Abstract 

Much of the law that governs intimate and contested choices operates in a moral grey zone—over conduct that is neither clearly acceptable nor clearly condemnable, and about which reasonable people remain genuinely divided. Abortion, assisted dying, recreational drug use, same-sex intimacy, and surrogacy all share this feature. This Article identifies a pervasive but underexamined choice that legislatures face whenever they decide to permit such conduct. A legislature can affirmatively recognize a statutory right to engage in the conduct—what we call a right by permission—or it can retain a general prohibition and carve out a bounded exception for specified circumstances—a right by exemption. These two pathways can produce identical de facto access, yet they are not interchangeable. We argue that they differ in their symbolic, expressive, and behavioral consequences, and that this difference is itself a tool of governance.

Our central claim is that framing shapes support: people are more willing to permit a morally difficult act when the law presents it as a bounded exception to a continuing rule than when it presents the same act as an affirmative endorsement. On this account, the exemption is not a mere drafting convention but a distinctive legal technology for governing morally grey conduct.

We develop and test this claim by first mapping the moral topology of each form of conduct—sorting its variants into the morally "white" (broadly accepted), "grey" (genuinely contested), and "black" (broadly condemned)—and then measuring how the permission-versus-exemption framing moves public support across that gradient. We expect the two frames to diverge most sharply in the grey zone, where an exemption can secure democratic backing that an outright right cannot. But the same mechanism carries costs: governing rights through exemption preserves the underlying stigma of prohibition even as it expands access. The Article thus reframes a familiar drafting question as a substantive choice about how a democracy recognizes contested freedoms—and about what it communicates when it does.

Paper will be shared closer to the seminar date.

Practicalities

This event will be held in person. The seminar will take place in Roeterseiland campus (REC) building A, room number A3.01.  

About the speaker 

Alexander Stremitzer is a Professor at ETH Zurich, where he has been since 2018, following positions as Professor of Law at UCLA and Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Bonn. His research spans theoretical and experimental law and economics, contracts, and contract design with work published in leading journals including the Yale Law Journal, the Journal of Legal Studies, and Games & Economic Behavior. He has served on the boards of the American Law and Economics Association and the European Association of Law & Economics.

About ACLE

The Amsterdam Center for Law and Economics (ACLE) is a joint initiative of the Faculty of Economics and Business and the Faculty of Law at the University of Amsterdam. The objective of the ACLE is to promote high-quality interdisciplinary research at the intersection between law and economics.