The University of Chicago Law School Faculty Blog

Student Blogger - Who is to Blame for Climate Change? Does it Even Matter?

The standard account of the climate change problem seems to be that developed countries got to where they are by recklessly exploiting resources, including the ability of the atmosphere to absorb greenhouse gases. These developed countries, therefore, need to take responsibility for solving the problem, the account goes. As Peter Singer puts it, "in terms a child could understand, as far as the atmosphere is concerned, the developed nations broke it. "

Is this account right? Answering that question breaks down into two parts: First, does the data support the conclusion that rich countries created the climate change problem? Second, even if the data does support that claim, does that mean that developed countries should bear more of the burden going forward?

Professor David Weisbach attempts to answer both parts in his paper "Responsibility for Climate Change, By the Numbers," presented at this week's Works in Progress (WiP) talk. The paper draws to some extent on recent work by Professors Cass Sunstein and Eric Posner in this area, and is connected to a forthcoming book project by all three professors.

Essentially, Weisbach argues that the conventional story is wrong on both counts - the data don't support a conclusion that rich states have contributed to the climate change problem significantly more than poor ones. Even if they did (Weisbach argues), an ethical theory that supported allocating more of the costs to developed countries today would be highly problematic, departing significantly with understandings of responsibility embodied in tort law.

Martha Nussbaum on Women in the Campaign and the Court

(This piece was originally published in the Philadelphia Inquirer on November 24. It is reposted here at the request of Professor Nussbaum, who welcomes discussion on the subject in this forum.)

Thomas Jefferson liked women - up to a point. They were fine as wives, daughters or mistresses, but they had better not try to enter the political realm.

"Were our state a pure democracy," he wrote to a friend in 1816, "there would yet be excluded from their deliberations . . . women, who, to prevent depravation of morals and ambiguity of issue, should not mix promiscuously in the public meetings of men."

Such "ideas" die hard. When I was elected as the first woman in Harvard's Society of Fellows in 1972, a prestigious classical scholar wrote to me that he didn't know what to call a female fellow. Perhaps the ancient Greek language could solve the problem, he suggested. Since hetairos is Greek for fellow, they could just call me hetaira.

As he and I knew well, however, hetaira was also the Greek word for high-class prostitute.

Such "jokes" reinforced the old Jeffersonian stereotype: Women are frivolous, distracting beings, all about sexuality, so they'd better not go near those important public gatherings.

Student Blogger - The Demarcation of Land: Patterns and Economic Effects

Professor Dean Lueck recently presented his paper (with Gary Libecap), The Demarcation of Land: Patterns and Economic Effects, at the Law and Economics Workshop. This is a forum where academic working papers are presented and discussed among interested faculty and students.

The two predominant ways that land is demarcated are metes and bounds (MB) and a centralized, rectangular survey (RS). The MB system is fairly haphazard, with settlers demarcating portions of land according to natural or man-made landmarks. This can result in highly irregular shapes (see picture), but in some areas (usually flat), it results in rectangular plots. RS demaracation is initiated by the government and plots the lands in a systematic way, disregarding any geographical barriers (mountains, streams, etc.). While the difference between demarcation systems may seem like an archaic question in this country, it may be of great use in developing countries with large areas of government-owned land. When that land is made available to citizens, the government will have to choose whether to impose a RS itself or allow the citizens to use MB to demarcate the land.

Can Hillary Clinton Serve? (The Pesky Emoluments Clause)

Over at The Volokh Conspiracy there is some discussion of a neat topic that has been the subject of occasional conversation around here, the application of The Emoluments Clause ("No Senator or Representative shall, during the Time for which he was elected, be appointed to any civil office under the Authority of the United States, which shall have been created, or the Emoluments whereof shall have been encreased during such time. . . ) to Hillary Clinton's capacity to serve as Secretary of State, at least until the end of the term to which she was elected. The Constitutional Convention history as well as the subsequent American experience is gathered, along with some observations, by Adam Bonin here. The former site quotes Michael Paulsen's suggestion that the text is clear and that Clinton is barred. The plain language of the Clause certainly seems to bar service. Of the several ways around this hurdle, Professor Paulsen (likes none - but if he must choose he) likes best - though somewhat tongue in cheek I think -- the Constitution's use of the male pronoun, as that allows Clinton to serve without violating the precise text.

Ressentiment, the Internet, and the Cloak of Invisibility

At last weekend's privacy conference, Martha Nussbaum described in vivid terms the objectification of women by men acting anonymously on the internet.  This was not a simple argument that men look at porn and fantasize a level of control they will never achieve legally in the real world.  Instead she (and Brian Leiter and others) described the systematized targeting of individual woman in "cyber cesspools," complete with engineered images of rape and sodomy of the target, exhortations to molest and kill, revelation of personal addresses and social security numbers, and cybertrespasses designed to erase the target's web presence. This is not only control and objectification in fantasy (which is bad enough but usually not actionable), but control, objectification, and psychic rape in the real world.

Most interestingly, Martha exposed much of the motivation of the wrongdoers as a species of ressentiment explored by Nietzche, an attempt by the powerless and resentful to wrest control from the strong whom they envy and fear.  It is no surprise that the worst abuses described at the conference were perpetrated against successful women who would be likely to prevail in an open contest of wits.  Only anonymous rumour can bring them down. Think of the arch-example of ressentiment:  James Claggart whose envy and distorted desire for Billy Budd leads to his whispered lies about Billy's involvement in mutiny.

Iraq -- correction

The poll I referred to was not in the Brookings Report but in a CSIS report that I meant to but failed to link to (somehow I linked to some other CSIS web page by accident).  It is here, slides 113-14.

The source listed is:

ABC/BBC/ARD/NHK POLL - IRAQ FIVE YEARS LATER: WHERE THINGS STAND, Monday, March 17, 2008

The Iraq War – A Humanitarian Success?

Consider these statistics (from this mostly dated Brookings report):

Time	Commercial TV Stations	Commercial Radio Stations	Independent Newspapers and Magazines
March 2006	54	114	268
Prewar (2003)	0	0	0

Or these: Internet and Telephone Subscribers

	Internet Subscribers	Telephone Subscribers
October 2007	827,500	14,300,000
Prewar	4,500	833,000

Or these: Index of Political Freedom (1-10, highest)

Israel	8.20
Lebanon	6.55
Morocco	5.20
Iraq	5.05
Palestine	5.05
Kuwait	4.90
Tunisia	4.60
Jordan	4.45
Qatar	4.45
Egypt	4.30
Sudan	4.30
Yemen	4.30
Algeria	4.15
Oman	4.00
Bahrain	3.85
Iran	3.85
UAE	3.70
Saudi Arabia	2.80
Syria	2.80
Libya	2.05

[Pre-war Iraq was certainly a 1.0.] A poll conducted last March found that 65 percent of Shiites and 87 percent of Kurds said that the “invasion was right.” Few (5%) Sunnis agreed but, overall, 49 percent of the population supported the invasion. (The poll results are in the Brookings report.)

More Google and Evil

The video from the Google debate is now up on YouTube. You can get my segment here; the rest of the segments, 13 in all, are available on the right hand side of that window.

Randy Picker on Google's "Don't Be Evil" Motto

Earlier this week, Paul H. and Theo Leffmann Professor of Commercial Law Randy Picker participated in a an Intelligence Squared U.S. event that addressed the statement "Google violates its 'don't be evil' motto." Randy began the debate:

The question isn’t whether Google is a great company. I think it is... The question isn’t whether Google does more good than evil. I think it does... The question’s whether we can identify certain things which they do which we think are important to how Google operates, that are inconsistent with that motto.

Want to find out what those "certain things" are? A full transcript of the debate is available here; audio and video will be available shortly are now available.

From the press release:

Intelligence Squared U.S., the Oxford style debate series sponsored by The Rosenkranz Foundation, announced the results of its fourth debate of the Fall 2008 season, "Google violates its 'don't be evil' motto."  A sold out audience at Rockefeller University's Caspary Auditorium, New York City voted 47% for the motion and 47% against at the conclusion of the debate. 6% were undecided, resulting in a tie, but with more of the undecided voters being swayed to the side arguing for the motion.

Speaking for the motion were Harry Lewis, former Dean of Harvard College and Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard, Randal C. Picker, the Paul H. and Theo Leffmann Professor of Commercial Law at the University of Chicago Law School, and Siva Vaidhyanathan a cultural historian and media scholar, and an associate professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia. Esther Dyson author of "Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age," Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute and Jeff Jarvis author of the upcoming book, "What Would Google Do?" spoke against the motion. John Donvan, a correspondent for ABC News "Nightline," moderated.

 

           

Brian Leiter and Scott Shapiro: "Even Further Beyond the Hart-Dworkin Debate"

This past weekend, John P. Wilson Professor of Law Brian Leiter took part in a Bloggingheads.tv "diavlog" with Yale's Scott Shapiro entitled "Even Further Beyond the Hart-Dworkin Debate." The entire conversation is embedded below, or you can jump to individual topics here: 

• A short primer on legal philosophy (06:06)
• Hart’s legal positivism vs. Dworkin’s (quasi-)natural law theory (13:45)
• Explaining theoretical disagreement: a challenge for positivism (16:56)
• Is theoretical disagreement so rare it needs no explanation? (09:10)
• Can a novel way of interpreting law be offered in good faith? (11:34)
• Brian and Scott explain why they are positivists (05:28)