In this brief essay, I address the way in which "new originalists" Jack Balkin and Lawrence Solum use the Domestic Violence Clause in Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution to support their theories. Balkin uses the Domestic Violence Clause to provide an example of an impermissible departure...

Theories of distributive justice are most severely tested in the area of disability. In this book (Introduction available for download), Mark Stein argues that utilitarianism performs better than egalitarian theories in dealing with the problems of disability. Egalitarian theories either give...

A common charge against utilitarianism is that it fails to respect the separateness of persons. The most straightforward meaning of the “separateness” charge is that utilitarianism conflates people, treating them as if they were not separate, as if they were parts of one person. In this...

Utilitarianism is more convincing than resource egalitarianism or welfare egalitarianism as a theory of how resources should be distributed between disabled people and nondisabled people. Unlike resource egalitarianism, utilitarianism can redistribute resources to the disabled when they would...

Autonomy is commonly seen as a fundamental value that should guide the federal regulation of human subjects research. In this article, we argue that autonomy is compromised, and should be compromised, for the sake of the welfare of research subjects and the welfare of people who stand to benefit...