A number of judge-made doctrines attempt to promote international comity by reducing possible tensions between the United States and foreign sovereigns. For example, courts usually interpret ambiguous statutes to conform ...

In both legal practice and legal scholarship, it is sometimes best to proceed without attempting to answer the foundational questions. Originalists can inquire into the original public meaning of the Equal Protection Clause ...

Human beings are prone to "misfearing": Sometimes they are fearful in the absence of significant danger, and sometimes they neglect serious risks. Misfearing is a product of bounded rationality, and it produces serious ...

Excessive borrowing, no less than insufficient savings, might be a product of bounded rationality. Identifiable psychological mechanisms are likely to contribute to excessive borrowing; these include myopia, procrastination, ...

As many treaties and statutes emphasize, some risks are distinctive in the sense that they are potentially irreversible or catastrophic; for such risks, it is sensible to take extra precautions. When a harm is irreversible, ...

How can groups elicit and aggregate the information held by their individual members? There are three possibilities. Groups might use the statistical mean of individual judgments; they might encourage deliberation; or they ...

This review-essay explores the uses and limits of cost-benefit analysis in the context of environmental protection, focusing on three recent books: Priceless, by Frank Ackerman and Lisa Heinzerling; Cellular Phones, Public ...

Because risks are on all sides of social situations, it is not possible to be “precautionary” in general. The availability heuristic ensures that some risks stand out as particularly salient, whatever their actual magnitude. ...