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"This book presents a self-contained and accessible economic analysis of American politics. Chapters address voters, political parties, the media, Congress, the Presidency, and the Supreme Court. Maurer explains how the Framers' design usually encourages moderation - but can also veer into the kind of dangerously divisive politics we know today"--

"This book presents a self-contained and accessible economic analysis of American politics. Chapters address voters, political parties, the media, Congress, the Presidency, and the Supreme Court. Maurer explains how the Framers' design usually encourages moderation - but can also veer into the kind of dangerously divisive politics we know today"--

Commercial and academic communities use private rules to regulate everything from labor conditions to biological weapons. This self-governance is vital in the twenty-first century, where private science and technology networks cross so many borders that traditional regulation and treaty solutions are often impractical. Self-Governance in Science analyzes the history of private regulation, identifies the specific market factors that make private standards stable and enforceable, explains what governments can do to encourage responsible self-regulation, and asks when private power might be legitimate. Unlike previous books which stress sociology or political science perspectives, Maurer emphasizes the economic roots of private power to deliver a coherent and comprehensive account of recent scholarship. Individual chapters present a detailed history of past self-government initiatives, describe the economics and politics of private power, and extract detailed lessons for law, legitimacy theory, and public policy

Terrorism by means of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) has been studied for decades - since the Cold War and fears of secret agents with suitcase-sized atomic bombs. Although WMD research has accelerated since September 11, 2001, much of this scholarship is hard to find, forcing nonspecialists to fall back on gut instinct and Beltway clichés. This book provides a review of what scientists and scholars know about WMD terrorism and America's options for confronting it. It also identifies multiple instances in which the conventional wisdom is incomplete or misleading.

Scientists have long recognized two distinct forms of human thought. "Type 1" reasoning is unconscious, intuitive, and specializes in finding complex patterns. It is typically associated with the aesthetic emotion that John Keats called "beauty." "Type 2" reasoning is conscious, articulable, and deductive. Scholars usually assume that legal reasoning is entirely Type 2. However, critics from Holmes to Posner have protested that unconscious and intuitive judgments are at least comparably important. This Article takes the conjecture seriously by asking what science can add to our understanding of how lawyers and judges interpret legal texts. The analysis is overdue. Humanities scholars have long invoked findings from cognitive psychology, brain imaging, and neural network theory to argue that postmodern interpretations that ignore texts in favor of politics and cultural explanations are hopelessly incomplete. Similar arguments should be a fortiori stronger in law, where judges and scholars routinely stress the detailed wording of texts. The Article begins by reviewing previous attempts to apply literary theory to legal texts. We argue that the main failing of this literature is that it says little or nothing about how judges and advocates choose between competing legal interpretations. Section II argues that the best way to fill this gap is to ask what scientists have learned about the brain. This includes the fundamental insight that most human thought processes rely on both Type 1 and Type 2 methods. The Article also documents the surprising cognitive psychology result that Type 1 judgments show significant universality, i.e. that humans who study subjects for long periods often make similar choices without regard to the societies they were born into. Section III extends these arguments to law by arguing that legal judgment frequently turns on the brain's Type 1 pattern recognition machinery. The next two Sections build on this foundation to construct an explicit theory of how Type 1 thinking enters into legal ...

AbstractIndustry has organized increasingly effective self-governance initiatives since the 1980s. Almost all of these are based on the economic leverage of large retailers and manufacturers over their worldwide supply chains. This article documents commonalities in six of the best-studied examples—coffee, dolphin-safe tuna, fisheries, lumber, food processing, and artificial DNA—and offers straightforward economic and political theories to explain them. The theories teach that oligopoly competition can strongly constrain private power so that firms are answerable to a shadow electorate of consumers. Furthermore, rational firms often benefit from ceding significant power to suppliers and NGOs. These results extend traditional arguments that free markets constrain private power and suggest an explicit framework for deciding when private politics are legitimate.1