Private Lawdrafting, Intellectual Property, and Public Laws
Public lawmakers have inadequate and misaligned incentives to engage in legal innovation. Private lawmaking is offered as a potential solution to this problem. However, private lawmaking faces a dilemma: In order to be effective, the cost-reducing standard forms produced by private lawdrafters need to be publicly enacted. However, enactment as law eliminates the intellectual property rights that are essential to properly motivate the private lawdrafters to produce such forms. As a result, private lawdrafters will have inadequate and misaligned incentives to engage in legal innovation that would provide widespread benefits. Absent some mechanism to allow the private lawdrafter a way to appropriate the gains from his investment in cost reducing legal innovation, the promise of private lawmaking may be minimal.
Lawyers as Lawmakers: A Theory of Lawyer Licensing
Existing explanations of lawyer licensing focusing on the need to ensure lawyer quality are unconvincing. A license to practice is a dubious signal of quality, the licensing requirement restricts the availability of legal services, and state licensing is subject to political capture by lawyers. These criticisms of lawyer licensing laws are increasingly important as the current system is threatened by changes in the legal services market and increased federal regulation of the legal profession. It is, therefore, time to reexamine the theory underlying the state licensing system. This Article provides an alternative rationale for state licensing requirements. Lawyer licensing encourages lawyers to participate in lawmaking by capitalizing the benefits of their law-improvement efforts in the value of the law license. In other words, the license gives lawyers a kind of property right in state law. State competition gives lawyers an incentive to favor welfaremaximizing state laws that make the state attractive as a location for businesses and as a forum for litigation. This theory has important implications for both federalism and the scope and nature of lawyer licensing requirements. * Richard W. and Marie L. Corman Professor of Law, University of Illinois College of Law. I owe a particular debt to Bruce Kobayashi. Thanks for comments by Tom Ginsburg, Klaus Heine, Bruce Johnsen, Dean Lueck, Geoffrey Miller, Erin O'Hara, Richard Painter, Eric Rasmussen, Roberta Romano and participants at workshops at the American Law & Economics Association Annual Meeting, George Mason University Law School, University of Illinois College of Law and Kelley School of Business, Indiana University. Valuable research assistance was provided by Sheila Hathi and Brett Pyrdek. 1 Ribstein: Ribstein: Lawyers as Lawmakers: A Theory of Lawyer Licensing Published by University of Missouri School of Law Scholarship Repository, 2004
Deviant Women: Female Crime and Criminology in Revolutionary Russia, 1880-1930
This title examines the position of women in early Soviet society through the lens of deviance. After seizing power in 1917, the Bolsheviks initiated reforms aimed at abolishing the old way of life in Russia. A new Family Code liberalized marriage procedures, promoted communal living arrangements, and abolished the concept of illegitimacy. Other decrees legalized abortion, deregulated prostitution, and emancipated women. The Bolsheviks' Marxist ideology that guided these reforms was also behind the assertion that crime, an artifact of bourgeois capitalist exploitation, would disappear under socialism. As crime persisted, Soviet criminologists - a cohort of jurists, doctors, sociologists, anthropologists, psychiatrists, statisticians, and forensic experts - were charged with examining its causes and motives to determine the most effective methods to eliminate it. The problem of female crime occupied a prominent position in criminologists' studies. In explaining 'traditional' female crimes of the domestic sphere - infanticide, spouse murder, and petty theft, among others - criminologists pointed to the offenders' backwardness and ignorance, material circumstances, and even biology. Kowalsky examines the position of women in early Soviet society through the lens of deviance, exploring how Soviet criminologists understood female crime and how their attitudes helped shape the development of Soviet social and behavioral norms. "Deviant Women" looks at the emergence of criminology in early Soviet Russia, tracing the development of principles and theories - in particular of female deviance - and highlighting the ways in which criminologists were able to conduct innovative social science research under the constraints of Bolshevik ideology. Kowalsky then focuses on the analyses of female crime and criminologists' attitudes concerning sexuality, geography, and class. Concluding with a close study of infanticide, the most 'typical' crime committed by women, Kowalsky discusses the social attitudes that were revealed in the professional discussion of this crime. Historians of modern Russia and the USSR, scholars of gender studies, and those studying criminology will be fascinated by this original study.