Happy Memorial Day

Jennifer Brown and I will be guestblogging over at Larry Lessig’s wonderful blog starting tomorrow (from June 1 – June 7^th): check out http://www.lessig.org/blog/

Jennifer and I also just published an article at AlterNet arguing that New Jersey might respond to the Supreme Court’s boy scout opinion by mandating a private conversation between organizations that wish to retain the right to discriminate and their potential members. The organization would have to privately disclose to potential members that it discriminates. AND members would have to privately sign an acknowledgement (which would be kept on file by the organization for the possibility of in camera court review) that they wish to associate with an organization that retains the right to discriminate. See Warning: We Discriminate, Alternet www.alternet.org/rights/22030/ (May 17, 2005).

Also my Reckless Sex article has just been published A Separate Crime of Reckless Sex, 72 University of Chicago Law Review 599 (2005) (with Katharine Baker). You can read a prepublication version here: http://islandia.law.yale.edu/ayers/recklesssex.pdf But the published version includes some cool empiricism, including the following figure:

The table provides real impetus for our central claim that getting people to use condoms on their first sexual encounters could help reduce the power of STD epidemics. But it also provides a personal opportunity to assess where you stack up on the graph.

You can listen into a book discussion of my promissory fraud book, that I just did today at mms://www.hastingsgroupmedia.com/Criterion/053105promissoryfraud.wma

And finally, University of Chicago Press has just published Optional Law: Real Options in the Structure of Legal Entitlements (forthcoming University of Chicago Press, 2005). Lots of people in the intellectual property field have pointed out that the law has gone overboard in extending property rights. In lots of contexts, we would do better with mandated licensing fees that give non-owners the option to use and pay a fee. Optional Law not only formalizes the advantage of optional licenses but also shows there’s a dizzying array of optional entitlement structures that can dominate traditional notions of property. There are even experimental results showing that people bargain more efficiently in the shadow of optional regimes than in the shadow of property rules. You can read more about the book at: http://balkin.blogspot.com/2005/05/optional-law.html You can download the first chapter at http://islandia.law.yale.edu/ayers/obook.chapter1.pdf. Or as compensation for wading through these long spam emails, I would be happy to mail you a copy for free if you send me an email with the subject line “please send me a copy of Optional Law”… please include your mailing address. Single authored publications by yours truly are increasingly rare.

Sincerely,

Ian Ayres

William K. Townsend Professor

Yale Law School

PO Box 208215, New Haven, CT 06520

203.432.7101 (o), 203.432.4769 (fax), 203.624.5654 (h)

ian.ayres@yale.edu