . God and country." Whereas Professor Jacobs accepts this as a political reality and uses it as an anchor from which to engage in this discussion, Professor Kairys steadfastly disagrees: "The best hope for emerging from our disgraceful state of denial is to respectfully engage and challenge the cultural and political identification of guns with our nation's highest ideals and the deadly legacy of that identification as it is currently conceived."

As always, please click on the PENNumbra link to read previous Responses and Debates, or to check out pdfs of the Penn Law Review's print edition articles.

Posted by University of Pennsylvania Law Review at 02:30 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September Responses

PENNumbra has recently featured a number of excellent new responses to several of the Penn Law Review's print edition articles:

Benjamin C. Zipursky, in Evidence, Unfairness, and Market-Share Liability: A Comment on Geistfeld, responds to Mark A. Geistfeld's The Doctrinal Unity of Alternative Liability and Market-Share Liability, arguing that the proposals in Geistfeld's “provocative and insightful” article may be too far-reaching, and specifically contending that Geistfeld's “arguments made from a normative point of view for the principle of evidential grouping are unsound.”

David D. Meyer, in The Geography of Family Privacy, responds to Laura A. Rosenbury's Between Home and School, praising Rosenbury for “calling attention to the lack of scholarship addressing the childrearing that takes place” outside of the home and school environs, but noting that he remains unconvinced that it wouldn't be better to use location “not as an organizing principle, but as a more indeterminate factor in calibrating the strength of justification required of the state for any intervention in childrearing.”

Paul E. McGreal, in In Defense of Complete Preemption, responds to both Gil Seinfeld's The Puzzle of Complete Preemption and Trevor W. Morrison's response to Seinfeld, Complete Preemption and the Separation of Powers, arguing that both Geistfeld and Morrison fail to fully conceptualize the well-pleaded complaint rule and asserting that “the complete preemption doctrine and the bar on pleading anticipated defenses are simply two sides of the well-pleaded complaint coin.”

As always, please click on the PENNumbra link to read previous Responses and Debates, or to check out pdfs of the Penn Law Review's print edition articles, including Issue 6 of Vol. 155—the Symposium Issue, featuring the culmination of the conversation that began last November when the Penn Law Review held a Symposium on the topic, “Responses to Global Warming: The Law, Economics, and Science of Climate Change.”

Scholars interested in participating in a debate on PENNumbra, or in writing a response to any print edition article, PENNumbra debate, or previous PENNumbra response should send an email to online@pennumbra.con.

Posted by University of Pennsylvania Law Review at 07:54 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Debate: Consumer-Driven Health Care

PENNumbra has recently published this debate between Professor Kristin Madison of the University of Pennsylvania and Professor Peter Jacobson of the University of Michigan:

You won’t hear many health experts claim that the American healthcare system is functioning perfectly in terms of core considerations such as cost, access, and quality. The question that arises with the advent of any new policy approach seeking to improve the system is obvious: Does the change represent a step forward or backward? Professors Kristin Madison, of Penn, and Peter Jacobson, of the University of Michigan, take up this question in regard to the latest innovation in health care policy—consumer-directed healthcare (CDHC).

Professor Madison argues that while CDHC is not a panacea, “[e]ven if its shortcomings prevent its full diffusion through the American health care system, CDHC will still . . . help[] to establish a foundation for future reforms in health care finance and delivery, [and] has the potential to improve the health care system in the long run.” Professor Jacobson’s response? “CDHC is a direct attack on the idea that health care differs from other market commodities because of its moral aspirations . . . . For those who believe that equity should be a fundamental attribute of health care delivery, CDHC represents a huge step backwards.” Nonetheless, Professor Madison is convinced that CDHC will be a lightning rod that stirs the American health care system out of its complacency and “forces us to confront the tradeoffs inherent in any health care system in a resource-constrained world.“ Professor Jacobson is not content to wait and see how the American public reacts to CDHC: “If the policy focus is on CDHC, equity will be subordinated. If universal coverage dominates, CDHC proponents are probably right that cost and quality issues will be subordinate. For me, it’s an easy choice—helping those without insurance to have a minimal acceptable level of care.”

Read the whole debate.

Posted by University of Pennsylvania Law Review at 01:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Announcing the Law Review Forum Project

I am very pleased to announce a new project here at Concurring Opinions – the Law Review Forum Project. We will be hosting online forums for several law reviews. Increasingly, law reviews are creating online forums as companions to their regular law review issues. These forums contain very short response pieces, essays, debates, and other works that attempt to bridge the gap between regular legal scholarship and the blogosphere.

Journals seeking to create their own online forum face two daunting challenges. First, they must create and actively maintain a web presence. Second, they must find ways to attract readers, which is difficult in an age where so many blogs and other websites exist. A wide readership for a website depends upon having daily content. Law review forums produce content sporadically throughout the year at intervals that are not regular enough to attract a significant readership.

Therefore, we have invited a number of law reviews to participate in a partnership with our blog. Throughout the year, each law review will periodically post forum essays here at Concurring Opinions. We are not requiring an exclusive license, so participating law reviews can also cross-post at their own websites.

We see this as a mutually-beneficial arrangement. We can bring great content to our blog, and law reviews can reach our significant audience without the pressures of having to build and maintain an online readership or of having to produce content with regularity.

Law reviews currently with and without existing forums will be participating. Thus far, the following law reviews have agreed to participate:

* Harvard Law Review
* Virginia Law Review
* Michigan Law Review
* University of Pennsylvania Law Review
* Northwestern Law Review
* UCLA Law Review
* George Washington Law Review

In the near future, we hope to be expanding the list of participating law reviews.

Posted by Daniel J. Solove at 01:04 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack