Author Archive | Eric Posner

That is the proposal of Christopher Mayer, Edward Morrison, and Tomasz Piskorski, contained in this paper, which has received attention from Congress. The proposal addresses one of the major difficulties posed by the current financial/economic crisis: millions of homeowners with negative equity have a strong incentive to walk away from their homes, leading to foreclosure, […]

The first issue of the Journal of Legal Analysis has appeared. Several features should be noted: 1. It is faculty edited and peer reviewed. 2. It publishes

Mark Kleiman rebuts an argument of mine: Eric Posner says that since the other parties to the Convention Against Torture are unlikely to do anything to enforce its provisions, Holder has full discretion to decline prosecution on political or policy grounds. But a duly ratified treaty is the law of the land, and Holder is […]

Phillipe Sands says yes, here and here. He might be right, but there are grounds for skepticism. First, some background. International law carves the world into states; within each state, the national government takes primary responsibility for enforcing the criminal law when crimes occur on its territory. States also claim jurisdiction when nationals commit crimes […]

Barack Obama

In a previous post, I asked whether the Obama administration was likely to prosecute Bush administration officials for authorizing waterboarding after Holder announced that he believed that waterboarding was torture. I concluded that the

Here is the draft executive order for shutting down Guantanamo. Note this language (emphasis added): Sec. 3. Closure of Detention Facilities at Guant

In my last post, I described Durbin

As I mentioned in an earlier post, a number of bills are floating around Congress that would revise Chapter 13 so as to ease the burden on homeowners. Currently, under Chapter 13, if you own a house with a $250,000 mortgage but only a $200,000 market price, you can

Dick Cheney famously advocated strong executive authority, ruing the collapse of presidential power that he witnessed in the era of the Ford administration and the post-Watergate Congress. One of his goals as vice president was to

Paul Krugman

The current idea is to establish an

Ever-hopeful observers say yes, but Holder

Is TARP a fabulous success? No! But it isn