Law Commons^™

Can Congress Authorize The Opponents Of Self-Financed Candidates To Receive Extra-Large Contributions?, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

Is the so-called Millionaires’ Amendment, which permits federal candidates who are running against self-funded opponents to receive contributions significantly above the standard federal statutory ceiling constitutional?

Federal law caps contributions to federal candidates, but the Supreme Court has ruled that limits on how much money a candidate can contribute to his or her own campaign are unconstitutional. This case tests the 2002 Millionaires’ Amendment, which enables candidates for Congress running against self-financing opponents to obtain contributions well above the ordinary statutory ceiling and also imposes additional reporting requirements on self-funding candidates.

Global Climate Change Offers Hot Career Opportunities, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

Michael Gerrard, editor of Global Climate Change and U.S. Law, is passionate about global warming and the role lawyers can play in improving the environment. Student Lawyer's Donna Gerson talks to Gerrard about his career path and how law students can make a difference combating climate change.

Missing Parents, Clare Huntington

Faculty Scholarship

In an effort to protect children from abuse and neglect, the child welfare system focuses on parents, both as potential wrongdoers and as the locus for rehabilitation. This attention informs the discourse surrounding state intervention: parents' rights are balanced against children's rights, and family autonomy is understood as an overriding value. But the child welfare system centers parents in the wrong way, leading to academic debates that miss the mark and methods of intervention that are often counterproductive.

An effective child welfare system would be built upon the understanding that, in general, the state can best support children by supporting …

A House Still Divided, Clare Huntington

Faculty Scholarship

In response to Adam B. Cox, Immigration Law's Organizing Principles, 157 U. PA. L. REv. 341 (2008).

Adam Cox's Immigration Law's Organizing Principles contests the traditional view that immigration law and alienage law – in his terms, "selection rules" and "regulation rules" – are distinct categories with legal and moral salience. Building upon prior scholarship that also called the distinction into question, Cox offers important insights into why this dividing line does not have the sharp conceptual edges that the jurisprudence would suggest exist. Despite the analytical persuasiveness of Cox's argument, I am not convinced that it will destabilize the …

Parents As Hubs, Clare Huntington

Faculty Scholarship

In her provocative article The Networked Family: Reframing the Legal Understanding of Caregiving and Caregivers, Professor Melissa Murray offers a much-needed corrective to the view that families are “autonomous islands” and argues that the law should recognize the networks of care provided by nonparental caregivers.I wholeheartedly agree with Professor Murray that the law should support families in providing care. I am also deeply sympathetic to the claim that family law is overly reliant on binary opposites — here, the mutually exclusive categories of parent and legal stranger — that do not capture the complex reality of family life. And …

Repairing Family Law, Clare Huntington

Faculty Scholarship

Scholars in the burgeoning field of law and emotion have paid surprisingly little attention to family law. This gap is unfortunate because law and emotion has the potential to bring great insights to family law. This Article begins to fill this void — and inaugurate a larger debate about the central role of emotion in family law — by exploring the intriguing and significant consequences for the regulation of families that flow from a theory of intimacy first articulated by psychoanalytic theorist Melanie Klein. According to Klein, individuals love others, inevitably transgress against those they love out of hate and …

The Constitutional Dimension Of Immigration Federalism, Clare Huntington

Faculty Scholarship

In Farmers Branch, Texas, the city council enacted a measure to fine landlords who rent their premises to unauthorized migrants, and in Arizona, the state legislature passed a law imposing stiff penalties on employers who intentionally or knowingly hire unauthorized migrants. In San Francisco, the board of supervisors passed a measure that bars law enforcement officers from inquiring into the immigration status of an individual in the course of a criminal investigation. In Alabama and Florida, state officials have entered into agreements with the federal government permitting state law enforcement officers to arrest and detain non-citizens on immigration charges. Other …

Are We Over-Lawyering International Affairs, Philip C. Bobbitt, John D. Hutson, John C. Yoo, Philip D. Zelikow, Edwin D. Williamson

Faculty Scholarship

This panel will discuss the role of lawyers — particularly government lawyers — in addressing questions of legal policy. We will discuss fundamental questions such as: Should lawyers decide legal policy? Or, is that best left to the policymakers? Should lawyers give advice as to legal policy, or should they stick to providing answers as to what the law is? How should lawyers respond to what a policymaker thinks is the legal question, but is really a question of legal policy? If lawyers find the law vague or lacking, should they fill in the gaps, advising as to what the …

Pick A Card, Any Card, Ronald J. Mann

Faculty Scholarship

At the heart of all serious thought about consumer financial products is the difficulty of understanding the mental processes by which consumers evaluate, compare, and use those products. Usury proposals from scholars and policy makers depend on explicit or implicit assumptions about how interest-rate caps will affect the mix of products available in the marketplace and the choices that consumers make among them. Legislators and lobbyists that decry a torrent of consumer bankruptcy filings rely explicitly on the claim that consumers abuse credit products. Proposals to outlaw products like payday loans assume that those who use the products are so …

Children, Kin, And Court: Designing Third Party Custody Policy To Protect Children, Third Parties And Parents, Joshua Gupta-Kagan

Faculty Scholarship

Millions of American children are raised primarily by people other than their parents, mostly by grandparents and other kin, and millions more are raised by third parties for some period of their childhood. In most such situations, informal arrangements negotiated by family members and kinship networks effectively provide care for these children. Many cases, however, require some formal legal arrangement; third party custody orders are needed to obtain necessary services and benefits for children whose parents are absent, and to protect children in the rare but still significant instances in which a parent is abusive or neglectful.

States currently have …

Public Financing And Presidential Elections, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

In this article, legal scholar Richard Briffault traces the history of public funding of presidential elections. He analyzes the implications and prospects for the 2008 general election campaign. He also discusses the challenges facing the system of public funding, as campaign costs increase and public support wines, and possible reforms.

A Requiem For Sam's Bank, Ronald J. Mann

Faculty Scholarship

This paper situates Wal-Mart's failed application to form a banking subsidiary in the context of payments policy. Generally, I argue that permitting Wal-Mart to have a bank would have a salutary effect on the relatively uncompetitive market for payment networks. The dominant position of Visa and MasterCard, in which payments are priced above cost to subsidize credit, inevitably will give way to a world in which payment services are priced at cost, or even below cost as a loss-leader to attract customers to other goods and services. Entry into this market by Wal-Mart would be likely to spur more robust …

The American Law Institute Goes Global: The Restatement Of International Commercial Arbitration, George A. Bermann

Faculty Scholarship

The American Law Institute's new Restatement of the U.S. Law of International Commercial Arbitration is only barely underway, and the reporters began with a chapter, namely the recognition and enforcement of awards, that should represent for them a comfort zone of sorts within the overall project. Yet, already a number of difficult, and to some extent unexpectedly difficult, questions have arisen. Some of the difficulties stem from the very nature of an ALI Restatement project. Others stem from the nature of arbitration itself and, more particularly, from the inherent tension between arbitral and judicial functions in the arbitration arena. Still …

Unsafe At Any Price, Ronald J. Mann

Faculty Scholarship

Making Credit Safer is a fascinating collaboration between two scholars of very different bents. Elizabeth Warren's career rests oil decades of careful empirical research, integrated into trenchant policy analysis, and deeply informed by the cultural and social significance of debt. Oren Bar-Gill, by contrast, is a formally trained economist, who is at the start of his academic career, and has gained wide recognition for his successful application of theories of behavioral economics to the products that dominate the modern credit card industry.

Rethinking Copyright: Property Through The Lenses Of Unjust Enrichment And Unfair Competition, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

Faculty Scholarship

For some time now, scholars have come to recognize the existence of numerous structural infirmities deeply embedded within the modern copyright system. Most of these infirmities have been attributed to internal tensions within copyright law and policy, including the competing philosophies of access and control, use and exclusion, and rights and exceptions. Professor Stadler’s insightful article documents these tensions and proposes a new way of mediating them. She argues that copyright law is best understood as instantiating a restriction
on unfair competition and, consequently, that it should do little more than protect creators of original works from “competitive harm” in …

Detention As Targeting: Standards Of Certainty And Detention Of Suspected Terrorists, Matthew C. Waxman

Faculty Scholarship

To the extent that a state can detain terrorists pursuant to the law of war, how certain must the state be in distinguishing suspected terrorists from nonterrorists? This Article shows that the law of war can and should be interpreted or supplemented to account for the exceptional aspects of an indefinite conflict against a transnational terrorist organization by analogizing detention to military targeting and extrapolating from targeting rules. A targeting approach to the detention standard-of-certainty question provides a methodology for balancing security and liberty interests that helps fill a gap in detention law and helps answer important substantive questions left …

A Multilateral Solution For The Income Tax Treatment Of Interest Expenses, Michael J. Graetz

Faculty Scholarship

Recent developments – including greater taxpayer sophistication in structuring and locating international financing arrangements, increased government concerns with the role of debt in sophisticated tax avoidance techniques, and disruption by decisions of the European Court of Justice of member states' regimes limiting interest deductions – have stimulated new laws and policy controversies concerning the international tax treatment of interest expenses. National rules are in flux regarding the financing of both inbound and outbound transactions.

Heretofore, the question of the proper treatment of interest expense has generally been looked at from the perspective of either inbound or outbound investment. As a …

Symposium On Pursuing Racial Fairness In Criminal Justice: Twenty Years After Mccleskey V. Kemp, Jeffrey Fagan, Mukul A. Bakhshi

Faculty Scholarship

Last year marked the twentieth anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in McCleskey v. Kemp, a case whose ramifications for the pursuit of racial equality within criminal justice are still felt today. McCleskey set an impossibly high bar for constitutionally-based challenges seeking fundamental racial fairness in capital punishment. The McCleskey decision strengthened a jurisprudential climate that shifted and increased the burden onto defendants seeking constitutional relief from discriminatory and biased decisions at every step of the criminal justice process, from arrest to conviction and punishment. The McCleskey court articulated a crime-control rationale for tolerance of error and refused to …

The Permissible Reach Of National Environmental Policies, Henrik Horn, Petros C. Mavroidis

Faculty Scholarship

Trading nations exchange tariff concessions in the context of trade liberalizing rounds. Tariffs, nonetheless, are not the only instrument affecting the value of a concession. Domestic instruments affect it as well, but public order is not negotiable, and, consequently, is not scheduled. Public order is unilaterally defined, but must respect the default rules concerning allocation of jurisdiction which are common to all WTO Members and bind them by virtue of their appurtenance to the international community. In this paper, we focus on the interaction between trade and environment. The purpose of this study is to highlight how these rules and …

The Perils Of Theory, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

As I recall, Professor Clark had more sense than to be my student at Columbia, but I heard a lot about him from admiring colleagues. Clearly he has fulfilled the promise they saw, and this remarkable Symposium is only one indicator of that. The article to which our attention is properly drawn, more than two and a quarter centuries into our nation's history, has an originalist base, tightly and persuasively focused on original understandings of the Supremacy Clause. Professor Clark lays out a cogent account of the Clause's politics and the centrality of its language to the most fundamental of …

The Irony Of Judicial Elections, David E. Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

Judicial elections in the United States have undergone a dramatic transformation. For more than a century, these state and local elections were relatively dignified, low-key affairs. Campaigning was minimal; incumbents almost always won; few people voted or cared. Over the past quarter century and especially the past decade, however, a rise in campaign spending, interest group involvement, and political speech has disturbed the traditional paradigm. In the "new era," as commentators have dubbed it, judicial races routinely feature intense competition, broad public participation, and high salience.

This Article takes the new era as an opportunity to advance our understanding of …

Self-Defense And The Psychotic Aggressor, George P. Fletcher, Luis E. Chiesa

Faculty Scholarship

This brief essay, written for the Criminal Law Conversations Project, examines whether one can justifiably kill a faultless, insane assailant to save oneself or another from imminent and serious harm. Although scholars on both sides of the Atlantic agree that the person attacked should not be punished for defending herself from the psychotic aggressor, there is significant disagreement with regards to whether the defensive response should be considered justified or merely excused. Furthermore, amongst those who argue that the appropriate defense in such cases is a justification, there is disagreement regarding whether the specific ground of acquittal should be self-defense …

Financial Disclosure Of Risks Related To Global Climate Change, Michael B. Gerrard, Christopher Anderson

Faculty Scholarship

Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regulations require publicly traded companies to disclose the material impacts of environmental laws on their business. Increasing attention is being paid to the issue of securities disclosure of financial risks and opportunities posed by impending regulation relating to global climate change and by climate change itself.

Climate Change And The Limits Of The Possible, Jedediah S. Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

Climate change looks to be more than just another environmental problem. It threatens to test the limits of our dominant ways of understanding and solving, not just environmental problems, but problems of political economy generally. Climate change has distinctive temporal and spatial features – how long it takes to unfold and the ways in which its effects are distributed across the globe – which may outstrip the capacity of our basic principles of economic and political decision-making. If so, then understanding the issue in a static way may ensure that we expect to fail in addressing it and are inarticulate …

Designing The Architecture For Integrating Accommodation: An Institutionalist Commentary, Susan P. Sturm

Faculty Scholarship

Integrating Accommodation, by Elizabeth F. Emens, reshapes the framework for evaluating workplace accommodations to assure consideration of their third-party benefits. In an ingenious move, the article extends the contact hypothesis, which conventionally emphasizes the attitudinal benefits of integrating diverse groups, to the impact of integrating the accommodations made so that disabled people can effectively participate in the workplace. The article shows how accommodations benefit third parties by improving their workplace conditions and thus have the potential to change attitudes toward disability, accommodation, and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

The Melting Of Patent Law, Eben Moglen

Faculty Scholarship

In this special comment, the author posits that the patent system as it stands is archaic and oppressive, and has neither intellectual nor moral support. Having veered away from its original goals, by virtue of the change in the technological and functional basis of government, it instead serves as a justification for inequalities of wealth distribution. The author argues that substantial reform is required that would shift the balance in patent law from monopolistic greed to public interest, paving the way for access to knowledge.

Proxy Contests In An Era Of Increasing Shareholder Power: Forget Issuer Proxy Access And Focus On E-Proxy, Jeffrey N. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

The current debate over shareholder access to the issuer's proxy statement for the purpose of making director nominations is both overstated in its importance and misses the serious issue in question. The Securities and Exchange Commission's ("SEC's") new e- proxy rules, which permit reliance on proxy materials posted on a website, should substantially reduce the production and distribution cost differences between a meaningful contest waged via the issuer's proxy and a freestanding proxy solicitation. No matter which avenue is used, however, the serious question relates to the appropriate disclosure required of a shareholder nominator. Should the nominator be subject to …

Demystifying The Right To Exclude: Of Property, Inviolability, And Automatic Injunctions, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

Faculty Scholarship

The right to exclude has long been considered a central component of property. In focusing on the element of exclusion, courts and scholars have paid little attention to what an owner's right to exclude means and the forms in which this right might manifest itself in actual property practice. For some time now, the right to exclude has come to be understood as nothing but an entitlement to injunctive relief – that whenever an owner successfully establishes title and an interference with the same, an injunction will automatically follow. Such a view attributes to the right a distinctively consequentialist meaning, …

No Outsourcing Of Law? Wto Law As Practiced By Wto Courts, Petros C. Mavroidis

Faculty Scholarship

This article provides a critical assessment of the corpus of law that the adjudicating bodies of the World Trade Organization (WTO) – the Appellate Body (AB) and panels – have used since the organization was established on January 1, 1995. After presenting a taxonomy of WTO law, I move to discern, and to provide a critical assessment of, the philosophy of the WTO adjudicating bodies, when called to interpret it. In discussing the law that WTO adjudicating bodies have used, I distinguish between sources of WTO law and interpretative elements. This distinction will be explicated in part I below. Part …

"They Say I Am Not An American…": The Noncitizen National And The Law Of American Empire, Christina Duffy Ponsa-Kraus

Faculty Scholarship

The American papers sometimes contain tales about persons who have forgotten who they are, what are their names, and where they live. The Porto [sic] Ricans find themselves in the same predicament as those absent-minded people. To what nationality do they belong? What is the character of their citizenship? ... [l]f since they ceased to be Spanish citizens they have not been Americans [sic] citizens, what in the name ·of heaven have they been?