Law Commons^™

The Political Economy Of Recognition: Affirmative Action Discourse And Constitutional Equality In Germany And The U.S.A., Kendall Thomas

Faculty Scholarship

This paper undertakes a comparative exploration of affirmative action discourse in German and American constitutional equality law. The first task for such a project is to acknowledge an important threshold dilemma. The difficulty in question derives not so much from dissimilarities between the technical legal structures of German and American affirmative action policy. The problem stems rather from the different social grounds and groupings on which those legal structures have been erected. Because German "positive action"' applies only to women, gender and its cultural meanings have constituted the paradigmatic subject of the policy. The legal discussion of positive action has …

Impeachment As A Technique Of Parliamentary Control Over Foreign Affairs In A Presidential System, Lori Fisler Damrosch

Faculty Scholarship

The central inquiry for this essay is the proper use of the impeachment tool in foreign relations contexts, including war powers. In Part I, the essay begins with a brief review of British impeachment practice (limited to war and foreign policy concerns) known to the Founding generation and reflected in certain fundamental texts of the Founding; this treatment does not betoken any originalist orientation on my part (au contraire) but will set the context for later developments. Part II then turns to the travails of President Andrew Johnson as seen through the eyes of Walter Bagehot, the author of …

Japan's Experience With Deposit Insurance And Failing Banks: Implications For Financial Regulatory Design?, Curtis J. Milhaupt

Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines three decades of Japanese experience with deposit insurance andfailing banks, and analyzes the implications of that experience for bank safety net reform in other countries. To date, the literature and policy debate on deposit insurance have been heavily colored by U.S. banking history and have focused almost exclusively on explicit deposit protection schemes. Analysis of Japan's safety net experience suggests that (a) deposit insurance, for all its flaws, is superior to the real-world alternative-implicit government protection of depositors and discretionary regulatory intervention in bank distress, (b) a well-designed explicit deposit insurance system that includes a credible bank …

Lifetime Employment: Labor Peace And The Evolution Of Japanese Corporate Governance, Ronald J. Gilson, Mark J. Roe

Faculty Scholarship

In Japan, large firms' relationships with their employees differ from those prevailing in large American firms. Large Japanese firms guarantee many employees lifetime employment, and the firms' boards consist of insider employees. Neither relationship is common in the United States.

Japanese lifetime employment is said to encourage firms and employees to invest in human capital. We examine the reported benefits of the firm's promise of lifetime employment, but conclude that it is no more than peripheral to human capital investments. Rather, the "dark" side of Japanese labor practice – constricting the external labor market – likely yielded the human capital …

Autonomy Through Separation?: Environmental Law And The Basic Law Of Hong Kong, Benjamin L. Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

One hundred days after taking office as Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (Hong Kong SAR) of the People's Republic of China, Tung Chee-hwa pledged both to take steps to improve Hong Kong's environment, and to increase coordination of environmental policy with officials in neighboring Guangdong Province. Tung's comments marked a rhetorical shift from environmental policy in British Hong Kong: eight years earlier, the Hong Kong government's first White Paper on environmental policy, Pollution in Hong Kong – A Time to Act, made only passing mention of China. Yet the White Paper was not alone in …

Class Action Litigation In China, Benjamin L. Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

Class struggle has moved to China's courtrooms. Since the passage of China's 1991 Civil Procedure Law (CPL), which explicitly permits class action litigation, multiplaintiff groups have brought suits seeking compensation for harm caused by pollution, false advertising, contract violations, and securities law violations. Although administrative bodies continue to resolve most disputes in China, the increasing prevalence of class actions is one aspect of an explosion in civil litigation over the past decade. Class action litigation has the potential to alter the role courts play in adjudicating disputes, increase access to the courts, and facilitate the independence of the legal profession. …

Reflections In A Distant Mirror: Japanese Corporate Governance Through American Eyes, Ronald J. Gilson

Faculty Scholarship

For the last ten years, Japanese corporate governance has served as a distant mirror in whose reflection American academics could better see the attributes of their own system. As scholars came to recognize that the institutional characteristics of the American and Japanese systems were politically and historically contingent, other countries' approaches became serious objects of study, rather than just way stations on the road to convergence. One learned about one's own system from the choices made by others.

As it came to be conceived, the Japanese corporation of the 1980s represented quite a different method of organizing production. Styled the …

Comparative Law In The New European Community, George Bermann

Faculty Scholarship

As a member and leader of America's immediate post-war generation of comparative lawyers, Rudolf Schlesinger viewed the then European Economic Community (Community) as an unprecedentedly important arena for the theory and practice of comparative law. He was right in doing so. As we know, the Community initially faced the prospect, among other things, of harmonizing the laws of six continental European countries, representing distinct branches of the European civil law tradition. Then, within a dozen years, the Community expanded to pick up members that stood on the outskirts of the European civil law tradition (Denmark) and squarely within the common …

Recent Legislation: Constitutional Law – Congress Imposes New Restrictions On Use Of Funds By The Legal Services Corporation – Omnibus Consolidated Rescissions And Appropriations Act Of 1996, Pub. L. No. 104-134, 110 Stat. 1321, Benjamin L. Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

Fierce political battles have raged about the Legal Services Corporation (LSC) for much of its twenty-three year history. Critics have attacked LSC for pursuing a "radical agenda" and for "engaging in dubious litigation that is of no real benefit to poor people," while supporters have termed LSC "the one program in the entire war on poverty that made a difference" and have decried the "campaign to deny the right of legal representation to the poor." Last year, in the Omnibus Consolidated Rescissions and Appropriations Act of 1996 (OCRAA), Congress reduced LSC funding by thirty percent – to $278 million in …

Mature Adjudication: Interpretive Choice In Recent Death Penalty Cases, Bernard Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

Capital punishment presents a "hard" case for adjudication. It provokes sharp conflict between competing constitutional interpretations and invariably raises questions of judicial bias. This is particularly true in the new Republic of South Africa, where the framers of the interim constitution deliberately were silent regarding the legality of the death penalty. The tension is of equivalent force in the United States, where recent expressions of core constitutional rights have raised potentially irreconcilable conflicts in the application of capital punishment.

Two recent death penalty decisions – the South African Constitutional Court opinions in State v. Makwanyane and the United States Supreme …

The Legal Structure Of The Chinese Socialist Market Enterprise, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

China's phenomenal economic growth since 1978 has been accompanied by a cascade of institutional innovation and experimentation. In at least this one sense a hundred flowers are blooming in the People's Republic. The range of institutional forms and their defiance of the conventions of economic organization in both capitalist and socialist societies are impressive.

The Chinese leadership calls the new order by the unfamiliar (and to some, oxymoronic) term "socialist market" economy. Its "market" dimensions include deregulation of most prices, decentralization of decision-making to the household in agriculture and to the enterprise in industry, incentive schemes for peasants, managers, and …

Regulatory Federalism: A Reprise And Introduction, George A. Bermann

Faculty Scholarship

This colloquium, like its predecessor, proceeds on the basis of a series of assumptions. First, it assumes that the federalism dimension of the regulatory state is an important one Gust as is the regulatory dimension of the federal state). In introducing our first colloquium, I suggested that, although determining the content of public policy is critical in a democratic society, also critical is determining the level of government at which the choice of policy is made. Ingolf Pernice remarked then that a federal system is "any legal entity [which is] comprised of states for the purpose of pursuing certain common …

Administrative Law: The Hidden Comparative Law Course, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

What does today's Administrative Law course give your students that you might not be aware of and might be helped by knowing? That, as I understand it, is the question I am to answer. But we may also want to think about the overall shape of the curriculum: it may be useful to ask about fundamental issues our students may not be aware of, that may not be dealt with elsewhere in the law school curriculum. I'll spend most of my time on the question I've been asked to address, but I hope you will accept a few sentences on …

Regulatory Decisionmaking In The European Commission, George A. Bermann

Faculty Scholarship

As an institution variously described as the "motor" or "engine" of European integration and as the European Union's "executive branch," the Commission of the European Communities finds itself at the center of Community decisionmaking. Yet its decisional processes are still quite poorly understood, at least in the United States. The relatively poor grasp of Commission decisionmaking is certainly not due to any general lack of interest in procedure within the American audience. The problem lies more in the highly restrictive view of decisionmaking that traditionally dominates procedural accounts of the Community institutions. Those accounts have tended to reflect three preoccupations. …

European Community Law From A U.S. Perspective, George A. Bermann

Faculty Scholarship

Although less than forty years have passed since the founding of the European Economic Community (now the European Community), the lifetime of the Community is well marked temporally. The term of each Commission furnishes a convenient time-line for measuring the Community's progress in legal integration. Since the 1970s, each year has been punctuated by two or more "summit" meetings of heads of state or government. These summits not only are key markings in their own right, but also furnish an occasion for additional monitoring of the Community's state of health. Throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, the Community submitted …

Taking Subsidiarity Seriously: Federalism In The European Community And The United States, George A. Bermann

Faculty Scholarship

For a principle that has dominated discussions of European federalism for over five years, subsidiarity has received surprisingly poor academic mention. Subsidiarity has been criticized as "inelegant . . .Eurospeak," "the epitome of confusion," and simple "gobbledegook." It has been described by some as nothing new and by others as quite novel and actually quite dangerous. The President of the Commission of the European Communities, said to be an enthusiast of subsidiarity, finds it used at times as an "alibi," and more specifically as "a fig leaf ... to conceal [an] unwillingness to honour the commitments which have already been …

Subsidiarity And The European Community, George Bermann

Faculty Scholarship

The notion of subsidiarity in European federalism labors from all manner of burdens. It seems elusive by nature, commentators claiming that they do not know what subsidiarity means or, if they do, that they do not see in it anything new. At the same time subsidiarity has been presented at least in some quarters as a panacea for the Community's current malaise. It clearly is not that. Even if subsidiarity has not been oversold, it is almost certainly overexposed, a condition that the present Article is unlikely to cure.

My purpose in this Article is simply to help make some …

Conflicts Of Copyright Ownership Between Authors And Owners Of Original Artworks: An Essay In Comparative And International Private Law, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

Most, if not all, copyright laws distinguish between ownership of the incorporeal copyright, and ownership of chattels. A generally-accepted corollary holds that alienation of the chattel that constitutes the material form of a copyrighted work does not carry the copyright with it. Applying this principle to works of the visual arts, it should be clear that sale of a painting, even if it is the only "copy" of a work, is not a transfer of the exclusive rights under copyright to reproduce the work or to create derivative works based on the painting. Similarly, ownership of the copyright confers no …

Investment Companies As Guardian Shareholders: The Place Of The Msic In The Corporate Governance Debate, Ronald J. Gilson, Reinier Kraakman

Faculty Scholarship

Comparative corporate governance is both necessary and hard. Recent scholarship has identified the political and historical contingency of the American pattern of corporate governance. The Berle-Means corporation, with its separation of management and risk bearing and the attendant agency conflict between managers and shareholders, is now widely recognized as being as much a creature of the American pattern of law and politics as the handiwork of neutral market forces. This recognition underscores the need to place the American experience in a comparative perspective. Other patterns of corporate governance can provide both insights into the operation of our own and a …

International Human Rights Law In Soviet And American Courts, Lori Fisler Damrosch

Faculty Scholarship

To what extent should domestic courts apply international law – specifically the international law of human rights? I would like to examine this question with reference to two very different states: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the United States. For quite distinct reasons, neither of the two has yet fully embraced the idea of direct application in national tribunals of the body of international law that regulates the relationship between human beings and their own governments. As the post-Cold War era unfolds, it is time to ask whether either or both of these erstwhile adversaries might finally be …

A Tale Of Two Copyrights: Literary Property In Revolutionary France And America, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

The French and U.S. copyright systems are well known as opposites. The product of the French Revolution, French copyright law is said to enshrine the author: exclusive rights flow from one's (preferred) status as a creator. For example, a leading French copyright scholar states that one of the "fundamental ideas" of the revolutionary copyright laws is the principle that "an exclusive right is conferred on authors because their property is the most justified since it flows from their intellectual creation." By contrast, the U.S. Constitution's copyright clause, echoing the English Statute of Anne, makes the public's interest equal, if not …

French Copyright Law: A Comparative Overview, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

French copyright law has attracted considerable recent attention in the United States. Debate over the nature and scope of legislation permitting U.S. entry into the Berne Union for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works spurred some of this interest: because France was a founding member of that Union, some participants in the Berne adherence process perceived "Berne level" copyright protection to be synonymous with "French" copyright protection. As Congress continues to consider modifications to the U.S. copyright law, particularly in the area of moral rights, France again supplies a leading example. And the on-going litigation in France concerning the …

The Hague Evidence Convention In The Supreme Court: A Critique Of The Aérospatiale Decision, George A. Bermann

Faculty Scholarship

With its decision in Société Nationale Industrielle Aérospatiale v. United States District Court, the United States Supreme Court resolved what had been widely regarded as "one of the most difficult and important issues in international civil litigation in United States courts." This opportunity arose out of the divergence of views among American courts on the proper way to reconcile the need for full disclosure of evidence with respect for the sensitivities of foreign states where that evidence might be located. The case before the Supreme Court, like many lower court cases, dealt specifically with the impact of the Hague …

The Scope Of Consular Immunity Under The Vienna Convention On Consular Relations: Towards A Principled Interpretation, Curtis J. Milhaupt

Faculty Scholarship

A consular officer, mistaken for a trespasser as he leaves his mission to attend a cultural function, struggles with a police officer and is subsequently charged with assault and battery. The Vienna Convention on Consular Relations provides that consular officers are immune from jurisdiction for "acts performed in the exercise of consular functions." Does the Vienna Convention shield the consular officer from suit? The scope of consular immunity is uncertain because courts differ in their application of the Convention's immunity rule.

This Note argues that a principled interpretation of the scope of consular immunity consistent with the Vienna Convention requires …

The Universal And The Particular In Legal Discourses, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

My target in this article is a set of views that I shall call the functionalist perspective of comparative law. Of course, the word "functionalist" stands for a number of different theories. In order to be precise about the view that I oppose, I shall set my sights on the arguments developed in Otto Kahn-Freund's inaugural lecture Comparative Law as an Academic Subject, published two decades ago.

Integrating Governmental And Officer Tort Liability, George A. Bermann

Faculty Scholarship

The legislative and judicial dismantling of sovereign immunity is among the more significant and celebrated reforms of recent American administrative law. In many instances, this development has given those seeking damages for wrongful governmental action their first and only defendant. Even in situations in which litigants already had a cause of action against individual public officials, making the government amenable to suit has enhanced the chances of actual recovery, since officials often lack the means to satisfy judgments rendered against them. The immunity from liability enjoyed by public officials also has undergone a complex series of changes. Though still in …

On Lawful Governments, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

What is the meaning of sentences of the form 'X is the lawful government of the country Y,' and what kinds of statements are normally -made by using them? Most answers to these questions can be classified as legalistic, moralistic, or compromise solutions. The gist of the legalistic approach is that the lawful government is that authorized by the positive law of the land. Critics of the legalistic approach point out that disagreement about the lawful government is not always solved when agreement is reached about the positive law of the land. For example, two people may disagree as to …

Decision Trees, Peter L. Strauss, Michael R. Topping

Faculty Scholarship

The object of this paper is to inform those concerned with the administration of justice in Ethiopia – particularly, criminal justice – about a new and simple procedure which may assist in procuring uniform interpretation and application of laws and regulations. The problem of uniform interpretation and application is particularly severe where, as in Ethiopia, new laws must be interpreted and applied by persons who have not yet had the opportunity of formal legal education. For these persons the discovery of the relevant code articles and the understanding of their interrelationships and application must be very difficult indeed. One possible …

The Presumption Of Innocence In The Soviet Union, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

The presumption of innocence is a curious item in the baggage of Western legal rhetoric. Revered today here and abroad, it has become a standard clause in international testimonials to the rights of man. Yet, at first blush, it seems conceptually anomalous and irrelevant in practice. It is hardly a presumption of fact – a distillation of common experience; statistics betray the suggestion that men indicted on criminal charges are likely to be innocent. Nor is it a legal rule masquerading as an irrebuttable presumption; it is rebuttable by proof beyond a reasonable doubt of the defendant's guilt. Further, it …

On Interpreting The Ethiopian Penal Code, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

The aim of this article is to set out and discuss some general principles of interpreting the Ethiopian Penal Code – that is to say, of using it. Even now, ten years after it came into effect, many people have difficulty in understanding and using the Penal Code in a straightforward way. It seems complex, and many of its fundamental conceptions are unfamiliar to Ethiopian lawyers. This article, discussing at length how the code is built, may help reduce its apparent complexity and thus facilitate its day-to-day application.