Gray’s Progress: From Liberalisms to Enlightenment’s Wake
In this article, Jeremy Shearmur discusses John Gray’s life and work.
The Death and Life of a Reluctant Urban Icon. Review Essay of Jane Jacobs: Urban Visionary by ALice Sparberg Alexiou
In this article, Pierre Desrochers reviews Alice Sparberg Alexiou’s Jane Jacobs: Urban Visionary.
Volume 21, Number 3 (2007)
Medieval Schools: From Roman Britain to Renaissance England by Nicholas Orme
In this article, Thomas E. Woods, Jr. reviews Nicholas Orme’s Medieval Schools: From Roman Britain to Renaissance England.
Volume 21, Number 3 (2007)
The Costs of Public Income Redistribution and Private Charity
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.
Democracy in America and the Possibilities for Law without the State
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)
The Limits of Jacksonian Liberalism: Individualism, Dissent, and the Gospel of Andrew According to Lysander Spooner
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.
The Kelo Decision and the Fourteenth Amendment
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.
Eminent Domain and Economic Development: The Mill Acts and the Origins of Laissez-Faire Constitutionalism
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)
Changing the Guard: Private Prisons and the Control of Crime, Alexander Tabarrok, ed.
In this article, Daniel J. D’Amico reviews Changing the Guard: Private Prisons and the Control of Crime which was edited by Alexander Tabarrok.
Volume 21, Number 2 (2007)
The Law of the Somalis: A Stable Foundation for Economic Development in the Horn of Africa by Michael van Notten; Spencer Heath MacCallum, ed.
In this article, Nortbert Lennartz reviews Michael van Notten’s The Law of the Somalis: A Stable Foundation for Economic Development in the Horn of Africa.
