Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Academic Blogs -> Legal Theory Blog

Academic

: Legal Theory Blog

Congleton on Coercion & Baselines

By Lawrence Solum

Roger D. Congleton (George Mason University - Center for Study of Public Choice) has posted Coercion, Taxation, and Voluntary Association on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

Voluntary and coercive relationships among person play important roles in ethics, political theory, and Western law. This essay attempts to clarify the meaning and limits of coercion using matrix representations of voluntary and coercive proposals.

Two settings are focused on in this paper: the first is one in which an outsider can make explicit or implicit proposals that an individual (or organization) can accept or reject. The second is one where governments make explicit or implicit proposals that an individual or organization can accept or reject by emigrating to another polity.

In both settings, the "base line" turns out to be an important consideration in determining whether a proposal is coercive or not.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on September 21, 2010 (boomark / email).