The Law\u27s Mystery

What is the continuing significance of Cohen v. California, the 1971 U.S. Supreme Court decision holding that “Fuck the Draft” is a message protected by the First Amendment? Using Cohen as an exemplar, this article offers a new theory about how to understand the law and judicial opinions. The theory begins in a recognition of the “law” as resting upon mystery and uncertainty, a mystery that is also the source of the law’s enchantment. It is this enchantment that we depend upon for the law to be authoritative rather than authoritarian and reducible to the political and thus to power. In simple terms, the mystery of the law—its being beyond us in this way—constitutes its legitimate authority over us. The law that discloses itself to us does so through the openings that language provides. For our culture, judicial opinions are its primary way of doing this. Having introduced the theory, the article applies it, exploring whether it is possible to bring to the surface the tracings of a “great” judicial performance, using “great” in the sense of revealing an opening through which the law discloses itself. This section describes a reading of Cohen that aims to discover whether through the performance of the opinion, its author has uncovered something that is “of the essence” of our community. The article finally raises questions about what it would mean to legal education and law practice if judicial opinions were evaluated without destroying the law’s mystery. What would it mean if we thought of judges as preservers of this mystery? What would it mean if readers of opinions started thinking in terms of their own experience of the opinion rather than as critics of it? And what would it mean if lawyers saw their task as related to “truth”

Macroeconomic Performance of Currency Boards in Transition Economies

The link between the exchange rate regime and macroeconomic performance has always been a debatable issue in international economics. This paper takes a critical look at this debate by focusing on the relative macreoeconomic performance of currency boards against other exchange rate regimes in transition economies. The empirical findings of this paper show that, relative to floating regimes, currency boards in transition economies are associated with lower inflation and higher real per-capita growth. Additionally, transition economies with currency boards experience higher real GDP per-capita growth compared to both pegged and floating regimes. According to the currency board experiences in transition economies, it can be stated that currency boards in Estonia, Lithuania and Bulgaria brought lower inflation and higher real GDP growth to these countries relative to the pre-currency board period.Transition Economies, Exchange Rates, Currency Boards, Inflation, Growth

Did the Credit Crunch in Japan Affect Household Welfare? An Augmented Euler Equation Approach Using Type 5 Tobit Model

We investigate whether the credit crunch in Japan affected household welfare and the manner in which it did. We augment the theoretical framework of a consumption Euler equation with endogenous credit constraints and estimate it with household panel data for 1993-1999, generating several empirical findings. First, a small portion of the people faced credit constraints in Japan before and after the financial crisis in 1997. Accordingly, our results reject the standard consumption Euler equation. Second, the credit crunch affected household welfare negatively, albeit not seriously, after 1997. Our results corroborate that the credit crunch in Japan was supply-driven.

Adaptation and mitigation in long-term climate policies

The paper analytically explores the optimal policy mix between mitigation and environmental adaptation against climate change at a macroeconomic level. The constructed economic- environmental model is formulated as a social planner problem with the adaptation and abatement investments as separate decision variables. The authors prove the existence of a unique steady state and provide a comparative static analysis of the optimal investment. It leads to essential implications for associated long-term environmental policies. In particular, the dependence of the optimal ratio between abatement and adaptation investments on economic efficiency appears to have an inverted U-shape. Data calibration and numerical simulation are provided to illustrate theoretical outcomes.environmental adaptation, mitigation, optimal investment, long-term climate policies