Infanticide or Murder? Canada’s shifting answer
What is the proper legal response to a mother killing her infant child? In Desperate Measures: Rationalizing the Crime of Infanticide, Canadian law professor Isabel Grant examines the crime of infanticide and issues of statutory interpretation that are currently before the Canadian courts. “The article examines the recent trend towards charging women who kill their […]
Are women legislators more liberal on abortion?
The Culture Wars Meet State Politics: Gender, Representation and Abortion Policy provides an interesting analysis of the fact that the number of women in a state legislature increases the likelihood that a state will have more liberal abortion policies. The authors find a difference in the manner in which women candidates are recruited in the […]
Pain as Fact and Heuristic
If you are like me, you aren’t sure what “heuristic” means. According to multiple sources, it is an experience-based technique for problem solving. In her new article,Pain as Fact and Heuristic: How Pain Neuroimaging Illuminates Moral Dimensions of Law, Professor Amanda C. Pustilnik argues against a simple understanding of physical pain as a justification for […]
Autonomy, Restraint and the Common Good
The views of Joseph Raz, Ronald Dworkin, John Finnis, and Robert George on the value and limits of personal autonomy are examined in a new article by Adam McLeod, The Mystery of Life in the Laboratory of Democracy: Personal Autonomy in State Law. “The article then examines several different areas of state law where one […]
How the Court Made Political Compromise Impossible
Randy Beck has just posted a new piece entitled Fueling Controversy on SSRN. He responds to a recent Yale Law Journal article by Linda Greenhouse and Reva Siegel, Before (and After) Roe v. Wade: New Questions about Backlash, in which they question the received wisdom that the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade generated […]