Copyright (c) 2008 University of Illinois College of Law All rights reserved. http://law.bepress.com/uiuclwps Recent documents in University of Illinois Legal Working Paper Series en-us Wed, 20 Aug 2008 05:09:50 PDT 3600 http://law.bepress.com/uiuclwps/papers/art92 http://law.bepress.com/uiuclwps/papers/art92 Mon, 18 Aug 2008 13:22:09 PDT Despite regular acknowledgement of the interconnectedness of global ecosystems, government policies at the national level focuses on environmental problems within their borders. As a result, the level of public and private resources expended on environmental protection in rich and poor countries is dramatically different on both a per capita and an absolute basis. While this outcome is readily explained by the politics of environmental issues, in which voters reward governments for domestic expenditures but are skeptical of expenditures outside the jurisdiction, these differences mean that the total amount of environmental quality purchased across nations is lower than it could be. It means that some nations are purchasing small, expensive increments in environmental quality while large, low-cost increments in other jurisdictions are not purchased. By applying the principles of marginal analysis from economics, this article demonstrates that this produces both less total environmental quality and treats residents of rich and poor countries different in a morally unacceptable way. The authors propose that governments provide more transparent cost and benefit information to allow public discussion of such differential treatment and to encourage environmental gains from wherever most efficiently achievable Andrew P. Morriss Environmental Law International Law Law and Economics http://law.bepress.com/uiuclwps/papers/art91 http://law.bepress.com/uiuclwps/papers/art91 Mon, 18 Aug 2008 12:56:06 PDT Spiritualism was one of the most salient cultural phenomena of late-nineteenth-century American life. The belief of considerable numbers of respectable citizens that they could communicate with the dead via an entranced medium called into question both popular and scientific conceptions of rationality, volition, and freedom. In turn, these changing ideas about the mind challenged American law's commitment to its belief in free and reasonable legal actors. This Article, the first to consider Spiritualism's implications for American law, examines the legal reaction to the anxieties Spiritualism generated for the Age of Contract. Principally, it looks at the judicial response to cases of Spiritualists' wills that were challenged on the grounds of insanity and undue influence. In these cases, concerns about the mind forced their way through the curtain of formalist objectivity at the heart of contractarian jurisprudence. In dealing with such concerns, I argue, American judges adopted a realist, pragmatic strategy of promoting polyphonic discussion, protecting individual belief, and preserving democratic decision-making. Approaching the subject from the perspective of cultural legal history, I suggest that popular culture, science, and the law were mutually constitutive discourses in which nineteenth-century Americans enacted their anxieties about the mind, the will, and the family. Finally, I propose that a contextualized understanding of these nineteenth-century debates can suggest much about current legal concerns regarding behavioral psychology and cognitive neuroscience. Christopher Buccafusco Contracts Jurisprudence Law and Society Legal History Medical Jurisprudence Psychology and Psychiatry Science and Technology