Descripciones mejoradas de Syndetics:

Does the seller of a house have to tell the buyer that the water is turned off twelve hours a day? Does the buyer of a great quantity of tobacco have to inform the seller that the military blockade of the local port, which had depressed tobacco sales and lowered prices, is about to end? Courts say yes in the first case, no in the second. How can we understand the difference in judgments? And what does it say about whether the psychiatrist should disclose to his patient's girlfriend that the patient wants to kill her?

Kim Lane Scheppele answers the question, Which secrets are legal secrets and what makes them so? She challenges the economic theory of law, which argues that judges decide cases in ways that maximize efficiency, and she shows that judges use equality as an important principle in their decisions. In the course of thinking about secrets, Scheppele also explores broader questions about judicial reasoning--how judges find meaning in legal texts and how they infuse every fact summary with the values of their legal culture. Finally, the specific insights about secrecy are shown to be consistent with a general moral theory of law that indicates what the content of law should be if the law is to be legitimate, a theory that sees legal justification as the opportunity to attract consent.

This is more than a book about secrets. It is also a book about the limits of an economic view of law. Ultimately, it is a work in constructive legal theory, one that draws on moral philosophy, sociology, economics, and political theory to develop a new view of legal interpretation and legal morality.

Tabla de contenidos provista por Syndetics

• Preface
• 1 Framing Secrecy
• Chapter 1 The Sociology of Secrecy
• The Trails of Five Secrets
• The Concept of Secrecy
• Forms of Secrecy
• Justifications for Secrets
• A Note on Lies and Half-Truths
• Secrets and the Social Distribution of Knowledge
• Chapter 2 The Economic Analysis of Secrecy
• An Economic Hypothesis
• The Economics of Information: An Overview
• The Law and Economics of Secrecy
• Efficient Secrets
• Chapter 3 Secrecy and Strategy
• Strategic Uses of Information
• The Social Context of Strategic Secrets
• The Costs of Secret-Keeping in a Reactive World
• 2 Developing a New Jurisprudence
• Chapter 4 A Contractarian Theory of Law
• Consent as a Basis for Legal Morality
• How Consent Works
• Those Who Choose
• Scope of Consent: Holistic or Piecemeal
• Negative and Positive Contractarianism
• Direct Secrets
• Serial and Shared Secrets
• Contractarianism and Utilitarianism
• Chapter 5 A Theory of Legal Interpretation: The Mutual Construction of Rules and Facts
• On the Question of Texts
• The Need for a Theory of Interpretation
• The Interpretive Theory of the Economic Analysis of Law
• A Theory of Legal Interpretation
• Implications for the Study of Law
• Coda: How Law Is Not Like Literature
• 3 Understanding Fraud
• Chapter 6 The Nondisclosure Puzzle and Equal Access to Information
• Where the Buyer Knows More than the Seller
• Where the Seller Knows More than the Buyer
• Equal Access as a Theory of the Doctrine of Nondisclosure
• Comparing Contractarian and Economic Theories
• Chapter 7 Legally Relevant Facts in Fraud Cases
• The Importance of Material Information
• The Status of the Parties: Buyer and Seller
• Equal or Superior Means of Knowledge
• The Relation of the Parties to Each Other
• The Nature of the Agreement
• Special Confidence
• The Conduct of the Knowledgeable Party
• Chapter 8 Comparing Economic and Contractarian Theories of Nondisclosure and Fraud
• The Economic Analysis of Nondisclosure
• Legitimate Nondisclosure and Equal Access to Information
• 4 Understanding Privacy
• Chapter 9 Secrecy and Privacy
• Secrets in the Shadow of Privacy
• Privacy Claims and Standing to Sue
• Chapter 10 Threshold Rules and Direct Secrets
• Threshold Rules
• Direct Secrets
• Chapter 11 Serial Secrets
• Overdisclosure
• Identification
• Confidential Relations
• A Note on Secondhand Secrets
• Chapter 12 Trade Secrets as Corporate Privacy
• Secrecy
• Investment
• Confidential Relations
• Independent Discovery
• Chapter 13 Comparing Economic and Contractarian Theories of Privacy
• The Economic Theory of Privacy
• A Contractarian Theory of Privacy
• 5 Understanding Implied Warranties
• Chapter 14 The Rule and Reality of Caveat Emptor in New York State, 1804-1900
• Caveat Emptor as a Legal Puzzle
• Core Applications of the Doctrine of Caveat Emptor
• Food, Fraud, Horses, and Slaves: The Original Exceptions to the Caveat Emptor Rule
• The Rise of Sales by Sample: 1825-1900
• Another Shift in Sales Conventions: The Executory Contract, 1840-1900
• Complex Products and the Knowledgeable Seller: 1860-1900
• Economic and Contractarian Theories of Implied Warranty
• 6 Concluding
• Chapter 15 The Logic of Legal Secrets
• Toward a Social Theory of Secrecy
• Toward a Contractarian Theory of Law
• Toward a Constitutional Jurisprudence
• Appendix: Studying the Common Law: An Introduction for Social Scientists
• References
• Table of Cases
• Index of Names
• Subject Index

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Kim Lane Scheppele is assistant professor of political science, assistant research scientist in the Institute of Public Policy Studies, and adjunct assistant professor of law at the University of Michigan. She is the coauthor of Crime and Punishment: Changing Attitudes in America and is cofounder of the Conference Group on Jurisprudence and Public Law.