Law Commons^™

Intraportfolio Litigation Essay, Amanda M. Rose, Richard Squire

Faculty Scholarship

The modern trend is for investors to diversify. Shareholders who own one S&P 500 firm tend to own many of the others as well. This trend casts doubt on the traditional compensation and deterrence rationales for legal rules that hold corporations liable for the acts of their agents. Today, when A Corp sues B Corp (for breach of contract, theft of trade secrets, or any other legal wrong), many of the same shareholders own both the plaintiff and the defendant. For these shareholders, damages just shift money from one pocket to another, minus of course lawyer fees. We offer here …

Judicial Takings And State Action: Rereading Shelley After Stop The Beach Renourishment The Very Idea Of Judicial Takings, Nestor M. Davidson

Faculty Scholarship

When the Supreme Court recently dipped its toe into longstanding debates about judicial takings in Stop the Beach Renourishment, Inc. v. Florida Department of Environmental Protection, the intimation that the Court might finally recognize the doctrine generated a wave of responses. Commentators concerned with the expansion of regulatory takings jurisprudence argued that it would be unwise to apply the Takings Clause to the judiciary; those inclined to defend a more vigorous application of the Clause, perhaps not surprisingly, saw a promising new avenue of vindication. It would be naive to argue that the Stop the Beach Renourishment plurality's logic could-or …

Obama Tax Reforms Are Misguided, Constantine N. Katsoris

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Fiduciary Law's Lessons For Deliberative Democracy, David L. Ponet, Ethan J. Leib

Faculty Scholarship

One of the ascendant understandings of democracy in contemporary political theory is that democratic societies ought to be deliberative The precise requirements for "deliberative democracy" are contested both as a matter of normative theory and institutional design; but most deliberative democrats see deliberation as essential to the legitimation of decision-making within the polity. Yet deliberative democrats have expended most of their efforts mapping what deliberation should look like at two different levels of decision-making: the deliberation among citizens themselves in exercises of direct and participatory democracy - and the deliberation among legislators or other official actors within the organs of …

Prosecutors' Ethical Duty Of Disclosure In Memory Of Fred Zacharias , Bruce A. Green

Faculty Scholarship

In the spring of 2009, I sent Fred Zacharias an e-mail to let him know that the American Bar Association's (ABA) Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility, on which I was serving, was working on an opinion on prosecutorial ethics and to suggest that once it was published, the opinion might be fodder for our next article. Over the preceding decade, Fred and I had coauthored five articles on the regulation of prosecutors,' and various others on the regulation of lawyers in general, but at that time, we had no work in progress and had been out of touch …

Legal Ethics Scholarship Of Ted Schneyer: The Importance Of Being Rigorous, The Festschrift For Ted Schneyer Lawyer Regulation For The 21st Century: Foreword, Bruce A. Green

Faculty Scholarship

This collection on "Lawyer Regulation for the 21st Century" celebrates Ted Schneyer's legal ethics scholarship. From my perspective as Ted's friend and colleague in the field of legal ethics, it is obvious how richly he deserves this festschrift, and it is my privilege to be invited to contribute its foreword. But to someone outside the field, many questions might be raised. Why celebrate legal scholarship? Why celebrate legal ethics scholarship? Why celebrate Ted Schneyer's legal ethics scholarship? And why celebrate it by collecting writings on the theme of Lawyer Regulation for the 21st Century? Though I have no desire to …

Confidentiality Explained: The Dialogue Approach To Discussing Confidentiality With Clients, Elisia M. Klinka, Russell G. Pearce

Faculty Scholarship

Many lawyers lie to their clients by saying, “Everything you tell me is confidential” despite the existence of some rules that require lawyers to disclose client confidences and others that permit lawyers to disclose confidences to protect themselves or collect fees. In an effort to encourage clients to speak honestly, a number of commentators urge lawyers to provide either a general or specific notice of the exceptions to confidentiality. This Article offers a different approach. It seeks to promote an honest and open dialogue between lawyer and client that will create a relationship of mutual trust and will make it …

Witchcraft Accusations And Human Rights: Case Studies From Malawi, Chi Adanna Mgbako, Katherine Glenn

Faculty Scholarship

This Article explores potential community-based interventions to assist victims of witchcraft accusations, based on forty-five case studies from an experimental mobile legal-aid clinic in Malawi, a country in southeastern Africa where witchcraft accusations are widespread and often irreparably harm those accused. In Malawi, the accused are mainly older women who are often blamed for bewitching young children.

The Unenforceable Corrupt Contract: Corruption And Nineteenth Century Contract Law, Zephyr Teachout

Faculty Scholarship

This paper explores the 19th century practice of courts refusing to enforce "corrupt" contracts as against public policy.

Revolution And Intervention In The Middle East, Catherine Powell

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

China's Turn Against Law, Carl F. Minzner

Faculty Scholarship

Chinese authorities are reconsidering legal reforms they enacted in the 1980s and 1990s. These reforms had emphasized law, litigation, and courts as institutions for resolving civil grievances between citizens and administrative grievances against the state. But social stability concerns have led top leaders to question these earlier reforms. Central Party leaders now fault legal reforms for insufficiently responding to (or even generating) surging numbers of petitions and protests.

Chinese authorities have now drastically altered course. Substantively, they are de-emphasizing the role of formal law and court adjudication. They are attempting to revive pre-1978 Maoist-style court mediation practices. Procedurally, Chinese authorities …

Tax Expenditures, Reform, And Distributive Justice , Linda Sugin

Faculty Scholarship

Tax reform is coming, and it will be an important part of any plan to avert national fiscal disaster. The President's Fiscal Commission recently presented a proposal for comprehensive tax reform that will form the basis for serious legislative discussion. At the center of that proposal is elimination of "tax expenditures, " which are provisions in the tax law that operate like direct government spending. They include the charitable deduction, the home mortgage interest deduction, the exclusion for employer provided health insurance, the child credit, the earned income credit, education credits and deductions, the tax preference for retirement savings accounts …

Strategic Liability In The Corporate Group , Richard Squire

Faculty Scholarship

The typical large corporation divides itself into numerous subsidiaries but then overrides the liability barriers between them by having the subsidiaries and the parent company cross-guarantee each other's major debts. Previous scholarly theories of the corporate group cannot explain why. The leading theory posits that the subsidiaries make it easier for creditors to evaluate risk because they enable each creditor to lend against a discrete asset pool within the broader enterprise. But any such efficiency would be undercut by the guarantees, which transmit credit risk across subsidiary boundaries. This Article argues that the combination of subsidiaries and intragroup guarantees reflects …

Work Friends: A Commentary On Laura Rosenbury's Working Relationships, Ethan J. Leib

Faculty Scholarship

Knowing that work is a site of intimacy between coworkers does not tell us--as lawyers and public policy designers--what should change to accommodate this new knowledge. Rosenbury rightly emphasizes that this deeper understanding of intimate networks at work should enrich and modify our pursuit of antidiscrimination norms in the workplace. On the one hand, we might wish to allow friends to prefer one another at work in order to reinforce the social institution of friendship that does so much to sustain us. On the other hand, the dangers of homophily--the robust sociological finding that we tend to sort ourselves into …

Property's Morale , Nestor M. Davidson

Faculty Scholarship

A foundational argument long invoked to justify stable property rights is that property law must protect settled expectations. Respect for expectations unites otherwise disparate strands of property theory focused on ex ante incentives, individual identity, and community. It also privileges resistance to legal transitions that transgress reliance interests. When changes in law unsettle expectations, such changes are thought to generate disincentives that Frank Michelman famously labeled demoralization costs. Although rarely approached in these terms, arguments for legal certainty reflect underlying psychological assumptions about how people contemplate property rights when choosing whether and how to work, invest, create, bolster identity, join …

Developing Standards Of Conduct For Prosecutors And Criminal Defense Lawyers, Bruce A. Green

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Lawyering In A Vacuum, James A. Cohen

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Myths And Realities Of Correctional Severity: Evidence From The National Corrections Reporting Program On Sentencing Practices, John F. Pfaff

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Taming Or Protecting The Modern Corporation? Shareholder-Stakeholder Debates In A Comparative Light, Martin Gelter

Faculty Scholarship

In this article, I provide a comparative historical account on the debate of whether corporations should exclusively be run by the company in the interest of shareholders, or whether managers should be permitted or required to take the interests of others groups (stake-holders) into account. The comparison focuses on the US, Germany and France and traces the debates through the most important formative periods of these countries’ corporate governance systems. It is generally assumed that shareholder primacy has a stronger following in the US and the UK than in Continental Europe, where the stakeholder view is thought to be more …

Localities As Equality Innovators, Robin A. Lenhardt

Faculty Scholarship

This Article thus argues that instead of regarding cities and localities that, like Seattle and Louisville, try to develop serious solutions to existing racial disparities as "bad cities" no different from those whose notorious policies spurred the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, we should be regarding them as potential "equality innovators.” Their on-the-ground experience with the realities of race and its operation in the twenty-first century arguably places them in a better position than courts to develop innovative approaches to the structural racial inequities with which so many municipalities must grapple. Existing doctrine limits dramatically the ability …

What Happened To The "Up-Tick" Rule?, Constantine N. Katsoris

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Courts' Increasing Consideration Of Behavioral Genetics Evidence In Criminal Cases: Results Of A Longitudinal Study, Deborah W. Denno

Faculty Scholarship

This article, which is part of a symposium honoring David Baldus, presents a unique study of all criminal cases (totaling thirty-three) that addressed behavioral genetics evidence from June 1, 2007, to July 1, 2011. The study builds upon this author’s prior research on all criminal cases (totaling forty-eight) that used such evidence during the preceding thirteen years (1994-2007). This combined collection of eighty-one criminal cases employing behavioral genetics evidence offers a rich context for determining how the criminal justice system has been handling genetics factors for nearly two decades, but also why the last four years reveal particularly important discoveries. …

Historical Roots Of Citizens United Vs. Fec: How Anarchists And Academics Accidentally Created Corporate Speech Rights, The General Essay, Zephyr Teachout

Faculty Scholarship

This paper looks at how the early rhetoric around the First Amendment enabled later development of corporate political speech rights.

Consent V. Closure, Howard M. Erichson, Benjamin C. Zipursky

Faculty Scholarship

Claimants, defendants, courts, and counsel are understandably frustrated by the difficulty of resolving mass tort cases. Defendants demand closure, but class certification has proved elusive and non-class settlements require individual consent. Lawyers and scholars have been drawn to strategies that solve the problem by empowering plaintiffs’ counsel to negotiate package deals that effectively sidestep individual consent. In the massive Vioxx settlement, the parties achieved closure by including terms that made it unrealistic for any claimant to decline. The American Law Institute’s Principles of the Law of Aggregate Litigation offers another path to closure: it proposes to permit clients to consent …

Collective Action And The Urban Commons, Sheila R. Foster

Faculty Scholarship

Urban residents share access to a number of local resources in which they have a common stake. These resources range from local streets and parks to public spaces to a variety of shared neighborhood amenities. Collectively shared urban resources suffer from the same rivalry and free-riding problems that Garrett Hardin described in his Tragedy of the Commons tale. Scholars have not yet worked up a theory about how this tragedy unfolds in the urban context, particularly in light of existing government regulation and control of common urban resources. This Article argues that the tragedy of the urban commons unfolds during …

Boumediene, Munaf, And The Supreme Court's Misreading Of The Insular Cases , Andrew Kent

Faculty Scholarship

In 2008, the Supreme Court embraced both global constitutionalism - the view that the Constitution provides judicially enforceable rights to non-citizens outside the sovereign territory of the United States - and what I call human-rights universalism - the view that the Constitution protects military enemies during armed conflict. Boumediene v. Bush found a constitutional right to habeas corpus for non-citizens detained as enemy combatants at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba, while Munaf v. Geren - decided the same day as Boumediene and involving U.S. citizens detained in Iraq during the war there - hinted that the Due Process …