Williams (2022) ties the political participation of Blacks to historical lynchings that occurred in the United States. Her findings document lower Black voter registration rates in southern counties with greater number of historical lynchings. We show that this effect is driven by four outlier...

Williams (2022) ties the political participation of Blacks to historical lynchings that occurred in the United States. Her findings document lower Black voter registration rates in southern counties with greater number of historical lynchings. We show that this effect is driven by four outlier...

The debate over market/individual regulation and freedom is not a new discussion. However, a clear understanding of the freedoms (or the lack of freedoms) and their economic consequences on early black Americans provides an informative understanding to the freedoms (or the lack of freedoms), and...

Since its inception, supporters of the Jones Act have claimed that the law is essential to U.S. national security. Although indefensible on economic grounds, Jones Act advocates argue that its restrictions promote the development of both a U.S. merchant marine and shipbuilding and repair...

Two broad positions have dominated the history of economic thought with respect to chattel slavery. The view of the classical economists, dating back as far as Adam Smith and including a good many abolitionists, was that slavery was inefficient and therefore unprofitable. The contrasting...

Of all the functions of government, or the State, national defense is generally considered to be the most essential. Ideally, national defense should be a service provided by government to the people. The service entails protection from aggressors outside the State’s jurisdiction, usually...

The paper examines the role of self-ownership versus other ownership of labor with implications for the interpretation of the historical evidence regarding timing of black migration from the South to the North after emancipation

Prior research has uncovered a large and positive correlation between educa- tion and health, but there are difficulties in determining whether this relation- ship is causal. In this paper I reexamine whether education has a causal impact on health. I follow synthetic cohorts using successive...

This essay is based on a featured lecture that I gave as part of the Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal's 2 symposium on a proposed right of publicity law in New York. The essay draws from my recent book, The Right of Publicity: Privacy Reimagined for a Public World, published by Harvard...