Law Commons^™

Power And Possibility In The Era Of Right To Counsel, Robust Rent Laws & Covid-19, Erica Braudy, Kim Hawkins

Articles & Chapters

New York City (NYC) finds itself in an unprecedented housing crisis as the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic reveals with devastating force that safe, sustainable and affordable housing is both a human right and a public health necessity. The profound humanitarian and economic devastation of COVID-19 puts millions of New Yorkers at risk of eviction especially those within Black and Latinx communities. In addition, the pandemic hit just as the legal landscape for tenants was transformed through landmark legislation ensuring the Right to Counsel in eviction proceedings and sweeping reforms of New York's rent laws. The unparalleled COVID-19 pandemic, the influx of …

Punishment Without Process: Victim Impact Proceedings For Dead Defendants, Bruce Green, Rebecca Roiphe

Articles & Chapters

After Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide in jail, two judges allowed his accusers to speak in court. This article argues that the proceedings were inappropriate because the criminal case ends when the defendant dies. If the conviction and appeal are not final, there is no finding of guilt, and the defendant is still presumed innocent. Allowing accusers to speak at this time violates the principle of due process and threatens to undermine faith in judges and the criminal justice system in general. While courts are at times legally required to hear from victims of crimes, they were not allowed to do …

Capitalism And Risk: Concepts, Consequences, And Ideologies, Edward A. Purcell

Articles & Chapters

Politically charged claims about both "capitalism" and "risk" became increasingly insistent in the late twentieth century. The end of the post-World War II boom in the 1970s and the subsequent breakup of the Soviet Union inspired fervent new commitments to capitalist ideas and institutions. At the same time structural changes in the American economy and expanded industrial development across the globe generated sharpening anxieties about the risks that those changes entailed. One result was an outpouring of roseate claims about capitalism and its ability to control those risks, including the use of new techniques of "risk management" to tame financial …

Shareholder Cultivation And New Governance, Tamara Belinfanti

Articles & Chapters

Several formal proposals have been made to address shareholder short-termism and speculative behavior. These include the imposition of a financial transaction tax, changes to the U.S. capital gains tax rate, and the adoption of an Investor Stewardship Code in the United Kingdom. This Article reverses the focus from top-down solutions and instead, focuses on bottom-up grass root solutions that corporations can employ, and in some cases do already employ to achieve substantially the same effect of rewarding certain types of shareholder behavior while discouraging others — a process I refer to as "Shareholder Cultivation." While many of the techniques and …

A Tale Of Three Hoaxes: When Literature Offends The Law, Molly Guptill Manning

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Beyond Economics In Pay For Performance, Tamara C. Belinfanti

Articles & Chapters

This article argues that while much of the intellectual energy has focused on the economics of executive pay, the challenge of executive compensation is as much a challenge of human behavior as it is one of economics. The raison d’etre of pay for performance (PFP) is to motivate executives to make decisions that are in the best interest of their firm and its shareholders. Attention to the relevant individual, situational, cultural, and institutional dynamics (what I term “behavioral dynamics”) that affect how executives are motivated and how they value future rewards is critical for the sustainability of PFP as a …

Guilty By Association? Regulating Credit Default Swaps, Houman B. Shadab

Articles & Chapters

A wide range of U.S. policymakers initiated a series of actions in 2008 and 2009 to bring greater regulation and oversight to credit default swaps (CDSs) and other over-the-counter derivatives. The policymakers’ stated motivations echoed widely expressed criticisms of the regulation, characteristics, and practices of the CDS market, and focused on the risks of the instruments and the lack of public transparency over their utilization and execution. Certainly, the misuse of certain CDSs enabled mortgage-related security risk to become overconcentrated in some financial institutions.

Yet as the analysis in this Article suggests, failing to distinguish between CDS derivatives and the …

The Proxy Advisory & Corporate Governance Industry: The Case For Increased Oversight And Control, Tamara C. Belinfanti

Articles & Chapters

The proxy advisory and corporate governance industry plays a significant role in shareholder voting and in the formulation of corporate governance policy. The industry operates with relatively little accountability and virtually free from regulatory oversight. Understanding the relationship between this industry and mutual funds, who in the aggregate are the largest owners of publicly traded shares in the United States, is critical to understanding issues of shareholder rights, the meaning of the right to vote in corporate elections, and the role that institutional investors, like mutual funds, play in the corporate landscape.

Mutual funds exercise their substantial voting power by …

Canadian Softwood Lumber And Free Trade Under Nafta, Sydney M. Cone Iii.

Articles & Chapters

Canada and the United States have been involved in a long-running dispute over U.S. efforts to protect U.S. producers of softwood lumber by imposing high duties on imports of Canadian-origin softwood lumber. This dispute was prolonged by virtue of the fact that Canada and the United States not only are parties to the North American Free Trade Agreement ("NAFTA"), but also are members of the World Trade Organization ("WTO"). NAFTA contains provisions for the resolution of a trade dispute by an arbitration panel. A WTO agreement known as the Dispute Settlement Understanding ("DSU") separately provides for the creation of panels …

Dependency By Law: Poverty, Identity, And Welfare Privatization, Frank W. Munger

Articles & Chapters

Privatization of welfare reflects the political pressure to limit public responsibility for protection of social citizenship. Recent welfare reforms incorporate three classic market-like privatization mechanisms--contracting out services forcing allocation of a limited pool of benefits, and deregulation. Deregulation entails strategic diversion and disqualification of large numbers of would-be applicants who are left without alternatives to the labor market. In this article I discuss an empirical study of the effects of deregulation of welfare on the self-perceptions of recipients. Interviews with recipients and with low-wage health care workers, former recipients, show that, criticisms of welfare notwithstanding, they have embraced welfare reforms …

The Human Right To Housing: Making The Case In U.S. Advocacy, Maria Foscarinis, Brad Paul, Bruce Porter, Andrew Scherer

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Afterword: How Can We Save The Safety Net?, Frank W. Munger

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Rights In The Shadow Of Class: Poverty, Welfare, And The Law, Frank W. Munger

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Poverty, Welfare, And The Affirmative State [Comments], Frank W. Munger

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Legal Services In The Doha Round, Sydney M. Cone Iii.

Articles & Chapters

As a subcategory of professional services and a sub-subcategory of business services, legal services, when supplied transnationally, are the subject of negotiation in the current round of multilateral trade negotiation known as the Doha Round. The negotiations on legal services that take place in the Doha Round have considerable potential for affecting the economics and activities of lawyers and law firms, and for influencing the content of local professional rules governing the practice of law. This article examines that potential.

Bombing Markets, Subverting The Rule Of Law: Enron, Financial Fraud, And September 11, 2001, Faith Stevelman

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Interpreting Indentures: How Disequilibrium Economics And Financial Asset Specificity Support Narrow Interpretation, Houman B. Shadab

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Views On Multidisciplinary Practice With Particular Reference To Law And Economics, New York, And North Carolina, Sydney M. Cone Iii.

Articles & Chapters

This Article-after describing analytical gaps in the work of the ABA Commission on MDP, and after criticizing the analysis of MDP by the law and economics school and the Big Five subset thereof-sets forth, with commentary, proposals relating to MDP developed by the New York State Bar Association and the MDP Task Force of the North Carolina Bar Association. It concludes by comparing these proposals in the context of the law governing lawyers in the United States.

The Future Debate On Multidisciplinary Practice In The United States, Sydney M. Cone Iii.

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Global Issues In Compensatory Justice: Introduction, Penelope Andrews

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Immanence And Identity: Understanding Poverty Through Law And Society Research, Frank W. Munger

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Legislatures, Courts And The Sec: Reflections On Silence And Power In Corporate And Securities Law, Faith Stevelman

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Contractual Bankruptcy Waivers: Reconciling Theory, Practice, And Law, Marshall E. Tracht

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Panhandlers At Yale: A Case Study In The Limits Of Law, Brandt Goldstein

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Economic Rights Of The Institutionalized Mentally Disabled, Michael L. Perlin

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Ideas And Interests: Businessmen And The Interstate Commerce Act, Edward A. Purcell Jr.

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.