William Davis has published Property, Wills, & Estates in The Count of Monte Cristo: A Comparison Between the Napoleonic Code & Mississippi Law. Here is the abstract. In the literary classic The Count of Monte Cristo, the hero inherits a treasure after escaping the prison in which he was wrongly confined. The central question this comment seeks to answer is, “Was this inheritance transfer legal?” From this starting point, two different legal regimes are analyzed. Beginning with a discussion of the Napoleonic Code in force at the time of both the novel’s setting and publication, this co ..read more

Richard K. Sherwin, New York Law School, has published Chorological Jurisprudence and Liberal Democratic Flourishing as NYLS Legal Studies Research Paper No. 4764287. Here is the abstract. These days, it is difficult not to be preoccupied with calamity. Profound crises surround us on many fronts: climate change and ecological catastrophe, the dark shadow of viral pandemics, and dire threats to liberal democracy and the rule of law. In dark times, paralysis and despair can pull us further into the dark. To make our way back to the light we need to marshal every cultural, cognitive, affective, a ..read more

Ted M. Sichelman, University of San Diego School of Law, has published The Mathematical Structure of the Law. Here is the abstract. Scientific “law” and human-made law (“social law”) are both “laws” in a very general sense—scientific laws “govern” the workings of the material world and social laws govern the behavior of people. Beyond this superficial resemblance, do social laws partake of the same sorts of mathematical structures as scientific laws? Many theorists have proposed formal deontic-oriented logical models of legal rights and other entitlements. Here, leveraging the formalism of Wes ..read more

Angelo Ryu, University of Oxford, Saint John's College, is publishing How Reasons Make Law in the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies. Here is the abstract. According to legal anti-positivism, legal duties are just a subset of our moral duties. Not every moral duty, though, is legal. So what else is needed? This article develops a theory of how moral duties come to be law, which I call the constitutive reasons account. Among our moral reasons are legal reasons—and those reasons make moral duties into legal duties. So the law consists of moral duties which have, as one of their underlying reasons ..read more

Enrico Bonadio, City University, London, City Law School, and Bryan Khan, University of the West Indies, have published Remix, Reuse and Reggae: Creativity and Copyright in Jamaican Music in Enrico Bonadio - Chen Zhu (eds.), Music Borrowing and Copyright Law (Enrico Bonadio and Chen Zhu eds., Hart Publishing 2023. Here is the abstract. What makes the story of the rise of reggae music so fascinating are the circumstances in which the genre evolved. It seems to have been birthed by a cosmic alignment of the right social and cultural factors, rather than an anticipatable evolution of existing cul ..read more

John R. Brooks, Fordham University School of Law, and David Gamage, University of Missouri School of Law, are publishing The Original Meaning of the Sixteenth Amendment in the Washington University Law Review. Here is the abstract. The Sixteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution enshrines Congress’s “power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived.” Challenges to the exercise of that power have typically turned on whether the thing being taxed is “income” or not. In the most recent example, the 2023 Supreme Court case of Moore v. United States, taxpayers have ..read more

Nathan Ristuccia, Institute for Free Speech, is publishing 'Dangerous to the Liberties of a Free People': Secret Societies and the Right to Assemble in volume 4 of the Journal of Free Speech Law. Here is the abstract. Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries often feared that secret assembly threatened republican government. Oath-bound secret societies were allegedly elitist cabals that would establish an imperium in imperio oppressive to ordinary citizens. Yet despite this hostility, many early Americans also insisted that freedom of assembly included the right to gather anonymous ..read more

Ian Keay, Queen's University, Department of Economics, Kris Inwood, University of Guelph, Department of Economics, and Blair Long, Cape Breton University have published Institutional Change and Criminal Sentencing on the Frontier: Evidence from British Columbia's Jails, 1864-1913. Here is the abstract. In this paper we document the effect of transformative institutional change on criminal sentencing in a frontier environment. New historical evidence digitized from British Columbia’s (BC) prison admission ledgers allows us to track changes in sentencing distributions from 1864 to 1913. We find ..read more

Neal Feigenson, Ouinnipiac University School of Law, has published Say It With Pictures: Image and Text in Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith. Here is the abstract. The majority and dissenting opinions in the Supreme Court’s recent case on fair use, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith, feature an unprecedented number of pictures: seventeen separate illustrations, almost all color photographs, and all but one embedded in the opinions instead of being relegated to an appendix. Images have appeared in SCOTUS opinions before, but never like this ..read more

Evan D. Bernick, Northern Illinois University College of Law, has published Horrifying Jurisprudence as a Northern Illinois University College of Law Legal Studies Research Paper. Here is the abstract. This Essay uses the horror video game Alan Wake 2 as a jumping-off point to discuss and critique horrifying jurisprudence—accounts of law that evoke the emotion of horror. By centering on a horror writer whose storytelling shapes the real world, Alan Wake 2 invites analogies to legal interpretation. Legal interpretation often involves storytelling and produces real-life horrors. No legal philoso ..read more