Law Commons^™

Incentives To Settle Under Joint And Several Liability: An Empirical Analysis Of Superfund Litigation, Howard F. Chang, Hilary Sigman

All Faculty Scholarship

Congress may soon restrict joint and several liability for cleanup of contaminated sites under Superfund. We explore whether this change would discourage settlements and is therefore likely to increase the program 's already high litigation costs per site. Recent theoretical research by Kornhauser and Revesz finds that joint and several liability may either encourage or discourage settlement, depending on the correlation of outcomes at trial across defendants. We extend their two-defendant model to a richer framework with N defendants. This extension allows us to test the theoretical model empirically using data on Superfund litigation. We find that joint and several …

Book Review Of But For Birmingham: The Local And National Movements In The Civil Rights Struggle, Davison M. Douglas

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Book Review Of Make Haste Slowly: Moderates, Conservatives, And School Desegregation In Houston, Davison M. Douglas

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Psychology Of Global Climate Change, Jeffrey J. Rachlinski

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

In its attempt to address the threat of global climate change, society has struggled to reach a consensus regarding the need for preventive measures. Professor Rachlinski describes the threat of global climate change as a unique commons dilemma and explains that various psychological phenomena of judgment render it unlikely that society will be able to respond effectively to the threat. After considering the effects of biased assimilation, loss aversion, and other psychological processes, the author explains that an innovative approach is necessary to properly address the dilemma of global climate change.

Specifically, the author examines the prospect of governmental intervention …

Constitutional Design: An Oxymoron?, Donald L. Horowitz

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Appointment Of General Yaron: Continuing Impunity For The Sabra And Shatilla Massacres, Linda A. Malone

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Courtroom Technology, A Judicial Primer, Fredric I. Lederer

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Creating And Solving The Problem Of Drug Use During Pregnancy, Dorothy E. Roberts

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Changing Structure In The Practice Of Law, Geoffrey C. Hazard Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Why The Successful Assassin Is More Wicked Than The Unseccessful One, Leo Katz

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Toward A Greener Gatt: Environmental Trade Measures And The Shrimp-Turtle Case, Howard F. Chang

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Delaware Law As Applied Public Choice Theory: Bill Cary And The Basic Course After Twenty-Five Years, William W. Bratton

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Copyright And Democracy: A Cautionary Note, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

Democratic theories of copyright have become quite the rage in recent years. A growing number of commentators have offered their views on the relationship between copyright law and the process of self-governance.' No scholar has been more committed to developing this perspective than Neil Netanel. In an important series of articles, Netanel has pursued a powerful and innovative project that attempts to reexamine copyright through the lens of democratic theory. His core concern is that the concentration of private wealth and power in communications and mass media is creating unprecedented disparities in the ability to be heard. The ""speech hierarchy"" …

Rethinking Welfare Rights: Reciprocity Norms, Reactive Attitudes, And The Political Economy Of Welfare Reform, Amy L. Wax

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Death Is The Whole Ball Game, Jeffrey A. Fagan, James S. Liebman, Valerie West

Faculty Scholarship

In Capital Appeals Revisited and The Meaning of Capital Appeals, Barry Latzer and James N.G. Cauthen argue that a study of capital appeals should focus only on overturned findings of guilt, and complain that in A Broken System we examine all overturned capital verdicts. But the question they want studied cannot provide an accurate evaluation of a system of capital punishment. By proposing to count only "conviction" error and not "sentence" error, Latzer and Cauthen ignore that if a death sentence is overturned, the case is no longer capital and the system of capital punishment has failed to achieve its …

The Moral Exclusivity Of The New Civil Society, Dorothy E. Roberts

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Without Fear Or Favor: Judge James Edwin Horton And The Trial Of The Scottsboro Boys, Douglas O. Linder

Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

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 …

Memorial: Margaret Althea Goldblatt (1948-2000), Margaret A. Leary

Articles

Margaret Goldblatt, who died on June 15, 2000, in Cape Town, South Africa, after a year-long battle with cancer, was a rare combination of librarian and entrepreneur. She had both a sense of humor and a sense of professionalism that endeared her to those who knew her. Many of her colleagues knew her only through telephone and e-mail communications, for she worked the last several years from the office of Ward and Associates, located in the home she shared with her husband Peter Ward and her two children, Clea Goldblatt, age 21, and Zachary Ward, age 11.

Death Matters – A Reply To Latzer And Cauthen, James S. Liebman, Jeffrey A. Fagan, Valerie West

Faculty Scholarship

The legal treatment of capital punishment in the United States "rests squarely on the predicate that the penalty of death is qualitatively different from a sentence of imprisonment, however long. Death, in its finality, differs more from life imprisonment than a 100-year prison term differs from one of only a year or two. This predicate is among "the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society" and determine whether a punishment is "cruel and unusual" in violation of the Constitution. Because "'[f]rom the point of view of the defendant, [death] is different in both its severity …

A Comprehensive Wealth Tax, David Shakow, Reed Shuldiner

All Faculty Scholarship

Income, consumption, and wealth are all possible bases for a tax system in the United States. Scholars have specified the structure of income tax and consumption taxes, but no one has attempted to describe in detail a comprehensive wealth tax for the United States. In this paper, we begin to develop such a structure. In particular, we hypothesize that the combination of a flat rate tax on networth and a flat rate tax on earned income along with an appropriate level of exemptions, could be an attractive tax base. In order to explore the structure of a wealth tax, we …

The Paradox Of Silence: Some Questions About Silence As Resistance, Dorothy E. Roberts

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Vern Countryman And The Path Of Progressive (And Populist) Bankruptcy Scholarship, David A. Skeel Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Vern Countryman was the leading progressive bankruptcy scholar - and in fact the leading bankruptcy scholar of any perspective. This article explores the links between Countryman's work and that of his New Deal predecessors, on the one hand, and his successors, on the other. In addition to Countryman himself, the article focuses on William Douglas, who was Countryman's predecessor and mentor, as well as being the leading bankruptcy scholar of the New Deal. Among Countryman's successors, the article focuses on the work of Elizabeth Warren, Countryman's successor at Harvard Law School and the nation's leading …

The Complicated Ingredients Of Wisdom And Leadership, Michael A. Fitts

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Designing Electronic Casebooks That Talk Back: The Cato Program, Kevin D. Ashley

Articles

Electronic casebooks offer important benefits of flexibility in control of presentation, connectivity, and interactivity. These additional degrees of freedom, however, also threaten to overwhelm students. If casebook authors and instructors are to achieve their pedagogical goals, they will need new methods for guiding students. This paper presents three such methods developed in an intelligent tutoring environment for engaging students in legal role-playing, making abstract concepts explicit and manipulable, and supporting pedagogical dialogues. This environment is built around a program known as CATO, which employs artificial intelligence techniques to teach first-year law students how to make basic legal arguments with cases. …

Benign Hegemony? Kosovo And Article 2(4) Of The U.N. Charter, Jules Lobel

Articles

The 1999 U.S.-led, NATO-assisted air strike against Yugoslavia has been extolled by some as leading to the creation of a new rule of international law permitting nations to undertake forceful humanitarian intervention where the Security Council cannot act. This view posits the United States as a benevolent hegemon militarily intervening in certain circumstances in defense of such universal values as the protection of human rights. This article challenges that view. NATO's Kosovo intervention does not represent a benign hegemony introducing a new rule of international law. Rather, the United States, freed from Cold War competition with a rival superpower, is …

Complexity And Copyright In Contradiction, Michael J. Madison

Articles

The title of the article is a deliberate play on architect Robert Venturi's classic of post-modern architectural theory, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. The article analyzes metaphorical 'architectures' of copyright and cyberspace using architectural and land use theories developed for the physical world. It applies this analysis to copyright law through the lens of the First Amendment. I argue that the 'simplicity' of digital engineering is undermining desirable 'complexity' in legal and physical structures that regulate expressive works.

Becoming Visible: The Ada's Impact On Healthcare For Persons With Disabilities, Mary Crossley

Articles

This Article will adopt the perspective of individuals with disabilities in their encounters with the health care finance and delivery system in the United States, and will pose the question of what the past decade has shown the ADA to mean (or not mean) for those individuals' ability to seek, receive, and pay for effective health care services. To that end, this Article will provide an overview of three broad areas on which the ADA has had varying degrees of impact.

Part II of the Article will examine how the ADA has affected the rights of an individual with a …

A Broken System: Error Rates In Capital Cases, 1973-1995, James S. Liebman, Jeffrey Fagan, Valerie West

Faculty Scholarship

There is a growing bipartisan consensus that flaws in America's death-penalty system have reached crisis proportions. Many fear that capital trials put people on death row who don't belong there. Others say capital appeals take too long. This report – the first statistical study ever undertaken of modern American capital appeals (4,578 of them in state capital cases between 1973 and 1995) – suggests that both claims are correct.

Capital sentences do spend a long time under judicial review. As this study documents, however, judicial review takes so long precisely because American capital sentences are so persistently and systematically fraught …

Building Bridges Iv: Of Cultures, Colors, And Clashes--Capturing The International In Delgado's Chronicles, Berta E. Hernández-Truyol

UF Law Faculty Publications

Sex, race, gender, sexuality, color, religion, language, nationality, ethnicity, culture, poverty - socially constructed categories, social tropes that relegate "others" to subordinated positions in the varied and various cultural and economic marketplaces of both global and local societies. Richard Delgado's transformational work engages all of these tropes insightfully, disturbingly, and illuminatingly. His rich literature conceptualizes persons as multidimensional, complex beings and exposes society as the pre-fabricated stage in which diverse interactions evolve. Delgado's epistemological stance is fluid, non-rigid, and grounded on subjectivity.

In this essay I will focus on Delgado's latest book When Equality Ends: Stories About Race and Resistance. …