Category: Law
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Mark D. White Classes start for me on Monday (though our spring semester starts today–that's right, on a Friday), and my first class will be one of my favorites to teach. legal philosophy. And luckily for me (and for my students), I was given the perfect news item to start the class and motivate our…
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Mark D. White When economists debate the neutality of money, they are concerned with its effects on real output and growth. But other scholars, such as philosophers and sociologists, consider the social neutrality of money–that is, whether the pervasive use of money in society has a qualitative effect on the way we think about both…
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Mark D. White There seems to be a bit of discussion in the air about acacdemic blogging lately (and not just at the wonderful dinner I shared with Jonathan Wight last night at the ASSA conference!). In addition to the pieces I highlighted several days ago, I just found this post by my friend Dan…
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Mark D. White Anne Barron (LSE, Department of Law) has an interesting paper in the latest issue of Law and Philosophy (31/1, January 2012) exploring a Kantian approach to copyright law: Kant, Copyright and Communicative Freedom Abstract: The rapid recent expansion of copyright law worldwide has sparked efforts to defend the ‘public domain’ of non-propertized information,…
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Mark D. White Just a brief note to draw your attention to a terrific new article forthcoming in the European Journal of Philosophy that summarizes the literature on the ethics of imposing risk, an omnipresent problem with no easy solution but which is of critical concern to anyone dealing with issues of harm, whether from…
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Mark D. White The latest blow to the Affordable Care Act came yesterday from a U.S. appeals cout in Atlanta–let me merely repeat what The Wall Street Journal quoted from the opinion today, which makes the case exceptionally well: [The individual mandate] is "breathtaking in its expansive scope," the court wrote. "The government's position amounts…
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Mark D. White From today's Albany TImes Union: CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — More than 1,500 married, New Hampshire gay couples could be placed into a classification all their own if lawmakers succeed next year in repealing the state's two-year-old law legalizing same-sex unions. Legislation to repeal gay marriage is one of the highly charged issues…
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Mark D. White Last nigt New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed a bill allowing same-sex marriage after a lengthy process of legislative tomfoolery. Those who have read my previous posts and work on the issue will not be surprised to hear that I am very happy about the result and less than pleased with the…
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Mark D. White Regardless of where you stand on the law, economics, or politics of the Affordable Care Act, I highly recommend Ilya Shapiro's new paper "A Long, Strange Trip: My First Year Challenging the Constitutionality of Obamacare" (forthcoming in Florida International Law Review), in which the CATO scholar details his year of writing, speaking,…
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Mark D. White Sociologist Jaye Cee Whitehead (Pacific University) has a wonderful piece in The New York Times today titled "The Wrong Reasons for Same-Sex Marriage," arguing that the recent arguments espousing the economic benefits of same-sex marriage for cash-strapped states and municipalities miss the point: Those making these economic arguments probably have the best…
Mark D. White 