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The goal of this piece is to survey the emerging and rapidly growing literature on the economic consequences of COVID-19 and government response, and to synthetize the insights emerging from a very large number of studies. This survey (i) provides an overview of the data sets used to measure social distancing and COVID-19 cases and deaths; (ii) reviews the literature on the determinants of compliance and effectiveness of social distancing; (iii) summarizes the literature on the socio-economic consequences of COVID-19 and government interventions, focusing on labor, health, gender, discrimination and environmental aspects; and (iv) discusses policy proposals.

When Ponzi schemes collapse and enter into bankruptcy liquidation, bankruptcy trustees assume that conveyances made by the debtor for no consideration are fraudulent conveyances. This article argues that they are not. Virtually all the assets held by a Ponzi scheme are held in constructive trust for the victims of the fraud. If victims of the fraud can trace the proceeds of their investments into property transferred to a third party, the third party holds the asset transferred in trust for the relevant victim. When a bankruptcy trustee characterizes the asset as a fraudulently conveyed asset, the trustee expropriates the asset from the victim on behalf of the unsecured creditors of the Ponzi scheme. There are only two justifications for this expropriation. First, tracing is impossible or too costly. This claim reduces to the claim that a thief should not restore the loot to the victim when it is costly to do so. Second, when the third party points out that the victims (not the bankruptcy trustee) owns the cause of action for restoration of the loot, the third party is making an impermissible ius tertii defense. Being estopped from this defense, the third party must surrender the transferred asset to the bankruptcy trustee. This essentially completes the expropriation of victim property for the benefit of the unsecured creditors, who are scarcely entitled to enjoy this stolen property.

Improvements, not an overhaul, are needed for Employment Insurance (EI) eligibility, states a new report from the C.D. Howe Institute. In “Unequal Access: Making Sense of EI Eligibility Rules and How to Improve Them,” authors David Gray and Colin Busby find that the degree of alleged deterioration of the EI program as a social safety net over time is greatly misunderstood and exaggerated.

This essay questions the predominant assumption within legal academia that the goal of scholarship should be to give policy advice. We do not make the obvious point that it is questionable whether legislatures care about what law professors think. Rather, we claim that policy suggestions fall within what Jacques Lacan called the “discourse of the university.” The terminology reflects not a normative judgment that professors should speak it, but an empirical observation that they all too often do speak it.The discourse of the university is expertise. It is not a true critical discourse, but a discourse of power because it is an attempt to make others act in a preferred way. It serves, often inadvertently, as an adjunct to the more obvious exercise of power called the “discourse of the master,” which is roughly equivalent to Hart’s concept of law. The master’s voice, like positive law, is to be obeyed not because it is moral, but merely because it is recognized as authoritative. By seeking to justify legal rules, the discourse of the university provides the missing rationalization for the master, thereby strengthening its reign. That is, the master tells you what to do; the university tries to convince you why you should do it. The two power discourses are to be contrasted to two critical discourses of the analyst and the hysteric. If the power discourses are those of the governor, the critical discourses are those of the governed: the subjects subjected to law. The analyst’s discourse is that of interpretation and counseling. The hysteric’s is the discourse of challenge. We argue that not only should they be the predominant discourses of practice, but also of theoretical and doctrinal scholarship.

This article examines tax liens under New York law, to the extent they arise from tax warrants. The article describes the procedures that the Department of Taxation and Finance must follow to obtain a tax lien (at all times comparing state procedure by that applicable to federal tax liens). It describes the extent to which tax warrants are entitled to Full Faith and Credit in other states. It also examines the curious incorporation by reference of the New York law of money judgments (itself hopelessly confusing). The article concludes by examining the New York tax lien in priority contests with other creditors (secured and unsecured).

In Taylor v. Freeland & Kronz, a debtor claimed a law suit was exempt. The bankruptcy trustee failed to object within the required period. Later, the law suit realized an amount that far exceeded the monetary limit to which the debtor was entitled. The Supreme Court permitted the debtor to keep all of the proceeds, even beyond the statutory limit, claiming that a deadline was a deadline. Recently, in Schwab v. Reilly, the Supreme Court overruled Taylor, holding that a claim to a monetarily limited item can only exempt the monetary limit. The Court tries and fails to "reconcile" these two holdings. Nevertheless, the rule reached in Schwab is a rational and sensible reading of bankruptcy's exemption process. In the new vision, judicial valuations play no role. An interpretive difficulty arises, however. If judicial valuations play no role in the exemption process, why did Congress bother to craft a careful definition of valuation in Bankruptcy Code section 522(a)(2)? In spite of this embarrassment, a humble role can be found for section 522(a)(2), and the Supreme Court's interpretation of the exemption process can be defended.

A very large number of chapter 13 plans are confirmed each year. Unlike chapter 11 plans (for non-individuals), these plans may be revised after confirmation. The modification provisions of the Bankruptcy Code, however, give very little guidance as to what constitutes a permissible modification. In contrast, confirmation of the original plan is very carefully governed. This article theorizes that modification must honor the basic chapter 13 bargain. According to this bargain, the debtor is entitled to the bankruptcy estate and the creditors are entitled to net surplus income. The article assesses whether the diffuse and disorganized caselaw of modification adheres to this normative structure. It explains how some of the precedents permit creditors to raid the bankruptcy estate in violation of a debtor's rights. In particular, it argues that, in a modification, a court should not perform again the "best interest of the creditors" test of Bankruptcy Code 1325(a)(4), nor should bifurcation of secured claims be revisited.

In 1902, Bertrand Russell overturned set theory, which aspired to reduce all sets to their rules of recognition. These rules were to have logical priority to empirical sets posited by empirical human beings. As a result of Russell's Paradox, set theory gave up the hope of theorizing sets. This paper claims Russell's Paradox can be applied directly to jurisprudence. The result is that legal positivism (carefully defined as the claim that law can be reduced to rules of recognition) is invalid and must be abandoned. The corollary to this proposition is that law cannot be entirely separated from morality.

Based on fieldwork conducted at the outset of the current economic downturn, this paper examines the experiences of a group of unemployed managers and professionals in their fifties. Following a review of existing literature, the authors use a narrative methodology to explore how these people incorporate the experience of job loss into their self-images and identities. They identify certain core similarities in the experiences of unemployed professionals and then discern three narrative strategies through which unemployed professionals tried to make sense of their dismissal and sustain their sense of selfhood. The first approached job loss as a temporary career derailment and insisted on seeing a future as a resumption of career, no matter how implausible such a prospect appeared to others. The second saw the job loss as the end of the line, a traumatic event, the product of cruelty, injustice and unfairness, from which there is no prospect of resuming or salvaging a career. The third narrative strategy accepted job loss as a radical discontinuity but refused to lapse into despondency, self-blame or in extreme blame and vilification of others. Instead, it attributed it to social factors, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to other uncontrollable forces, towards which they adopted a philosophical attitude, seeking to live within their means and engage in temporary paid and unpaid work, studies and other creative activities. The term, "narrative coping," is proposed as a way of describing each unemployed professional’s struggle to construct a story that offers both meaning and consolation. The paper is intended as a contribution to two academic fields that in the past have generally stayed well clear of each other. One addresses the psychological consequences of job loss, along with coping mechanisms and the effectiveness of interventions intended to aid the unemployed. The second addresses narrative constructions of identity and career among professionals, focusing specifically on the effects of job loss on the way people construct and sustain their life stories.

On the 50th anniversary of the Hart-Fuller debate, this essay examines Hart's defense of the thesis that law is not necessarily connected with morality. This paper argues that such a conclusion follows from Hart's presentation of the internal point of view as an empirically knowable claim of causation of the human will. The paper argues that the internal point of view contradicts the very idea of human freedom. If the internal point of view is analyzed as Immanuel Kant would analyze it - as a problematic claim that coheres with the possibility that human beings are free - Hart's internal point of view contradicts all of the other ideas for which Hart is known - the separation thesis (law is not the same as morality), the rule of recognition, and the distinction between core and penumbra meaning of legal rules. Although none of Hart's ideas is tenable from a Kantian perspective, nevertheless Hart's jurisprudence still serves two valuable purposes: it emphasizes that positive law and subjectivity are in tension and that legality (i.e., Hart's external point of view) is an aspiration of positivist jurisprudence. That is to say, the moral program of Hart's jurisprudence is to make the external point of view possible by means of the internal point of view. So conceived Hart's jurisprudence becomes a moral, not a descriptive, claim.

This article studies the property aspects of judicial liens that arise upon docketing money judgments in New York. It investigates the execution sales procedure and finds an aspect of it clearly unconstitutional. The homestead exemption and various priority issues are described as well. The interaction of these judicial liens with senior mortgages and bankruptcy proceedings is carefully analyzed, as well as the priority of federal tax liens as against New York judicial liens. The Supreme Court's opinion in United States v. McDermott is criticized as wrongly decided on multiple grounds. This opinion holds that federal tax liens are senior to after-acquired property liens claimed by judgment creditors.

In 2005, Congress attempted to aid the plight of the secured creditor financing automobiles, especially with regard to chapter 13 cram down. The amendments it offered are peculiar and difficult. This article tries to reconcile all parts of the new amendments by distinguishing adequate protection payments from cram down payments, so that the new rules requiring equal cram down payments (which contain an interest component) and adequate protection paytments (which must not contain an interest component) can function in a non-contradictory way. The article also suggests that Congress inadvertently introduced an asset payment rule which permits debtors to put the car to the secured creditor in full payment of the car debt. Technically, this even allows the debtor to keep all insurance proceeds from a wreck while paying the secured creditor in full with the wreck itself - a shocking result not easily avoidable on the statutory language as written.

This article consists of three chapters in a work on Hegel's Science of Logic. The three chapters cover Hegel's analysis of actuality. What is actual for Hegel is that things pass away. Everything else is an illusory being or an appearance. When an appearance of essence shows itself to be finite and false, it passes away and becomes actual, since its destiny is to pass away. This leads directly to Hegel's theory of subjectivity. For Hegel, substance is subject. And what is subject is the continuance of being across the process of the disappearance or dissolution of appearances.

This paper addresses God's existence, according to Hegel. Does God exist? For Hegel, the question does not make sense, because existence (basically the symbolic realm of language and thought - the realm of things) is inadequate to God's concept. People who ask the question, Does God exist? are in search of a proof or a ground in which to assure the questioner that God does or does not exist. Hegel argues, however, that any such ground is by definition finite. What Hegel does is to attack the question Does God exist? on the side of existence. Since existence implies finite things, any adduced ground of God is a finite thing that must waft away, like all other finite things. The paper analysis the middle chapters of essence in Hegel's monumental Science of Logic. It is the fifth nstallment of the author's attempt to explicate this neglected work with a pictographic system that illustrates every logical step Hegel makes in his master work. The middle chapters of essence analyze the nature of things and show them to be finite. The import of Hegel's analysis upon the metaphysics is that any purported ground of God - some specific proof - is itself a thing that is finite and must waft away. Only when the deck is cleared of all finite things can God (in its infinitude) be appreciated in its true notion. The paper defers, however, for a later day, Hegel's ultimate ontological proof of God which exceeds the mediocre realm of mere existence.

This article tests the constitutional structure of the bankruptcy estate in the theater of conveyances that occur after a bankruptcy petition is filed. The article advocates the view that a bankruptcy trustee is not the "absolute owner" of the bankruptcy estate but owns a lien on it. A surplus interest is owned by the debtor which can be conveyed in many situations without interference by a bankruptcy trustee. In the course of the study the article attempts to mediate between bankruptcy's automatic stay and the trustee's power to avoid postpetition conveyances under Bankruptcy Code Section 549(a).

The Science of Logic is the keystone for Hegel's philosophy. Perhaps the single most perplexing problem in this work is the status of the beginning. Hegel insisted that philosophy must be self-grounding. It cannot start from "givens." Yet, if Hegel's beginning is merely stipulated or "given," then his project is defeated. The usual view of Hegel's intent is that the beginning (Pure Being) is the last step, so that what begins as a presupposition ends up being "proven." This article suggests something different. It proposes that the beginning (Pure Being) is actually the "antepenultimate" (or third-from-last) step of the Science of Logic. So conceived, the first step is a kind of collapse from the last step (absolute knowing) to the antepenultimate step. The beginning is a failure to have a coherent thought - the failure to produce an unmediated thing.

The final segment in Hegel's analysis of "being" is measure - the unity of quality and quantity. At stake in these chapters is the difference between quantitative and qualitative change. A being or thing is indifferent to quantitative change, which comes from the outside. For instance, a legislature can increase the stringency of zoning regulations, and yet the legislation is still constitutional "zoning." But there comes a point at which quantitative change effects a qualitative change - zoning becomes an uncompensated "taking" of property. This paper analyzes how Hegel, in the "Science of Logic," derives measure from the categories of quality and quantity, and how essence - the "beyond" of being/appearance is in turn derived. The paper is the third installment on a complete analysis of Hegel's most important (and least read) work - the Science of Logic (1831).

Fraudulent conveyances are supposedly "avoided." Wicked creditors are supposedly equitably "subordinated" in federal bankruptcy proceedings. In this article, Professor Carlson argues that these concepts inadequately describe a legal regime in which only some (not all creditors) have avoidance rights, or where some (but not all) creditors have been harmed by the creditor's wicked act. In fact, what really occurs in both these areas of law is that third party property is transferred to the set of creditors with rights under fraudulent transfer law or under equitable subordination law. Once this is realized, fraudulent transfer law and equitable subordination are revealed to be precisely the same remedy. Given this equation, various aspects of American debtor-creditor law are revealed to be irrational. For instance, in federal bankruptcy proceedings, creditors always share and share alike when fraudulent transfers are avoided. But this is not always so in equitable subordinations. In addition, courts have held that equitable subordination is a uniquely federal remedy. But this is not so if equitable subordination is just ordinary fraudulent transfer law in the context of a liquidation regime. The article also shows that the origin of equitable subordination is in fraudulent transfer law and other state-law concepts, further bolstering the view that there is no distinction between fraudulent transfer avoidance and equitable subordination in general.

This paper is the second of nine installments explaining how Hegel's "Science of Logic" functions. This installment covers Hegel's three chapters on quantity. To the author's knowledge, no philosopher has ever bothered to define what "quantity" or "number" is. Hegel takes this enterprise seriously. Quantity is here defined as being that is subject to yet indifferent to outside determination. Pure quantity is equated with space, time, and the ego. Each of these is self-externalizing--that is, subject to outside determination.. The task of the concept of quantity over the three chapters that Hegel dedicates to the topic is to re-unite with quality. , Hegel has prodQuality stands for the indifference of quantum to externality. When quality is fully actualized, uced "measure." This paper is apparently the first paper in English to analyze Hegel's prescient critique of calculus.

This article assesses the opening three chapters of Hegel's monumental "Science of Logic," a work largely unknown in the United States but recognized in Europe as the foundation of Hegel's impressive philosophical edifice. Hegel's task was to develop a foundation-free philosophy, in which the inherent contradictions in concepts caused the self-destruction of the concept and the generation of a new, improved concept. Hegel begins his work by examining the concept of Pure Being. Being itself shows to be finite, however. Being repeals itself and propels itself into thought. "Reality" therefore gives way to "ideality." Upon entering the realm of the Ideal, Being eventually becomes quantity--content-free being. The opening chapters of the Science of Logic are controversial. Carlson, however, defends Hegel against the various objections that have been raised Hegel's opening moves.

This paper applies Jacques Lacan's theory of retrospective cause to the jurisprudence of H.L.A. Hart and his followers. The thesis is that "effect" (judicial decision) precedes "cause" (law). The proper tense for legal discourse is, therefore, future anterior. The following points follow from this: (1) Positivism asserts that law is not necessarily connected to morality, but this is a priori wrong. Law wishes to be separate from morality, but it necessarily fails. (2) The theory vindicates Dworkin's notorious "right answers" theory, but makes the additional point that there is only one answer: you are guilty; you failed to conform to the law. In short, knowledge of the law is the very definition of the superego. (3) Positive law is the fantasy of the subject that cannot bear the prodigal weight of pure morality. The failure of this fantasy, however, is psychosis itself. (4) Conservative jurisprudence ("judges should follow and not make the law") is fundamentally necessary to any jurisprudence. Yet the "limit" of conservative jurisprudence (in calculus terms) is the Freudian superego. (5) Pragmatism is the vainglorious conceit of self-sovereignty, but it is logically an impossible position.