The essay begins with an overview of the ICESCR Committee’s General Comment on ICESCR Article 15(1)(c), “the right of everyone to benefit from the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.” It then analyzes the key provisions of the General Comment relevant to the collective administration of copyright and neighboring rights. The essay next considers two legal and policy issues with important human rights implications: whether membership in CMOs should be mandatory, and whether CMOs should promote national culture. The essay concludes by evaluating the practical implications of adopting a human rights framework to analyze collective management issues.

With that background, the article considers the question whether there should be a fundamental change in the role and character of the position of U.S. Attorney. It concludes that a career or civil service role for U.S. Attorneys is neither politically feasible nor desirable. Rather, the presidential appointment of U.S. Attorneys, with approval by the Senate, provides a desirable counterweight to Main Justice, both by creating separate spheres of political influence and by allowing for decentralization of federal power. It argues that there is real value in a structure that delegates federal prosecutorial power to local districts, reinforcing federalism and allowing federal law to be adapted to different conditions.

Although the advantages of political appointments for the U.S. Attorneys outweigh the disadvantages, there are still reasons for concern. The article evaluates four mechanisms that have been proposed to moderate the effect of partisan politics at the appointment stage and the effect of improper partisan pressure that may be exerted on U.S. Attorneys by the executive branch, Congress or local political leaders. Three of the mechanisms are identified as promising alternatives to an impracticable and undesirable reconfiguration of the Department.

In this inquiry, I identify some tensions between the understanding of the judicial role animating the umpire analogy and the actual practice of constitutional adjudication in the race conscious student assignment cases recently decided by the Supreme Court of the United States. I argue that those cases vividly illustrate how inapt the umpire analogy is if one takes its appeal to formalism seriously as a statement about how judges can or should execute their responsibilities in constitutional cases.

The umpire analogy would have judges just decide constitutional cases according to the rules. Judges, however, cannot just decide constitutional cases according to the rules because they cannot agree on what the rules are in the vast majority of the most important cases. Judges cannot agree on what the rules are in such cases because a critical purpose of constitutional rules is to express a social vision, and many social visions in contemporary American society are deeply contested. Instead of pursuing the impossible task of simply applying the rules, the judiciary does its job and sustains its institutional legitimacy over the long run in significant part by articulating a vision of social order that resonates with fundamental public values. The school cases exemplify a social practice in which judges make contested appeals to popular ideals in fashioning - not merely applying - the rules that constitute contemporary constitutional law.

In Part I, I examine the virtues and vulnerabilities of the umpire analogy. In Part II, I identify pertinent parts of the judicial opinions on voluntary integration plans. In Part III, I explore what those opinions elucidate - and what the umpire analogy occludes - about the preconditions of law's public legitimation and the purposes of the institution of law, particularly in the area of constitutional law.

In our view, conflicts should be seen broadly as the discipline that developed to deal with conflicts between laws, without necessarily being committed to any one method or policy. Surprisingly, we demonstrate that it is precisely the seemingly negative features of conflicts - the field's high degree of technicality disparaged as a "conflict-of-laws machine" and the multitude of theories famously deemed a "dismal swamp" - that figure among the advantages of a conflict-of-laws approach to international law in domestic courts.

A conflict-of-laws approach offers ways to respect the nature of international law as law, without simplifying that nature by characterizing it exactly as domestic law. In addition, seeing the parallel with conflict of laws brings a wealth of experience that can enrich and refine the debate on international law in domestic courts. Finally, the parallel with conflicts changes international law in domestic courts from a specific problem addressed by international and constitutional lawyers into a general problem of relativism - which, we argue, conflict of laws is uniquely positioned to address.

The review traces how public choice writing on these problems has been influenced by two evolutionary improvements in public choice thinking: (1) a shift from models that posit policy will always be dominated by concentrated economic interests to models that incorporate the possibility of broad-based citizen collective action under certain conditions; (2) a shift from models employing thick-rationality assumptions that take the preferences of actors to be defined exclusively in terms of their material self-interest, to models with thin-rationality assumptions that acknowledge the possibility that principled commitments, including to the general social welfare or to sound public policy, can form part of the preference set of many political actors. Empirical work has validated these theoretical and modeling improvements.

The models that are emerging from these two shifts remain faithful to public choice's fundamental orientation toward envisioning a "politics without romance," and they persist in analyzing public decision making by understanding the individual motives for action. At the same time, they acknowledge a fuller range of possibilities from government action than the simpler but less accurate rent-seeking models do. The simpler models predict only grim results from government decision making, suggesting that government action routinely fails to address environmental problems constructively and does so primarily as a means of transferring wealth to powerful economic interests away from the rest of us. Under the improved models, government can be responsive to the public's interests and the general welfare when conditions are right.

Public choice has always traced an intellectual lineage back to neoclassical market theory, which has made important contributions to environmental policy by developing a toolkit of environmental market-improving measures such as fees, pollution taxes, subsidies and cap-and-trade, along with analyzes of the pros and cons of each tool in light of the environmental problem to be addressed. Going forward, public choice research can make similar contributions to the study of how environmental policy is made if the newer public choice models are deployed to develop more systematic recommendations of feasible ways to improve the quality of governmental decision making.

In 21st century America, the answer seems simple - government experts and scientists tell us. We take for granted that our tap water is subject to exacting chemical and biological analyzes. The name of the relevant federal law - The Safe Drinking Water Act - says it all. Yet, in historical terms, the very idea of the need to conduct detailed chemical and biological analyzes, much less even appreciating why we should care about drinking water’s invisible contents, is still stunningly novel. The germ theory of disease has only been around for about 150 years, a recent development compared to the history of human settlement. And, even today, legitimate questions are being asked about our drinking water. Are the standards stringent enough? Does the infrastructure delivering our water meet these standards? How can we be sure we are even regulating the right substances?

This article explores how societies through history have answered the timeless question, “Is it safe to drink the water?” Our technical understanding of water safety is more sophisticated than ever before, but a society’s understanding and regulation of drinking water has never been a purely technical matter. While the Safe Drinking Water Act may look dramatically different than the laws and norms relied on by other societies and in other times, they share far more similarities than differences.

Norms and values shape our management of safe drinking water just as surely as do chemical assays. The fundamental problem, as we shall see, is that no source of water can ever be safe in completely objective terms, either today or two hundred years from now. Because of the universality of this challenge, because safety is an eternally moving target, one can take valuable lessons from the historical record. The article explores how societies have changed their conception of safe drinking water through time, shifting their behavior, governance and laws as a result, and what this means for us today.

We believe that the evidence reviewed here shows that the PSLRA's provisions have largely achieved their intended purposes. For example, many more private suits are headed by an institutional lead plaintiff, such plaintiffs appear to fulfill the desired role of monitoring the suit's prosecution and their presence is associated with suits yielding better settlements and lower attorneys' fees awards. SEC enforcement efforts, while significant, have tended to focus on weaker targets, suggesting that the big fish get away. Equally importantly, markets impose their own discipline on companies whose managers release false financial reports and, in turn, firms discipline the managers who are responsible for false misleading reporting, perhaps because of the presence of, or potential for, private enforcement actions.