“The Death Penalty in Delaware: An Empirical Study” Cornell Legal Studies Research Paper No. 08-025 By John H. Blume, Theodore Eisenberg, Sheri Lynn Johnson, and Valerie P. Hans Part of the Third Annual Conference on Empirical Legal Studies Papers, this article reports the findings of the first phase of a three-phase empirical study of the death penalty in Delaware. The preliminary findings indicate that race of victim effects. Seventy percent of the death sentences were imposed in white victim cases, even though the majority of the murder victims are black. Delaware has one of the highest death sentencing rates in the country which appears to be the result of a change in the Delaware death sentencing scheme from jury to judge sentencing.
“Why Paretians Can’t Prescribe: Preferences, Principles, and Imperatives in Law and Policy” Cornell Legal Studies Research Paper No. 08-028 By Robert C. Hockett This article rejects what the author calls "Paretian welfarism" and advocates an alternative it calls "fair welfare." The article then analyzes the idiom of social welfare functions (SWFs) in which Paretian welfarist legal theorists frame their putative prescriptions. The author then draws the foregoing analyses together in two simple discursive proofs, counterparts to formal results the author presents elsewhere. The first shows the impossibility of "welfarist" prescription. The second shows Paretianism's cognate impossibility. Finally, the article presents the "fair welfare" alternative. The true "Grundnorm" for legal theory is an equal opportunity norm that is the material counterpart to that agent equality found earlier in the article to underlie preference-incumbent norms of distributive propriety. Because those norms constitute the logical form of prescription itself, fair welfare is the appropriate form for our legal prescribing to take.
“Bailouts, Buy-Ins, and Ballyhoo: Forget K Street, Save Main Street, and You Will Save Wall Street—and Paulson—As Well” Cornell Legal Studies Research Paper No. 08-029 By Robert C. Hockett The author suggests a critical amendment to Treasury Secretary Paulson's proposed "bailout" plan for troubled financial institutions. If the United States channels the plan through FHA and its recently refederalized GSE siblings, we shall neatly avoid all objections currently raised to the plan—those sounding in unconstitutional delegation, moral hazard, and inequity alike. Rather than "rescuing Main Street by rescuing Wall Street" through new Treasury authority, in short, we should employ institutional means already at our disposal by which we shall readily "rescue Wall Street by rescuing Main Street."
“Reflective Intensions: Two Foundational Decision-Points in Mathematics, Law, and Economics” Cornell Legal Studies Research Paper No. 08-027 By Robert C. Hockett This article examines two critical junctures at which foundational decisions must be made in three areas of theoretical inquiry—mathematics, law, and economics. The first such juncture is the “arbitrary versus criterial choice” juncture. The second decision point concerns how to respond to certain paradoxes and/or indeterminacies that typically attend recursive, reflexive, or self-referential capacities in the discipline in question. The article argues that the most important lesson that has emerged in foundational mathematics since the time of Cantor is that neither a fully intensionalist nor a fully extensionalist understanding of the foundational concepts upon which the discipline is built—whether these be categories, classes, or sets—is sustainable.
