Author Archive | Leo Katz, guest-blogging

Last week was my baptism as a blogger. The astuteness and vigor of many of the reactions I got seemed to me dwarf even the most successful academic workshop presentations I have had. To be sure, in bluntness too the reactions dwarfed what I am used from a workshop presentation, and did occasionally make me […]

Here is another example I have found interesting in its own right but also helpful in thinking about consent. It is an admittedly completely artificial case of triage. Al’s favorite hobby is the piano. One day he has a traffic accident. As he is pulled from the rubble he notices that the dexterity of one […]

Let me present you with a problem I have found quite fruitful to contemplate, both because I find it intrinsically interesting and because it seems to carry a larger lesson. It is the problem of voluntary torture. Imagine the following proposal by a wild-eyed legislator for making our criminal justice system more efficient. “The point […]

One of the main things a law teacher does in class is to explore the boundary regions of a legal doctrine—the hard-to-categorize cases that are most likely to give rise to litigation: Is it an assault for a man to kiss a sleeping woman? Has the hunter acquired ownership of a wild animal when one […]

Not everyone was convinced by my contention in yesterday’s post that the mismatch theory of loopholes is wrong, to put it mildly. Their reservations are understandable. More detail is needed to make the claim convincing, more detail than a blog post allows. More importantly, however, it is hard to be convinced of the wrongness of […]

A lawyer tells a client who is on the verge of declaring bankruptcy, to move to a state with generous exemptions: to convert most of his remaining assets into a house (exempt), designated pensions (exempt as well) and similar special assets, which the law deems to be the equivalent of the shirt on your back, […]