The conclusion drawn here is that property owners do indeed owe moral obligations to future generations. But the scope of those obligations is restricted, certainly more so than some theorists, such as Jeremy Waldron, have claimed. Unlike Waldron, for whom such obligations are a matter of rights, I argue that the obligations that property owners owe to past generations are grounded on dependence. Specifically, I argue that if we expect fellow members of our communities in future generations to continue what I call the life-transcending projects that we began, then it is incumbent on us to provide that same background conditions that we enjoyed to those future generation community members to whom we transfer the responsibility of continuing or fulfilling our life-transcending projects. Moreover, as the distance between the living and the unborn increases, our obligations to future generational communities generally weaken. Our obligations to them are limited to the background conditions that enable them to continue the life-transcending projects transferred to them. These conclusions place me in an intermediate position between those who take a robust view of the obligations that the living owe to future generations and those who think that the living owe no such obligations at all.

There is a third form of government action that receives less attention than forms (a) and (b), however, possibly owing in part to its straddling the traditional public/private divide. We call it the “government as market actor” form, whereby government instrumentalities pursue traditionally “public” ends through traditionally “private” means. Inattention to this pervasive form of government action might signal a theoretical blindspot attending the public/private distinction itself. At least as importantly, however, this inattention also denies us a practical opportunity: it prevents our more fully exploiting the government role in question.

This essay, part of a larger project, aims to encourage fuller theoretical appreciation and wider practical use of the role we identify. It first offers a provisional taxonomy of recurrent forms that the government market actor role appears to take, affording a wealth of illustrative case studies in so doing. It then envisions additional good that governments might do, simply by extending their market acting roles to spheres in which they have yet to be fully utilized. The essay concludes by suggesting next steps in both theorizing and employing the government market actor role.

The move from primarily micro- to combined micro- and macroprudential finance-regulatory regimes is surely to be welcomed, for reasons that this author has offered in earlier articles. The old ‘lean versus clean’ debate is resolved once again now in favor of leaning. The victory does, however, raise certain new legal challenges to which predominantly microprudential finance-regulatory regimes are not typically subject – challenges of which regulators and other financially-oriented lawyers will wish to stay mindful. This Article aims to assist that endeavor by exhaustively cataloguing and provisionally addressing the mentioned challenges, in order that interested parties might thereby be able to find comprehensive treatment of the subject in one place.

This problem represents a clash of legal cultures. International lawyers trained in civil law jurisdictions are nonplussed by this development, while the Anglo-American literature on targeting has all-but-ignored this conflict. But when told of these decisions, U.S. military lawyers view this “reinterpretation” of intent as conflating the principles of distinction and proportionality. If a military commander anticipates that attacking a building may result in civilian casualties, why bother analyzing whether the collateral damage is proportional? Under the dolus eventualis view, the commander is already guilty of violating the principle of distinction. The following Article voices skepticism about this vanguard application of dolus eventualis to the law of targeting, in particular by noting that dolus eventualis was excluded by the framers of the Rome Statute and was nowhere considered by negotiators of Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Convention. Finally and most importantly, a dolus eventualis-inspired law of targeting undermines the Doctrine of Double Effect, the principle of moral theology on which the collateral damage rule rests. At stake is nothing less than the moral and legal distinction between terrorists who deliberately kill civilians and lawful combatants who foresee collateral damage.

Men can also qualify for benefits based solely on their status as husband or widower of a worker; but spouse benefits go overwhelmingly to women.

No additional payroll tax is levied on the employee-spouse to cover spouse benefits nor do they constitute a shift in the payout pattern between spouses of a set amount of benefits. These are quite simply additional payments based on marriage.

Appended to Social Security in 1939 and dramatically liberalized since, spouse benefits represent a discrete and increasingly problematic feature of the program. At a time when analysts and politicians of nearly all persuasions agree that the long-term fiscal health of Social Security calls for legislative revision, one might expect serious proposals for spouse benefit reform, but so far that has not occurred. No doubt, that is because any prospective reduction in spouse benefits that promised to contribute to Social Security’s long-term fiscal balance would, standing alone, quite properly be perceived as having a negative impact on women. Costly, outdated, and inequitable, these marriage-based benefits may be, but unless supplanted by some less arbitrary way to connect Social Security to families and alternative measures to assure adequate retirement income for women they cannot be got rid of. On the other hand, any package of Social Security reforms that fails to rethink and revise the spouse-benefit provisions will miss a rare opportunity to improve the fairness and adequacy of the program’s benefits for women and run the risk of disadvantaging them as a group.

The article traces the history of the provisions governing entitlement to and the amount of spouse benefits, exploring why a program addition that seemed so attractive in the program’s early years has become a source of disturbing arbitrariness and inequity and how a measure specifically designed to improve retirement income for women has become less and less effective. The deficiencies of the present system are illuminated through comparison with alternative methods of connecting a family’s covered earnings with later benefits modeled on state marital property regimes and the law’s treatment of other forms of spousal retirement income. The article concludes with a survey of the challenges, administrative and political, that would confront any serious effort to pursue so dramatic a reform.

This paper aims to assist analysis of and reflection on the range of options for ensuring Social Security's future while not adding yet another solvency proposal to the already ample supply. It begins with several background observations. These are followed by a discussion of personal (or private) accounts to which former President George W. Bush gave salience and which continue to be included among the talking points of politicians hostile to Social Security's fundamental structure. Next the paper reviews the more likely program changes that would (unlike personal accounts) directly address Social Security's long-term "deficit." That section is followed by one sketching possible revisions in the program's benefit structure designed to achieve ends other than reducing Social Security expenditures. The paper concludes with some observations on the role that framing has played in past debates over Social Security's future. Finally, there is an appendix explaining the central terms and components of the current program. It is provided for readers who might otherwise be unclear about the meaning or implications of changing Social Security's "Primary Insurance Amount" formula or its "Full Retirement Age."

This Essay accordingly aims to impose structure upon one particular, and indeed particularly complex, source of uncertainty now damaging EMU prospects. That is the matter of how best to defend, legally speaking, continuity of contract in the event of some basic change in the current Euro regime.

The hope is that sizing up and breaking down this question into its constituent parts might accomplish at least three related aims. One is to render the hypothetical problems raised by the question more tractable than they would otherwise be. Another is to facilitate the development of provisional plans of approach to such problems in the event they should present themselves. Finally, yet another is to afford confidence to the markets by enabling contingency planning of the sort just suggested, thereby lessening the likelihood of self-fulfilling ‘run’-like activity on European debt instruments.

I contend that for understanding the standards of proof, the modern versions of logic — in particular, fuzzy logic and belief functions — work better than classical probability. This modern logic suggests that factfinders view evidence of an imprecisely perceived and described reality to form a fuzzy degree of belief in a fact’s existence; they then apply the standard of proof in accordance with the theory of belief functions, by comparing their belief in a fact’s existence to their belief in its negation.

This understanding explains how the standard of proof actually works in the law world. It gives a superior mental image of the factfinders’ task, conforms more closely to what we know of people’s cognition, and captures better what the law says its standards are and how it manipulates them. One virtue of this conceptualization is that it is not a radically new view. Another virtue is that it nevertheless manages to resolve some stubborn problems of proof, including the infamous conjunction paradox.