The University of Chicago Law School Faculty Blog

Law.com Names Faculty Podcast to Top Ten List

Over on Law.com, Robert Ambrogi has provided a list of "Ten Legal Podcasts to Keep You Informed," which features our own Faculty Podcast. If you'd like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do so via iTunes or any other podcatcher to get informative, timely talks by Chicago faculty and distinguished visitors delivered directly to your computer.

Student Blogger - Brian Leiter: “Why Tolerate Religion?”

Monday marked this year’s first meeting of the Law and Philosophy Workshop. It is traditional for one of the workshop’s early meetings to be limited to students in order to familiarize them with some of the key concepts and common problems that characterize that year’s topic. This year’s topic being “Toleration and Religious Liberty,” it was fitting for Brian Leiter to present his paper, “Why Tolerate Religion?” (available here) at this first student-only meeting.

“Why Tolerate Religion?” is an attempt to find a principled argument for religious toleration that does not apply equally to toleration of conscience generally. Leiter notes that religion has been given a special place in our constitutional system, and asks if this is justified. At the workshop’s opening, he acknowledged that in his paper he was taking for granted that if there is a principled foundation for the law of religious liberty, it is to be associated with the idea of toleration, as opposed to some other concept such as equal respect.

New Blogging Initiative

We have begun a new project of inviting students to act as blog correspondents for some of the many workshops, lectures, and conferences that take place each week at the Law School.  We believe that the blog is an excellent medium for recording and communicating a broad sample of the intellectual life of the law school, and we're excited about the possibilities for outside engagement with internal activities that this project will trigger.  This project begins with a blog post on a recent Law & Philosophy Workshop given by Professor Brian Leiter; over the next few weeks, expect to see a growing number of posts from these Student Correspondents on a variety of topics and events.

Bernard Harcourt's Election Blog, en Francais

Bernard Harcourt, Julius Kreeger Professor of Law and Criminology and Director of the Center for Studies in Criminal Justice, has been asked by L'Express -- a French news magazine similar to Time or Newsweek -- to cover the U.S. elections for their readers. His election blog can be found here.

Richard Epstein: "Robert Nozick Vs. The U.S. Congress"

In his latest weekly column for Forbes.com, Richard Epstein argues that the failures of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are a result of Congress' over-reliance on "patterned principles" in making decisions:

Now that yesterday's market nosedive shows the disappointing Congressional bailout has not calmed markets, let the post-mortem begin. Disasters like this latest financial meltdown don't just happen. Mistakes this huge require an impoverished political philosophy to grease the skids. Fannie and Freddie didn't design their horrific lending policies by chance. No, behind this lending fiasco lay the strong collective preference for the "patterned principles" of justice that Robert Nozick attacked so powerfully in his 1974 masterpiece, Anarchy, State, and Utopia.

Believers in patterned principles hold that there is some preordained social order that is more just than others. Accordingly, the function of the state is to use the levers of powers to manipulate behavior to achieve the desired outcomes. These patterned principles stand in opposition to historical principles of justice, which are content to establish the rules of the game and then let the legal moves by individual players determine the social outcomes. For Nozick, the key rules were rules of justice in acquisition (to set up the initial property rights) and justice in  transfer, whereby those rights (and others derived from them) could be exchanged or combined through voluntary transactions.

Read the full article here.

Update: Thanks to "Stu" for pointing out the typo in the original title of this post.

Strategic Manipulation of the Information Markets

Just over a week ago, Nate Silver, the founder of the excellent political blog FiveThirtyEight.com, wrote about potential manipulation of Intrade’s information market on the 2008 presidential race. It’s difficult to gauge whether this manipulation is in fact occurring, in part because it’s hard to imagine that very many traders would be willing to invest thousands of dollars in moving a relatively meaningless information market more than a month before the election. Late last week, however, Intrade’s political market almost certainly fell subject to strategic manipulation, this time with a much more prosaic goal: to exploit overlapping markets in order to turn an easy profit.

Karl Llewellyn on Marriage and the Family

For this week's Faculty Podcast, we invite you to step into the Wayback Machine for a glimpse of the Law School some 50 years ago. One of the leading legal scholars of his generation, Karl Llewellyn taught at Chicago from 1951 until his death in 1962. In this undated classroom recording, he takes an often light-hearted look at the implicit legal structures of what was at the time considered the "typical" American family. Listen to the end, and you'll also hear him discuss with his students their upcoming exam.

Epstein on "The Christmas Tree Effect"

In Richard Epstein's weekly column at Forbes.com, he discusses the House's refusal to pass legislation bailing out the financial industry earlier this week:

Well, the gong has struck, now that a closely divided House of Representatives has failed to approve round one of the bailout program. The stock market responded with a deep plunge, as the uncertainty continues. It is too early, however, to write a definitive post-mortem because some new proposal may make it through a suspicious and hostile Congress. But it is instructive to understand at least some of the reasons why this initial effort fell apart.

Read the rest of the column here.

New Comments Policy

Upon the recommendation of the Faculty Blog Committee, we have adopted a new policy regarding reader comments here on the Faculty Blog. You can read the policy here. We believe that this policy will improve the Faculty Blog experience for all involved.

Agree or disagree with the new policy? As always, we welcome your comments.

Comments on this post have been disallowed, and previous comments removed. It has become clear that the Law School's initial decision to err on the side of leniency, and to expect our readers to adhere not only to the letter of the newly adopted comments policy but to its spirit as well, has led to escalation of the very problem this policy sought to prevent. Disagreements with intellectual positions continue to be encouraged, so long as they are expressed in civil terms; ad hominem attacks, however politely phrased, will not be tolerated.