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[This month, I'm serializing my 2003 Harvard Law Review article, The Mechanisms of the Slippery Slope.] Just as precedents can be extended beyond their original terms through equality slippery slopes and attitude-altering slippery slopes, they can also be extended through small change tolerance slippery slopes. Legal rules are often unavoidably…

[This month, I'm serializing my 2003 Harvard Law Review article, The Mechanisms of the Slippery Slope.] Say you care little about the .50-caliber rifle ban, but your neighbor strongly supports or opposes it. His vote in the election, he says, will be influenced by the candidates' views on the ban,…

[This month, I'm serializing my 2003 Harvard Law Review article, The Mechanisms of the Slippery Slope.] Libertarians often tell the parable of the frog. If a frog is dropped into hot water, it supposedly jumps out. But if a frog is put into cold water that is then heated, the…

[This month, I'm serializing my 2003 Harvard Law Review article, The Mechanisms of the Slippery Slope.] Experience with a policy can change people's empirical judgments about policies of that sort, and this can of course be good. Sometimes, though, people learn the wrong lesson, because they err in evaluating an…

[This month, I'm serializing my 2003 Harvard Law Review article, The Mechanisms of the Slippery Slope.] Judges to some extent tend to be reluctant to rely on their own moral or practical judgments. This tendency shouldn't be overstated, but neither should it be ignored. Thus, judges may defer to policy…

[This month, I'm serializing my 2003 Harvard Law Review article, The Mechanisms of the Slippery Slope.] From Aggregates of Legislative or Judicial Decisions.—So far, the discussion has focused on the principles that people may draw from one statute or case. But people who are applying the is-ought heuristic often look…

[This month, I'm serializing my 2003 Harvard Law Review article, The Mechanisms of the Slippery Slope.] From Legislative Decisions.—So far, I have argued that a legal rule may change some people's attitudes: People may apply the is-ought heuristic and conclude that if the rule exists, its underlying justifications are probably…

[This month, I'm serializing my 2003 Harvard Law Review article, The Mechanisms of the Slippery Slope.] "[T]he assault weapons ban is a symbolic—purely symbolic—move in [the] direction [of disarming the citizenry]," wrote columnist Charles Krauthammer, a proponent of a total gun ban. "Its only real justification is not to reduce…

[This month, I'm serializing my 2003 Harvard Law Review article, The Mechanisms of the Slippery Slope.] The discussion above has assumed that we know up front the preferences people have among positions 0, A, and B. But sometimes B might not even be considered at first, and the apparent choice…

[This month, I'm serializing my 2003 Harvard Law Review article, The Mechanisms of the Slippery Slope.] An intermediate position A might also be untenable if it is burdensome to administer. One obvious burden might be the effort required to make and review decisions under a nuanced, fact-intensive rule: for instance,…

[This month, I'm serializing my 2003 Harvard Law Review article, The Mechanisms of the Slippery Slope.] Multi-peaked slippery slopes can happen when a significant group of people prefers both extremes to the compromise position. One such situation is when A without B seems unfairly discriminatory. Consider the following example: Position…