A Course In Three Divisions. Division 1, Basic Trends; Division 2, Creative Thinkers; Division 3, Understanding Modern Art.

A Course In Three Divisions. Division 1, Basic Trends; Division 2, Creative Thinkers; Division 3, Understanding Modern Art.

Conundrums, puzzles, and perversities: these are Leo Katz's stock-in-trade, and in "Why the Law Is So Perverse", he focuses on four fundamental features of our legal system, all of which seem to not make sense on some level and to demand explanation. First, legal decisions are essentially made in an either/or fashion - guilty or not guilty, liable or not liable, either it's a contract or it's not - but reality is rarely that clear-cut. Why aren't there any in-between verdicts? Second, the law is full of loopholes. No one seems to like them, but somehow they cannot be made to disappear. Why? Third, legal systems are loath to punish certain kinds of highly immoral conduct while prosecuting other far less pernicious behaviors. What makes a villainy a felony? Finally, why does the law often prohibit what are sometimes called win-win transactions, such as organ sales or surrogacy contracts? Katz asserts that these perversions arise out of a cluster of logical difficulties related to multicriterial decision making. The discovery of these difficulties dates back to Condorcet's eighteenth-century exploration of voting rules, which marked the beginning of what we know today as social choice theory. Condorcet's voting cycles, Arrow's Theorem, Sen's Libertarian Paradox - every seeming perversity of the law turns out to be the counterpart of one of the many voting paradoxes that lie at the heart of social choice. Katz's lucid explanations and apt examples show why they resist any easy resolutions. "The New York Times Book Review" called Katz's first book "a fascinating romp through the philosophical side of the law". "Why the Law Is So Perverse" is sure to provide its readers a similar experience.

In "Ill-Gotten Gains," Leo Katz describes the underlying principles that not only guide the law but also moral decisions. Mixing wit with insight, anecdotes with analysis, Katz uncovers what is really at stake in crimes such as insider trading, blackmail, and plagiarism. With its startling conclusions and myriad twists, this book will fascinate all those intrigued by the perplexing relationship between morality and law.
"An ambitious and well-written book of legal and moral theory to overthrow both utilitarianism and its cousin, the economic approach to law."--Richard A. Posner, "New Republic"
"A good, well-written book full of interesting examples."--"Library Journal"
" An] elegant defense of circumvention and subterfuge . . . a heroically counterintuitive book."--Malcolm Gladwell, "New Yorker"

With with and intelligence, Leo Katz seeks to understand the basic rules and concepts underlying these moral, linguistic, and psychological puzzles that plague the criminal law. Drawing on insights from analytical philosophy and psychology, he brings order into the seemingly endless multiplicity of these puzzles; many of them turn out to be variations of a few basic philosophical problems, making their appearance in different guises. To test his arguments, Katz moves far beyond the traditional body of exemplary criminal law cases. He brings into view the decision of common law judges in colonial and postcolonial Africa, famous cases such as the Nuremberg trials, Aaron Burr's treason, and ABSCAM, as well as well-known incidents in fiction.

The law is full of schemes that use subterfuge and circumvention. Clients routinely ask their lawyers to help them find a legal way around the law; and lawyers routinely oblige them, saying things like: "You would like to make a movie with lots of steamy sex and not run the risk of an obscenity suit? Well, why don't you load it up with some important social message, and that way it no longer qualifies as obscene!" Or: "You would like to reduce your taxes? Well, why don't you consider the following ridiculous-sounding investment ..." When, if ever, are such schemes wrong? When does tax avoidance become tax evasion? When does a hard bargain become blackmail? And even if an action is legally sanctioned, could it still be morally wrong? In Ill-Gotten Gains, Leo Katz leads us through a tangled realm rife with puzzles and dilemmas to find the underlying principles that guide not only the law but our moral decisions as well. Mixing wit with insight, anecdotes with analysis, Katz uncovers what is really at stake in crimes such as insider trading, blackmail, and plagiarism. He then goes on to reveal their surprising connections to cases where someone tries to evade the law by finding refuge in it, from the convict who staves off execution by rendering himself incompetent with mind-altering drugs, to companies that sell strategies to beat the SAT test. Ultimately, Katz argues, the law, as well as our conscience, is surprisingly uninterested in final outcomes and astonishingly sensitive to how we get there, which is why sins of commission are so much more weighty than sins of omission. Among the more peculiar implications of this phenomenon is that much behavior we intuitively judge to be devious, Machiavellian, or downright diabolical is in fact perfectly moral; and that much behavior which, in a free society, we consider the very model of morality is in fact quite the opposite. Ill-Gotten Gains draws on a wide range of examples, from Jesuitic advice on how to kill someone with impunity, to Hemingway's observations on bullfights, and the Scott-Amundsen race for the South Pole. With its startling conclusions and myriad twists along the way, the book will fascinate all those intrigued by the often perplexing relationship between morality and the law.