Ảnh đẹp ngày 05 tháng 01 năm 2011
Bức ảnh này làm ta có cảm giác thật ấm áp trong những ngày lạnh lẽo và u ám như hôm nay. Thêm nữa, nó cũng làm ta nhớ về những người thân của ta mà đã đi xa mãi mãi, những người mà, vào một ngày, tháng, năm cụ thể nào đó trong quá khứ, cũng bên ta như thế này…
The Economic Analysis of Law – An Introduction
Economic analysis of law applies the tools of microeconomic theory to the analysis of legal rules and institutions. Ronald Coase [1961] and Guido Calabresi [1961] are generally identified as the seminal articles but Commons [1924] and Hale [1952] among others had brought economic thinking to the study of law in the 1910s and 1920s. Moreover, as I will elaborate below, economic analysis of law derives from several different intellectual traditions in economics.
Richard Posner [1973] brought economic analysis of law to the attention of the general legal academy; by the late 1970s, his work had provoked a vigorous controversy within the legal academy. That controversy has usually defined the debate around the philosophical foundations of economic analysis of law. Posner made two claims: (I) Common law legal rules are, in fact, efficient; and (II) Legal rules ought to be efficient. In both claims, “efficient” means maximization of the social willingness-to-pay. In the course of the controversy, two other claims were articulated in Kornhauser [1984, 1985]: (III) Legal processes select for efficient rules; and (IV) individuals respond to legal rules economically. (In this third claim, “efficient” means “Pareto efficient.”) Kornhauser identified this last, behavioral claim as central to the enterprise. A fifth claim is also implicit in the literature: (V) on the best interpretation of law, common law doctrines promote efficiency.[1] Notice that (V) differs from (I) in important respects. According to (V), an economic interpretation fits a doctrine not because, as asserted in (I), the legal rules in fact induce efficient behavior but because the rule would induce efficient behavior within the view of the world that seems to underlie the judicial decisions. (I) is an empirical claim that requires the analyst to determine whether the actual behavior induced by legal rules is efficient; it requires knowledge of how individuals do, in fact, behave and of which behavior in the real world would, in fact, be efficient. (V) requires only knowledge of the content of judicial opinions; the analyst interprets these opinions to extract an economic model that underlies the decision. (V) might be true even though legal rules induced inefficient behavior in the real world because the announced legal rule might be efficient within the implicit model used by judges.
These five claims do not correspond directly to traditional questions in the philosophy of law. The evaluative claim (II) that legal rules ought to be efficient would, if directed to judges, qualify as a theory of adjudication, one of the central concerns of anglo-american philosophy of law. Central philosophic questions concerning the concept of law, of its normativity, and the obligation to obey the law, however, are not directly addressed. The behavioral claim as well as the evolutionary claim (III) and the positive claim (II), by contrast, concern empirical issues that philosophers of law generally neglect. Nevertheless, the controversy within the legal academy has generally regarded economic analysis of law as providing a comprehensive theory of law that challenges traditional approaches to law. Indeed, an explanation of the vehemence of the controversy should identify differences in fundamental views concerning law.
- 1. Two Strands of Thought within Economic Analysis of Law
- 2. The Concept of Law
- 3. The Obligation to Obey the Law
- 4. Theories of Adjudication
- 5. Evaluation of Legal Rules and Institutions
- 6. Concluding Remarks
- Bibliography
- Other Internet Resources
- Related Entries
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Compassionate Conservative or Cowboy Capitalist?
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The president understands that opportunity is the best poverty program.
Whatever happened to compassionate conservatism? Despite the Bush administration’s focus on the war against terror, the idea didn’t disappear. But as White House thinking developed, it got incorporated into a larger, more profound domestic theory. Yes, we need a safety net, the current view seems to go; but we don’t need a European-style welfare state. What’s called for is the traditional American opportunity society, as much a boon to the poor as to everyone else.
Implicit in compassionate conservatism was an epochal paradigm shift that is now all but explicit. Taken together, compassionate conservatism’s elements added up to a sweeping rejection of liberal orthodoxy about how to help the poor, which a half-century’s worth of experience had discredited. If you want to help the poor, compassionate conservatives argued, liberate them from dependency through welfare reform, free their communities from criminal anarchy through activist policing, give them the education they need to succeed in a modern economy by holding their schools accountable, and let them enjoy the rewards of work by taxing their modest wages lightly or not at all. For the worst off—those hampered by addiction or alcohol or faulty socialization—let the government pay private organizations, especially religious ones, to help. Such people need a change of heart to solve their problems, the president himself deeply believed; and while a clergyman or a therapist might help them, a bureaucrat couldn’t.
In the Heart of Freedom, in Chains
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Elite hypocrisy, gangsta culture, and failure in black America
Two April days threw a clarifying light on the state of race in America. On the 11th, North Carolina’s attorney general exonerated three white Duke students of the rape charges that a black stripper had lodged with much press fanfare a year earlier. The next day, CBS fired shock jock Don Imus for calling black Rutgers women’s basketball players “nappy-headed hos.” Between them, these events suggest an explanation for America’s most vexed social question: in a country whose chief domestic imperative for 50 years has been ending racism and righting long-standing wrongs against blacks—with such success that we now have an expanding black middle class, a black secretary of state, black CEOs of three top corporations, a black Supreme Court justice, and a serious black presidential candidate—how can there still exist a large black urban underclass imprisoned in poverty, welfare dependency, school failure, nonwork, and crime? How even today can more black young men be entangled in the criminal-justice system than graduate from college? How can close to 70 percent of black children be born into single-mother families, which (almost all experts agree) prepare kids for success less well than two-parent families?
The legacy of slavery and racism isn’t the reason, economist Thomas Sowell has long argued. That legacy didn’t stop blacks from raising themselves up after Emancipation. By World War I, Sowell’s data show, northern blacks scored higher on armed-forces tests than southern whites. After World War II and the GI Bill, black education and income levels rose sharply. It was only in the mid-1960s that a century of black progress seemed to make a sudden U-turn, a reversal that long-past events didn’t cause. Beginning around 1964, the rates of black high school graduation, workforce participation, crime, illegitimacy, and drug use all turned sharply in the wrong direction. While many blacks continued to move forward, a sizable minority solidified into an underclass, defined by self-destructive behavior that all but guaranteed failure.
Alexander Hamilton, Modern America’s Founding Father
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How New York’s opportunity society became America’s
We New Yorkers imagine our city’s history begins in earnest with the Gilded Age and the Great Migration that brought many of our forebears sailing under the Statue of Liberty’s torch to supercharge a nascent metropolis with a jolt of new energy. But this summer, when a handful of square-bearded, antique-garbed Pennsylvania German Baptists jacked a yellow clapboard house up over a Harlem church and wheeled it around the corner to a new site in St. Nicholas Park, we recalled that more than a century earlier Gotham took center stage as the nation’s first capital. For the house belonged to Alexander Hamilton—not only one of the greatest Founding Fathers but the one who stamped the infant republic forever with the unique spirit of New York City.
The other Founders were Americans of a century’s standing, who fought the Revolution to defend liberties their families had claimed for generations. Washington and Jefferson, landed grandees, descended from seventeenth-century Virginians; Harvard-educated John Adams’s forebears settled in Massachusetts Bay in 1638. Such men were rooted Americans, living on land inherited from their fathers. Hamilton, by contrast, was a penniless immigrant from the West Indies; like so many New Yorkers, he had come here from elsewhere, seeking his fortune.
The Obsolete New York Model
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Where a tax-eating majority votes itself a permanent income
It’s worth recalling that when the Founding Fathers led the American colonists in revolt against British oppression, they weren’t rebelling against torture on the rack or being chained in galleys or having to let aristocrats deflower their daughters. They were rebelling against taxes. To them, having to pay duties they hadn’t voted for themselves was a tyrannical taking of property—theft—and, in true Lockean fashion, they concluded that since government exists to protect life, liberty, and property, a regime that does the opposite renders itself illegitimate. What would they make, then, of today’s New York City, where 1.2 percent of the taxpayers—40,000 households—pay 50 percent of the income taxes, and half the households pay no income tax at all? If the tax code ensures that those who pay the bulk of the taxes are always a minority of those who vote for the legislature that imposes the taxes, isn’t that taxation without representation? Isn’t it also the tyranny of the majority that the Founders tried to prevent?
A state of affairs so opposed to the Founders’ vision could never have come about all at once. It took shape in emergency spurts, sparked by upheavals like the Civil War, which prompted crisis measures like the first federal income tax (made legal retrospectively in 1913 by the Sixteenth Amendment). For New York, the cataclysmic turning point was the Depression. Gotham was the New Deal metropolis, with New York senator Robert F. Wagner and Gotham mayor Fiorello La Guardia falling over each other to make the city the showcase for President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s big programs, designed (among other aims) to turn urban ethnics—whose normally supportive banks and charities the Depression had crushed along with their jobs—into the foundation of Democratic Party power.
The Godfather, R.I.P
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Irving Kristol, realist, humanist, institution-builder, friend
Irving Kristol, who died today at 89, was famously the godfather of neoconservatism, and he was the godfather of City Journal, too, having urged the Manhattan Institute’s then-president Bill Hammett 20 years ago to start a magazine. Ever practical and realistic, Irving knew that it wasn’t enough for conservatives to have good ideas; they also needed vehicles to communicate them. If the mainstream media—which in that pre-Internet era really had a monopoly on news and opinion—didn’t want to give conservatives a platform, there was no use complaining: we’d just have to start our own publications. Irving understood the power of ideas as well as anyone, but he also understood the power of institutions.
His own world-historically influential magazine, The Public Interest, bore Irving’s stamp of practicality and realism, indeed of realpolitik. It aimed, through its hard-headed emphasis on social-scientific data, to rise above mere theorizing and opinion into the realm of fact and proof. Ever the anti-utopian, in politics and in temperament, Irving was interested in the world as it is, not as some system wanted it to be. He’d had his youthful flirtation with left-utopianism and, disillusioned by experience, became a neoconservative—a liberal, as he defined it, who’s been mugged by reality. What he really meant, of course, was simply a liberal who’d been mugged—who’d seen that all the liberal, welfare-state ideals for the uplift of the poor, and especially the minority poor, had in the end produced a criminal underclass, exactly the opposite of the intended uplift. The good intentions counted for nothing with him and even sparked a certain dry contempt; it was the result that mattered.
“Hiện đại thứ hai” và nền văn hóa công luận
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| Bùi Văn Nam Sơn |
| Thế giới kết thúc thập niên đầu tiên của thế kỷ 21 bằng một sự kiện đặc biệt: hội nghị Copenhagen về biến đổi khí hậu được tổ chức rầm rộ chưa từng có với kết quả… đáng thất vọng! Cái “Realpolitik” (“chính trị thực tế”’) vì lợi ích trước mắt của các quốc gia dường như vẫn còn thắng thế trước các mối hiểm họa toàn cầu.
Tuy nhiên, ở bình diện khác, hội nghị ấy vẫn mang tầm vóc lịch sử, vì, dù hay muốn hay không, nó là một dấu hiệu xác nhận các dự báo lý thuyết của nhiều nhà nghiên cứu xã hội vào những năm giao thời giữa hai thiên niên kỷ: sự chuyển biến khách quan của công cuộc hiện đại hóa thứ nhất sang thời kỳ hiện đại hóa thứ hai với một loạt các khái niệm mới mẻ như: xã hội-nguy cơ, xã hội-thế giới và nền văn hóa công luận… Có đủ lý do để chúng ta, khi đón xuân mới, thử tiếp cận với hệ vấn đề mới mẻ này, hay, nói đúng hơn, trở lại với vấn đề hiện đại hóa, một chủ đề của báo Xuân TBKTSG cách đây hai năm. Từ “Hiện đại hóa thứ nhất” đến “Hiện đại hóa thứ hai” Hiện đại hóa (thứ nhất) là một phức hợp những biến đổi bắt đầu từ thế kr thứ 18 ở phương Tây với các tiến trình công nghiệp hóa, đô thị hóa và cá nhân hóa. Luận điểm chủ yếu hiện nay: chúng ta đang là những chứng nhân của một sự đứt gãy của tiến trình hiện đại hóa, vì tiến trình ấy từng bước thoát ly khỏi các khuôn khổ của xã hội công nghiệp cổ điển để mang dấu ấn của một hình thái mới, gọi là xã hội-nguy cơ. Nếu trong ba thế kỷ qua, hiện đại hóa đã làm tan rã xã hội nông nghiệp lạc hậu và hình thành cấu trúc của xã hội công nghiệp thì công cuộc hiện đại hóa (thứ hai) ngày nay lại bắt đầu phá vỡ các khuôn khổ của xã hội công nghiệp để hình thành một hình thái xã hội mới. Đặc trưng để phân biệt giữa hai thế kỷ sẽ là sự thay thế “logic của việc sản xuất sự giàu có” bằng một “logic” mới đang ngày càng chiếm ưu thế. “logic của việc sản xuất nguy cơ”, đồng thời cũng là sự biến đổi từ “logic của việc phân phối sự giàu có” thành “logic của việc phân phối nguy cơ”. Trong xã hội tiền hiện đại, nguy cơ chủ yếu gắn liền với thế giới tự nhiên: đói kém, bệnh tật, động đất…; còn ngày nay nguy cơ chủ yếu do chính con người tạo ra: sản xuất thừa, bất công, thất nghiệp, ô nhiễm với các dạng nguy cơ điển hình: hạt nhân, hóa học, sinh học và môi trường. Xã hội nguy cơ do nhân tai dần thế chỗ cho xã hội bất trắc do thiên tai. |
The Education of John Jay
Legal Club: Như chúng tôi đã có lần đề cập với các bạn về vấn đề Chủ nghĩa Liên Bang – Federalism – đó là một trong những chủ đề, theo chúng tôi, là hấp dẫn nhất của lý thuyết về pháp luật và nhà nước. Để có thể tìm hiểu một cách toàn diện nhất về Chủ nghĩa Liên Bang thì một trong những cách tốt nhất là tìm hiểu về thân thế, sự nghiệp và các tác phẩm của những người được gọi là “cha đẻ” của chủ nghĩa này. Một trong những con người tiêu biểu nhất, đó là John Jay. Ông được biết đến như là một trong ba tác giả của cuốn Người Liên Bang – Federalist Papers – bao gồm: John Jay, A.Hamilton và J.Madison (cha đẻ của Hiến pháp Hoa Kỳ). Cuốn sách Người Liên Bang có thể coi là cuốn sách kinh điển nhất về Chủ nghĩa Liên Bang (và chúng tôi cũng đang lần lượt giới thiệu tới các bạn). Bài viết dưới đây sẽ cung cấp cho các bạn một cái nhìn khá đầy đủ về John Jay.
(Do khối lượng công việc của chúng tôi thời gian gần đây khá bận nên chúng tôi chưa thể hoàn thành bản dịch Tiếng Việt của các bài đã đăng. Rất mong các bạn thông cảm. Chúng tôi hy vọng thông qua việc đọc bằng nguyên bản gốc Tiếng Anh, các bạn sẽ có thể nâng cao được khả năng tiếng Anh và chúng tôi cũng sẽ cố gắng để hoàn thành những bản dịch Tiếng Việt trong thời gian sớm nhất. Xin chân thành cảm ơn các bạn!)
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The Education of John Jay
America’s indispensable diplomat
Myron Magnet
Few could fathom why 55-year-old John Jay turned down President Adams’s nomination to rejoin the Supreme Court when his two terms as New York’s governor ended. What would lead him, in the hale prime of life, to retire instead to the plain yellow house he’d just built on a hilltop at the remote northern edge of Westchester County, two days’ ride from Manhattan, where visitors were few and the mail and newspapers came but once a week? After 27 years at the forge of the new nation’s founding, why would so lavishly talented a man give up his vital role on the world stage for the quiet life of a gentleman farmer?
But just that option—the chance for every man to sit quietly under his vine and his fig tree, with none to make him afraid—is what he had labored more than a quarter-century to bring about, and he felt he had achieved it. As the first chief justice both of New York and of the United States, as president of Congress and governor of his state, as secretary for foreign affairs and, most important, as the diplomat who stamped his vision on America’s foreign policy for generations to come, he had tried to ensure for his countrymen the peace, order, and stability that had seemed to him fragile and elusive from the moment he was born.
A sense of life’s fragility hung over Jay’s childhood; already at six and seven, his father described him as “very grave” and “very reserved,” though “indowed with a very good capacity.” He grew up with a keen sense that his Huguenot ancestors—refugees, like the Plymouth Pilgrims, from religious tyranny—had fled to the New World in the nick of time after France began persecuting Protestants in 1685. Before he was born, smallpox had blinded an elder brother and sister, for whom, he later wrote, “this world has not been a Paradize”; of his four other siblings, one was retarded and another emotionally disturbed. Shortly after John’s birth on Manhattan’s Pearl Street in 1745, his father moved his brood to a farm bordering Long Island Sound in Rye, an easier setting for his two blind children. Though Jay’s father had grown rich as a merchant, married a Van Cortlandt heiress, and counted most of the colony’s Dutch and Huguenot establishment as his relatives, and though he and his wife were loving parents, Jay’s childhood after he went to boarding school at age eight in the French-speaking Huguenot town of Nouvelle Rochelle had its share of privations. His eccentric schoolmaster treated his pupils “with little food and much scolding,” Jay’s son and biographer William reports. The boy struggled to keep the snow off his bed by blocking up his broken window with scraps of wood.
