Susan Moller Okin, in her 1989 book Justice, Gender, and the Family, puts forth an objection to Nozick’s entitlement theory. In short, Nozick’s entitlement theory states that unowned material resources can be legitimately acquired by labor in a certain sense. Okin argues that an advocate of Nozick’s entitlement theory must, on pain of contradiction, accept that a mother owns her offspring by virtue of being the creator, at least until the offspring has developed certain properties and capabilities.

Volume 21, Number 3 (2007)

“Intellectuals . . . seek neither to understand the world nor to change it, but to denounce it,” so wrote Raymond Aron (1983, p. 158) in a damning critique of those who were very much his intellectual kindred. Such a sentiment may at first seem surprising since Aron was, after all, a Marxist scholar and lifelong socialist who felt comfortable with the social welfare states prevalent in postwar Europe— welfare states that his fellow intellectuals strongly supported.

In this article, Jeremy Shearmur discusses John Gray’s life and work.

Volume 21, Number 3 (2007)

In this article, Pierre Desrochers reviews Alice Sparberg Alexiou’s Jane Jacobs: Urban Visionary.

Volume 21, Number 3 (2007)

In this article, Thomas E. Woods, Jr. reviews Nicholas Orme’s Medieval Schools: From Roman Britain to Renaissance England.

Volume 21, Number 3 (2007)

Most academic participants in the ongoing debate over income redistribution are aware that it is not possible, ever, for government to tax one set of persons and redistribute the same amount to a set of subsidy recipients. Some fraction of each dollar taxed will always be absorbed in wages and salaries of the administrative bureaucracy, costs of purchasing, powering, maintaining and replacing equipment, buildings, etc., and other overhead costs. Only the remainder will actually be received by the target population in the form of cash or in kind payments.

Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America raises a particularly provocative series of issues which challenge some of the basic assumptions of law and economics scholarship on dispute settlement.

Volume 21, Number 2 (2007)

In 1844 Massachusetts resident Lysander Spooner (1808–1887) advertised in the public press the establishment of the American Letter Mail Company. That agency promised to carry letters from New York to Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Boston at a uniform rate of 5 cents (significantly less than the 12 ½ cents the federal postal service required for letters traveling from Boston to New York and 25 cents to Washington, D.C.); in so doing, it intentionally challenged the legitimacy of the federal postal monopoly. To be sure, Spooner intended to realize a profit from that venture.

In the Kelo decision, the city of New London, Connecticut, exercised the power of eminent domain to seize the private property of Susette Kelo and eight other petitioners who owned a total of fifteen properties in the historic Fort Trumbull area of the city.

In Kelo v. City of New London (2005), the United States Supreme Court upheld the use of the eminent domain power to take property from homeowners for the purpose of economic development. Under the Fifth Amendment, wrote Justice John Paul Stevens for the majority, eminent domain may be used only for a public purpose. But “public purpose” is a broad concept.

Volume 21, Number 2 (2007)