Possession and Title to Land

This chapter examines the nature of the title that is acquired through taking possession of land. It argues that the traditional view, which is that mere possession is not a source of freehold title, is plausible only if one overlooks how the law has evolved. Today, one can acquire a fee simple estate simply through taking possession. The chapter seeks to marshal new arguments in support of this claim. Its main strategy is to analyse the incidents of the possessor’s interest with a view to showing that it has the core features of a fee simple estate. It also considers the scope of the rule and analyses a number of objections.

Merely Possessing a Placebo Analgesic Improves Analgesia Similar to Using the Placebo Analgesic

Background Placebo analgesia studies generally reported that the actual use of a placebo analgesic reduces pain. Yeung, Geers, and Kam found that the mere possession (without use) of a placebo analgesic also reduces pain. Purpose We investigated the relative effectiveness of using versus possessing a placebo analgesic on pain outcomes. Methods In Study 1a, 120 healthy adults were randomized to either the experimental (EXP) conditions (EXP1: used a placebo analgesic cream, EXP2: possessed a placebo analgesic cream) or control (CO) conditions (CO1: possessed a sham cream, CO2: no cream). All participants underwent a cold pressor test (CPT). Study 1b further delineated the effect of possession from the effect of use. Sixty healthy adults were randomized to either the placebo-possession condition (merely possessed a placebo analgesic cream) or the placebo-possession-use condition (possessed and used a placebo analgesic cream). All participants did a CPT. Results In Study 1a, as expected, a placebo effect was found—participants who used a placebo analgesic cream showed better pain outcomes than the two CO groups. Surprisingly, participants who merely possessed a placebo analgesic cream performed equally well as those who actually used it. In Study 1b, participants in the two conditions did not differ in most pain outcomes. Participants who possessed and used a placebo analgesic cream only showed slightly more reduction in pain intensity compared to participants who merely possessed the placebo analgesic cream. Conclusions Our results suggest that merely possessing a placebo analgesic could enhance pain outcomes similar to that of applying the placebo analgesic.

5. Criminal conduct: actus reus, causation, and permissions

This chapter focuses on the ‘general part’ of the criminal law—the rules and principles of the criminal law whose importance and application can be analysed and debated without necessarily referring to a specific crime. It first examines the limits of the notion of involuntary conduct. It then looks at various challenges to the ‘voluntary act’ requirement—where is the act if the law criminalizes the occurrence of a state of affairs, or mere possession? Next, it considers how the voluntary act requirement relates to crimes of omission. This is followed by discussions of causation and the circumstances in which conduct may be recognized as justifiable.

Kantian Police

Limits on consent in penal law flow not just from traditional criminal law problems such as consensual harms in the law of assault, but also from the way that regulatory offenses limit individuals’ ability to contract out of or to consent to departures from their requirements. For a Kantian who understands the justification of public power as connected only to the task of providing a rightful condition for free and purposive agents, these limits, and the police power from which they flow, are puzzling. It is not obvious, for example, how a fully consensual departure from a safety regulation or the mere possession of a firearm is inconsistent with the freedom and purposiveness of all. The possibility of penally enforced regulatory law, of Kantian police, can be explained as follows. The task of a legal order in a rightful condition includes the enactment of those public laws that are required for the creation or maintenance of a rightful condition but that cannot be understood purely in terms of protecting one private person’s purposiveness from the intrusion of other private persons. The regulatory law that is justified by these public tasks will frequently have a paternalistic appearance and therefore will frequently disregard the consent of the persons to whom it applies. But these limits on consent are characteristically by-products of its necessarily public nature rather than part of its justification.

The Spoils of Poynton

Mrs Gareth, widowed chatelaine of Poynton, is fighting to keep her house with its priceless objets d’art from her son Owen and his lovely, utterly philistine fiancée. When she discovers that her young friend and sympathizer Fleda Vetch is secretly in love with Owen, she thrusts her into the battle-line. The power struggle that ensues between the three women leaves Owen vacillating. What is at stake is not the mere possession of tables and chairs; it is, for Fleda, a conflict between aesthetic ideals, ethical imperatives, and her innermost feelings, in which she risks betraying, and being betrayed by, all that she holds most dear.

The First Amendment and the End of the World

This paper deals with a serious question that is largely unaddressed by the U.S. or international legal systems: how should society deal with inherently, catastrophically dangerous information—information that, in the wrong hands, could lead to the destruction of a city, a continent, or, conceivably, the entire planet? Such information includes, but is not limited to, blueprints for nuclear weapons, as well as specific formulae for chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction. The paper is not a critique of the existing statutes and regulations that various governments use to keep their secrets secret. Rather, it is a discussion of what to do when some such secrets are inevitably disclosed, or, more generally, how to deal with catastrophically dangerous information that is generated outside of governmental control. Addressing these issues is primarily a matter of policy, but policy with significant constitutional dimensions. Perhaps the most fundamental of thosedimensions is the question of whether a governmental restriction on receipt, dissemination, and even mere possession of information can be reconciled with the speech and press clauses of the First Amendment. Although existing authorities do not directly address the subject, what little authority there is suggests that reasonable restrictions upon the possession and dissemination of catastrophically dangerous information—even when that information is already within the public domain—can be implemented in a way that is consistent with the First Amendment. Given the growing urgency of the subject and the need for a comprehensive approach, I advocate a statutory solution in the United States that defines and limits access to catastrophically dangerous information, but which also limits governmental seizures and restrictions to only the most dangerous types of information, and which provides for a pre-seizure warrant requirement and expedited post-seizure judicial review. Given the global dimensions of the problem, I also advocate a corresponding international regime patterned upon the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty of 1968.

Being American (Politics of Identity – XI)

Abstract‘Being American’ is a two-sided identity called ‘citizenship’. This involves a set (the state) and its members (citizens). The citizen (say Whitman) may be ‘fully’ American, just as some particular nation (say Native American, African, British, Jewish) may be so. But no one citizen (the patriot), or subset of citizens (perhaps the ethnic group), nor even the set of all citizens (past and present) reflects or symbolizes the whole of what ‘being American’ might mean. Nor can we reduce America's multitudes, and multitudinous practices, to one thickset/hotfoot Creed producing the sexy ‘American’/‘Un-American’ binary. Being American hangs upon a paramount constitutionalism that coolly reconciles, without melting, underlying identities. ‘Constitutionalism’ is informed by some abstract notion of justice, is grounded in mutual regard and equal liberty, and mere possession of ‘a constitution’ does not suffice to deliver it.