Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Keyword
-
- Book reviews (13)
- Washington v. Glucksberg (7)
- United States Supreme Court (6)
- Due process (5)
- Right to die (5)
-
- United States (5)
- Empirical research (4)
- Freedom of speech (4)
- Liberties (4)
- Treaties (4)
- Unenumerated rights (4)
- Congress (3)
- International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (3)
- Interpretation (3)
- Law reform (3)
- Physician assisted suicide (3)
- Public choice theory (3)
- Scandals (3)
- Symposia (3)
- Autonomy (2)
- Canada (2)
- Case studies (2)
- China (2)
- Citizenship (2)
- Claims (2)
- Class actions (2)
- Corporations (2)
- Costs (2)
- Covenant of the League of Nations (2)
- Death with Dignity Act (2)
Articles 1 - 30 of 57
Full-Text Articles in Law
Uncertainty Revisited: Legal Prediction And Legal Postdiction, Ehud Guttel, Alon Harel
Uncertainty Revisited: Legal Prediction And Legal Postdiction, Ehud Guttel, Alon Harel
Michigan Law Review
Legal scholarship, following rational-choice theory, has traditionally treated uncertainty as a single category. A large body of experimental studies, however, has established that individuals treat guesses concerning the future differently than guesses concerning the past. Even where objective probabilities and payoffs are identical, individuals are much more willing to predict a future event (and are more confident in the accuracy of their predictions) than they are willing to postdict a past event (and are also less confident in the accuracy of their postdiction). For example, individuals are more willing to bet on the results of a future die toss than …
The Myth And The Reality Of American Constitutional Exceptionalism, Stephen Gardbaum
The Myth And The Reality Of American Constitutional Exceptionalism, Stephen Gardbaum
Michigan Law Review
This Article critically evaluates the widely held view inside and outside the United States that American constitutional rights jurisprudence is exceptional. There are two dimensions to this perceived American exceptionalism: the content and the structure of constitutional rights. On content, the claim focuses mainly on the age, brevity, and terseness of the text and on the unusually high value attributed to free speech. On structure, the claim is primarily threefold. First, the United States has a more categorical conception of constitutional rights than other countries. Second, the United States has an exceptionally sharp public/private division in the scope of constitutional …
A Narrow Path To Diversity: The Constitutionality Of Rezoning Plans And Strategic Site Selection Of Schools After Parents Involved, Steven T. Collis
A Narrow Path To Diversity: The Constitutionality Of Rezoning Plans And Strategic Site Selection Of Schools After Parents Involved, Steven T. Collis
Michigan Law Review
Justice Kennedy's concurrence in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District Number 1 raised an important and timely constitutional issue: whether the Constitution permits K-12 public school districts not under existing desegregation orders to use site selection of new schools or rezoning plans to achieve racial diversity. Numerous scholars and journalists have interpreted Justice Kennedy's concurrence as explicitly answering the question in the affirmative. This Note argues that the opposite is true. Justice Kennedy's past jurisprudence, as well as his language in Parents Involved, favors the use of strict scrutiny. Indeed, in Parents Involved, Justice Kennedy …
Practice Makes Perfect? An Empirical Study Of Claim Construction Reversal Rates In Patent Cases, David L. Schwartz
Practice Makes Perfect? An Empirical Study Of Claim Construction Reversal Rates In Patent Cases, David L. Schwartz
Michigan Law Review
This Article examines whether U.S. district court judges improve their skills at patent claim construction with experience, including the experience of having their own cases reviewed by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. In theory, higher courts teach doctrine to lower courts via judicial decisions, and lower courts learn from these decisions. This Article tests the teaching-and-learning premise on the issue of claim construction in the realities of patent litigation. While others have shown that the Federal Circuit reverses a large percentage of lower court claim constructions, no one has analyzed whether judges with more claim construction appeal …
Torts And Innovation, Gideon Parchomovsky, Alex Stein
Torts And Innovation, Gideon Parchomovsky, Alex Stein
Michigan Law Review
This Essay exposes and analyzes a hitherto overlooked cost of tort law: its adverse effect on innovation. Tort liability for negligence, defective products, and medical malpractice is determined by reference to custom. We demonstrate that courts' reliance on custom and conventional technologies as the benchmark of liability chills innovation and distorts its path. Specifically, recourse to custom taxes innovators and subsidizes replicators of conventional technologies. We explore the causes and consequences of this phenomenon and propose two possible ways to modify tort law in order to make it more welcoming to innovation.
Nothing Improper? Examining Constitutional Limits, Congressional Action, Partisan Motivation, And Pretextual Justification In The U. S. Attorney Removals, David C. Weiss
Michigan Law Review
The forced mid-term resignations of nine U.S. Attorneys was an unprecedented event in American history. Nearly one year after the administration executed the removals, the House Judiciary Committee was still reviewing and publicizing emails, memoranda, and other documents in an effort to understand how the firings were effectuated. This Note examines many of those documents and concludes that the removals were likely carried out for partisan reasons. It then draws on the Constitution, Supreme Court precedent, and separation of powers principles to argue that Congress is constitutionally empowered to enact removal limitations for inferior officers such as U.S. Attorneys so …
Are Artificial Tans The New Cigarette? How Plaintiffs Can Use The Lessons Of Tobacco Litigation In Bringing Claims Against The Indoor Tanning Industry, Andrea Y. Loh
Michigan Law Review
Indoor tanning salons have grown significantly in popularity during recent years. Scientific research has revealed a strong link between skin cancer and ultraviolet light exposure from indoor tanning lamps. Despite such dangers, federal regulations place minimal restrictions on the labeling of indoor tanning lamps. Indoor tanning salons work vigorously to dispel notions of a link to skin cancer, often falsely promoting various health benefits of indoor tanning. The first lawsuit for injuries resulting from indoor tanning was recently filed against an indoor tanning salon, and other such litigation is poised to follow. This Note examines three potential tort claims against …
Optimal Political Control Of The Bureaucracy, Matthew C. Stephenson
Optimal Political Control Of The Bureaucracy, Matthew C. Stephenson
Michigan Law Review
It is widely believed that insulating an administrative agency from the influence of elected officials, whatever its other benefits orjustifications, reduces the agency's responsiveness to the preferences of political majorities. This Article argues, to the contrary, that a moderate degree of bureaucratic insulation from political control alleviates rather than exacerbates the countermajoritarian problems inherent in bureaucratic policymaking. An elected politician, though responsive to majoritarian preferences, will almost always deviate from the majority in one direction or the other Therefore, even if the average policy position of a given elected official tends to track the policy views of the median voter …
Is There A Duty?: Limiting College And University Liability For Student Suicide, Susanna G. Dyer
Is There A Duty?: Limiting College And University Liability For Student Suicide, Susanna G. Dyer
Michigan Law Review
This Note argues that nonclinician administrators employed by institutions of higher education do not have a special relationship with their students such that they have a duty to act with reasonable care to prevent a foreseeable student suicide. Courts that have in recent years ruled to the contrary have done so by incorrectly basing their duty-of-care analysis on foreseeability of harm alone. With an eye toward a proper duty-of-care analysis, this Note analyzes multiple factors to reach its conclusion, including the ideal relationship between colleges and their students and the burden on and capability of colleges to protect their students …
Corporate Taxation And International Charter Competition, Mitchell A. Kane, Edward B. Rock
Corporate Taxation And International Charter Competition, Mitchell A. Kane, Edward B. Rock
Michigan Law Review
Corporate charter competition has become an increasingly international phenomenon. The thesis of this Article is that this development in corporate law requires a greater focus on corporate tax law. We first demonstrate how a tax system's capacity to distort the international charter market depends both upon its approach to determining corporate location and upon the extent to which it taxes foreign source corporate profits. We also show, however, that it is not possible to remove all distortions through modifications to the tax system alone. We present instead two alternative methods for preserving an international charter market. The first-best solution involves …
Property Rules, Liability Rules, And Uncertainty About Property Rights, Stewart E. Sterk
Property Rules, Liability Rules, And Uncertainty About Property Rights, Stewart E. Sterk
Michigan Law Review
Clarity can be a considerable virtue in property rights. But even when property rights are defined clearly in the abstract, ascertaining the scope of those rights in concrete situations often entails significant cost. In some instances, the cost of acquiring information about the scope of property rights will exceed the social value of that information. In those circumstances, further search for information about the scope of rights is inefficient; the social harm avoided by further search does not justify the costs of the search. Potential resource users, however make decisions based on private costs and benefits, not social costs and …
Categorizing Categories: Property Of The Estate And Fraudulent Transfers In Bankruptcy, Michael R. Cedillos
Categorizing Categories: Property Of The Estate And Fraudulent Transfers In Bankruptcy, Michael R. Cedillos
Michigan Law Review
11 U.S.C. § 541 defines "property of the estate" in bankruptcy, but courts have not interpreted that section uniformly. The Fifth Circuit has read the term broadly to include both interests in property that the trustee recovers under § 541(a)(3) and legal or equitable interests under § 541(a)(1) that have purportedly been fraudulently transferred but which the trustee has not yet recovered. The Second Circuit, however, has taken a more restrained approach, holding that fraudulently transferred property that the trustee has not yet recovered does not constitute property of the estate. This Note argues that courts should adopt the Second …
Free Speech And The Case For Constitutional Exceptionalism, Roger P. Alford
Free Speech And The Case For Constitutional Exceptionalism, Roger P. Alford
Michigan Law Review
Embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the evocative proposition that "[e]veryone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression." Beneath that abstraction there is anything but universal agreement. Modern democratic societies disagree on the text, content, theory, and practice of this liberty. They disagree on whether it is a privileged right or a subordinate value. They disagree on what constitutes speech and what speech is worthy of protection. They disagree on theoretical foundations, uncertain if the right is grounded in libertarian impulses, the promotion of a marketplace of ideas, or the advancement of participatory democracy. They …
An "Unintended Consequence": Dred Scott Reinterpreted, Sam Erman
An "Unintended Consequence": Dred Scott Reinterpreted, Sam Erman
Michigan Law Review
Austin Allen's monograph marks the 150th anniversary of the decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford with a revisionist interpretation of that oft-examined case. Many scholars have portrayed the case as a proslavery decision that fanned sectional fires. After all, the Court held that blacks were not U.S. citizens and that Congress was impotent to bar slavery in U.S. territories. Allen, by contrast, understands the case primarily as a judicial attempt to rationalize federal commerce and slavery jurisprudences. Part I argues that this ambitious reinterpretation enriches, but does not topple, existing Dred Scott historiography. In the case of the Court's citizenship …
Weakening The Bill Of Rights: A Victory For Terrorism, Stephen Reinhardt
Weakening The Bill Of Rights: A Victory For Terrorism, Stephen Reinhardt
Michigan Law Review
What is most remarkable about Richard Posner's latest book-and he has written many-is that he argues that we should repose full confidence in the executive branch to handle the most sensitive constitutional issues of our time without once mentioning the flagrant breaches of law and critical falsehoods with which President Bush and his administration have deluged the public since 9/11. This only seven years after he composed a lengthy tome regarding President Clinton's impeachment in which he appropriately, if harshly, condemned the president for his unethical and illegal conduct, principally his deliberate lies and purposeful lack of candor with the …
Deconstructing International Criminal Law, Kevin Jon Heller
Deconstructing International Criminal Law, Kevin Jon Heller
Michigan Law Review
After nearly fifty years of post-Nuremberg hibernation, international criminal tribunals have returned to the world stage with a vengeance. The Security Council created the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia ("ICTY") in 1993 and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda ("ICTR") in 1994. Hybrid domestic-international tribunals have been established in Sierra Leone (2000), East Timor (2000), Kosovo (2000), Cambodia (2003), Bosnia (2005), and Lebanon (2007). And, of course, the international community's dream of a permanent tribunal was finally realized in 2002, when the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court ("ICC") entered into force. This unprecedented proliferation of international …
Gatekeeper Failures: Why Important, What To Do, Merritt B. Fox
Gatekeeper Failures: Why Important, What To Do, Merritt B. Fox
Michigan Law Review
The United States was hit by a wave of corporate scandals that crested between late 2001 and the end of 2002. Some were traditional scandals involving insiders looting company assets - the most prominent being Tyco, HealthSouth, and Adelphia. But most were what might be called "financial scandals": attempts by an issuer to maximize the market price of its securities by creating misimpressions as to what its future cash flows were likely to be. Enron and WorldCom were the most spectacular examples of these financial scandals. In scores of additional cases, the companies involved and their executives were sued by …
Law Enforcement In Subordinated Communities: Innovation And Response, Richard Delgado
Law Enforcement In Subordinated Communities: Innovation And Response, Richard Delgado
Michigan Law Review
Policing styles and policy reform today exhibit a ferment that we have not seen since the turbulent sixties. The reasons propelling reform include some of the same forces that propelled it then - minority communities agitating for a greater voice, demands for law and order - but also some that are new, such as the greater premium that society places on security in a post-9/11 world. Three recent books discuss this new emphasis on styles of policing. Each centers on policing in minority communities. Steve Herbert's Citizens, Cops, and Power: Recognizing the Limits of Community examines the innovation known as …
War Tales And War Trials, Patricia M. Wald
War Tales And War Trials, Patricia M. Wald
Michigan Law Review
In this foreword, I will compare my experiences as a judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and the work of war crimes tribunals generally, with a few of the recurrent themes in epic tales of war. Books and trials strive to educate and to persuade their audiences of the barbarity of war and its antipathy to the most fundamental norms of a humane society.3 War crimes tribunals began with Nuremberg and have proliferated in the past fifteen years. These tribunals were established to try and to punish individuals for violations of international humanitarian law ("IHL")-the so-called …
Peace Through Law? The Failure Of A Noble Experiment, Robert J. Delahunty, John C. Yoo
Peace Through Law? The Failure Of A Noble Experiment, Robert J. Delahunty, John C. Yoo
Michigan Law Review
Ever since its publication in 1929, Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front has been regarded as a landmark of antiwar literature. Appearing a decade after the end of the First World War, the novel became a literary sensation almost overnight. Within a year of publication, it had been translated into twenty languages, including Chinese, and by April 1930, sales for twelve of the twenty editions stood at 2.5 million. Remarque was reputed to have the largest readership in the world. Hollywood took note, and an equally successful film appeared in 1930. The success of the novel was …
Judging Sex In War, Karen Engle
Judging Sex In War, Karen Engle
Michigan Law Review
Rape is often said to constitute a fate worse than death. It has long been deployed as an instrument of war and outlawed by international humanitarian law as a serious-sometimes even capital-crime. While disagreement exists over the meaning of rape and the proof that should be required to convict an individual of the crime, today the view that rape is harmful to women enjoys wide concurrence. Advocates for greater legal protection against rape often argue that rape brings shame upon raped women as well as upon their communities. Shame thus adds to rape's power as a war weapon. Sexual violence …
Temporary Accidents?, M. Elizabeth Magill
Temporary Accidents?, M. Elizabeth Magill
Michigan Law Review
In Part I of this Review, I will summarize Croley's book, focusing on his powerful critique of public choice theory and the alternative account that he develops and defends. Part II assesses the book, arguing that Croley is successful in demonstrating agency autonomy but less successful in showing that either administrator motivations or the administrative process tend to make agencies regulate in welfare-enhancing ways. As is often the case, the critique is more powerful than the construction of the alternative account. Even so, Croley's book should alter debates over the possibility of good government by placing the agency and how …
Scandal, Sukyandaru, And Chouwen, Benjamin L. Liebman
Scandal, Sukyandaru, And Chouwen, Benjamin L. Liebman
Michigan Law Review
This Review proceeds in four parts. Part I describes West's account of scandal in Japan and the United States and explores some of the ramifications of his account. Part II examines the formation of scandal in contemporary China. Part III compares scandal in China with West's conclusions about scandal in Japan and the United States. Part IV discusses defamation litigation in China, with a view to adding further comparative insight to West's discussion of Japanese libel suits.
The Citizenship Paradox In A Transnational Age, Cristina M. Rodríguez
The Citizenship Paradox In A Transnational Age, Cristina M. Rodríguez
Michigan Law Review
Through Americans in Waiting, Hiroshi Motomura tells us three different stories about how U.S. law and policy, over time, have framed the relationship between immigrants and the American body politic. He captures the complexity, historical contingency, and democratic urgency of that relationship by canvassing the immigration law canon and teasing from it the three frameworks that have structured immigrants' social status, their interactions with the state, and the processes of immigrant integration and naturalization. In so doing, he illuminates how popular mythologies about the assimilative capacity of the American melting pot obscure myriad political and social conflicts over how …
Rational Choice, Reputation, And Human Rights Treaties, Alex Geisinger, Michael Ashley Stein
Rational Choice, Reputation, And Human Rights Treaties, Alex Geisinger, Michael Ashley Stein
Michigan Law Review
Part I of this Review sets forth Guzman's general theory of international law with specific consideration of the way reputation influences state behavior. Part II then tests Guzman's overarching thesis by applying it to human rights treaties and concludes that explaining states' entry into human rights treaties requires a broader conception of reputation than Rational Choice allows.
What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Mass Torts?, Anthony J. Sebok
What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Mass Torts?, Anthony J. Sebok
Michigan Law Review
Twenty years ago, Deborah Hensler and a team of scholars at the RAND Corporation's Institute for Civil Justice issued a report entitled Trends in Tort Litigation: The Story Behind the Statistics. Pressure had been mounting both in the business community and the Republican Party to "reform" tort law throughout the 1980s. There was concern that Americans "egged on by avaricious lawyers, sue[d] too readily, and irresponsible juries and activist judges wayla[id] blameless businesses at enormous cost to social and economic well-being." The RAND report argued that the real risk of a torts "explosion" came from the world of mass …
Federal Fairness To State Taxpayers: Irrationality, Unfunded Mandates, And The "Salt" Deduction, Brian Galle
Federal Fairness To State Taxpayers: Irrationality, Unfunded Mandates, And The "Salt" Deduction, Brian Galle
Michigan Law Review
By sheer dollars alone, the largest impact of the Alternative Minimum Tax is to deny many taxpayers the deduction for the taxes they paid to their state and local governments under § 164 of the Internal Revenue Code. This Article provides a fine-grained analysis of the overall fairness of the state-andlocal- tax deduction--and, by implication, the fairness of its partial repeal through the Alternative Minimum Tax. I offer for the first time a close examination of how newly understood limits on taxpayer mobility and rationality might affect individuals' choices of bundles of local taxes and localgovernment services, which in turn …
Don't Cross The Streams: Past And Present Overstatement Of Customary International Law In Connection With Conventional Fair And Equitable Treatment Obligations, Theodore Kill
Michigan Law Review
The obligation to provide fair and equitable treatment to foreign investors and investments has existed as a concept of international economic law at least since the 1919 Covenant of the League of Nations. The fair and equitable treatment provision is a key protection contained in the vast majority of modern bilateral investment treaties. Tribunals adjudicating alleged breaches of these fair and equitable treatment provisions have not arrived at a uniform interpretation of the term. As a threshold issue, however each tribunal must address the question of whether a state's obligations under a given treaty's fair and equitable treatment provision will …
Confidence In The Nonprofit Sector Through Sarbanes-Oxley-Style Reforms, Joseph Mead
Confidence In The Nonprofit Sector Through Sarbanes-Oxley-Style Reforms, Joseph Mead
Michigan Law Review
Over the past several years, the nonprofit sector suffered a series of highly visible scandals that shook the public's confidence in charitable organizations. Concerned politicians and nonprofit leaders responded with a variety of reforms inspired by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. The Note focuses on three such reforms: requiring nonprofit officers certify financial statements, mandating audits of nonprofits' financial statements, and imposing independent audit committees on nonprofit boards of directors. This Note argues that, contrary to the conclusions of many commentators, these reforms will provide a net benefit to the nonprofit sector by increasing donor confidence while imposing minimal costs.
The Significance Of The Local In Immigration Regulation, Cristina M. Rodríguez
The Significance Of The Local In Immigration Regulation, Cristina M. Rodríguez
Michigan Law Review
The proliferation of state and local regulation designed to control immigrant movement generated considerable media attention and high-profile lawsuits in 2006 and 2007. Proponents and opponents of these measures share one basic assumption, with deep roots in constitutional doctrine and political rhetoric: immigration control is the exclusive responsibility of the federal government. Because of the persistence of this assumption, assessments of this important trend have failed to explain why state and local measures are arising in large numbers, and why the regulatory uniformity both sides claim to seek is neither achievable nor desirable. I argue that the time has come …