New occupations,old demands: The public regulation of paraprofessionals

Like doctors, lawyers, and architects before them, many new paraprofessionals occupations are rapidly being defined and regulated, raising the time-worn questions regarding the virtues of free labor markets versus those of regulated labor markets. The trend to regulation is growing rapidly as the paraprofessionals increase in number. The new regulation may improve the quality of services that paraprofessionals provide. But the costs threaten to exceed the benefits. There are less costly ways to deal with the problems that have given rise to the demands for regulation. The success of these demands is due in part to inadequate consideration of their implications.     

Two Rights of Free Speech

My main argument in this paper is that the right to freedom of expression is not a single right, complex as it may be, but spans two separate rights that I label the right to speak and the right to hear. Roughly, the right to speak stands for the right of a person to express freely whatever they wish to communicate to some other persons or to the public at large. The right to hear stands for the right to have free and unfettered access to any kind of content that has been communicated by others. The right to speak and the right to hear are two separate rights, grounded in different kinds of interests. I try to show that this division of rights and their respective rationales can be utilized to explain how we think about some of the limits of the right to freedom of expression, particularly in the context of conflicts between the right to speak and the right to hear, conflicts that are rather pervasive. I also argue, though perhaps less conclusively, that in thinking about the limits of freedom of expression, an exclusive focus on the harm principle would be misguided. There is no reason to deny that speech is often harmful, sometimes very much so, but the prevention of harm is not sufficient to justify legal prohibition, at least not in this case.     

The Rule of Law and its Limits

Law and Philosophy -     

American medical policy and the "crisis" of the welfare state: a comparative perspective

Health policy debates rarely include broad review of cross-national experiences with related social policies. This article addresses the connection between medical policy concerns and the development of welfare states in the advanced industrial democracies following the oil crisis of 1973-74. After examining the evidence about what actually occurred during the "crisis" years of the welfare state, the article relates the debates about the welfare state's crisis to American concerns about medical care in the 1980s. The distinctive American response to the fiscal strains of stagflation-more severe cuts in social spending than necessary based on the country's economic strength, threats of bankruptcy to produce small adjustments to large programs, and inability to address the problems of medical care as anything other than budgetary strain--is linked to American dissensus about the purposes of the welfare state.