Law Commons^™

Corrective Justice, Equal Opportunity, And The Legacy Of Slavery And Jim Crow, David B. Lyons

Faculty Scholarship

Chattel slavery was a brutally cruel, repressive, and exploitative system of racial subjugation. When it was abolished, the former slaveholders owed the freedmen compensation for the terrible wrongs of enslavement. Ex-slaves sought reparations, especially in the form of land, but few received any sort of recompense. The wrongs they suffered were never repaired.

No one alive today can be held accountable for the wrongs of chattel slavery, and those who might now be called upon to pay reparations were not even born until many decades after slavery ended. For some scholars, the lack of accountable parties makes current reparations claims …

Building A Digital Collection: The Making Of Historical Publications Of The United States Commission On Civil Rights, Bill Sleeman

Faculty Scholarship

This article briefly explores the technical and administrative tasks required to create a digital resource devoted to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

The Timing, Intensity, And Composition Of Interest Group Lobbying: An Analysis Of Structural Policy Windows In The States, John M. De Figueiredo

Faculty Scholarship

This is the first paper to statistically examine the timing of interest group lobbying. It introduces a theoretical framework based on recurring “structural policy windows” and argues that these types of windows should have a large effect on the intensity and timing of interest group activity. Using a new database of all lobbying expenditures in the U.S. states ranging up to 25 years, the paper shows interest group lobbying increases substantially during one of these structural windows in particular--the budgeting process. Spikes in lobbying during budgeting are driven primarily by business groups. Moreover, even groups relatively unaffected by budgets lobby …

The Domestic Origins Of International Agreements, Rachel Brewster

Faculty Scholarship

This paper examines how international agreements are substitutes for statutes. The statutory law-making system and international agreement negotiations are separate, but sometimes rival, processes for setting national-level policy. International agreements have several advantages over domestic statutes. Under United States law, international agreements can entrench policies that might otherwise be subject to change; they can transfer agenda-setting power from the Congress to the President; and they can delegate authority to international organizations. Each of these effects can lead domestic interest groups to seek international negotiations rather than domestic legislation. Little difference exists between the politics of international and domestic law: Interest …

Render Copyright Unto Caesar: On Taking Incentives Seriously, Wendy J. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay suggests we bifurcate our thinking. Conventional copyright rules by money, so let it rule the money-bound. Let a different set of rules evolve for more complex uses, particularly when the users have a personal relationship with the utilized text. Much recent scholarship contains dramatic suggestions to secure a freedom to be creative, rewrite, and be imaginative. My work has long sought to defend such freedoms, but I believe we understand imagination and its conditions too little to employ it as a starting point. I suggest instead that we acquire a better conceptual map of the generative process and …

Congressional Representation Of Black Interests: Recognizing The Importance Of Stability, Guy-Uriel Charles, Vincent L. Hutchins, Harwood K. Mcclerking

Faculty Scholarship

The relationship between black constituency size and congressional support for black interests has two important attributes: magnitude and stability. Although previous research has examined the first characteristic, scant attention has been directed at the second. This article examines the relationship between district racial composition and congressional voting patterns with a particular emphasis on the stability of support across different types of votes and different types of districts. We hypothesize that, among white Democrats, the influence of black constituency size will be less stable in the South, owing in part to this region’s more racially divided constituencies. Examining LCCR scores from …

Cost-Benefit Analysis, Static Efficiency And The Goals Of Environmental Law, Matthew D. Adler

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Politics, Power, And Public Health: A Comment On Public Health’S New World Order, Laurence R. Helfer

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Fear Assessment: Cost-Benefit Analysis And The Pricing Of Fear And Anxiety, Matthew D. Adler

Faculty Scholarship

Risk assessment is now a common feature of regulatory practice, but fear assessment is not. In particular, environmental, health and safety agencies such as EPA, FDA, OSHA, NHTSA, and CPSC, commonly count death, illness and injury as costs for purposes of cost-benefit analysis, but almost never incorporate fear, anxiety or other welfare-reducing mental states into the analysis. This is puzzling, since fear and anxiety are welfare setbacks, and since the very hazards regulated by these agencies - air or water pollutants, toxic waste dumps, food additives and contaminants, workplace toxins and safety threats, automobiles, dangerous consumer products, radiation, and so …

A Tournament Of Judges?, Stephen Choi, Mitu Gulati

Faculty Scholarship

We suggest a Tournament of Judges where the reward to the winner is elevation to the Supreme Court. Politics (and ideology) surely has a role to play in the selection of justices. However, the present level of partisan bickering has resulted in delays in judicial appointments as well as undermined the public's confidence in the objectivity of justices selected through such a process. More significantly, much of the politicking is not transparent, often obscured with statements on a particular candidate's "merit"- casting a taint on all those who make their way through the judicial nomination process. We argue that the …

Fear Assessment: Cost-Benefit Analysis And The Pricing Of Fear And Anxiety, Matthew D. Adler

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Crime, Law, And The Community: Dynamics Of Incarceration In New York City, Jeffrey A. Fagan

Faculty Scholarship

Random Family (LeBlanc 2003) tells the story of a tangled family and social network of young people in New York City in which prison threads through their lives since childhood. Early on, we meet a young man named Cesar, who sold small amounts of crack and heroin in the streets near his home in the Bronx. During one of his many spells in jail, Cesar sees his father pushing a cafeteria cart in the Rikers Island Correctional Facility, New York City’s jail. Cesar had not seen his father in many years, but he was not very surprised to see him …