Last week, Kirkland and Ellis Professor of Law Eric Posner recorded a conversation with Yale's Jack Balkin on the Bloggingheads.tv site on "The Politics of Emergency." Among the topics covered were: executive power in a time of emergency, whether the president can change reality, secrecy in the Obama administration, and imagining an executive branch 2.0. The video is embedded below, or can be watched on the Bloggingheads site.
Update: Audio of this talk is now available and video is embedded after the jump.
Professor Omri Ben-Shahar spoke on the "Myths of Consumer Protection" at this year’s annual Ronald H. Coase lecture for first year law students. Ben-Shahar discussed why he believes the modern consumer protection movement is largely misguided. Consumer advocates cite three things that consumers need: information about products, access to courts, and remedies for wrongs done to them. In the eyes of the consumer advocate, a consumer cannot compete with large corporations without these three things. It would be David versus Goliath; and Goliath would always win.
Myth #1: Consumers will be better off if they have more information
Warning labels are on everything. You can’t install a piece of software or use a web site without checking some box guaranteeing that you have read the Terms of Service. Do these forms of disclosure benefit consumers?
Ben-Shahar believes not. Disclosures of information are often technical and hard to digest. People do not want to spend the time to read these disclosures. In a study of online viewing habits, 1/1000 people actually read a site’s Terms of Service, and that single curious individual only glanced at the complicated contract for an average of forty seconds—perhaps just a misclick.
Continue reading "Student Blogger - The Myths of Consumer Protection Law" »
Earlier this month, Columbia Law School held a symposium honoring Martha Nussbaum's contributions to the scholarship of gender, sexuality and the law. The proceedings will be published in a special issue of the Columbia Journal of Gender and Law, but videos of Prof. Nussbaum's keynote and the symposium panels (one of which featured Chicago's Mary Anne Case) are now available on Columbia's Gender & Sexuality Law Blog.
Late last year, Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics Martha Nussbaum and Harry Kalven Visiting Professor of Law Cass Sunstein organized a conference devoted to an interdisciplinary discussion of the legal and ethical issues posed by the new ways in which privacy can be invaded. "Speech, Privacy, and the Internet: The University and Beyond" brought together leading scholars to discuss these topics. As the conference webpage states,
The current rise in invasive personal gossip, much of it anonymous and much of it directed at students, often by other students, creates an atmosphere that threatens to disrupt the climate of instruction. On the other hand, restrictions on such internet sites raise delicate free speech issues. What challenges do these developments raise on campus, and what direction should universities take to meet these challenges?
Video of the conference keynote address, by former Chicago professor Lawrence Lessig, is embedded after the jump. The video also includes intros from Profs. Nussbaum and Sunstein and Provost Thomas Rosenbaum. You can read the University News Office story about the conference here. Audio downloads, abstracts, and selected papers are available here.
Continue reading "Conference: "Speech, Privacy, and the Internet: The University and Beyond"" »
This week's edition of the Faculty Podcast is a double header of two recent Chicago's Best Ideas talks: Judge Diane Wood and Martha Nussbaum February 2nd discussion "Constitutions and Capabilities," in which the pair discuss practical implications for judges of Prof. Nussbaum's capabilities approach; and Richard Epstein's "The Coming Meltdown in Labor Relations," in which he discusses the Employee Free Choice Act, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, and the Paycheck Fairness Act.
You can read Bryan Hart's summary of the Nussbaum/Wood talk here, and download the audio here; Bryan's write-up of the Epstein event is here, and the audio is here.
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In September, Frank and Bernice J. Greenberg Professor of Law Omri Ben-Shahar and Fischel-Neil Visiting Professor of Law Ariel Porat organized a conference intended to reevaluate the role of fault in contract law. Speakers included Chicago faculty Saul Levmore, Eric Posner, Richard Epstein and Judge Richard Posner, along with experts in contract law from around the world. Subscribers to our Faculty Podcast may have already heard Judge Posner's "Let Us Never Blame a Contract Breaker," and audio and video of the entire conference is now available on the conference website. You may also watch Professor Ben-Shahar's introduction to the conference in the video embedded after the jump.
Last week Judge Posner and Professors Nussbaum and Case faced off in a much-anticipated debate entitled "Posner Answers the Feminists" (moderated by Professor Stone). The talk (which you can listen to here) was inspired by articles written by Nussbaum and Case for a Symposium published by the University of Chicago Law Review commemorating Posner’s 25 years on the bench. Both professors wrote on the topic of Posner’s sexual harassment jurisprudence. See here for Case’s article and here for Nussbaum’s.
But what began as a discussion about specific sexual harassment opinions seemed to transform into a debate over the state of feminism in the United States. Posner questioned whether feminism is still a "live issue" in the United States given his view that women are outperforming men at all educational levels and forging ahead in all professions, including in the military. In Posner’s words, women are now dropping bombs on people "just like the boys." "If that isn’t equality," he joked, "I don’t know what is."
Continue reading "Student Blogger - Is Feminism A Live Issue?" »
Update: Audio of this talk is now available, and video of the talk is embedded after the jump.
A perception exists that little communication occurs between the ivory tower of legal academia and the trenches of legal practice. The Chicago's Best Ideas talk on Monday, February 2 tried to bridge this gap by "making philosophy confront reality," according to Professor Martha Nussbaum, the first speaker. Nussbaum started building the bridge on the philosophical side, extending her remarks into the legal implementation of her philosophy, and Judge Diane Wood of the Seventh Circuit started on the legal side, extending into the hopes for applying a coherent philosophy to decisionmaking.
Update: You can download audio of this talk here, and video of the talk is embedded after the jump.
As you may already know, Professor Richard Epstein is not President Obama's biggest fan. Obama favors some economic regulations that Epstein does not. In his Chicago's Best Ideas talk on Tuesday, January 27, Professor Epstein spoke about three proposed laws in the area of labor relations: the Employee Free Choice Act, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, and the Paycheck Fairness Act. Epstein spent most of his time on the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), so my attention will focus on that law. (Epstein has a column about the Lilly Ledbetter Act on Forbes.com.) The EFCA is an amendment to the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA).
Epstein started with the word "free" in the EFCA's name. Back in the nineteenth century before the New Deal, "free" meant free for both sides of the labor relationship: employer and employee. An employer could not force the employee to accept a particular wage, and the employee could not, even if represented by a union, force the employer to hire him at a given wage. The NLRA was passed at the height of the New Deal in 1935. (Epstein is, not surprisingly, no fan of the New Deal.) The Act provides that unions can prompt a unionization vote by getting at least 30 percent of employees to show support by signing cards, called the card check. The vote is a simple majority vote by secret ballot. If the union is approved, the employer must negotiate with the union. Freedom under the NLRA is one-sided because employers must negotiate with a valid union.
You may have noticed that it's been awfully quiet around here; It's the calm before the storm at the Law School as we prepare for classes to start on Monday. If you're looking to fill the hours between now and then, have a listen to the first Faculty Podcast of the new year. Recorded on October 6 of last year as part of the Law School's annual First Monday series, Bernard D. Meltzer Professor of Law Richard McAdams gave a talk entitled "The Fourth Amendment in Transition?"
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