Law Commons^™

Tax Constraints On Indexed Options, David M. Schizer

Faculty Scholarship

Indexed stock option grants reward executives for outperforming a benchmark, such as the market as a whole or competitors in the same industry. These options offer superior incentives by limiting the influence of factors beyond an executive's control, such as general market and industry conditions. Yet indexed options are almost never used. Professor Saul Levmore seeks to explain this puzzle with norms. This comment on his article argues that tax plays a larger role in this puzzle than he acknowledges, although tax is not a complete explanation. Accounting and Professor Levmore's norms-based account are then briefly considered.

Sentencing Eddie, Gerard E. Lynch

Faculty Scholarship

The mandatory minimum sentences attached to federal narcotics violations have come in for plenty of criticism. The United States Sentencing Commission in 1991 submitted a lengthy report critical of the mandatory minimum provisions. A political protest organization, Families Against Mandatory Minimums, has been formed, and has gotten some media attention. Newspaper columnists,professional commentators, judges, and academics, have criticized the statutes. Amidst the controversy over President Clinton's last-minute pardons of various offenders, his pardons of a number of marginal defendants sentenced to lengthy terms under these statutes have drawn little or no objection. Even Chief Justice Rehnquist, a strong voice for …

Remarks At Memorial Service For Professor Kellis E. Parker, Kendall Thomas

Faculty Scholarship

Seventeen years ago, I came to New York and Columbia University to begin a career in the legal academy. Seventeen years ago, I met Kellis Parker. The two moments run together in my mind, quite simply because my life in New York and at Columbia are inseparable from my relationship with Kellis Parker. If I had the time, I'd stand here and testify. I'd testify about the man who was my colleague, my mentor, my model, and my big-brother-in-the-law. I'd testify about the Kellis Parker who was my careful and generous critic. If I had time, I'd testify about Kellis, …

Restrictive Covenants, Employee Training, And The Limits Of Transaction-Cost Analysis, Gillian Lester

Faculty Scholarship

Restrictive covenants are an increasingly common feature of employment, used across a wide range of industries, occupations, and employees. In its most common form, a restrictive covenant prohibits an employee from competing with the employer within a certain geographic area fora specified period of time after departure, usually one or two years. Sometimes these clauses are drawn more narrowly, proscribing specific activities such as continued dealings with former customers. Regardless of scope, the typical remedy when an employee breaches such a covenant is injunctive relief.

A substantial literature within law and economics debates the merits of restrictive covenants from an …

Unemployment Insurance And Wealth Redistribution, Gillian Lester

Faculty Scholarship

This Article evaluates the merit of liberalizing unemployment insurance eligibility as a means to achieve progressive wealth redistribution-an idea that has recently gained popularity among policymakers and legal scholars. Unemployment insurance (UI) provides temporary, partial wage replacement to workers who suffer unexpected job loss, but it tends to exclude workers who have very low wages or hours of work, or who quit for reasons considered "personal" (for example, to accommodate family demands). Professor Lester argues that while redistribution to workers who are poor or who have caregiving obligations is a desirable goal, expanding UI is a poor way to do …

Taking Care, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

Care must be taken when human needs are expressed in the odd dialect of legal rights. This delicate act of translation – from private need to public obligation – demands acute sensitivity to the ways in which public responsibility inaugurates a new and complex encounter with a broad array of public preferences that deprive dependent subjects of primary stewardship over the ways in which their needs are met. Both Martha Fineman and Joan Williams have taken on the difficult project of making the ethical and political case for transforming dependency and care – from private or domestic need to public …

Is Article 2 The Best We Can Do?, Robert E. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

You will all be happy to know that, haying listened to my colleagues for the last three hours, I have completely forgotten what I was planning to say. But I haven't forgotten why I am here. I am the proverbial skunk at the garden party, and I hope to fulfill my role as the only skeptic in the group. I must tell you candidly, however, that I agree with everything Gail Hillebrand had to say. That doesn't mean she is going to agree with anything that I have to say, but perhaps there are two skeptics here this afternoon.

My …

The Ali And The Ucc, Lance Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

I will speak at less length than some of my colleagues here for two reasons. One is, my knowledge of this subject is extremely limited. I've taught for thirty years, but in areas of law that have nothing to do with these. And, it is only on coming to the American Law Institute job a year ago, that I find myself learning about NCCUSL, learning about all these issues, and learning in substantive ways about commercial law. Suddenly, out of the repressed memory, have come back my experiences in Professor Brancher's course in commercial law. I didn't learn it then, …

Clean Air, Clean Processes? The Struggle Over Air Pollution Law In The People's Republic Of China, William P. Alford, Benjamin L. Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

This Article commences in Part I by introducing law-making in China before reconstructing the drafting process and attendant political battles leading up to the revision of China's principal air pollution law in 1995 – which, as Ackerman and Hassler observed with reference to the United States, can be every bit as messy as the soiled air such efforts are intended to address. Part II then examines the institutional factors that ultimately are critical to an understanding of why the 1995 APPCL, as promulgated, fell well short of its original authors' objectives but set in motion a process that over time …

Have Moral Rights Come Of (Digital) Age In The United States?, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

More than any other contemporary American legal scholar, Professor Merryman has drawn attention to the moral rights claims of artists. Anything written in the field in the United States since 1976 owes inspiration to The Refrigerator of Bernard Buffet ("The Refrigerator") Professor Merryman's seminal article in the 1976 Hastings Law Journal. I feel this particularly acutely since I became interested in the issue as a law student, in 1978. It looked like a hopeful time, for Professor Merryman had shown the way, and the Second Circuit, in the then-recently decided Monty Python case, seemed to be paying heed. The …

Reasoning With Rules, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

What is special about legal reasoning? In what way is it distinctive? How does it differ from reasoning in medicine, or engineering, physics, or everyday life? The answers range from the very ambitious to the modest. The ambitious claim that there is a special and distinctive legal logic, or legal ways of reasoning, modes of reasoning which set the law apart from all other disciplines. Opposing them are the modest, who claim that there is nothing special to legal reasoning, that reason is the same in all domains. According to them, only the contents of the law differentiate it from …

Voting (Insincerely) In Corporate Law, Zohar Goshen

Faculty Scholarship

Voting lies at the center of collective decision-making in corporate law. While scholars have identified various problems with the voting mechanism, insincere voting — in the forms of strategic voting and conflict of interests voting — is perhaps the most fundamental. This article shows that insincere voting distorts the voting mechanism at its core, undermining its ability to determine transaction efficiency. As further demonstrated, strategic and conflict of interests problems frequently coincide with one another: voting strategically often means being in conflict, and many fact patterns present aspects of both problems. Finally, this article claims that although the two problems …

Presidents, Secretaries Of State, And Other Visible International Lawyers, Lori Fisler Damrosch

Faculty Scholarship

I invite you to join me on a journey back ninety years, to the 1911 Annual Meeting as recorded in the 1911 Proceedings (pp. 340-41). President Rovine's predecessor, the then-president of the Society, was Elihu Root, a former secretary of war and secretary of state who was at the time senator for New York (Senator Clinton, please take note!). Root would win the Nobel Peace Prize the following year. President Root proposed a toast to the honorary president of the Society, who then gave the banquet address.

High Brow, Lee C. Bollinger

Faculty Scholarship

Terry Sandalow has an extraordinary mind, its power suggested by his incredible brow and forehead. (I'm always reminded, in fact, of Melville's description of the massive size of the sperm whale's head as representing its huge intelligence.) By any measure, Terry is very smart, broadly educated, and deeply sensitive to the nuances of life. From my earliest days on the law faculty, I remember being continually impressed, at faculty discussions and seminars, by his illuminating questions and comments and aware of his reputation among students as one of the most intellectually challenging teachers. Colleagues routinely sought his advice and criticism …