For several decades now a debate has raged about policy-making by litigation. Spurred by the way in which tobacco, environmental, and other litigation has functioned as an alternative form of regulation, the debate asks whether policy-making or regulation by litigation is more or less socially...

This paper traces the shifts in treatments of intermediate groups among some liberal and democratic political theorists in the 18th and 19th centuries. The decades of the late 18th and early 19th centuries are traditionally understood to encompass the emergence of fully liberal political and...

The Supreme Court has held repeatedly that race-based preferences in public university admissions are constitutional. But debates over the wisdom of affirmative action continue. Opponents of these policies argue that preferences are detrimental to minority students -- that by placing these...

An important criticism of race-based higher education admission preferences is that they may hurt minority students who attend more selective schools than they would in the absence of such preferences. We categorize the non-experimental research designs available for the study of so-called...

Affirmative action bans can reduce black enrollment not only by reducing black admission advantages (contracting demand) but also by reducing applications (contracting supply) from black students who can still gain admission but prefer alternative schools that still practice affirmative action....

In this article, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of the effect of parental involvement (PI) laws on the incidence of abortions to minors across a span of nearly three decades. We contribute to the extant literature on this topic in several ways. First, we explore differences in estimates of...

This paper explores the foundations of religious influence in politics and society. We show that an important Islamic institution fostered the entrenchment of Islamism at a critical juncture in Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim country. In the early 1960s, rural elites transferred large...

Before the middle of the nineteenth century most laws enacted in the United States were special bills that granted favors to specific individuals, groups, or localities. This fundamentally inegalitarian system provided political elites with important tools that they could use to reward...

This paper investigates the response of young people in the United States to state laws dictating the minimum age at which individuals could marry, with and without parental consent. We use variation across states and over time to document behavioral responses to laws governing the age of...

When is it socially advantageous for legal rules to be changed in the light of altered circumstances? In answering this basic question here, a simple point is developed -- that past compliance with legal rules tends to reduce the social advantages of legal change. The reasons are twofold:...