Introduction If I had to select only one theoretical tool for a first-year law student to master, it would be the ex post/ex ante distinction. (Of course, this is cheating, because there is a lot packed into the distinction.) The terminology comes from law and economics, and here is the basic idea: The ex post perspective is backward looking. From...

The Legal Theory Bookworm recommends Marx's Ethical Vision by Vanessa Christina Wills. Here is a description: "The communists do not preach morality at all"; this line from The Communist Manifesto might seem to settle the question of whether Marxism has anything to offer moral philosophy. Yet, Marx issued both trenchant critiques of "bourgeois" morality...

The Download of the Week is Contract Law's Morality and Punitive Debt Enforcement by Mark P. Gergen. Here is the abstract: This article uses punitive enforcement of personal debt to critically examine contemporary moral theories of contract. Charles Fried and Peter Benson take the position contract law appropriately embodies the morality of commercial...

Michael Allan Wolf (University of Florida Levin College of Law) has posted The Takings Blunderbuss: From Pennsylvania Coal to Dobbs (13 Brigham-Kanner Property Rights J. ___ (2024)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract: This Article explores three problems with the excess use of the Takings Clause (the "takings blunderbuss") that should cause concern not...

Mala Chatterjee (Columbia Law School) has posted The Will to Outlive Ourselves (Time, Meaning, and Value: The Significance of the Past and the Future for the Present (Volume Honoring the Work of Samuel Scheffler) (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2025)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract: In Death and the Afterlife, Samuel Scheffler asks us to consider...

Christopher R. Green (University of Mississippi - School of Law) has posted Equal Citizenship Yes, Intermediate Scrutiny No on SSRN. Here is the abstract: United States v. Skrmetti, a constitutional challenge to Tennessee’s limits on children’s use of cross-sex hormones, offers the Supreme Court the first chance in almost 30 years to rethink its 1976...