Volume 48 (2016) Issue 4 (Winter)

Jeffrey Evans Stake. After death and after taxes, the laws relating to wills, trusts, and intestate succession determine what to do with a decedent’s assets. Much of that body of law is built upon the assumption that the law should…

Brian Skyrms. I think of the social contract not as some monolithic unitary pact, but as an assemblage of norms. Norms are conventions that are backed by sanctions. Sometimes the sanctions are codified in the law and enforced by government.…

Francis X. Shen. Law and neuroscience is approaching an inflection point. It has been roughly ten years since the New York Times Magazine put neurolaw on its cover, since Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky wrote his seminal article, “The Frontal Cortex…

Julie Seaman & David Sloan Wilson. [T]he first amendment is not only protective of but exercised by human beings who are subject to all the vagaries of human nature and their emotions, motivations, limitations, integrity, insight and intelligence. “It’s true,…

Carlton J. Patrick. While serving as Secretary of Defense under George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld once responded to a reporter’s question by famously dividing knowledge into three categories: known knowns (the things we know we know), known unknowns (the things…

Owen D. Jones. Law has two problems. Step back far enough from the particulate nature of law as we daily experience it—from the contracts, courtrooms, and codes, from the policies, patents, and police—and then the nationally and locally and topically…

Bruce R. Huber. Systems of political checks and balances, so prominently featured in the U.S. Constitution, are also commonly installed in statutory and regulatory regimes. Although such systems diffuse political authority and may facilitate participation and accountability, they come with…

Carissa Byrne Hessick. Courts have construed the right to due process to prohibit vague criminal statutes. Vague statutes fail to give sufficient notice, lead to arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement, and represent an unwarranted delegation to law enforcement. But these concerns…

Michael D. Guttentag. This article, a contribution to a symposium celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the Society for Evolutionary Analysis in Law, applies evolutionary analysis to the study of disclosure regulation. I consider how an evolutionary perspective can improve our…

Betsy J. Grey. Courts traditionally have been reluctant to admit PTSD evidence in rape cases. Prosecutors often attempt to introduce such evidence to establish that the victim did not consent to the sexual contact, but courts have been concerned that…