This essay is a chapter in a volume that examines constitutional law in the United States through the lens of H.L.A. Hart's quot;rule of recognitionquot; model of a legal system. My chapter focuses on a feature of constitutional practice that has been rarely examined: how jurists and scholars...

De minimis cutoffs are a familiar feature of risk regulation. This includes the quantitative individual risk thresholds for fatality risks employed in many contexts by EPA, FDA, and other agencies, such as the 1-in-1 million lifetime cancer risk cutoff; extreme event cutoffs for addressing natural...

Contemporary positivism has taken a communitarian turn. Hart, in the Postscript to quot;The Concept of Law,quot; clarifies that the rule of recognition is a special sort of social practice: a convention. It is not clear whether Hart, here, means convention in the strict sense elaborated by David...

Welfare polls are survey instruments that seek to quantify the determinants of human well-being. Currently, three welfare polling formats are dominant: contingent-valuation surveys, QALY surveys, and happiness surveys. Each format has generated a large, specialized, scholarly literature, but no...

The “social welfare function” (SWF) is a powerful tool that originates in theoretical welfare economics and has wide application in economic scholarship, for example in optimal tax theory and environmental economics. This Article provides a comprehensive introduction to the SWF framework. It...

This paper examines consumption decisions under risk assuming a prioritarian social welfare function, namely, a concave transformation of individual utility functions. Under standard assumptions, there is always more current consumption under ex ante prioritarianism than under utilitarianism....