Law Commons^™

International Law In Domestic Courts: A Conflict Of Laws Approach, Karen Knop, Ralf Michaels, Annelise Riles

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The relationship between international law and domestic law is rarely understood as a conflict of laws. Understanding it in this way opens up a parallel with the field of conflict of laws: the field for which the relationship between legal systems, especially the role of another system's jurisdiction, laws, and judgments vis-à-vis the domestic legal system, are exactly the bread-and-butter issues. We argue for such an approach to international law in domestic courts: an approach that we elaborate as "theory through technique."

In our view, conflicts should be seen broadly as the discipline that developed to deal with conflicts between …

Commerce In Religion, Bernadette Meyler

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

As this Symposium Article contends, religion increasingly overlaps with the commercial sphere, and courts are obligated to determine whether or not to adopt an entirely hands-off approach simply because the specter of religion lurks on the horizon. Whereas the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights tends to accept its member states' separation of commercial elements out from the protections more generally accorded to religion, the U.S. Supreme Court has treated the two spheres as overlapping. To the extent that each court does consider religious transactions in terms of commercial relations, each also arrives at a very different conception …

Changing The Paradigm Of Stock Ownership From Concentrated Towards Dispersed Ownership? Evidence From Brazil And Consequences For Emerging Countries, Erica Gorga

Cornell Law Faculty Working Papers

This paper analyzes micro-level dynamics of changes in ownership structures. It investigates a unique event: changes in ownership patterns currently taking place in Brazil. It builds upon empirical evidence to advance theoretical understanding of how and why concentrated ownership structures can change towards dispersed ownership.

Commentators argue that the Brazilian capital markets are finally taking off. The number of listed companies and IPOs in the Sao Paulo Stock Exchange (Bovespa) has greatly increased. Firms are migrating to Bovespa’s special listing segments, which require higher standards of corporate governance. Companies have sold control in the market, and the stock market has …

The Anti-Network: Private Global Governance, Legal Knowledge, And The Legitimacy Of The State, Annelise Riles

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Global private law has become the source of both anxiety and euphoria. Inherent in this fascination is the assumption that global private law threatens the legitimacy of the state by taking over its functions through new techniques of governance. In this article, I build upon research in one arena of global private governance, the production of legal documentation for the global swap markets, to challenge the most prominent assumptions about private law beyond the state. I argue that rather than focusing on how global private law is or is not an artifact of state power, a body of private norms, …

Transdisciplinary Conflict Of Laws Foreword: Cavers's Double Legacy, Karen Knop, Ralf Michaels, Annelise Riles

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

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The Us Subprime Mbs Crisis: New Legislative Agenda And Potential Ramifications For Foreign Jurisdictions, Yuliya Guseva

Cornell Law School Inter-University Graduate Student Conference Papers

The recent US liquidity crisis, triggered by the failure of mortgage-related securities, produced long-lasting ramifications inside and outside of the US. International financial indicators and the housing markets demonstrate that the mortgage-related liquidity problems keep reverberating throughout the US and the global economy. In the US, even such giants as Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, which were expected to inject market liquidity, have declared considerable losses from subprime MBS. The ongoing crisis provided a fertile ground for a number of publications and research. However, a range of fundamental issues regarding legislative responses to the US MBS crisis and its international …

The Co-Perpetrator Model Of Joint Criminal Enterprise, Jens David Ohlin

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Reproductive Injustice: An Analysis Of Nicaragua's Complete Abortion Ban, Jocelyn E. Getgen

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Jury Systems Around The World, Valerie P. Hans

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Lay citizens participate as decision makers in the legal systems of many countries. This review describes the different approaches that countries employ to integrate lay decision makers, contrasting in particular the use of juries composed of all citizens with mixed decision-making bodies of lay and law-trained judges. The review discusses research on the benefits and drawbacks of lay legal decision making as well as international support for the use of ordinary citizens as legal decision makers, with an eye to explaining a recent increase in new jury systems around the world. The review calls for more comparative work on diverse …

Property As Constitutional Myth: Utilities And Dangers, Laura S. Underkuffler

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Citizens As Legal Decision Makers: An International Perspective, Valerie P. Hans

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

On May 1, 2007, Korea's National Assembly approved a judicial reform bill that introduces a jury system for serious criminal cases in Korean courts. The jury system is limited: jurors will only participate in cases where the defendant agrees to a trial by jury, and the jury's verdicts are only advisory to the judge. Nonetheless, Korean citizens now have a remarkable new opportunity to make judgments about criminal trials.

With this law reform, Korea joins a growing list of countries whose legal systems employ citizens as legal decision makers. The United States, Great Britain, and many other common law countries …

The European Constitution And Its Implications For China, Xingzhong Yu

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The European Constitution is significant not only for the European Union, but also for a developing constitutional system like that of China. The EU constitutional practice may have positive implications on China's constitutional theory and practice. In the wake of the European constitutional achievement, Chinese constitutional scholars need to re-examine their long-held conviction in the indispensable role of the state in constitutional formation and imagination. The EU experience may have provided China with valuable insights and ways to deal with its inherited ethnic problems and improve its institutions on regional autonomy for ethnic minorities. China's own constitutional experiment in Hong …

Economic Emergency And The Rule Of Law, Bernadette Meyler

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Academic work extolling the merits of the "rule of law" both domestically and internationally abounds today, yet the meanings of the phrase itself seem to proliferate. Two of the most prominent contexts in which rule of law rhetoric appears are those of economic development and states of emergency. In the area of private law, dissemination of the rule of law across the globe and, in particular, among emerging market countries is often deemed a prerequisite for enhancing economic development, partly because it ensures that foreign investments will not be summarily expropriated and that contractual rights will not be frustrated by …

What's Your Sign? -- International Norms, Signals, And Compliance, Charles K. Whitehead

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

This Article proposes a new approach to analyzing state compliance with international obligations, positing that increased interaction among the world's regulators has reinforced norms within cross-border regulatory networks, influencing the actions of senior regulators who are network members and, in turn, affecting levels of state compliance.

Network norms help define what state actions constitute signals and the meanings of those signals. Certain actions, such as implementing a substantive network standard, may be considered a concrete expression of an abstract network norm. States that fail to implement that standard risk failing to send the right signal, potentially incurring significant network sanctions. …

Integrating Transnational Perspectives Into Civil Procedure: What Not To Teach, Kevin M. Clermont

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Introduction To The Italian Legal System. The Allocation Of Normative Powers: Issues In Law Finding, Marinella Baschiera

International Journal of Legal Information

No abstract provided.

The European Pasteurization Of French Law, Mitchel De S.-O.-L'E. Lasser

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

In a series of stunning decisions handed down in the last few years, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has condemned the decisionmaking procedures traditionally used by the French Supreme Courts (i.e., the Cour de cassation and the Conseil d'Etat). This Article traces and critiques this developing “fair trial” jurisprudence, which has also resulted in the condemnation of the supreme courts of Belgium, Portugal, and the Netherlands, whose decisionmaking procedures were all patterned on the French civil law model. Finally, the Article examines the dramatic and schismatic French responses that have ensued.

This Article offers a case study at …

Exporting U.S. Anti-Terrorism Legislation And Policies To The International Law Arena, A Comparative Study: The Effect On Other Countries' Legal Systems, Olga Kallergi

Cornell Law School Inter-University Graduate Student Conference Papers

The terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York on 9/11 set in motion a new era all over the world: an era of a world uniting against a common enemy, but also an era of insecurity and fear. Laws have been changed worldwide, nations have united against a common threat, legal theories and beliefs of centuries have been questioned, and civil liberties have been replaced by a need for national safety. Has this worldwide effort worked? Is our world a better place now that we are all fighting the same enemy? Did we learn from our past …

On The Design Of Efficient Priority Rules For Secured Creditors: Empirical Evidence From A Change In Law, Clas Bergström, Theodore Eisenberg, Stefan Sundgren

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

This article assesses the effect of a reduction in secured creditor priority on distributions and administrative costs in liquidating bankruptcy cases by reporting the first empirical study of the effect of a priority change. Priority reform had redistributive effects in liquidating bankruptcy. As expected, average payments to general unsecured creditors were significantly higher after the reform than before the reform and payments to secured creditors decreased. Reform did not increase the size of the pie to be distributed in bankruptcy. Nor did it increase the direct costs of bankruptcy.

Introduction To Comparative Legal Cultures: The Civil Law And The Common Law On Evidence And Judgment (Oral Presentation Of The Book By Antoine Garapon & Ioannis Papadopoulos, Juger En Amerique Et En France : Culture Judiciaire Française Et Common Law, Ioannis Papadopoulos

Cornell Law Faculty Working Papers

This book is the fruit of a basic idea, namely that comparative law is meaningless if it is regarded as the sole study of juxtaposed legal systems, regardless of their cultural dimension. The book’s main aim is to identify and analyze the basic cultural differences between the two great legal traditions of the West, the Continental and the Anglo-American one, through a thorough examination of the trial, and of judicial institutions more widely, as these are organized in France and the United States. For that purpose, after an introduction to the concept of legal culture and the basic notions of …

Taxation Of Spin-Off – U.S. And German Corporate Tax Law, Stefan W. Suchan

Cornell Law School J.D. Student Research Papers

Corporate law provides for a transaction commonly referred to as “spin-off”. The corporate enterprise is divided in (at least) two corporations. The stock of a controlled subsidiary will be distributed pro rata by a parent corporation to its shareholders which end up owning a brother/sister pair of corporate enterprises.

The Internal Revenue Code (IRC) in § 355 provides special rules for the distribution of stock and securities of a controlled corporation. The transaction is known as a “D reorganization”, if such a distribution follows the transfer by a corporation of all or a part of its assets to another corporation, …

Post-Enron: U.S. And German Corporate Governance, Stefan W. Suchan

Cornell Law School J.D. Student Research Papers

Only five years after Henry Hansmann and Reinier Kraakmann announced "the End of History of Corporate Law" – borrowing the words of Francis Fukuyama–, this observation seems at least questionable. Following two major failures of the “American Model” with the bankruptcy of Enron and WorldCom, the question of the "right" Corporate Governance regime is again under discussion.

Legislators around the globe assume that further development of Corporate Governance is necessary. There is consent for the need of improvement, but no clear answer on how to improve. A first step to solving the arising problems might be to evaluate the reasons …

What Future Democracy?, Aziz Rana

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The threat posed by Aids to the development of democracy in Africa plays no part in current discussions of the impact of the disease.

On International And Interdisciplinary Legal Ethics Scholarship, W. Bradley Wendel

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

"Legal Ethics is an international and interdisciplinary journal dedicated to the field of legal ethics." The mission statement of this journal poses three concise challenges for scholars in this discipline: To define the domain of legal ethics, to study it from a perspective that is valid across jurisdictional boundaries, and to incorporate the insights of related disciplines. As befits an emerging and exciting field, lawyers and university faculty throughout the English- speaking common-law world have begun to engage with all three of these problems. The book reviews section of Legal Ethics has highlighted the publication of many of the …

Approaches To Statutory Interpretation And Legislative History In France, Claire M. Germain

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Lay Participation In Legal Decision Making: Introduction To Law & Policy Special Issue, Valerie P. Hans

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

United States scholarship on lay participation revolves around one predominant form of lay participation, the jury (Hans & Vidmar forthcoming 2004). However, in the legal systems of many countries, laypeople participate as decision makers in other ways. Laypersons serve as judges (Provine 1986), magistrates (Diamond 1993), and private prosecutors (Perez Gil 2003). Lay and law-trained judges may also decide cases together in mixed tribunals (Kutnjak Ivkovi6 2003; Machura 2003; Vidmar 2002). Although diverse in structure, these methods share with the jury a set of animating ideas about lay involvement in legal decision making.

Many of these ideas appear to be …

Property As A Fundamental Constitutional Right? The German Example, Gregory S. Alexander

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Comparative Readings Of Roscoe Pound's Jurisprudence, Mitchel De S.-O.-L'E. Lasser

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Secured Debt And The Likelihood Of Reorganization, Clas Bergström, Theodore Eisenberg, Stefan Sundgren

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Theory suggests that secured creditors may increasingly oppose a debtor’s reorganization as the value of their collateral approaches the amount of their claims. If reorganization occurs and the value of the firm appreciates, the secured creditor receives only part of the gain. But if the firm’s value depreciates, the secured creditor bears all of the cost. Secured claimants, thus, often have more to lose than to gain in reorganizations. This study of Finnish reorganizations filed in districts that account for most of the country’s reorganizations finds that creditor groups most likely to be well-secured are most likely to oppose reorganization. …

A Comparative View Of Standards Of Proof, Kevin M. Clermont, Emily Sherwin

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

In common-law systems, the standard of proof for ordinary civil cases requires the party who bears the burden of proof to establish by a preponderance of the evidence that the facts alleged are true. In contrast, the prevailing standard of proof for civil cases in civil-law systems is indistinguishable from the standard for criminal cases: the judge must be firmly convinced that the facts alleged are true. This striking difference in common-law and civil-law procedures has received very little attention from either civilian or comparative scholars.

The preponderance standard applied in common-law systems is openly probabilistic and produces, on average, …