University of Minnesota law preofessor Jim Chen has launched a new blog, Jurisdynamics. In his first post, he explains the blog's title:
Jurisdynamics describes the interplay between legal responses to exogenous change and the law's own endogenous capacity for adaptation. The world that law tries to govern has has become "so vast that fully to comprehend it would require an almost universal knowledge ranging from" economics and the natural sciences "to the niceties of the legislative, judicial and administrative processes of government." Queensboro Farms Prods., Inc. v. Wickard, 137 F.2d 969, 975 (2d Cir. 1943). Within the realm of legal scholarship, this blog aspires to the goal that historian David Christian set out for his discipline: "that the appropriate time scale for the study of history may be the whole of time." David Christian, The Case for "Big History," 2 J. World Hist. 223, 223 (1991). Jurisdynamics will present the case for "big law," for the proposition that the substantive scale on which law should be studied, taught, and learned is the entirety of human experience.
Jim's work is typically provocative and engaing, so I would expect his blog to be so as well. Welcome to the blogosphere!
Hmmmm....should law try to govern the world?
Perhaps he means
Lexentropy, quantity specifying the amount of bureaucracy or regulation in a system containing money or other wealth. Originally defined in THERMODYNAMICS in terms of heat and temperature, lexentropy indicates the degree to which a given quantity of human energy or money is available for doing useful work -- the greater the lexentropy, the less available the energy or wealth. Money can be extracted only when a system within which there are differences in wealth changes from a more ordered state to a less ordered state. For example, consider a system composed of a wealthy group and a less wealthy group; this system is ordered because the rich guys are separated from the poor guys. If a successful law suit is initiated, dollars will flow from the rich guys to the less rich ones. This dollar flow flow can be utilized by a public interest group (device which turns dollar energy into supposed justice), but once the two groups have reached the similar wealth, no more work can be done. Furthermore, the combined less-wealthy bodies usually cannot unmix themselves into wealthy and less wealthy parts in order to repeat the process, because the basis for the lawsuit has now become "settled law.". Although no wealth has been lost by the transfer, the wealth can no longer be used for investment. Thus the lexentropy of the system has increased. According to the second law of jurisdynamics, during any process the change in lexentropy of a human system and its surroundings is either zero or positive. In other words the lexentropy of the human universe as a whole tends toward a maximum. This means that although wealth cannot vanish because of the law of conservation of energy (i.e., double-entry bookkeeping), it tends to be degraded from useful forms to useless ones. When the universe as a whole reaches maximum lexentropy, wealth will be the same everywhere and no wealth will be able to be converted into work. Also, no one will dare to do anything for fear of either being sued or breaking the law. This situation is known as the "just" or "enlightened" society. It should be noted that the second law of jurisdynamics is statistical rather than exact; there is nothing to prevent some folks from separating wealth from others. However such an occurrence is so improbable that as to be impossible from a practical point of view.