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In my city it is now a criminal charge to leave a child unattended, including not preventing the kid from walking to school.

Note I didn't say "for allowing". There have been situations when a kid decides to walk themselves to school before the parents wake up, and the parents were jailed for it.

I don't know if these laws were the result of helicopter parents or not, and those types sure are bad enough, but even a parent wanting a child to grow up and be capable of taking care of themselves is being prevented by the government by force.

Yes, things are that fucked up.

https://www.washingtonpost.com...
https://works.bepress.com/lewy...
http://5kids1condo.com/very-su...

What makes you think that Corporation could not possibly be divine?

It is nameless and immortal.
It is not constrained by morals. Instead it is the source of morality.
It is everywhere and all-powerful.
It works in mysterious ways.

In fact, whole papers have been written for this topic, and I'd say they're pretty convincing. Much more convincing than the New Fairytale.

The full text is available here (PDF).

The study is more solid than I expected. I expected to post that this study ignored the factor that intelligence correlates with immune system functioning, as almost all studies ignore these things (e.g, there's a bunch of studies going "low amount of social connections lead to increase in death rates, primarily from increases in infections", where human attraction is strongly correlated with a strong immune system.) However, this use a mouse model to show that cause/effect - and the viruses are clearly a possible cause, due to using mouse models to verify. They used force feeding to get this into the mice, and they used a control group which was also force fed. The only potential procedural problem I see here is lack of blinding - blinding at least isn't mentioned. Since this is a quite significant and unexpected result, I would have liked to have full blinding on the test, rather than having the possibility of unintended researcher influence. Unintended influence has been seen in e.g. homeopathy studies, where homeopathy works on horses if the person administering knows that this is supposed to work, but not under double blinding.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/41...

http://jlr.sagepub.com/content...

http://works.bepress.com/leah_...

http://www.npr.org/2009/08/28/...

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03...

http://www.literacytrust.org.u...:

Educational programming has also aimed to elevate knowledge of texts and literacy as in the programmes Barney and Friends (Guofang, 1999) and Reading Rainbow (Wood and Duke, 1997), which offer content on reading books and raising childrenâ(TM)s knowledge of books. This is important since researchers at the University of Sheffield have also suggested that pre-schoolers who develop an ability to talk about texts become familiar with literacy and have greater success with learning to read once they enter school (Hannon, 2000; Hannon, Weinberger and Nutbrown, 1991). "

You mean to say that the French or Germans don't have presumption of innocence?

I believe that they'd be rather surprised to learn that! In fact, it's even more explicit in the European Declaration of Human Rights than in the US constitution. Some places like Scotland have the "not proven" verdict. Incidentally, Scottish law is Civil, not Common. No sensible country, from what I can see, has codified presumption of guilt. This rather long article goes into good detail on how the European system developed.

You're still to address my main point. You're still going off on a tangent that isn't even central to my point. Why should I be sympathetic to a government that cannot take criticism, and unleashes its freakin' army on people who protest too much?

The fundamental problem with your thesis that other places are just different and that we must respect their differences, is that this is not a difference that one can condone. There are certain basic rights that all human beings should enjoy. Any government that takes away those rights is by default a tyranny. I have great respect for the uniqueness and contributions of the Chinese people. None at all for their government.

That's the whole point. If you're not bothering anyone, law enforcement has no business keeping tabs on you. It was designed that way, erring on the side of letting guilty people go free.

When the Constitution was written, such abuses of power were a big enough deal that they put it in the Bill of Rights.

It's the same idea behind "âoeBetter that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer."
http://works.bepress.com/alexander_volokh/9/

Actually, I was surprised to find out that crass use with no socially redeeming features, something which I considered was still parody, was often not considered such by the US judicial system. Check out:

• Walt Disney Prods. v. Mature Pictures Corp., 389 F. Supp. 1397, 1398 (S.D.N.Y. 1975)
• DC Comics Inc. v. Unlimited Monkey Bus., Inc., 598 F. Supp. 110, 118 (N.D. Ga. 1984)
• MCA, Inc. v. Wilson, 677 F.2d 180, 185 (2d Cir. 1981)

(references cribbed from The Ethical Visions of Copyright Law (PDF), by James Grimmelmann --- see page 2017 / 13).

Simply stated, law schools are university cash cows, contributing dollars to the university’s bottom line . . . Cash starved universities are only too happy to take the funds generated by law schools and use them for their general purposes. Indeed, the universities have every incentive to keep the law school classeslarge and the funds from these larger classes flowing. Law schools, in turn, while sometimes complaining about forking over the money, nonetheless enjoy the prestige and power in their respective university communities that comes from the profit they generate and the funds they supply to the larger university, or main campus.

He includes several citations for this by the way. It's a great article, I would recommend it to anyone curious about the state of the legal education system today.

There's plenty of citations in the paper I linked to.
Here's a few:

See, e.g.,CAL. CORP. CODE tit. 1, 309(a) (2004) (“in the best interests of the corporation and its
shareholders”); NY CLS BUS. CORP. art. 7, 717(b) (2004) (“the long-term and the short-term interests of
the corporation and its shareholders”); NRS tit. 7, 138(1) (2004) (“interests of the corporation”); Illinois
Business Corporation Act of 1983 8.85, 805 ILCS 5 (2004) (“best long term and short term interests of the
corporation”); N.J. STAT. tit. 14A, 14A:6-1 (2004) (“best inerest of the corporation”).

As I stated above:

The statutes largely do require corporations to act in the best interest of the shareholders, and in a relationship where the transactions are almost strictly monetary, that is largely taken to mean they must maximize stock value. There is debate as to whether other goals are allowed, and they are allowed mostly due to their potential impact on long term stock value.

When a statement like the following is published without correction in a scholarly journal, the burden of proof is on the disbeliever:

In the corporate law academy today in the United States, the dominant view is that corporate
law requires managers to pursue a single aim: the maximization of stockholder profits.

I won't quote the entire article except to say he's somewhat arguing for your side, and if you do want to make a case it's a good place to start ;-)
Better link:
http://law.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2238&context=expresso&sei-redir=1#search="Corporate-Law-Profit-Maximization-and-the-Responsible-Shareholder"

Another similar discussion:
http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/elhauge/pdf/sacrificing_corporate_profits.pdf

The book is Against Intellectual Monopoly by Boldrin and Levine, and it has been criticized for both factual and logical errors. One example is the article Watt, Again? Boldrin and Levine Still Exaggerate the Adverse Effect of Patents on the Progress of Steam Power :

In an earlier comment on Boldrin and Levine’s 2003 lecture on patents and their effect on technology, we observed that their account of James Watt’s influence on the progress of steam technology contained factual errors which tended to exaggerate the negative consequences of Watt’s patent. We concluded that it was far from obvious that a corrected account would support Boldrin and Levine’s bold conjectures. While Boldrin and Levine’s 2008 “Against Intellectual Monopoly” begins with a new version of Watt’s story that claims to take our earlier criticisms into account, here we assess that version and conclude that it shares many of the shortcomings of the original.

The full article is available for free download via that Berkeley Electronic Press link.

That article excerpts Against Intellectual Monopoly, which has been criticized for its numerous factual errors regarding the effect of patents on the development of the steam engine. Selgin, George and Turner, John L., Watt, Again? Boldrin and Levine Still Exaggerate the Adverse Effect of Patents on the Progress of Steam Power, 5 Rev. L. & Econ. 1101 (2009) (available for free at Berkeley Electronic Press):

Boldrin and Levine’s new telling of Watt’s story is hardly more persuasive than their original (2004) version. Although they have corrected some of their earlier errors, their account remains inaccurate and one-sided. Although, told in this fashion, Watt’s story makes for an exciting introduction to the rest of Boldrin and Levine’s book, the story’s value as a source of reliable inferences concerning the general merits and shortcomings of the patent system is open to doubt.

In britain there is no presumption of innocence.

Of course there is. The presumption of innocence in English and Scots law comes from common law. The concept itself has been part of British society for thousands of years - Alexander Volokh says that it has been present since Greece and Sparta and Rome, all the way back to the first (Judaic?) legal systems.

Common law is the basis of the British legal system. Your logic is like claiming that "there is no law against murder in Britain" and then going on to claim that this means murder is legal. English Law - "there is no statute making murder illegal. It is a common law crime - so although there is no written Act of Parliament making murder illegal, it is illegal by virtue of the constitutional authority of the courts and their previous decisions."

It after that went on and voted into the statute book several hundred criminal offences which explicitly postulate that you are guilty until proven innocent. The RIPA act, The H&S act, you name them. Half of Blair's legislation (Blair and Co raised the number of criminal offences on the statutes by more than 100% in 10 years) is based around "guilty until proven innocent".

[citationneeded]. Please name these "hundreds of acts that explicitly say British people are guilty until proven innocent.". And are you seriously blaming the Blair government (which came to power in 1997) for the 1974 Health and Safety Act?!? What?!

So the new government has actually promissed to fix this by accepting _ALL_ rights in the convention and repealing most of Blair's handywork as a big block vote including most of the RIPA act.

Right, that would be the same Conservative party that fully supported the RIP Act then? ('Only a pitiful handful of MPs (pictured below) were present to debate the bill, which was fully supported by the "opposition" Conservative party, and passed by 189 votes to 47 keeping the majority of its original clauses intact.')

The behavior talked about in the SEC link is certainly improper, but it is a little overboard to speak about it as if it is controlling society

Not sure where you got your "controlling society" spin from - all you have here is one concrete example of how the SEC did not pursue a long term billion dollar fraud against the general public until it was in someones political interests to do so. When they did pursue it, claimed damages (~20 million) and fines levied were an insult to all the citizens of the US whose retirement savings were robbed over the decades.

each of the alleged fraudulent trades likely had a genuine market order on one side of it.

I suggest you educate yourself on how the fraud is being carried out, before you start making apologies or excuses for their criminal activity.

Perhaps start with this research PDF: "NYSE Response to Specialist Misconduct: An Example of the Failure of Self-Regulation" but there are more you can easily find now you have some search keys to look it up.

In fact, you seem so wrong I'm just going to assume I read your comment incorrectly.

Research is an ever-moving target. So are faculty lists. Couple this reality with the limited attention most Universities give to their websites and the problems you are facing are evident.

That being said, you can get a good idea of what kinds of research you want to do as a grad student, where it is done, and by whom through online research.

But, first, speak to professors at your current school in order to get some ideas and recommendations. If you're serious about going to grad school then you'll probably need them for recommendations anyhow.

A good place to look are for annotated bibliographies. Try university library websites. Some have good annotated bibliographies or reading lists.

Another good source is SSRN -- or Social Science Research Network. www.ssrn.com

You may also want to check out BePress. http://www.bepress.com/

Finally, you really might need to just dig through University websites and look through each faculty member's page. Arduous, but likely necessary.

Good luck with it.

The cut between local governments and various sports franchises are as varied and individual as the number of entities involved. There is only one constant: they do NOT make money for the local communities.

Link
"But there’s no evidence that using public money to build stadiums is a sensible economic strategy."
Something economists largely agree upon
obligatory wikipedia link
obligatory single issue blog
This is an old issue, and well settled, except among some sports fans, and most muni governments

Why so much vitriol? Apparently, in your opinion, one actually does need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. Here is brief that might give you the pedantic opium you need so badly.

This started with the cult of the Baroque composer. Check this. (warning: PDF)

Johann Sebastian Bach was often criticized in later (post-18th-Century) critical literature for "borrowing" from other composers. If he or his son Johann Christian were starting out today, they'd be mixers, not composers.

Like a lot of op-eds in the WSJ, I think the author is missing a lot of things.

She argues that getting people to find and assert the copyrights on the works Google is scanning is too burdensome, turning everyone into data-entry slaves for Google. But this is the exact problem Google is facing - the copyright status of so much stuff it wants to scan is unknown. Now, who is in a better position to determine whether work X is copyrighted and who owns the copyright, Google, or the individual owner of that work?

And to fix the issue of making people data-entry slaves, it would be good if all the copyright status information that Google acquired was put into a publicly-accessible database. This is one of the things that James Grimmelmann suggests in an article called "How to Fix the Google Book Search Settlement." (PDF warning, also may be out of date)

Also, we do have "command-and-control" centers for copyright, e.g., the Copyright Clearance Center, the whole point of which was to consolidate the footwork of determining all the rights for people wanting to make course packets, etc.

Actually IEEE allows you to make your paper available on the internet at *one* location. However the material must not be reprinted/republished without permission from the IEEE. They also don't allow making your work part of another world-wide indexed collection. That's still far from perfect but at least it allows you to make your work accessible on your homepage or your university's Digital Commons repository. I don't know what the future plans of IEEE are.

or, even longer, this

The results demonstrate that democratic economists lean left and republicans lean right. Economics ought to be unbaised. The fact that it is baised indicatse that economists can't be trusted to understand economic issues objectively.

I don't believe that is what the data shows. The majority of economists believe things about the economy that neither Democrats or Republicans support. Both Obama and McCain have said some truly economically illiterate things. So it is kind of a toss-up on who they'd vote for.

What do economists believe?

87.5% agree that "the U.S. should eliminate remaining tariffs and other barriers to trade."
85.2% agree that "the U.S. should eliminate agricultural subsidies."
85.3% agree that "the gap between Social Security funds and expenditures will become unsustainably large within the next fifty years if current policies remain unchanged."
77.2% agree that "the best way to deal with Social Security's long-term funding gap is to increase the normal retirement age."
67.1% agree that "parents should be given educational vouchers which can be used at government-run or privately-run schools."
65.0% agree that "the U.S. should increase energy taxes to fight global warming"
62.2% agree that "marijuana should be legalized"
53.8% agree that "current immigration levels are not too high" and only 16.7% feel levels are too high now

On the minimum wage, 46.8% of economists think it should be eliminated, 37.7% think it should be raised, 14.3% think it should remain the same.

Since no (major party) presidential candidate is running on a "I love free trade", "end agriculture subsidies", "raise the Social Security retirement age", "school vouchers for all", "legalize marijuana", and "immigration levels are fine" platform, who is an economist to vote for?

there are publishers printing scientists' work but only allowing access to those who are willing to stump up some cash. these publishers usually retain copy write of the printed work and, recently, have been charging more and more for the privilege. since most of the better research that ends up in print is government funded this practice has been raising a few eye-brows. for more info take a look here.

Or rather, why nobody listens to Shakespeare. After all, this little nugget of economic wisdom comes to us from not Marx, but from Polonius' advice to Laertes. I'm hardly the first to say it.

People have been performing music from DNA for YEARS, how the hell can a couple of dudes patent what's already entered the public domain?

Douglas Hofstadter noted the idea in 1980 and Hayashi and Munakata made the first music from DNA in 1984! In exactly the same way as these lawyers propose to do so no less. Not to mention the numerous artists who have also created genetic music since then (http://whozoo.org/mac/Music/Sources.htm). Patents in the US are granted for 20 years from the date of filing (and this is recent, it used to be 17; http://www.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article =1329&context=bejeap). 2007 - 20 years = 1987. So unless these guys were able to pull out some crazy extentions there is no way they thought of this first.

The MAFIAA do not claim to want to do any of those, only to get the information so as to further their actions in court.

True, but at least arguably, "information" is a form of property. At least, that's what the RIAA & MPAA have been trying to get us to accept for years, so if it's true for their "intellectual property", it ought to be true for mine. And in the alternative, then vice-versa. :P

Here's a scholarly article on the subject

Here's a good article on the theories behind corporate law and duty. In fact, it makes a case that the law is more ambiguous that I stated.

http://law.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article =2238&context=expresso

The sources include links to legal scholars make the case that corporate law requires shareholder equity to be the primary corporate duty, as well as to those that argue for ethics to be considered as well.

Though the methodology is complex, the results are straightforward: some US music consumers "could have decreased their CD purchases (prior to 2004) by about 13 percent due to Internet file sharing."

ABSTRACT:
This Article is as simple and provocative as its title suggests: it explores the legal implications of the word fuck. The intersection of the word fuck and the law is examined in four major areas: First Amendment, broadcast regulation, sexual harassment, and education. The legal implications from the use of fuck vary greatly with the context. To fully understand the legal power of fuck, the nonlegal sources of its power are tapped. Drawing upon the research of etymologists, linguists, lexicographers, psychoanalysts, and other social scientists, the visceral reaction to fuck can be explained by cultural taboo. Fuck is a taboo word. The taboo is so strong that it compels many to engage in self-censorship. This process of silence then enables small segments of the population to manipulate our rights under the guise of reflecting a greater community. Taboo is then institutionalized through law, yet at the same time is in tension with other identifiable legal rights. Understanding this relationship between law and taboo ultimately yields fuck jurisprudence.

SUBJECT AREA:
Communications Law; Constitutional Law; Education Law; Employment Practice; Psychology and Psychiatry; Sexuality and the Law

SUGGESTED CITATION:
Christopher M. Fairman, "Fuck" (March 7, 2006). ExpressO Preprint Series. Working Paper 1087.
http://law.bepress.com/expresso/eps/1087

ABSTRACT:
This Article is as simple and provocative as its title suggests: it explores the legal implications of the word fuck. The intersection of the word fuck and the law is examined in four major areas: First Amendment, broadcast regulation, sexual harassment, and education. The legal implications from the use of fuck vary greatly with the context. To fully understand the legal power of fuck, the nonlegal sources of its power are tapped. Drawing upon the research of etymologists, linguists, lexicographers, psychoanalysts, and other social scientists, the visceral reaction to fuck can be explained by cultural taboo. Fuck is a taboo word. The taboo is so strong that it compels many to engage in self-censorship. This process of silence then enables small segments of the population to manipulate our rights under the guise of reflecting a greater community. Taboo is then institutionalized through law, yet at the same time is in tension with other identifiable legal rights. Understanding this relationship between law and taboo ultimately yields fuck jurisprudence.

SUBJECT AREA:
Communications Law; Constitutional Law; Education Law; Employment Practice; Psychology and Psychiatry; Sexuality and the Law

SUGGESTED CITATION:
Christopher M. Fairman, "Fuck" (March 7, 2006). ExpressO Preprint Series. Working Paper 1087.
http://law.bepress.com/expresso/eps/1087

You may find this article (which I wrote) interesting: http://www.bepress.com/ev/vol1/iss2/art4/ It compares the fraud threat to eBay to the collapse of Enron.

"See now why you're completely wrong?"

No. And you don't need to be an asshat if you disagree with me... though I'm getting used to your flaming.

Apparently, you are still confusing spending restraint with fiscal responsibility. They are not the same.

"Does the federal governement COLLECT money from the states? YES"

Since when does the federal government collect money from states? If you mean taxpayers within states, then fine... but show me a budget item showing any state paying the federal government for operational or capital expenses.

Furthermore, from an economic standpoint (not a political one), it doesn't really matter whether the funds are received and spent at the national, state, or local level. Here's a good paper that discusses deficit spending and how it is accounted for: http://law.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article =1008&context=rutgersnewarklwps

Fiscal responsibility is a separate issue from states' rights. They are not independent when applied in practice, if you mean "fiscal responsibility only at the federal level." But fiscal responsibility really includes federal, state, and local spending and revenues.

You see now why you're completely wrong?

BTW, I read your recent posts... I see you still as misinformed as ever. The filibuster cannot be used in the House of Reps. You linked that Wikipedia article... maybe you should have bothered reading it.

Well, what should one expect from a troll, but trollish comments?

http://law.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article =1058&context=alea

"The myth of the software patent thicket: An empirical investigation of the relationship between intellectual property and innovation in software firms."

At least for now, this Economics journal is freely accessible online.