Highly Automated Vehicles & Discrimination against Low-Income Persons

Law reform in the United States often reflects a structural bias that advances narrow business interests without addressing broader public interest concerns.\u27 This bias may appear by omitting protective language in laws or regulations which address a subject matter area, such as permitting the testing of highly automated vehicles ( HA Vs ) on public roads, while omitting a requirement for a reasonable level of insurance as a condition to obtain a testing permit.2 This Article explores certain social and economic justice implications of laws and regulations governing the design, testing, manufacture, and deployment of HA Vs which might advance a business interest without taking account of the public interest. This Article contrasts the steps that might be taken to ensure the economic well-being of low-income persons with the current state of HAV regulation. 3 This Article recommends steps to correct some of this bias

Social Justice and Deposit Return Calculations: A Study of Success and Failure in Commercial Law Reform

(Excerpt) This Article proceeds as follows: Part I describes case law which uses a “penalty” interpretation for § 2-718(2) and (3). Part II describes case law in which courts do not apply a penalty. Part III offers a penalty-free interpretation for § 2-718(2) and (3) that remains true to the statutory language. These three parts make extensive use of numerical examples and explanations. Although the presentation may seem dense in parts, an appreciation of the numbers is essential to understanding both the problem and the solution. Part IV describes the drafting history of § 2-718(2) and (3) to support the preferred interpretation. Understanding how we got here motivates the impetus for reform by revealing the complete lack of justification for the penalty interpretation. Part V explains that correcting the penalty interpretation has the potential to positively impact the lives of many low-income individuals, people for whom $500 is by no means a small calculation quibble. Here, structural concerns and system-design failures are discussed as important factors in favor of reform. The Article concludes in Part VI with a defense of a populist agenda for a non-uniform amendment to the UCC, including an appendix offering the simple statutory fix for proposal to state legislatures. It describes the kind of theory of legislation required to advocate for change despite the risk that such a change poses for uniformity in the law

Spectres of Law & Economics

There are spectres haunting law and economics - the spectres of G.W.F. Hegel and Jacques Lacan. This is one of the central theses of Professor Jeanne L. Schroeder\u27s challenging new book: The Triumph of Venus, the Erotics of the Market ( Triumph of Venus ). Schroeder uses insights inspired by the teachings of Hegel and the French psychoanalyst, Lacan, to critique some basic assumptiosn made by scholars who use economic ideas to investigate the law and legal institutions - the law and economics ( L&E ) practitioners. The book devotes much space to criticism of Judge Posner\u27s vision of law, using it as a proxy for L&E scholarship generally. Professor Schroeder succinctly states her basic problem with L&E: In recent years, the study of markets in American jurisprudence has been expropriated by the self-styled law-and-economics movement, the dominant discourse of private law in America\u27s most elite law schools. One of its appeals is that it gives an aura of scientific certainty and objectivity to legal analysis and normative policymaking. Despite its claim to scientific status, however, this scholarship is almost entirely devoid of methodological discussion and internal criticism, as though these matters were uncontroversial. (pp. 1-2

Forcing Analogies in Law: Badiou, Set Theory, and Models

Why think about set theory as part of legal studies? In particular, is there value in reading works by Alain Badiou, such as Being and Event,1 as speaking to law? This is the general question considered by this essay. By “law” I mean to designate juridical law, unless otherwise indicated. Being and Event makes many claims and distinctions. I focus on a few: first, the claim that equates mathematics with ontology; second, the distinction made among the one, the multiple, and multiplicities. In this regard, Badiou observes that traditional western metaphysics conceived of a multiple as dependent on the concept of the one. He identifies the work of mathematician Paul Cohen as providing a conceptual framework for thinking about multiplicities independent of reliance on the concept of the one (i.e. without the need for a prior concept of individuals). Cohen’s innovation was to introduce the technique of “forcing” to prove that the traditional axioms of set theory are consistent with the negation of the continuum hypothesis.4 Previously, Kurt Godel had proved that the traditional axioms of set theory are consistent with the truth of the continuum hypothesis.5 Together, the results of Gode