Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 30 of 32
Full-Text Articles in Law
In Memorium: Bernard Wolfman, Michael A. Fitts
In Memorium: Bernard Wolfman, Michael A. Fitts
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Women's Legal History Symposium Introduction: Making History, Felice J. Batlan
Women's Legal History Symposium Introduction: Making History, Felice J. Batlan
All Faculty Scholarship
This essay introduces the Chicago-Kent Symposium on Women's Legal History: A Global Perspective. It seeks to situate the field of women's legal history and to explore what it means to begin writing a transnational women's history which transcends and at times disrupts the nation state. In doing so, it sets forth some of the fundamental premises of women's legal history and points to new ways of writing such histories.
The Marginalist Revolution In Corporate Finance: 1880-1965, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
The Marginalist Revolution In Corporate Finance: 1880-1965, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries fundamental changes in economic thought revolutionized the theory of corporate finance, leading to changes in its legal regulation. The changes were massive, and this branch of financial analysis and law became virtually unrecognizable to those who had practiced it earlier. The source of this revision was the marginalist, or neoclassical, revolution in economic thought. The classical theory had seen corporate finance as an historical, relatively self-executing inquiry based on the classical theory of value and administered by common law courts. By contrast, neoclassical value theory was forward looking and as a result …
Advocacy Revalued, Geoffrey C. Hazard Jr., Dana A. Remus
Advocacy Revalued, Geoffrey C. Hazard Jr., Dana A. Remus
All Faculty Scholarship
A central and ongoing debate among legal ethics scholars addresses the moral positioning of adversarial advocacy. Most participants in this debate focus on the structure of our legal system and the constituent role of the lawyer-advocate. Many are highly critical, arguing that the core structure of adversarial advocacy is the root cause of many instances of lawyer misconduct. In this Article, we argue that these scholars’ focuses are misguided. Through reflection on Aristotle’s treatise, Rhetoric, we defend advocacy in our legal system’s litigation process as ethically positive and as pivotal to fair and effective dispute resolution. We recognize that advocacy …
Coase, Institutionalism, And The Origins Of Law And Economics, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
Coase, Institutionalism, And The Origins Of Law And Economics, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
Ronald Coase merged two traditions in economics, marginalism and institutionalism. Neoclassical economics in the 1930s was characterized by an abstract conception of marginalism and frictionless resource movement. Marginal analysis did not seek to uncover the source of individual human preference or value, but accepted preference as given. It treated the business firm in the same way, focusing on how firms make market choices, but saying little about their internal workings.
“Institutionalism” historically refers to a group of economists who wrote mainly in the 1920s and 1930s. Their place in economic theory is outside the mainstream, but they have found new …
Coasean Markets, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
Coasean Markets, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
Coase’s work emphasized the economic importance of very small markets and made a new, more marginalist form of economic “institutionalism” acceptable within mainstream economics. A Coasean market is an association of persons with competing claims on a legal entitlement that can be traded. The boundaries of both Coasean markets and Coasean firms are determined by measuring not only the costs of bargaining but also the absolute costs of moving resources from one place to another. The boundaries of a Coasean market, just as those of the Coasean business firm, are defined by the line where the marginal cost of reaching …
Book Review (Paul Frymer's Black And Blue: African Americans, The Labor Movement, And The Decline Of The Democratic Party)., Sophia Z. Lee
Book Review (Paul Frymer's Black And Blue: African Americans, The Labor Movement, And The Decline Of The Democratic Party)., Sophia Z. Lee
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
The Law Of Vertical Integration And The Business Firm: 1880-1960, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
The Law Of Vertical Integration And The Business Firm: 1880-1960, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
Vertical integration occurs when a firm does something for itself that it could otherwise procure on the market. For example, a manufacturer that opens its own stores is said to be vertically integrated into distribution. One irony of history is that both classical political economy and neoclassicism saw vertical integration and vertical contractual arrangements as much less threatening to competition than cartels or other horizontal arrangements. Nevertheless, vertical integration has produced by far the greater amount of legislation at both federal and state levels and has motivated many more political action groups. Two things explain this phenomenon. First, while economists …
Race, Sex, And Rulemaking: Administrative Constitutionalism And The Workplace, 1960 To The Present, Sophia Z. Lee
Race, Sex, And Rulemaking: Administrative Constitutionalism And The Workplace, 1960 To The Present, Sophia Z. Lee
All Faculty Scholarship
This Article uses the history of equal employment rulemaking at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Federal Power Commission (FPC) to document and analyze, for the first time, how administrative agencies interpret the Constitution. Although it is widely recognized that administrators must implement policy with an eye on the Constitution, neither constitutional nor administrative law scholarship has examined how administrators approach constitutional interpretation. Indeed, there is limited understanding of agencies’ core task of interpreting statutes, let alone of their constitutional practice. During the 1960s and 1970s, officials at the FCC relied on a strikingly broad and affirmative interpretation of …
Tracking Berle's Footsteps: The Trail Of The Modern Corporation's Law Chapter, William W. Bratton, Michael L. Wachter
Tracking Berle's Footsteps: The Trail Of The Modern Corporation's Law Chapter, William W. Bratton, Michael L. Wachter
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Book Review (Risa L. Goluboff's The Lost Promise Of Civil Rights), Sophia Z. Lee
Book Review (Risa L. Goluboff's The Lost Promise Of Civil Rights), Sophia Z. Lee
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
The Neal Report And The Crisis In Antitrust, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
The Neal Report And The Crisis In Antitrust, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
The Neal Report, which was commissioned by Lyndon Johnson and published in 1967, is rightfully criticized for representing the past rather than the future of antitrust. Its authors completely embraced a theory of competition and industrial organization that had dominated American economic thinking for forty years, but was just in the process of coming to an end. The structure-conduct-performance (S-C-P) paradigm that the Neal Report embodied had in fact been one of the most elegant and most tested theories of industrial organization. The theory represented the high point of structuralism in industrial organization economics, resting on the proposition that certain …
Neoclassicism And The Separation Of Ownership And Control, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
Neoclassicism And The Separation Of Ownership And Control, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
"Separation of ownership and control" is a phrase whose history will forever be associated with Adolf A. Berle and Gardiner C. Means' The Modern Corporation and Private Property (1932), as well as with Institutionalist economics, Legal Realism, and the New Deal. Within that milieu the large publicly held business corporation became identified with excessive managerial power at the expense of stockholders, social irresponsibility, and internal inefficiency. Neoclassical economists both then and ever since have generally been critical, both of the historical facts that Berle and Means purported to describe and of the conclusions that they drew. In fact, however, within …
The Coase Theorem And Arthur Cecil Pigou, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
The Coase Theorem And Arthur Cecil Pigou, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
In "The Problem of Social Cost" Ronald Coase was highly critical of the work of Cambridge University Economics Professor Arthur Cecil Pigou, presenting him as a radical government interventionist. In later work Coase's critique of Pigou became even more strident. In fact, however, Pigou's Economics of Welfare created the basic model and many of the tools that Coase's later work employed. Much of what we today characterize as the "Coase Theorem," including the relevance of transaction costs, externalities, and bilateral monopoly, was either stated or anticipated in Pigou's work. Further, Coase's extreme faith in private bargaining led him to fail …
Hotspots In A Cold War: The Naacp's Postwar Workplace Constitutionalism, 1948-1964, Sophia Z. Lee
Hotspots In A Cold War: The Naacp's Postwar Workplace Constitutionalism, 1948-1964, Sophia Z. Lee
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
"Free" Religion And "Captive" Schools: Protestants, Catholics, And Education, 1945-1965, Sarah Barringer Gordon
"Free" Religion And "Captive" Schools: Protestants, Catholics, And Education, 1945-1965, Sarah Barringer Gordon
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
The Protestant Revolutions And Western Law, William Ewald
The Protestant Revolutions And Western Law, William Ewald
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Berle And Means Reconsidered At The Century's Turn, William W. Bratton
Berle And Means Reconsidered At The Century's Turn, William W. Bratton
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
What's So Special About American Law?, William Ewald
What's So Special About American Law?, William Ewald
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Knowledge About Welfare: Legal Realism And The Separation Of Law And Economics, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
Knowledge About Welfare: Legal Realism And The Separation Of Law And Economics, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
The welfare state could not function without judgments about how well off its citizens are. For example, governments devise progressive income taxes, which are designed to capture more wealth from the well off and less from the impecunious. These policies presume an ability to take a manageable amount of information about an individual's income or assets and make judgments about her welfare. In fact, people do this all the time, mostly without thinking about the methodological problems involved.
The superficial casualness of our daily observations about welfare belies the state of the economic science of welfare measurement. Economists have attempted …
The Legalization Of The Presidencey: A Twenty-Five Year Watergate Retrospective, Michael A. Fitts
The Legalization Of The Presidencey: A Twenty-Five Year Watergate Retrospective, Michael A. Fitts
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
The Unitary Executive During The First Half-Century, Steven G. Calabresi, Christopher S. Yoo
The Unitary Executive During The First Half-Century, Steven G. Calabresi, Christopher S. Yoo
All Faculty Scholarship
Recent Supreme Court decisions and the impeachment of President Clinton has reinvigorated the debate over Congress’s authority to employ devices such as special counsels and independent agencies to restrict the President’s control over the administration of the law. The initial debate focused on whether the Constitution rejected the “executive by committee” employed by the Articles of the Confederation in favor of a “unitary executive,” in which all administrative authority is centralized in the President. More recently, the debate has begun to turn towards historical practices. Some scholars have suggested that independent agencies and special counsels have become such established features …
The Creation Of A Usable Judicial Past: Max Lerner, Class Conflict, And The Propagation Of Judicial Titans, Sarah Barringer Gordon
The Creation Of A Usable Judicial Past: Max Lerner, Class Conflict, And The Propagation Of Judicial Titans, Sarah Barringer Gordon
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
The Limits Of Preference-Based Legal Policy, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
The Limits Of Preference-Based Legal Policy, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
America's political institutions are built on the principle that individual preferences are central to the formation of policy. The two most important institutions in our system, democracy and the market, make individual preference decisive in the formation of policy and the allocation of resources. American legal traditions have always reflected the centrality of preference in policy determination. In private law, the importance of preference is reflected mainly in the development and persistence of common-law rules, which are intended to facilitate private transactions over legal entitlements. In constitutional law, the centrality of preference is reflected in the high position we assign …
The Roman Foundations Of European Law, William Ewald
The Roman Foundations Of European Law, William Ewald
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
The First Great Law & Economics Movement, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
The First Great Law & Economics Movement, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
Beginning in the 1880s American economists turned their attention to the law in a way unprecedented in American thought. Some legal academics in turn incorporated economics into their thinking about the law. Whether their output or its impact were great enough to warrant calling their efforts a law and economics "movement" is worth debating. This essay argues that there was such a movement.
Four things account for the increasing interest in law and economics at the turn of the century: (1) the widespread application of evolutionary models to the development of both law and economic theory; (2) the influence of …
The Antitrust Movement And The Rise Of Industrial Organization, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
The Antitrust Movement And The Rise Of Industrial Organization, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
The modern science of industrial organization grew out of a debate among lawyers and economists in the waning years of the nineteenth century. For Americans, the emergent business "trust" provoked a dialogue about how the law should respond. Many of the formal theories of industrial organization, such as the ruinous competition doctrine, the potential competition doctrine, and the post-classical concern about vertical integration, were actually borrowed from the law.
Anglo-American and European economists disputed the proper domain of theory and description in economic analysis. The British approach was exemplified Alfred and Mary Paley Marshall's Economics of Industry, published in …
The Doctrine Of Accommodation In The Jurisprudence Of The Religion Clauses, Sarah Barringer Gordon, Arlin M. Adams
The Doctrine Of Accommodation In The Jurisprudence Of The Religion Clauses, Sarah Barringer Gordon, Arlin M. Adams
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Foreign Investment: Foreign Economic Contract Law, Jacques Delisle
Foreign Investment: Foreign Economic Contract Law, Jacques Delisle
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Social Science And Segregation Before Brown, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
Social Science And Segregation Before Brown, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
The courts must bear a heavy share of the burden of American racism. An outpouring of historical scholarship on racism and the American law reveals the outrageous and humiliating extent to which American lawyers, judges, and legislators created, perpetuated, and defended racist American institutions. The law is not autonomous, however, particularly in areas of explicit public policy making. Lawyers did not invent racism. Rather they created racist institutions because society was racist and racism was implicit in its values. The trend in scholarship on the legal history of American racism, however, has been to place most of the blame for …