The Assignment of Errors in Appellate Briefs

Few subjects have troubled courts more and legal writers less than faulty assignments of error. Since the subject has received little attention outside the reports themselves, there has developed a mass of hitherto unassimilated case authority which, because of its size, is an obstacle rather than an aid to courts and attorneys. This article is the product of a survey of those cases. It will add little to the general store of information on the subject, but it is designed to do two things: (1) call the attention of the Bar to some of the clearer and better written discussions of the problem in the Washington cases, and (2) to segregate, throughout the footnotes, the particular decisions dealing with specific problems posed by the requirement that all briefs contain an assignment of the errors relied upon for reversal

Energy, Aesthetics and Knowledge in Complex Economic Systems

It is argued that the fact that economic systems are dissipative structures must be taken fully into account in economics if we are to understand the nature of the economic-ecological interface and how to deal with emergent environmental problems, such as global warming. Such problems are a product of economic growth, which is widely accepted to be the outcome of the acquisition and application of knowledge. Drawing upon disparate literatures within and outside economics, it is argued that economic growth should be more properly viewed as the outcome of a co-evolutionary process that involves the autocatalytic interaction of new knowledge and access of increasing amounts of free energy to do increasingly specialized forms of work. The conventional view is that energy is just a factor of production used increasingly as new knowledge is employed. The possibility of reverse causation is considered here. Specifically, the relevance of the ‘energy hypothesis,’ associated with Eric Schneider and his collaborators, is assessed. This hypothesis states that all dissipative structures have, as their primary objective, the reduction of accessible free energy gradients. It is concluded that such a hypothesis cannot be rejected in the context of economic behaviour and that this opens up an important research agenda for economists. It is argued that such research has to be interdisciplinary because our economic behaviour is driven by aspirational goals which are aesthetic constructions in the mind and strongly connected to our emotions. In this regard, recent neuropsychological literature, arguing that certain emotional dispositions are necessary before we can employ our cognitive capabilities effectively, is important to digest. Thus, the possibility exists that it is in the emotional domain of the mind that the energy hypothesis is operative. Aesthetic constructions are, thus, connecting agents in the knowledge-energy co-evolutionary process. Some of the macroeconomic evidence concerning the relationship between free energy use and economic growth is considered and it is found that the energy hypothesis cannot be rejected in the economic domain. However, considerably more research needs to be undertaken before any firm conclusions can be drawn

Ernst Freund as Precursor of the Rational Study of Corporate Law

Gindis, David, Ernst Freund as Precursor of the Rational Study of Corporate Law (October 27, 2017). Journal of Institutional Economics, Forthcoming. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2905547, doi: https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2905547The rise of large business corporations in the late 19th century compelled many American observers to admit that the nature of the corporation had yet to be understood. Published in this context, Ernst Freund's little-known The Legal Nature of Corporations (1897) was an original attempt to come to terms with a new legal and economic reality. But it can also be described, to paraphrase Oliver Wendell Holmes, as the earliest example of the rational study of corporate law. The paper shows that Freund had the intuitions of an institutional economist, and engaged in what today would be called comparative institutional analysis. Remarkably, his argument that the corporate form secures property against insider defection and against outsiders anticipated recent work on entity shielding and capital lock-in, and can be read as an early contribution to what today would be called the theory of the firm.Peer reviewe

Influence of the Built Environment on Pedestrian Route Choices of Adolescent Girls

We examined the influence of the built environment on pedestrian route selection among adolescent girls. Portable global positioning system units, accelerometers, and travel diaries were used to identify the origin, destination, and walking routes of girls in San Diego, CA and Minneapolis, MN. We completed an inventory of the built environment on every street segment to measure the characteristics of routes taken and not taken. Route-level variables covering four key conceptual built environment domains (Aesthetics, Destinations, Functionality, and Safety) were used in the analysis of route choice. Shorter distance had the strongest positive association with route choice, while the presence of a greenway or trail, higher safety, presence of sidewalks, and availability of destinations along a route were also consistently positively associated with route choice at both sites. The results suggest that it may be possible to encourage pedestrians to walk farther by providing high quality and stimulating routes

Lifecycle consumption plans, social learning and external habits: Experimental evidence

© 2014 Elsevier B.V. We report results from a laboratory experiment exploring the extent to which individuals can solve a deterministic, intertemporal lifecycle consumption optimization problem and the effect of revealing social information on past average consumption amounts; as all individuals have identical induced preferences and lifetime incomes, such social information could be useful in solving for the optimal consumption path. Instead, we find that the provision of social information on past average levels of consumption results in a greater deviation of consumption from both the unconditional and the conditionally optimal paths. We find some improvement in consumption planning relative to the conditional optimum when social concerns (external habits) are explicitly incorporated into subject's period utility functions as in external habit formation preference specifications. Our results on the effects of social information on consumption behavior may help to explain the phenomenon of over-consumption and under-saving that has been observed in many developed countries in recent decades as social information on the behavior of others has become more readily available

Lafite in China

Increased economic power has positioned China within the global elite, yet China’s legitimacy remains low with regard to hierarchies of taste. Drawing from Bourdieu and Elias, this article offers an account of the global dynamics of status contests, and the role played by cultural capital and notions of civility and vulgarity. Specifically, we examine how U.S., UK, and Chinese media represent Chinese consumption of fine wine, and particularly that of Château Lafite, in the 2000 to 2013 period. Our analysis reveals four major ways in which Chinese fine wine consumption is framed—as vulgar, popular, functional, and discerning—and highlights tensions between Western and Chinese terms of cultural legitimacy. The research uncovers nuanced dimensions to the “East/West” divide in terms of the grades of cultural capital, competing logics of valuation, and modes of civility at play. Macromarketing implications of fine wine consumption in a fragmented and complex market are discussed