The University of Chicago Law School Faculty Blog

Audio: Richard Epstein and Cass Sunstein: "Should Conservatives Vote for Obama?"

Back in March, Chicago's chapters of the Federalist Society and the Black Law Students Association cohosted a very well-attended debate on the question of whether conservative voters should support Barack Obama's presidential bid. Cass Sunstein (then Karl N. Llewellyn Distinguished Service Professor of Jurisprudence, now Visiting Professor of Law, as well as informal adviser to the Obama campaign) discussed why he thought some conservatives would embrace Obama, while James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of Law Richard Epstein pointed out a number of Obama's economic positions that he thought would be troubling to conservative voters. You can listen to the discussion by downloading the .mp3 file.

The 2008 Fulton Lecture in Legal History: Gerhard Casper, "Forswearing Allegiance"

Each year the Law School holds the Maurice and Muriel Fulton Lecture in Legal History. Created in 1985, the Fulton lecture brings a prominent legal historian to campus to discuss an issue in legal history. The 2008 lecture, presented on May 1, featured the return to Chicago of Professor Gerhard Casper, former Dean of the Law School (as well as President Emeritus of Stanford University). Professor Casper discussed the requirement that new citizens of the United States abjure prior allegiances and the way that requirement reflects upon historical concepts of citizenship.

Video of the lecture is embedded below, or you may download a .mov or .mp3 file; a written version of the lecture is also available. Transcripts and recordings of past Fulton lectures are available on the Law School website.

Audio/Video: M. Todd Henderson: "Predicting Crime (without the Pre-Cogs)"

In the absence of pre-cognitive superbeings and Tom Cruise, how are police and policy makers supposed to allocate scarce crime-fighting resources? There is a vibrant academic literature on predicting crime, with models of various types offered as the best way of estimating future crime rates. Many of these involve mapping software, which plots the past in the hopes of extrapolating to the future. Police use some of these techniques, but most are very crude, using things like weather or the location of liquor stores as "hot spots" to estimate crime rates. Police also use experience and gut instinct. All of the various methods, whether formal models or inside the head of the commissioner of police, are deployed in haphazard and isolated ways. In this lecture, recorded May 13, 2008 as part of the Chicago's Best Ideas lecture Assistant Professor of Law M. Todd Henderson presents an alternative.

Video of the talk is embedded below, and a .mov file and .mp3 file are also available. Prof. Henderson's paper on this topic (written with Justin Wolfers and Eric Zitzewitz) is available from SSRN.

Video: Sunstein and Thaler on "Nudge" and Noodles

Via the Research at Chicago site:

[Richard] Thaler and [Cass] Sunstein reminisce at their favorite Hyde Park lunch spot, Noodles, where they say they did some of their best work on the book. Noodles was so important to the creative process, it even made the acknowledgments. The two talk about what each brought to the project, the origin of the elephants on the book cover, their fear of forms, and their hopes for a new political consensus in the country.

Related Links:

• Nudge Blog
• Nudge Website

Audio/Video: Geof Stone, "The World of the Framers: A Christian Nation?"

It has become commonplace in American political discourse for Christian evangelicals to assert that the United States was founded as a "Christian nation" and that in recent decades secularists have gained control and distorted our nation's founding traditions and values. In this lecture, Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor Geoffrey Stone examines the beliefs of the Framers on this question. What did they think about Christianity, about the role of Christianity in the American nation, and about the relationship between religion generally and self-governance? The answers to these questions are important not only to constitutional interpretation, but even more fundamentally to an understanding of who we are – and who we are supposed to be – as a nation.

This talk was recorded April 21, 2008 as part of the Chicago's Best Ideas lecture series.

Video of the talk is embedded below, or you may download a .mov file or .mp3 file.

Audio/Video: Eric Posner and Henry Farrell, "Readers Like You"

Earlier this week on bloggingheads.tv, Chicago's Eric Posner engaged George Washington University's Henry Farrell in a wide-ranging discussion that explores a variety of issues, from the effect of the blogosphere on politics to the question of whether aggressive counterterrorism measures actually nurture militant Islamism.

The clip below features a portion of the discussion concerning the processing of enemy combatants; the full video (as well as downloadable audio, if that's more your style) is available here.

Audio/Video: Richard Epstein Asks, "Is the Administrative State Consistent with the Rule of Law?"

On January 29, the always entertaining Richard Epstein presented a Chicago's Best Ideas talk entitled "Is the Administrative State Consistent with the Rule of Law?" Video of the talk is embedded below, or you may download a .mov file or .mp3 file.

Here is the descriptive blurb that was on the poster for the talk:

Without question, the most distinctive feature of the modern social democratic state is the rise of administrative agencies, which at the federal level function as a shadowy Fourth Branch of government that fits uneasily into our constitutional scheme of separation of powers, and which at the state level oversee vast swaths of economic activity.

Defenders of the current administrative setup claim the elaborate procedural safeguards built into today’s administrative law effectively blunt the risk of arbitrary power, whose exercise has always been in tension with the rule of law. In this talk, Professor Epstein will explain why he thinks the massive discretion routinely confided in administrative agencies is in fact inconsistent with the rule of law on a wide range of matters dealing with economic liberties, tort liability, private property, and the institutional autonomy of voluntary associations.

Audio: Randy Picker's Hooding Ceremony Address

Friday was graduation day here at the Law School, so please join us in wishing heartfelt congratulations to the Class of 2008 and to their families. As is tradition, along with the University's graduation ceremony, the Law School hosted a hooding ceremony in Rockefeller Chapel. During this ceremony, graduates receive the distinctive purple hood that is worn during formal academic events by those who hold degrees in law.

This year's faculty speaker at the hooding ceremony was Randy Picker, Paul H. and Theo Leffmann Professor of Commercial Law, and a frequent contributor to this blog. You can listen to Randy's address here; he was introduced by Dean Saul Levmore.

Update: A transcript of Professor Picker's speech is also available.

Video: Cass Sunstein and Eugene Volokh on Information Cocoons

Yesterday, Bloggingheads.tv posted a discussion between Cass Sunstein and Eugene Volokh of UCLA (and the Volokh Conspiracy), in which they touch on questions of fairness, balkanization, serendipity, and defamation in the discourse of the blogosphere.

Martha Nussbaum: The 2008 Nora and Edward Ryerson Lecture

On May 14, Martha Nussbaum presented the 2008 Nora and Edward Ryerson Lecture. The Ryerson Lectures grew out of a 1972 bequest to the University by Nora and Edward L. Ryerson, a former Chairman of the Board. The University's faculty selects each Ryerson Lecturer based on a consensus that a particular scholar has made research contributions of lasting significance. Video of Professor Nussbaum's lecture, which was  entitled "Equal Respect for Conscience: The Roots of a Moral and Legal Tradition," is embedded below, and an .mp3 is also available.