Law and economics, or economic analysis of law, is the application of microeconomic theory to the analysis of law. The field emerged in the United States during the early 1960s, primarily from the work of scholars from the Chicago school of economics such as Aaron Director, George Stigler, and Ronald Coase. The field uses economics concepts to explain the effects of laws, assess which legal rules are economically efficient, and predict which legal rules will be promulgated. There are two major branches of law and economics; one based on the application of the methods and theories of neoclassical economics to the positive and normative analysis of the law, and a second branch which focuses on an institutional analysis of law and legal institutions, with a broader focus on economic, political, and social outcomes, and overlapping with analyses of the institutions of politics and governance.
John Jackson Sparkman was an American jurist and politician from the state of Alabama. A Southern Democrat, Sparkman served in the United States House of Representatives from 1937 to 1946 and the United States Senate from 1946 until 1979. He was the Democratic Party's nominee for vice president in the 1952 presidential election.
Patricia J. Williams is an American legal scholar and a proponent of critical race theory, a school of legal thought that emphasizes race as a fundamental determinant of the American legal system.
The Equal Protection Clause is part of the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The clause, which took effect in 1868, provides "nor shall any State ... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." It mandates that individuals in similar situations be treated equally by the law.
John Hart Ely was an American legal scholar. He was a professor of law at Yale Law School from 1968 to 1973, Harvard Law School from 1973 to 1982, Stanford Law School from 1982 to 1996, and at the University of Miami Law School from 1996 until his death. From 1982 until 1987, he was the 9th dean of Stanford Law School.
Critical race theory (CRT) is an academic field focused on the relationships between social conceptions of race and ethnicity, social and political laws, and media. CRT also considers racism to be systemic in various laws and rules, not based only on individuals' prejudices. The word critical in the name is an academic reference to critical theory rather than criticizing or blaming individuals.
Edward John Larson is an American historian and legal scholar. He is university professor of history and holds the Hugh & Hazel Darling Chair in Law at Pepperdine University. He was formerly Herman E. Talmadge Chair of Law and Richard B. Russell Professor of American History at the University of Georgia. He continues to serve as a senior fellow of the University of Georgia's Institute of Higher Education, and is currently a professor at Pepperdine School of Law, where he teaches several classes including Property for the 1Ls.
Derrick Albert Bell Jr. was an American lawyer, legal scholar, and civil rights activist. Bell first worked for the U.S. Justice Department, then the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, where he supervised over 300 school desegregation cases in Mississippi.
Federalist No. 70, titled "The Executive Department Further Considered", is an essay written by Alexander Hamilton arguing for a single, robust executive provided for in the United States Constitution. It was originally published on March 15, 1788, in The New York Packet under the pseudonym Publius as part of The Federalist Papers and as the fourth in Hamilton's series of eleven essays discussing executive power.
John C. Coffee Jr. is the Adolf A. Berle Professor of Law and director of the Center on Corporate Governance at Columbia Law School.
Paul Schiff Berman is an American lawyer and the Walter S. Cox Professor of Law at The George Washington University School of Law. He has held several other positions at the University including Vice Provost for Online Education and Academic Innovation and Dean of the School of Law.
Michael J. Klarman is an American legal historian and scholar of constitutional law. Currently, Klarman is the Kirkland & Ellis Professor at Harvard Law School. Formerly, he was James Monroe Distinguished Professor of Law, Professor of History, and Elizabeth D. and Richard A. Merrill Research Professor at the University of Virginia School of Law.
This is a selected bibliography of the main scholarly books and articles of Reconstruction, the period after the American Civil War, 1863–1877.
Angela P. Harris is an American legal scholar at UC Davis School of Law, in the fields of critical race theory, feminist legal scholarship, and criminal law. She held the position of professor of law at UC Berkeley School of Law, joining the faculty in 1988. In 2009, Harris joined the faculty of the State University of New York at Buffalo Law School as a visiting professor. In 2010, she also assumed the role of acting vice dean for research and faculty development. In 2011, she accepted an offer to join the faculty at the UC Davis School of Law, and began teaching as a professor of law in the 2011–12 academic year.
John Francis Manning is an American legal scholar who serves as the provost of Harvard University. He is the Dane Professor of Law at Harvard Law School (HLS), where he is a scholar of administrative and constitutional law. From 2017 to 2024, he was the 13th Dean of Harvard Law School.
Poll taxes in the United States is the history of the use of poll tax across the US. Poll taxes had been a major source of government funding among the colonies and states which formed the United States. Poll taxes became a tool of disenfranchisement in the South during Jim Crow, following the end of Reconstruction. This practice was commonplace until it was outlawed in 1965, following the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which is considered one of the most monumental pieces of civil rights legislation ever passed. The Twenty-fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution was the impetus for this act, which prohibited both Congress and the states from implementing poll taxes, but initially this only included Federal elections, and was not enforced until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed.
Ian F. Haney López is an American legal scholar who is the Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Public Law at UC Berkeley School of Law. He works in the area of racism and racial justice in American law.
Kenneth Culp Davis was an American legal scholar remembered as "the father of administrative law." He was a professor of law at West Virginia University from 1935 to 1939, at the University of Texas at Austin from 1940 to 1948, at Harvard University from 1948 to 1950, at the University of Minnesota from 1950 to 1960, at the University of Chicago from 1961 to 1976, and at the University of San Diego from 1976 until his retirement in 1994.
Jean Stefancic is an American legal academic, Professor and Clement Research Affiliate at the University of Alabama. She has written numerous books with her husband Richard Delgado.
In critical race theory, the black–white binary is a paradigm through which racial history is presented as a linear story between White and Black Americans. This binary has largely defined how civil rights legislation is approached in the United States, as African Americans led most of the major racial justice movements that informed civil rights era reformation. The paradigm conceptualizes Black and White people as the two predominant racial groups, viewing all racism accordant to anti-blackness, and the Black–White relation as central to racial analysis. According to critical race scholars, the binary acts to govern racial classifications and describe how race is understood and approached politically and socially throughout American history. The black-white binary is a product of white socialization and reduces race relations to an oppressor/oppressed dichotomy.
