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Chicago's Best Ideas

Bernard Harcourt, "Neoliberal Penality: A Genealogy of Excess"

in

What work do the categories "the free market" and "regulation" do for us? Why do we incarcerate one out of every one hundred adults? These seemingly unrelated questions, it turns out, are deeply interconnected. The categories of free and regulated markets emerged as an effort to make sense of irreducibly individual phenomena—unique forms of social organization.


66:03 minutes (60.47 MB)

CBI: M. Todd Henderson, "Unsafe Harbors and Other Regulatory Oddities"

in
Date: 
09.30.2009
Location: 
Room II

Most of what we think about as "law" involves a background rule that conduct is legal with an exception for what lawmakers define as illegal. But there are several other ways in which law is made. The most obvious is the concept of a "safe harbor," where the background rule is that conduct is illegal with an exception for what lawmakers define as legal.

Faculty: 
M. Todd Henderson

Douglas Baird, "Eero Saarinen's Law School"

in

This Chicago's Best Ideas lecture was recorded May 2, 2009, as part of the Law School's annual reunion festivities. Douglas Baird is Harry A. Bigelow Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School.


62:14 minutes (56.98 MB)
Media information
Archive year: 
2009

CBI: Saul Levmore, "What’s the Right Drinking Age? and Other Problems of the Slippery Slope"

in
Date: 
11.10.2009
Location: 
Room II

Legal scholars praise "incrementalism" and "minimalism" in law, which is to say the idea that law should progress in small steps and lawmakers should intervene less rather than more. But the acclaim for these approaches ignores the role of interest groups in our legal system.

Faculty: 
Saul Levmore

CBI: Omri Ben-Shahar, "One-Way Contracts"

in
Date: 
10.13.2009
Location: 
Room II

What if consumer contracts were legally enforceable only against the consumers, but not against the business? The idea of "one-way contracts," to which consumers are bound but the businesses are not, is offered as a basis to explore alternative, non-legal consumer protections.

Faculty: 
Omri Ben-Shahar

M. Todd Henderson, "The Nanny Corporation"

in

We are all familiar with the Nanny State: governments telling us what we can put in our bodies, to wear seatbelts, not to talk on our cell phones while driving, and so on. But governments are not the only institutions that act paternalistically—we are seeing the rise of the Nanny Corporation.


65:23 minutes (59.87 MB)
Media information
Archive year: 
2009
Speaker: 
M. Todd Henderson
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