热点大瓜

How Poverty Leads to Under-Participation in Innovation
April 4, 2025
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Speaker: Stephanie Plamondon
Abstract: The U.S. is an innovation-based economy. To grow and thrive, the country depends on continued creative contributions from its citizens and the transformation of those contributions into innovative products and services. For much of the past century, with the U.S. considered the world leader in innovation, this growth was a given.

But the privileged position of the U.S. in the global innovation landscape is under threat. In recent years, the U.S. has fallen out of the top ten innovative countries in the Bloomberg Innovation Index. Commentators and scholars lament the country’s stalled productivity and declining ability to compete against international cities for venture-capital backed startups and creative talent. As other countries learn and implement lessons about innovation from the U.S., global competition threatens to leave the one-time leader behind.

In the face of this shift of fortunes, there is no shortage of proposed solutions. But in the midst of this discussion, one topic that has been largely overlooked is the potential role that poverty and inequality play in a country’s ability to produce socially beneficial innovation.

To this end, innovation scholars have recently made a concerning discovery: those raised at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder in the U.S. innovate at much lower rates than those raised in more affluent circumstances. While there are many possible causal contributors to this result, in this chapter I draw on a wealth of psychological and neuroscientific evidence to make the case for one such contributor: the profound impact growing up in poverty has on brain development. Poverty changes brain developmental trajectories in ways that negatively impact present and future creative and innovative potential. Additionally, the circumstance of poverty affects adult decision-making in ways inimical to creativity.

This analysis suggests that a large percentage of the U.S. population is failing to meet its innovative potential because of poverty. Economist Raj Chetty, whose group identified this innovation gap between rich and poor, refers to the children who could be innovating as adults (but are not) as “lost Einsteins.” Further, the innovation gap, though at least partially driven by socioeconomic status, also has racial and gender components that overlap with socioeconomic factors. Given the importance of innovation for our economy and the general welfare, this missed innovation is a loss not only for individual lost Einsteins, but also for the country. The Chetty study estimates, for example, that if “women, minorities, and children from lower-income families were to invent at the same rate as white men from high-income (top-quintile) families, the total number of inventors in the economy would quadruple.”

This chapter helps set the stage for my larger argument that poverty- and inequality- reduction, in the form of guaranteed income, is a viable and sensible innovation policy that will help the U.S. reclaim its position as a global innovation leader.

Speaker Bio: Stephanie Plamondon joined the BYU Law faculty in 2015. Her research focuses on mind sciences, innovation, and the law. She is particularly interested in applying empirical work in psychology and neuroscience to current legal and policy challenges in innovation law, intellectual property law, criminal law, public health law, and other areas. Her recent research has explored how poverty and adversity impact decision-making and what this means for innovation, creation, and distributive justice. She is currently working on a book project that explores the potential of poverty-reducing policies to bring more underrepresented persons into the innovator pool and improve the quality of innovative and creative output in the U.S.

Prior to joining BYU's faculty, Plamondon was the resident academic fellow with Stanford's Program in Neuroscience and Society (SPINS), a joint initiative of Stanford Law School and Stanford Department of Psychology. She also spent time as a patent litigation attorney at Goodwin Procter in Boston, and as a law clerk for the Honorable Raymond C. Clevenger III on the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C. In Fall 2018, she was a visiting professor at Notre Dame Law School.

Plamondon holds a J.D. (cum laude) from Harvard Law School, a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of Utah School of Medicine, and an undergraduate degree in Physics from the University of Prince Edward Island in her hometown of Charlottetown. Her legal writing (some of which has been published under the name Stephanie Plamondon Bair) has appeared in the Northwestern University Law Review, the Boston University Law Review, the BYU Law Review, the Ohio State Law Journal, the University of Illinois Law Review, and the Berkeley Technology Law Journal, among other outlets. Her science writing has appeared in Nature, Animal Behaviour, and the Journal of Comparative Psychology.

Color, Race, and Employment Discrimination
February 21, 2025
Thursday, 509 O'Brian Hall
Noon Reception; 12:30 Presentation
Option to attend via Zoom, 

Access the advance paper(s) here.

Speaker: Joni Hersch (Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Law and Economics)

Abstract: There is substantial evidence of discriminatory treatment of persons with darker skin color. Immigrants with darker skin color in particular suffer a substantial earnings penalty that has not diminished over time or with duration in the United States. Legal charges of color discrimination in employment have also increased substantially over time. Color discrimination is likely to become increasingly relevant as the United States continues to become more racially and ethnically diverse through immigration and a growing multiracial and multi-ethnic population. Although Title VII does not prohibit claims of discrimination between parties of the same identifiable race, courts are typically skeptical of intra-racial claims even when color is alleged as the source of discriminatory treatment. In light of the newly-mandated addition of the Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) reporting category for US government surveys, color discrimination claims may become more viable as those of MENA ancestry will no longer be automatically categorized as White. Furthermore, the new Federal combined question for collecting racial and ethnicity data highlights the importance of recognizing color as well as race in monitoring enforcement of civil rights laws.

Speaker Bio: Joni Hersch is an economist who works in the areas of employment discrimination and empirical law and economics. Professor Hersch joined Vanderbilt Law School as a professor of law and economics in 2006, with secondary appointments in the Department of Economics and the Owen Graduate School of Management. That same year, she and W. Kip Viscusi co-founded Vanderbilt’s Ph.D. Program in Law and Economics. 

Hersch is a research fellow with IZA Institute for Labor Economics and was co-editor of the peer-reviewed IZA Journal of Labor Economics from summer 2015 through summer 2018. She also serves as associate editor of the Review of Economics of the Household. 

Hersch has published numerous articles in leading peer-reviewed journals and law reviews. She is the author of Sex Discrimination in the Labor Market (Foundations and Trends in Microeconomics, 2006) and co-editor of Emerging Labor Market Institutions for the Twenty-First Century (University of Chicago, 2004).

Before joining Vanderbilt’s faculty, Hersch was an adjunct law professor at Harvard Law School. She was a professor of economics at the University of Wyoming from 1989 to 1999 and has been a visiting professor of economics at Northwestern, Caltech, Duke, and Harvard.

Hersch’s research focuses on the influence of gender, race, national origin, skin color, and family background on labor market outcomes, higher education and inequality. Her research has received international media attention and has been featured in publications such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Vox, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, and the L.A. Times.

The Origins of “The Rule of Law”
APRIL 11, 2025
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Speaker Bio: A noted legal historian, Jeremy Kessler writes primarily about First Amendment law, administrative law, and legal theory. His forthcoming book, Conscription and Constitutional Change in Twentieth Century America (Harvard University Press, 2025) explores how the contested development of the military draft transformed the relationship between civil liberties law and the American administrative state. 

Abstract: The Article offers a novel account of the origins of “the rule of law” in the English-speaking world. The phrase itself likely entered the language as a literal translation of the Latin regula juris. Prior to the early seventeenth century, however, the phrase appears to have been used exclusively to refer to the specific legal rule or maxim most relevant to the resolution of a particular kind of dispute. The more general and abstract use of the phrase – to refer to an ideal of political morality or an ideal type of governance – first appeared in the public record around 1610. It did so in the context of English common lawyers’ criticism of royal economic regulation limiting commodity production and circulation. The ideal type of governance that these common lawyers had in mind was the rule of common-law rules. They believed that the “chief subject or object” of these rules was the freedom of Englishmen to dispose of their possessions and professional skills as they wished, and to profit thereby. The earliest advocates of “the rule of law” thus found themselves in the vanguard of a cross-class project that sought to privilege the equal liberty of commodity exchangers over other long-recognized political, religious, and economic entitlements. Consequently, the original rule of law – the rule of common-law rules – came with a set of libertarian and egalitarian expectations, in addition to expectations of publicity, clarity, regularity, and so on. 

When A.V. Dicey popularized “the rule of law” in the late nineteenth century, he claimed to be restating age-old English common sense. While this claim exaggerated the continuity and coherence of English legal history, Dicey’s conception of the rule of law did indeed track the original, early-seventeenth-century conception in significant respects, including its libertarianism, its market-oriented egalitarianism, and its commitment to the supremacy of the common law. For both Dicey and his early modern precursors, the key to the equal liberty of English subjects was the centrality of common law courts to the settlement of disputes, whether between private parties, or between private parties and public officials. Contemporaneous critics of Dicey’s conception thus rightly understood him to be defending a legal worldview that dated to the early days of competitive capitalism. Yet the appeal of that worldview persists.

In the middle of the twentieth century, Anglophone legal philosophers did craft an alternative: a more austere and generalizable conception of the rule of law, one freed from the libertarian, egalitarian, and common-law sensibilities of Dicey and his precursors. While an intellectual coup, this minimalist conception has proven unsatisfying not only to legal practitioners but also to a growing number of legal theorists, including some of the minimalist conception’s erstwhile defenders. For these critics, Jeremy Waldron foremost among them, the minimalist conception fails to capture common-sense understandings of both law and the rule of law. But why does the contemporary common sense to which Waldron appeals so closely echo the concerns of common lawyers in 1610? 

This Article argues that the answer lies in the limited yet significant socio-economic context shared by early modern common lawyers, late nineteenth century jurists, and contemporary legal theorists. That shared context is the dominance of commodity exchange, which has characterized capitalist societies since their emergence in sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe. The common lawyers who first used the phrase “the rule of law” to denote an ideal of political morality were responding to a profound and lasting social and economic transformation. That transformation – the penetration of commodity exchange into ever more domains of social life – gave rise to demands for the rule of law four hundred years ago, and continues to shape discourse about the rule of law today.