Punishment and culture

From the chain gang to the electric chair, the problem of how to deal with criminals has long been debated. What explains this concern with getting punishment right? And why do attitudes toward particular punishments change radically over time? In addressing these questions, Philip Smith ...

The hollow hope

can courts bring about social change?

In follow-up studies, dozens of reviews, and even a book of essays evaluating his conclusions, Gerald N. Rosenberg's critics - not to mention his supporters - have spent nearly two decades debating the arguments he first put forward in "The Hollow Hope". With this substantially expanded ...

Law and capitalism

what corporate crises reveal about legal systems and economic development around the world

Recent high-profile corporate scandals#such as those involving Enron in the United States, Yukos in Russia, and Livedoor in Japan#demonstrate challenges to legal regulation of business practices in capitalist economies. Setting forth a new analytic framework for understanding these problems, Law and Capitalism examines ...

Constitutional conscience

the moral dimension of judicial decision

While many recent observers have accused American judges - especially Supreme Court justices - of being too driven by politics and ideology, others have argued that judges are justified in using their positions to advance personal views. Advocating a different approach - one that eschews ideology but still ...

Financial markets volatility and performance in emerging markets

Eds. Sebastian Edwards, Márcio G.P. Garcia. Capital mobility is a double-edged sword for emerging economies, as governments must weigh the benefits of investment against the potential economic costs and political consequences of currency crises, devaluations, and instability. "Financial Markets Volatility and Performance in Emerging ...

Castles, battles and bombs

how economics explains military history

From the walls of Troy to the sands of Iraq, humans have devoted staggering resources to the art and science of war. Yet while military history has long studied the economics of conflict, until now there have been few attempts to apply the principles of ...

Genres of the credit economy

mediating value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-century britain

How did banking, borrowing, investing, and even losing money - in other words, participating in the modern financial system - come to seem like routine activities of everyday life? "Genres of the Credit Economy" addresses this question by examining the history of financial instruments and representations of ...

Tulipmania

money, honor, and knowledge in the dutch golden age

In the 1630s, the Netherlands was gripped by tulipmania: a speculative fever unprecedented in scale and, as popular history would have it, folly. We all know the outline of the story - how otherwise sensible merchants, nobles, and artisans spent all they had (and much that ...

The bourgeois virtues

ethics for an age of commerce

For a century and a half the artists and intellectuals of Europe have scorned the bourgeoisie. And for a millennium and a half the philosophers and theologians of Europe have scorned the marketplace. The bourgeois life, capitalism, Mencken's "booboisie," and David Brooks' "bobos" all ...

Mapping paradise

a history of heaven on earth

Throughout history, humans have searched for paradise. When early Christians adopted the "Hebrew Bible", and with it the story of "Genesis", the "Garden of Eden" became an idyllic habitat for all mankind. Medieval Christians believed paradise was a place on earth, different from the world ...

The pure thoery of capital

"The Pure Theory of Capital", F. A. Hayek's long- overlooked, little-understood volume, was his most detailed work in economic theory. Originally published in 1941 when fashionable economic thought had shifted to John Maynard Keynes, Hayek's manifesto of capital theory is available again for ...

Dark hope

working for peace in Israel and Palestine

For decades, we've been shocked by images of violent clashes between Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. But for all their power, those images leave us at a loss: from our vantage at home, it's hard for us to imagine ...

Reflections on the just

At the time of his death in 2005, French philosopher Paul Ricoeur was regarded as one of the great thinkers of his generation. In more than half a century of writing about the essential questions of human life, Ricoeur's thought encompassed a vast range ...

The legal analyst

a toolkit thinking about the Law

There are two kinds of knowledge law school teaches: legal rules on the one hand and tools for thinking about legal problems on the other. Although the tools are far more interesting and useful than the rules, they tend to be neglected in favor of ...

The medical malpractice myth

American health care is in crisis because of exploding medical malpractice litigation. Insurance premiums for doctors and malpractice lawsuits are skyrocketing, rendering doctors both afraid and unable to afford to practice medicine. Undeserving victims sue at the drop of a hat, egged on by greedy ...

The Microsoft case

antitrust, high technology, and consumer welfare

Microsoft was the defining antitrust case of our era, and will be the focus of scholarly discussion about the proper role of antitrust for years to come. This book tells the story of the litigation and shows how law, ideology, evidence, and economic theory influenced ...

Out of the pits

traders and technology from Chicago to London

From New York to Singapore, from Chicago to London, the trading floors of the world's financial markets are icons of global capitalism. Images of them are used on the news all the time--traders burying their heads in their hands when the market is down ...

Financial founding fathers

the men who made America rich

When you think of the founding fathers, you think of men like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin - exceptional minds and matchless statesmen who led the colonies to a seemingly impossible victory over the British and established the constitutional and legal framework for our ...

American taxation, american slavery

At the dawn of the nineteenth century, the war for independence may have been long over, but the true conclusion to the American Revolution was still being written. The choices in the 1800 election could not have been starker: Federalist John Adams prized the need ...

The economics of attention

style and substance in the age of information

If economics is about the allocation of resources, then what is the most precious resource in our new information economy? Certainly not information, for we are drowning in it. No, what we are short of is the attention to make sense of that information. With ...