A Perspective on Suitable Latitude for Religious Establishments

Laurence Winer & Nina J. Crimm. How should we balance claims of religious liberty against demands for maintaining separation of church and state? Are privately held secular corporations, whose owners have sincere religious beliefs regarding contraception, entitled to disregard legal…
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Making It Reign: Bow Down to Money (as Speech)

Tracy Alice Olson. Specifically, this Comment considers reconciling the level of scrutiny and deference due to campaign contributions and disclosure requirements with campaign expenditures. Part I traces the historical legal basis of campaign finance. Beginning with the Constitution, the background…
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Biologically Biased Beneficence

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…
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Evolution, Norms, and the Social Contract

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.…
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Law and Neuroscience 2.0

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…
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#FREESPEECH

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,…
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The Long-term Promise of Evolutionary Psychology for the Law

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…
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KEYNOTE: Law and the Brain—Past, Present, and Future

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…
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Checks, Balances, and Nuclear Waste

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…
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Vagueness Principles

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…
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