Chicago's Best Ideas (video)

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. The question of how to structure and package the residential experience is a deeply interesting and difficult one. How physically large or small should residential holdings be? How densely should they be clustered? Should spaces for working, recreating, cooking, and bathing be contained within the private residential unit, shared with other households, or procured a la carte? How permanent should the connection be between a household and a living space? How much control should households have over the environment surrounding the dwelling unit? Answers to these and many other queries differ both within and between societies. A law and economics perspective that emphasizes problems of scale illuminates the ways in which law intersects with private decisionmaking to deliver housing, and can inform the task of configuring residential property optimally.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. Mary Anne Case, professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School, puts her work on reproductive technologies and on analogies in the governing of marriage and business corporations in an explicitly Coasian context. She analyzes the long history and recent past to make predictions about the future of families, sex, and society.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. Martha Nussbaum, professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago's Philosophy Department, Law School, and Divinity School, discusses her ideas in teaching a type of patriotism in schools that is rooted in good values, protective of conscience, and friendly to critical thinking and dissent. She supports her argument from the history of the U.S. and India and from figures such as Lincoln, King, Gandhi, and Nehru.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. Omri Ben-Shahar, Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School and Kearney Director of the University of Chicago Institute for Law and Economics, discusses the place of "No Contract" assurances in the broader context of consumer protection and his ongoing work on the failings and promises of consumer law.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. Anup Malani, professor at the University of Chicago Law School, describes a number of surprising contract provisions that can be used to tackle the holdup problem, where a buyer and seller agree on a price for a future date, but the seller later demands a higher price. He also discusses how contract law can affect the scope and ownership of firms.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. Aziz Huq, assistant professor of law at the University of Chicago Law School, discusses what forum should be employed to adjudicate the status of terrorist suspects. Recent clashes between Congress and the President have yielded highly controversial provisions in a recent National Defense Authorization Act that might force such adjudications into a military forum. The problem of forum choice is typically framed as a simple matter of law, but this assumes doctrinal rules can easily sort suspects between civilian and military venues.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. Geoffrey Stone, professor at the University of Chicago Law School, discusses how the Supreme Court confirmation process has changed over the years and whether members of the Senate are more prone to oppose nominees today. Stone examines the process by which the Senate does—or does not—confirm a President's nominees to the Supreme Court.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. Anu Bradford, assistant professor at the University of Chicago, discusses "the Brussels Effect," which highlights an underestimated aspect of European power the discussion on globalization and power politics overlooks: Europe's unilateral power to regulate global commerce.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. Ponzi schemes come in many sizes. The colossal fraud engineered by Bernard Madoff is an occasion to rethink the legal rules and remedies associated with such episodes. But then there are smaller Ponzi-like schemes, such as fraud in law school admissions, and the question of whether law does or should play any role. At the other extreme are nation-size Ponzi schemes, such as our recent mortgage-and-foreclosure crisis and, similarly perhaps, long-range deficit spending in many countries, such that one generation defrauds another. In this CBI, Professor Saul Levmore asks why law might be much better at one of these levels than at the others. Concrete problems can help us understand law's comfort zone, or its proper domain.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. It is widely believed today that the free market is the best mechanism ever invented to efficiently allocate resources in society. Just as fundamental is the belief that government has a legitimate and competent role in policing and punishing. The result, in this country, has been an incendiary combination of laissez faire and mass incarceration. Today, the United States incarcerates over one percent of its adult population, the highest number and rate in the world. In this CBI, Professor Harcourt will trace the birth of the idea of natural orderliness in economic thought and its gradual evolution into today's myth of the free market, and explore how it could possibly have produced the largest government-run penal sphere on the globe.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. Patents encourage innovation by granting inventors exclusive rights to sell their inventions. The resulting monopoly profits are a reward for innovation. It is commonly thought, however, that these monopoly profits price some consumers of inventions out of the market. This loss of consumption is an "efficiency" cost of patents. Thus, according to the conventional wisdom an optimal patent regime should balance the value of innovation to those who can purchase it against the efficiency cost of lost consumption to those who cannot purchase it. In our CBI talk, we question whether patents result in foregone consumption and reject the conventional tradeoff that drives optimal patent policy. We argue that there exist contractual mechanisms, such as health insurance and patent pools, that mitigate or stop consumers from being priced out of the market for innovations. Instead, the main concern with patents is that it transfers wealth from consumer s to inventors.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. The spectacular rise and fall of the housing market over the past decade has shaken the foundations of virtually every aspect of our economy. In this CBI, Dean Schill will briefly survey the causes and consequences of the "mortgage meltdown." With the current crisis as a backdrop, he will focus on two or three topics related to his research interests which include (1) whether legal and policy incentives for home ownership are desirable, (2) whether the structure of mortgage law makes sense and (3) the advantages and disadvantages of proposals for resolving the current mortgage crisis. Michael Schill is Dean and Harry N. Wyatt Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. Institutional investors, because of their relatively larger ownership stakes, have more incentive than retail investors to monitor the companies in which they invest, particularly if it is costly to exit. Since owning shares in a well-governed firm reduces an investor's own monitoring costs and also may provide higher liquidity and lower associated trading costs, such investments are attractive to institutional investors. In a recent study, Visiting Professor Alicia Davis finds that higher governance quality, as defined by a metric that heavily weights internal governance factors (e.g., board composition), is associated with higher proportions of institutional trading and ownership. This finding is consistent with the presence of a corporate governance clientele effect and the reasonable conjecture that institutions have more reason to prefer well-governed companies than retail investors. However, Davis also finds that higher governance quality, as defined by a metric focused on external governance (i.e., exposure to the market for corporate control), is associated with higher proportions of trading and ownership by individuals. It is unlikely that retail investors have a stronger aversion to firms with antitakeover protections in place than institutions, so this result is unlikely due to the presence of a corporate governance clientele effect. One possible explanation lies beyond investor governance preferences. Retail investors, in general, are more loyal to management than their institutional counterparts. This often makes individual investors key players in close votes accompanying battles for corporate control and firms with large retail shareholder bases, on the margin, less attractive takeover targets. Therefore, the presence of retail investors may function as a partial substitute for antitakeover defenses. The fact that the study's overall findings hold only for firms that pay dividends--and the ones therefore more likely to engender retail investor loyalty--lends support to this view.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. Reasonably secure property rights are widely understood as important for economic growth, though it is also understood that interest groups and politicians can benefit from particular configurations of rights. What might change in a world where intellectual property dominates? How should we expect innovators to be motivated in the next century? The history of the evolution of property rights, and of the roles played by courts and legislatures in defining these rights, offers clues about our legal and technological future.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. The recent health care bill represents what is likely to turn out to be the most comprehensive health care reform ever, Medicare included. Yet many of its provisions were included in the last minute without serious discussion or debate. And those provisions that have been in all versions of the bill since the outset are likely to have profound, if unintended consequences. In this talk, Professor Epstein will explain why he thinks that the combined weight of these many programs is likely to produce a major implosion in health care services in both the short and the long run.He will also discuss the opportunities lost on health care reform, all of which involved some program of market liberalization with respect to such key matters as interstate competition for insurance, government mandates, and medical licensing and malpractice.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. In 1972-73, Geoffrey Stone served as a law clerk to Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. The 1972 Term was an eventful one for the Supreme Court, resulting in landmark decisions in such areas as obscenity, equal protection, abortion, and criminal procedure. Moreover, the 1972 Term marked a critical transition from the "liberal" era of the Warren Court to a new era, which has now lasted for almost forty years, in which the Court has been dominated by increasingly "conservative" justices. Professor Stone will discuss his experiences and insights during the Court's 1972 Term.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. Art V of the Constitution makes the formal process of constitutional amendment extremely difficult - in fact far too difficult according to most constitutional scholars. But does it matter? And if so, what can we do about it?Amending Art V seems near impossible…and the idea, advanced by some Yale law professors, that we should be free to amend the Constitution via a national referendum seems equally implausible (not to mention undesirable). Professor Dixon therefore proposes a new solution to the problem: that the Supreme Court should treat failed amendments supported by a Congressional majority as "partial" constitutional amendments.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. The law has always treated children differently, and these differences in treatment are largely attributed to differences in capacity.Children lack the decision making ability and the self-control of adults, the cases and commentary explains, and therefore should be given less control over their own lives, and blamed less severely for their offenses.For much of the 20th century, these developmental arguments were grounded in life experience and conventional wisdom.More recently, however, developmental psychologists and legal scholars have joined forces to argue for legal rights and responsibilities that more accurately and consistently reflect psychological (and, most recently, neuroscientific) research about how children change as they grow up.This heavy reliance on developmental science was embraced by the Supreme Court in Roper v. Simmons, the 2005 case ruling that the Constitution prohibited the imposition of the death penalty for offenses committed by juveniles.While the Roper analysis can be applauded for its careful attention to social scientists' increasingly sophisticated understanding of children's capacities, it also demonstrates certain risks that come with this inter-disciplinary approach.In her talk, Buss will consider these risks, and suggest an approach to the formulation of children's rights that rests less on our current understanding of children's capacities and more on the role we want the law to play in shaping how children grow up.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. Legal scholars praise "incrementalism" and "minimalism" in law, which is to say the idea that law should progress in small steps and lawmakers should intervene less rather than more. But the acclaim for these approaches ignores the role of interest groups in our legal system. There are many issues where there is good reason to think that legislating step-by-step is a recipe for getting to the wrong result.But can we distinguish cases where the "slippery slope" is a well-deserved slur from those where law is simply moving incrementally in order to experiment or placate anxieties and get things right? As we will see, compensation policies and even moratoria on certain kinds of regulation might be an antidote to an unrecognized problem with interest groups.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. What if consumer contracts were legally enforceable only against the consumers, but not against the business? The idea of "one-way contracts," to which consumers are bound but the businesses are not, is offered as a basis to explore alternative, non-legal consumer protections. Despite weakening legal protections of consumers, the one-way contracts regime has the potential to improve consumers' well being. In fact, in many area consumer contracts are already disguised "one-way contracts." The conclusion is that the focus among consumer protection advocates on enhancing access to, and the scope of, legal remedies may be misguided. Omri Ben-Shahar is Frank and Bernice J. Greenberg Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. Law often allocates risk, as through tort doctrines. Should people be able to undo or "reverse" such risk allocations by, for example, selling their rights to any claims that may later develop? Scholars have interestingly examined this question, as well as many other innovative ideas for rearranging risk outside of traditional insurance markets. This talk focuses attention on some related but underexplored questions surrounding risk reversibility itself—such as the optimal amount of stickiness in society's default risk allocations, the effects of heterogeneity in risk arrangements, and the implications (cognitive and otherwise) of starting from one risk baseline rather than another. Lee Fennell is Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School. This talk was recorded October 22, 2008, as part of the Chicago's Best Ideas series. Chicago’s Best Ideas, a lecture series begun in honor of the University of Chicago Law School’s Centennial, highlights the intellectual innovations of the School’s distinguished faculty.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. This panel was recorded on October 15, 2008, and sponsored by the Law School Democrats and the Law School Republicans.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. Preventing global warming requires lowering carbon production, and China produces a high level of carbon emissions. China gains a significant advantage to its economic growth from its continued use of fossil fuels, but the harms from global warming will fall disproportionately on other countries. Thus, some writers advocate giving side payments to China as part of an international agreement to reduce global warming. Their analysis treats China as a "black box"; the input is money, the output is reduced carbon emissions. But when we open the box, the situation is not so simple. The box really has two Chinas inside.In this edition of Chicago's Best Ideas on January 14, Professors Daniel Abebe and Jonathan Masur presented "The Two Chinas and the Problem of Global Warming," based on their paper "Climate Change and Internal Heterogeneity." The first China is Eastern China. Eastern China is prosperous, having experienced a blistering growth rate around 10 percent annually over the past couple decades. Most of China's major cities dot the Eastern coast, and the cities are hubs for finance and manufacturing. The second China is Western China. Western China resembles a developing country and is still mostly agrarian. Per capita GDP is half what it is in the East (9,967 yuan versus 19,813 yuan). The interplay between the two gives the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) incentives to not accept a climate-change treaty.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. The Enlightenment took us from a world of Empire to an Age of Reason and equality in the public sphere. But it left the private spheres of culture and religion in the Dark Ages of imposition and unreason. In the Enlightenment worldview, freedom in the public sphere is freedom itself. Human rights came to be defined as “rights guaranteed in the secular political world.” But today on the frontlines of women’s movements in the Muslim world we hear challenges to this view of freedom and equality. Significantly, Muslim women’s challenges do not reject Enlightenment values but seek to take them further. No longer content to accept freedom in the public sphere and tyranny in the private, individuals in the modern world increasingly demand change within their religious communities in order to bring their faith in line with democratic norms and practices. In this talk Professor Sunder tells of a rising, transnational grassroots movement led by Muslim women to read the Qur’an for themselves, thus taking the traditional Enlightenment values of critique and participation the next mile, to religion itself. Madhavi Sunder is Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School. This talk was recorded May 7, 2009, as part of the Chicago's Best Ideas series. Chicago’s Best Ideas, a lecture series begun in honor of the University of Chicago Law School’s Centennial, highlights the intellectual innovations of the School’s distinguished faculty.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. What work do the categories "the free market" and "regulation" do for us? Why do we incarcerate one out of every one hundred adults? These seemingly unrelated questions, it turns out, are deeply interconnected. The categories of free and regulated markets emerged as an effort to make sense of irreducibly individual phenomena—unique forms of social organization. In the process, the categories helped shape the dominant belief that the economic realm is characterized by natural order, and that the only legitimate sphere of government intervention is policing and punishment. The consequences have been devastating: first, in distorting and expanding the penal sphere beyond our worst possible dreams, and, second, in naturalizing and masking the regulatory mechanisms inherent to all markets that massively redistribute wealth. In this CBI, Professor Harcourt challenges these categories and asks us to imagine a world where the terms "free" and "regulated" markets no longer exist.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. In the absence of pre-cognitive superbeings and Tom Cruise, how are police and policy makers supposed to allocate scarce crime-fighting resources? There is a vibrant academic literature on predicting crime, with models of various types offered as the best way of estimating future crime rates. Many of these involve mapping software, which plots the past in the hopes of extrapolating to the future. Police use some of these techniques, but most are very crude, using things like weather or the location of liquor stores as "hot spots" to estimate crime rates. Police also use experience and gut instinct. All of the various methods, whether formal models or inside the head of the commissioner of police, are deployed in haphazard and isolated ways. In this lecture, recorded May 13, 2008 as part of the Chicago's Best Ideas lecture Assistant Professor of Law M. Todd Henderson presents an alternative.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. It has become commonplace in American political discourse for Christian evangelicals to assert that the United States was founded as a "Christian nation" and that in recent decades secularists have gained control and distorted our nation's founding traditions and values. In this lecture, Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor Geoffrey Stone examines the beliefs of the Framers on this question. What did they think about Christianity, about the role of Christianity in the American nation, and about the relationship between religion generally and self-governance? The answers to these questions are important not only to constitutional interpretation, but even more fundamentally to an understanding of who we are – and who we are supposed to be – as a nation.This talk was recorded April 21, 2008 as part of the Chicago's Best Ideas lecture series.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. A common perception is that since the Supreme Court frequently divides 5-4, it is balanced between conservatives and liberals. The vote breakdown, however, does not tell us anything about the Court's ideological breakdown. The Supreme Court has discretionary jurisdiction, and any group of nine justices will tend to choose cases that divide them because those cases are the ones that are the most legally uncertain.On April 14, 2009, Professor Geoffrey Stone presented a talk in the Chicago's Best Ideas lecture series entitled "Obama's Supreme Court." He discussed what he thinks the makeup of the current Court really is. (Throwing the word "Obama" in the title is a good way to get people in the door.) In a series of entries on Huffington Post, he describes what follows in more depth.First, Professor Stone served up some facts about the current Court. Seven of the nine sitting Justices were appointed by Republicans, as were twelve of the last fourteen appointees. The so-called "swing" vote on the Court has shifted from Justice Stewart to Powell to O'Connor to Kennedy, each of whom is widely considered more conservative than the last. According to an article by Professor Landes and Judge Posner, four of the current Justices are more conservative than any Justice since 1937 except Rehnquist. Finally, there are not any "full-throated" liberals like Justice Marshall or Brennan on the Court.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. On April 9, Mary Anne Case, Arnold I. Shure Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School, gave a Chicago's Best Ideas talk entitled "Feminist Fundamentalism."At a time when so many different religious fundamentalisms are coming to the fore and demanding legal recognition, in this talk Prof. Case seeks to vindicate feminist fundamentalism, defined as an uncompromising commitment to the equality of the sexes as intense and at least as worthy of respect as, for example, a religiously or culturally based commitment to female subordination or fixed sex roles.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. Why have we taken so few precautions in the face of threatening climate change? In a February Chicago's Best Ideas talk entitled "Climate Change and the Battle of the Generations" Dean Saul Levmore focused on the difficulty of dealing with a long-off threat in our political system.The question, he says, is how voters and their politicians can be encouraged to care about problems that can be deferred for consideration by a different electorate or set of taxpayers – but at much higher cost. We know that we should solve most long term problems sooner rather than later, but there are pressures that put off painful solutions. Dean Levmore draws on what we know about “median voters” and median citizens in order to hazard guesses about the coming battle among generations. In this “battle,” young voters will grow increasingly concerned about what is likely to occur as they age – but these voters do not yet have sufficient political power. In turn, arrangements among countries will be seen to depend in part on the disparate age profiles of countries. The topic, in other words, is global warming and the public choice problem of intergenerational bargaining.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. Clinical Professor of Law Mark Heyrman delivered this lengthily titled CBI on November 6, 2007. His description of the talk is below:"In the 1970's most states tightened their standards for involuntary commitment. During the past fifteen years the movement has been in the opposite direction--relaxing those standards. This talk will apply ideas developed by former Law School Dean Norval Morris to explore the effects (if any) these changes have had and will have on the number of persons involuntarily confined in psychiatric hospitals and why other institutional arrangements are substantially more important in explaining past and future fluctuations in the number of such commitments."

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. A perception exists that little communication occurs between the ivory tower of legal academia and the trenches of legal practice. The Chicago's Best Ideas talk on Monday, February 2 tried to bridge this gap by "making philosophy confront reality," according to Professor Martha Nussbaum, the first speaker. Nussbaum started building the bridge on the philosophical side, extending her remarks into the legal implementation of her philosophy, and Judge Diane Wood of the Seventh Circuit started on the legal side, extending into the hopes for applying a coherent philosophy to decisionmaking.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. As you may already know, Professor Richard Epstein is not President Obama's biggest fan. Obama favors some economic regulations that Epstein does not. In his Chicago's Best Ideas talk on Tuesday, January 27, Professor Epstein spoke about three proposed laws in the area of labor relations: the Employee Free Choice Act, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, and the Paycheck Fairness Act. Epstein spent most of his time on the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), so my attention will focus on that law. (Epstein has a column about the Lilly Ledbetter Act on Forbes.com.) The EFCA is an amendment to the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA).

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. If you've ever wondered what Arnold I. Shure Professor of Law Mary Anne Case and former Chicago professor (and current Supreme Court Justice) Antonin Scalia might actually agree on, have we got a treat for you. The first Chicago's Best Ideas talk of the year, held on October 1, featured Professor Case discussing "Why Evangelical Protestants are Right When They Say that State Recognition of Same-Sex Marriages Threatens Their Marriages and What the Law Should Do About It."