Digital Commons Network^™

Gandhi’S Prophecy: Corporate Violence And A Mindful Law For Bhopal, Nehal A. Patel

Nehal A. Patel

AbstractOver thirty years have passed since the Bhopal chemical disaster began,and in that time scholars of corporate social responsibility (CSR) havediscussed and debated several frameworks for improving corporate responseto social and environmental problems. However, CSR discourse rarelydelves into the fundamental architecture of legal thought that oftenbuttresses corporate dominance in the global economy. Moreover, CSRdiscourse does little to challenge the ontological and epistemologicalassumptions that form the foundation for modern economics and the role ofcorporations in the world.I explore methods of transforming CSR by employing the thought ofMohandas Gandhi. I pay particular attention to Gandhi’s critique ofindustrialization and principle of swadeshi (self-sufficiency) …

The Second Dimension Of The Supreme Court, Joshua B. Fischman, Tonja Jacobi

Tonja Jacobi

Describing the justices of the Supreme Court as ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives’ has become so standard—and the left-right division on the Court is considered so entrenched—that any deviation from that pattern is treated with surprise. Attentive Court watchers know that the justices are not just politicians in robes, deciding each case on a purely ideological basis. Yet the increasingly influential empirical legal studies literature assumes just that—that a left-right ideological dimension fully describes the Supreme Court. We show that there is a second, more legally-focused dimension of judicial decision-making. A continuum between legalism and pragmatism also divides the justices, in ways …

The High Price Of Poverty: A Study Of How The Majority Of Current Court System Procedures For Collecting Court Costs And Fees, As Well As Fines, Have Failed To Adhere To Established Precedent And The Constitutional Guarantees They Advocate., Trevor J. Calligan

Trevor J Calligan

No abstract provided.

Limiting Leukophobia: Looking Beyond Lockup. Debunking The Strategy Of Turning White Collars Orange, Jared J. Hight

Jared J Hight

The legal and political landscape of the past 30 years has resulted in the abandonment of the utilitarian principle of parsimony as applied to white collar criminals. In response to preceding decades of minor punishments meted out for serious white collar crimes, the Federal Sentencing Commission abandoned the typical past practices of sentencing judges and instead formulated Guidelines that are wildly excessive and no longer balance the need for community safety with the need for that same community to remain economically efficient. The guiding principles of deterrence, rehabilitation, and incapacitation have been deemphasized in a new model that focuses primarily …

Empirical Evaluation Of Law: The Dream And The Nightmare, John J. Donohue

John Donohue

No abstract provided.

Popular Culture's Portrayal Of Attorney Decision-Making And It's Consequences- An Analysis Of An Attorney's Internal Ethical Conflict In Film, Tara M. Parente

Tara M. Parente

This paper explores how popular culture portrays attorney decision-making and its consequences. This paper compares and contrasts two films in order to exemplify how attorneys are portrayed throughout film and how this carries over into real life. Attorneys are faced with ethical dilemmas at all times, especially throughout career advancement and the decisions made tend to affect every aspect of an attorney's life.

Nuclear Chain Reaction: Why Economic Sanctions Are Not Worth The Public Costs, Nicholas C.W. Wolfe

Nicholas A Wolfe

International economic sanctions frequently violate human rights in targeted states and rarely achieve their objectives. However, many hail economic sanctions as an important nonviolent tool for coercing and persuading change. In November 2013, the Islamic Republic of Iran negotiated a temporary agreement with major world powers regarding Iran’s nuclear program. The United States’ media and politicians have repeatedly and incorrectly attributed Iran’s willingness to negotiate to the effectiveness of economic sanctions.

Politicians primarily focus on immediate domestic effects and enact sanctions without a thorough understanding of the long-term effects on the United States economy and the public within a targeted …

Beyond Finality: How Making Criminal Judgments Less Final Can Further The Interests Of Finality, Andrew Chongseh Kim

Andrew Chongseh Kim

Courts and scholars commonly assume that granting convicted defendants more liberal rights to challenge their judgments would harm society’s interests in “finality.” According to conventional wisdom, finality in criminal judgments is necessary to conserve resources, encourage efficient behavior by defense counsel, and deter crime. Thus, under the common analysis, the extent to which convicted defendants should be allowed to challenge their judgments depends on how much society is willing to sacrifice to validate defendants’ rights. This Article argues that expanding defendants’ rights on post-conviction review does not always harm these interests. Rather, more liberal review can often conserve state resources, …

How To Create American Manufacturing Jobs, John D. Gleissner Esquire

John D Gleissner Esquire

No abstract provided.

Snopa And The Ppa: Do You Know What It Means For You? If Snopa (Social Networking Online Protection Act) Or Ppa (Password Protection Act) Do Not Pass, The Snooping Could Cause You Trouble, Angela Goodrum

Angela Goodrum

No abstract provided.

What’S Age Got To Do With It? Supreme Court Appointees And The Long Run Location Of The Supreme Court Median Justice, Matthew L. Spitzer

Matthew L Spitzer

For approximately the past 40 years Republican Presidents have appointed younger Justices than have Democratic Presidents. Depending on how one does the accounting, the average age difference will vary, but will not go away. This Article posits that Republicans appointing younger justices than Democrats may have caused a rightward shift in the Supreme Court. We use computer simulations to show that if the trend continues the rightward shift will likely increase. We also to produce some very rough estimates of the size of the ideological shift, contingent on the size of the age differential. In addition, we show that the …

Costs Of Codification, Dru Stevenson

Dru Stevenson

Between the Civil War and World War II, every state and the federal government shifted toward codified versions of their statutes. Academia has so far ignored the systemic effects of this dramatic change. For example, the consensus view in the academic literature about rules and standards has been that precise rules present higher enactment costs for legislatures than would general standards, while vague standards present higher information costs for courts and citizens than do rules. Systematic codification – featuring hierarchical format and numbering, topical arrangement, and cross-references – inverts this relationship, lowering transaction costs for legislatures and increasing information costs …

Contract Theory And The Failures Of Public-Private Contracting (Forthcoming), Wendy Netter Epstein

Wendy Netter Epstein

The market for public-private contracting is huge and flawed. Public-private contracts for services such as prisons and welfare administration tend to result in cost savings at the sacrifice of quality service. For instance, to cut costs, private prisons skimp on security. Public law scholars have studied these problems for decades and have proposed various public law solutions. But the literature is incomplete because it does not approach the problem through a commercial lens. This Article fills that gap. It considers how economic analysis of contract law, in particular efficiency theory and agency theory, bear upon the unique problems of public-private …

Kids, Counsel And Costs: An Empirical Study Of Indigent Defense Services In The Los Angeles Juvenile Delinquency Courts, Cyn Yamashiro

cyn yamashiro

In the landmark case In re Gault, the Supreme Court guaranteed juveniles virtually all of the criminal due process rights previously granted to adults. Arguably the most vital of those rights is the right to competent counsel. Scholars have studied how systems provide legal counsel and have questioned the use of certain models to provide defense services. Los Angeles County utilizes two distinct models for the provision of defense services: a contract-panel attorney model and a public defender office. This study looks at data from over 2,800 juvenile court case files from the Los Angeles juvenile courts and asks the …

The Criminal Justice System Creates Incentives For False Convictions, Roger Koppl, Meghan Sacks

Roger Koppl

We examine the incentive structure of the various actors of the criminal justice system within an organization economics framework. Specifically, we examine the incentives of the police, forensic scientists, prosecutors and public defenders. We find that police, prosecutors and forensic scientists often have an incentive to garner convictions with little incentive to convict the right person, whereas public defenders often lack the resources and incentives to provide a vigorous defense for their clients. The “multitask problem” of organizational economics helps explain how this skewed incentive structure creates false convictions.

Race, Prediction & Discretion, Shima Baradaran

Shima Baradaran

Many scholars and political leaders denounce racism as the cause of disproportionate incarceration of black Americans. All players in this system have been blamed including the legislators who enact laws that disproportionately harm blacks, police who unevenly arrest blacks, prosecutors who overcharge blacks, and judges that fail to release and oversentence black Americans. Some scholars have blamed the police and judges who make arrest and release decisions based on predictions of whether defendants will commit future crimes. They claim that prediction leads to minorities being treated unfairly. Others complain that racism results from misused discretion. This article explores where racial …

False Marking In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction, Raghav Krishnapriyan

Raghav Krishnapriyan

The false marking statute, a once-obscure corner of patent law, is now in the limelight. This past year, false marking suits have increased by two orders of magnitude, largely as a result of courts interpreting the law in ways favorable to plaintiffs. This article argues that the statute, one of the few remaining examples of qui tam laws in the Anglophone world, is actually an atavism. It harnesses work on the economics of advertising to argue that recent moves to liberalize the law rest on flawed economic models, and may have anti-competitive effects. Finally, it suggests that technological changes have …

Does Tort Law Deter?, W. Jonathan Cardi, Randy Penfield, Albert H. Yoon

W. Jonathan Cardi

For nearly four decades, economic analysis has dominated academic discussion of tort law. Courts also have paid increasing attention to the potential deterrent effects of their tort decisions. But at the center of each economic model and projection of cost and benefit lies a widely-accepted but grossly under-tested assumption that tort liability in fact deters tortious conduct. This article reports the results of a behavioral science study that tests this assumption as it applies to individual conduct. Surveying over 700 first-year law students, the study presented a series of vignettes, asking subjects to rate the likelihood that they would engage …

Predicting Violence, Shima Baradaran

Shima Baradaran

The last several years have seen a marked rise in state and federal pretrial detention rates. There has been very little scholarly analysis of whether increased detention is reducing crime, and the discussion that has taken place has largely relied on small scale local studies with conflicting results. This article asks whether the United States is making substantially mistaken judgments about who is likely to commit crimes while on pretrial release and whether we are detaining the right people. Relying on the largest dataset of pretrial defendants in the U.S., this article determines what factors, if any, are relevant in …

Uncompensated Torts, Rick Swedloff

Rick Swedloff

Victims of intentional torts suffer more than $460 billion of damages each year. Unlike those injured by negligence, however, those injured by intentional acts often have no practical remedy. They cannot recover from judgment proof defendants. And no other part of the compensatory system provides a significant remedy. Thus, victims of the most egregious torts go uncompensated. This failure to compensate magnifies certain inequities. Victims are likely to be hit twice by these bad acts: once by the victimization itself and once because they have few financial resources to aid them on their road to recovery.

This Article explores the …

The External Effects Of Black-Male Incarceration On Black Females, Stéphane Mechoulan

Stéphane Mechoulan

This paper examines how the increase in the incarceration of Black men and the sex ratio imbalance it induces shape the behavior of young Black women. Combining data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the Current Population Survey to match male incarceration rates with individual observations over two decades, I show that Black male incarceration lowers the odds of Black non-marital teenage fertility while increasing young Black women's school attainment and early employment. These results can account for the sharp bridging of the racial gap over the 1990s for a range of socio-economic outcomes among females.

Self Restraint And National Security, Nathan Alexander Sales

Nathan Alexander Sales

Why does the government sometimes tie its own hands in national security operations? This article identifies four instances in which officials believed that the applicable laws allowed them to conduct a particular military or intelligence operation but nevertheless declined to do so. For example, policymakers have barred counterterrorism interrogators from using any technique other than the fairly innocuous methods listed in the Army Field Manual. Before 9/11, officials rejected the CIA’s plans to use targeted killings against Osama bin Laden and other terrorist leaders. Judge advocates sometimes use policy considerations to restrict military strikes that would be lawful. And in …

A Million Little Takings, Dru Stevenson

Dru Stevenson

IOLTA programs are a very popular mechanism for funding legal services for the poor, and are now operating in every state. As a result, however, IOLTA has become the most frequent and widespread instance of government takings of private property in America. The post-Kelo era has seen increasing legislative restrictions on takings, and the post-Kelo reforms in several states appear to have inadvertently made their respective IOLTA programs illegal by banning all takings where the government immediately gives the taken property to another private party (in this case, private poverty-law foundations and legal aid clinics). IOLTA takings also highlight a …

The Instrumental Justice Of Private Law, Alan Calnan

Alan Calnan

Instrumentalists and deontologists have long battled for an exclusive theory of private law. The instrumentalists have argued that private law is merely a means to achieving any number of political or social ends. Deontologists, by contrast, have contended that the law seeks only the moral end of justice and cannot be used for anything else. In this article, I critique these extreme positions and offer an intermediate theory called “instrumental justice.” I show that the absolute instrumental view is elusive, illusory, and illiberal, while the absolute deontological view is incoherent, implausible, and in one critical respect, impossible. Instrumental justice avoids …

Prioritizing Justice: Combating Corporate Crime From Task Force To Top Priority, Mary K. Ramirez

mary k ramirez

Inadequate law enforcement against corporate criminals appears to have created perverse incentives leading to an economic crisis – this time in the context of the subprime mortgage crisis. Prioritizing Justice proposes institutional reform at the Department of Justice in pursuing corporate crime. Presently, corporate crime is pursued nationally primarily through the DOJ Corporate Fraud Task Force and other task forces, the DOJ Criminal Division Fraud Section, and the individual U.S. Attorney’s Offices. Rather than a collection of ad hoc task forces that seek to coordinate policy among a vast array of offices and agencies, the relentless waves of corporate criminality …

Exporting Class Actions To The European Union, Tiana Leia Russell

Tiana Leia Russell

In this paper, I present the theoretical debates regarding the value of class action litigation, both with respect to compensation and deterrence. I begin by reviewing the class action litigation model in the United States. The paper then explores the current state of private antitrust enforcement in the European Union, with specific focus on the availability of class action litigation within Europe. I discuss recent calls within the European Union for greater private enforcement of competition law and outline steps the Commission has taken in addressing that need, including the recently published White Paper on Damages for Breach of EC …

Predicting Crime, Todd Henderson

Todd Henderson

Prediction markets have been proposed for a variety of public policy purposes, but no one has considered their application in perhaps the most obvious policy area: crime. This paper proposes and examines the use of prediction markets to forecast crime rates and the impact on crime from changes to crime policy, such as resource allocation, policing strategies, sentencing, post-conviction treatment, and so on. We make several contributions to the prediction markets and crime forecasting literature.

First, we argue that prediction markets are especially useful in crime rate forecasting and criminal policy analysis, because information relevant to decisionmakers is voluminous, dispersed, …

Race In The War On Drugs: The Social Consequences Of Presidential Rhetoric, Jeff L. Yates, Andrew Whitford

Jeff L Yates

One of the president’s main leadership tools for influencing the direction of American legal policy is public rhetoric. Numerous studies have examined the president’s use of the “bully pulpit” to lead policy by influencing Congress or public opinion, or by changing the behavior of public agencies. We argue that the president can use rhetoric to change the behavior of public agencies and that this can have important social consequences. We focus on the disproportionate impact of presidential rhetoric on different “target populations” in the context of the War on Drugs. Specifically, we observe that presidential rhetoric had a greater impact …

The Intersection Of Judicial Attitudes And Litigant Selection Theories: Explaining U.S. Supreme Court Decision Making, Jeff L. Yates, Elizabeth Coggins

Jeff L Yates

Two prominent theories of legal decision making provide seemingly contradictory explanations for judicial outcomes. In political science, the Attitudinal Model suggests that judicial outcomes are driven by judges' sincere policy preferences -- judges bring their ideological inclinations to the decision making process and their case outcome choices largely reflect these policy preferences. In contrast, in the law and economics literature, Priest and Klein's well-known Selection Hypothesis posits that court outcomes are largely driven by the litigants' strategic choices in the selection of cases for formal dispute or adjudication -- forward thinking litigants settle cases where potential judicial outcomes are readily …

Courting Genocide: The Unintended Effects Of Humanitarian Interventions, Jide O. Nzelibe

Jide O Nzelibe

Invoking memories and imagery from the Holocaust and other German atrocities during World War II, many contemporary commentators and politicians believe that the international community has an affirmative obligation to deter and incapacitate perpetrators of humanitarian atrocities. Today, the received wisdom is that a legalistic approach, which combines humanitarian interventions with international criminal prosecutions targeting perpetrators, will help realize the post-World War II vision of making atrocities a crime of the past. This Article argues, in contrast, that humanitarian interventions are often likely to create unintended, and sometimes perverse, incentives among both the victims and perpetrators of atrocities. The problem …