Law Commons^™

Domestic Enforcement Of International Decisions – Remarks By Lori F. Damrosch, Lori Fisler Damrosch

Faculty Scholarship

I approach this topic first within the centennial framework, and then with attention to the Sanchez-Llamas and Bustillo cases just argued at the Supreme Court, as well as the Medellin case (pending in Texas) and other current problems.

The Paradox Of The Drug Elimination Program In New York City Public Housing, Jeffrey A. Fagan, Garth Davies, Jan Holland

Faculty Scholarship

In this study, we examine the effects of the DEP intervention at three levels of complementary theoretical and practical relevance: the public housing development itself, the neighborhood in which public housing is situated, and the police precinct where the tract is located. From surveys of residents, observations of program activities, and analyses of NYCHA's program records, we compiled detailed information on the components of DEP and the reactions of public housing residents to each type of intervention. We then analyzed panel data from 1985-1996 to estimate the effects of DEP on crime rates in and around the city's public housing …

The Past, Present, And Future Of Violent Crime Federalism, Daniel C. Richman

Faculty Scholarship

The history of the federal involvement in violent crime frequently is told as one of entrepreneurial or opportunistic action by presidential administrations and Congress. The problem with this story, however, is that it treats state and local governments as objects of federal initiatives, not as independent agents. Appreciating that state and local governments courted and benefited from the federal interest is important for understanding the past two decades, but also for understanding the institutional strains created by the absolute priority the feds have given to counterterrorism since September 11, 2001. Intergovernmental relations are at a crossroads. For two decades, the …

The Housing Court Act (1972) And Computer Technology (2005): How The Ambitious Mission Of The Housing Court To Protect The Housing Stock Of New York City May Finally Be Achieved, Mary Zulack

Faculty Scholarship

1972 to concentrate housing-related cases in a single court and to involve judges in the process of seeing that the housing stock was repaired. When I agreed to contribute an essay on how the Housing Court is fulfilling its obligation to preserve the housing stock, for the October 29, 2004 conference held by The Justice Center of the New York County Lawyers' Association, I imagined I would review annual court-produced statistics. I expected this to include 30 years worth of information about repairs claimed to be needed, orders to repair issued, number of repairs actually made, the range of enforcement …

Six Myths About Kelo: Kelo V. City Of New London, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

Kelo v. City of New London, 125 S. Ct. 2655 (2005), is unique in the modem annals of law in terms of the negative response it has evoked. The initial reaction by lawyers familiar with the case was one of lack of surprise. Within days, however, Internet bloggers, television commentators, and neighbors talking over backyard fences decided that Keio was an outrage. Even Justice Stevens sought to distance himself from his own majority opinion, declaring in a speech to a bar association that he thought the outcome was "unwise," and that he would not have supported it if he were …

Inducers And Authorisers: A Comparison Of The Us Supreme Court's Grokster Decision And The Australian Federal Court's Kazaa Ruling, Jane C. Ginsburg, Sam Ricketson

Faculty Scholarship

On June 27, 2005, the US Supreme Court announced its much-awaited decision in MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster Ltd. A few months after this, the Federal Court of Australia handed down its decision at first instance in relation to parallel litigation in that country concerning the KaZaa file sharing system. Both decisions repay careful consideration of the way in which the respective courts have addressed the relationship between the protection of authors' rights and the advent of new technologies, particularly in relation to peer-to-peer networks.

In the Grokster case, songwriters, record producers and motion picture producers alleged that two popular …

Home Rule And Local Political Innovation, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

As demonstrated by San Francisco's recent adoption of instant runoff voting and New York City's recent expansion of its program for funding candidates for municipal office, local governments around the country have been actively engaged in examining and revising electoral and governmental processes. These local initiatives include alternative voting systems, campaign finance reforms, conflicts of interest codes, term limits, and revisions to tax, budget and legislative procedures. These local innovations illustrate both the capacity of local governments to restructure basic features of their political organization and their interest in doing so. Local political innovations also test the scope of local …

Optimal Liability For Terrorism, Darius N. Lakdawalla, Eric L. Talley

Faculty Scholarship

This paper analyzes the normative role for civil liability in aligning terrorism precaution incentives, when the perpetrators of terrorism are unreachable by courts or regulators. We consider the strategic interaction among targets, subsidiary victims, and terrorists within a sequential, game-theoretic model. The model reveals that, while an "optimal" liability regime indeed exists, its features appear at odds with conventional legal templates. For example, it frequently prescribes damages payments from seemingly unlikely defendants, directing them to seemingly unlikely plaintiffs. The challenge of introducing such a regime using existing tort law doctrines, therefore, is likely to be prohibitive. Instead, we argue, efficient …

Embracing Chance: Post-Modern Meditations On Punishment, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

Since the modern era, the discourse of punishment has cycled through three sets of questions. The first, born of the Enlightenment itself, asked: On what ground does the sovereign have the right to punish? Nietzsche most forcefully, but others as well, argued that the question itself begged its own answer. The right to punish, they suggested, is what defines sovereignty, and as such, can never serve to limit sovereign power. With the birth of the social sciences, this skepticism gave rise to a second set of questions: What then is the true function of punishment? What is it that we …

The American Transformation Of Waste Doctrine: A Pluralist Interpretation, Jedediah S. Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

This Article draws on an episode of nineteenth-century American doctrinal history to develop a pluralist approach to explaining changes in property law. It addresses the question: What causes ac­count for the development of property regimes across time? The courts' answer emerges from examination of nineteenth-century American reform of the law of waste, which governs the changes te­nants may make in the estates they occupy. A line of state supreme court cases, beginning in 1810, transformed the doctrine from the strict rule of English common law to a flexible standard. Economic analysis helps to explain the change; the full story, however, …

Rights Myopia In Child Welfare, Clare Huntington

Faculty Scholarship

For decades, legal scholars have debated the proper balance of parents' rights and children's rights in the child welfare system. This Article argues that the debate mistakenly privileges rights. Neither parents' rights nor children's rights serve families well because, as implemented, a solely rights-based model of child welfare does not protect the interests of parents or children. Additionally, even if well-implemented, the model still would not serve parents or children because it obscures the important role of poverty in child abuse and neglect and fosters conflict, rather than collaboration, between the state and families. In lieu of a solely rights-based …

Legal Ground Rules In Coordinated And Liberal Market Economies, Katharina Pistor

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter seeks to explain the affinity between the nature of economic systems: coordinated market economies (CMEs) and liberal market economies (LMEs) on the one hand, and legal origin (civil vs common law systems) on the other. It starts with the simple observation that LMEs tend to be common law jurisdictions, and CMEs civil law jurisdictions. It proposes that the affinity between economic and legal system offers important insights into the foundations of different types of market economies and, in particular, differences in the scope of the state vs the powers of the individual. The main argument is that the …

Legislating Racial Fairness In Criminal Justice, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

Twenty years ago, in McCleskey v. Kemp, the Supreme Court rejected a capital defendant's claim that statistical evidence of racial discrimination in the administration of Georgia's death penalty system constituted a violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. Yet, even as McCleskey effectively bars constitutional challenges to racial disparities in the criminal justice system where invidious bias is difficult to establish, the Court invites advocates to pursue legislation as a remedy to racial disparities. Indeed, the McCleskey Court offers as a rationale for its ruling the judiciary's institutional incompetence to remedy these disparities, holding that "McCleskey's arguments are best …

The Media As Participants In The International Legal Process, Monica Hakimi

Faculty Scholarship

We know what we know about current international events through the media. The media (with their instantaneous transmission of images and sound across great distances) inform us of everything from the train bombings in Madrid and London, to human rights abuses in Darfur, to the fall of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Yet the media do not simply communicate raw information; they selectively filter, define and give shape to the events that they cover — in terms of what is happening, whether it is appropriate, and how relevant international actors should and do respond. The media thus are the nerves of the …

Framing Affirmative Action, Kimberlé W. Crenshaw

Faculty Scholarship

With the passage of the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative ("MCRI"), Michigan joins California and Washington to constitute the new postaffirmative action frontier. For proponents such as Ward Connerly, affirmative action is on the edge of extinction. Connerly plans to carry his campaign against what he calls "racial preferences" to eight states in 2008, scoring a decisive Super-Tuesday repudiation of a social policy that he portrays as the contemporary face of racial discrimination.

On the other side of the issue, proponents of affirmative action are struggling to regroup, fearful that the confluence of lukewarm support among Democratic allies, messy presidential politics …

Objections In Conscience To Medical Procedures: Does Religion Make A Difference Lecture?, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

How should the government res pond if people refuse standard medical treatment? What should the government do if people refuse medical treatment for their children, and what autonomy should teenagers be given in making such choices? Is religion a proper basis for refusing such medical treatment? Furthermore, should medical practitioners have a privilege not to render services that they object to in conscience? This article analyzes such questions and proposes that the most sensible answers depend on context. Legislatures should sometimes create no exemptions, should sometimes create exemptions based on nonreligious criteria, and should sometimes use criteria framed in terms …

The Essential Role Of Securities Regulation, Zohar Goshen, Gideon Parchomovsky

Faculty Scholarship

This Article posits that the essential role of securities regulation is to create a competitive market for sophisticated professional investors and analysts (information traders). The Article advances two related theses – one descriptive and the other normative. Descriptively, the Article demonstrates that securities regulation is specifically designed to facilitate and protect the work of information traders. Securities regulation may be divided into three broad categories: (i) disclosure duties; (ii) restrictions on fraud and manipulation; and (iii) restrictions on insider trading – each of which contributes to the creation of a vibrant market for information traders. Disclosure duties reduce information traders’ …

The Journal: Fortieth Anniversary Volume, Debra A. Livingston

Faculty Scholarship

This is to congratulate the editors of the Columbia Journal of Law and Social Problems as they mark the Journal's fortieth anniversary. The Journal's first editor-in-chief, Andrew Krulwich, recalled on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary that the Journal "began as a germ of an idea to expand the law school journal experience to include more empirical methods and social issues." In 1965, when the first issue was published, there was a growing sense among students and professors that "the traditional sources of legal knowledge," including the established journals and the scholarly expectations that had grown up around them, were …

Lawyering Across Multiple Legal Orders – Rethinking Legal Education In Comparative And International Law, Katharina Pistor

Faculty Scholarship

I appreciate the opportunity to briefly introduce a new course Columbia Law School is offering to first year students for the first time this spring semester. The course, which I will be co-teaching with my colleague George Bermann, is called "Lawyering in Multiple Legal Orders." The title reflects the basic "philosophy" of the course, namely that legal practitioners today will invariably work in more than one legal order. This notion is not unfamiliar to lawyers practicing in federal systems, such as the United States. By the end of the first semester students have a basic understanding of the federalist system …

Our International Constitution, Sarah H. Cleveland

Faculty Scholarship

This Article seeks to challenge and redirect contemporary debate regarding the role of international law in constitutional interpretation based upon an examination of historical Supreme Court practice. The Article has three goals: It first marshals the weight of evidence regarding the Supreme Court's historical use of international law in constitutional analysis, to rebut the claim that the practice is new. It then analyzes the ways that the Court has used international law from a legitimacy perspective, and finally draws lessons from the historical practice to offer preliminary suggestions- regarding the normatively appropriate use of international law.

The Accardi Principle, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

This article is organized as follows. Part I reviews the history of the Accardi principle in the Supreme Court. We learn that the Court has intimated three different theories about the source of the Accardi principle, and has left many questions about its dimensions unanswered. Part II surveys the use of the principle by the D.C. Circuit. This provides additional insights into how the Accardi principle works in practice, including the importance of questions about the meaning of agency regulations and whether agency regulations can render otherwise unreviewable agency action subject to judicial review. Part III seeks to restate the …

The Promise (And Limits) Of Neuroeconomics, Jedediah S. Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

Neuroeconomics — the study of brain activity in people engaged in tasks of reasoning and choice — looks set to be the next behavioral economics: a set of findings about how people make decisions that casts both light and doubt on widely accepted premises about rationality and social life. This Article explains what is most exciting about the new field and lays out some specific research tasks for it.

Simon Says Take Three Steps Backwards: The National Conference Of Commissioners On Uniform State Laws Recommendations On Child Representation, Jane M. Spinak

Faculty Scholarship

In considering whether I wanted to submit a response to this conference, I turned back to the Fordham Law Review's Proceedings of the Conference on Ethical Issues in the Legal Representation of Children, now referred to by this conference's participants as Fordham. While the entire volume helped me to formulate this response, I want to begin by acknowledging Linda Elrod's and Ann Haralambie's two responses in Fordham as essential to my decision. In a few short pages they encapsulated the essential message of Fordham: that by the end of the last century, the practice of lawyers for children was to …

Common Sense About Original And Subsequent Understanding Of The Religion Clauses, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay is mainly about the Establishment Clause, but it covers analogous questions about free exercise as well. I try to untangle the threads of various controversies, concentrating primarily on what seems fairly resolvable on examination, while also noting uncertainties that do not yield to easy analysis. I ask how constitutional language should have been and should be interpreted, adopting a strategy that gives weight to ordinary meaning and to the general sense of why that language was adopted. I do not eschew reference to legislative history; however for our purposes in this Essay, legislative history turns out to be …

The Limits Of Courage And Principle, Jedediah S. Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

Michael Ignatieff, the director of the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, is not a lawyer. His work, however, treats issues of core concern to lawyers: nation-building, human rights, the ethics of warfare, and now, in his latest book, the proper relationship between liberty and security. The Lesser Evil is, in part, a book a legal scholar might have written: a normative framework for lawmaking in the face of the terror threat. It is also something more unusual: an exercise in an older type of jurisprudence. Ignatieff discusses law in the light of moral psychology …

History, Human Nature, And Property Regimes: Filling In The Civilizing Argument, Jedediah S. Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

Carol Rose’s paper exemplifies qualities I have admired in Carol’s work since I first read her in 1999 and 2000. It also raises questions about her work and that of anyone who tries to follow in her footsteps. Because I am one of those chasers after methodological Rose petals, I am (at least) doubly interested in these questions.

Institutional Coordination And Sentencing Reform, Daniel C. Richman

Faculty Scholarship

Deciding how much time a person should spend in prison for a serious crime is an inherently moral and political act. And it is certainly coldhearted and philosophically problematic to view sentencing as just an agency problem with criminal defendants as objects of a system in which prison terms are simply outputs. So I will not even try to justify resorting to a narrow institutional perspective as a normative matter. But, for better or worse, those political actors with the greatest influence on sentencing regimes have to think in aggregate terms. While there is considerable normative appeal to the idea …

Lulac On Partisan Gerrymandering: Some Clarity, More Uncertainty, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

LULAC’s treatment of the partisan gerrymandering question, thus, may be as significant for the continuing divisions and uncertainties it reveals as for the result it achieved. A majority of the Court is willing to grapple with the gerrymandering issue but that majority is internally torn over what makes partisan gerrymandering a constitutional problem and when judicial intervention is appropriate. The Court’s difficulty is understandable. Gerrymandering is a challenge to democratic self-government, but judicial intervention requires a judicially manageable theory of democracy compatible with the Constitution and our political institutions. It remains to be seen whether the Court can agree upon …

Waging War Against Terror: An Essay For Sandy Levinson, Philip Chase Bobbitt

Faculty Scholarship

Wars are acts of State, and therefore there has never been a "war on terror." Of course states have fought terrorism, in many guises, for centuries. But a war on terror had to await the development of states – including virtual states like al Qaeda's global ummah – whose constitutional order was not confined to a particular territory or national group and for whom terror could therefore be a permanent state of international affairs, either sought in order to prevent persons within a state's control from resisting oppression by accessing global, empowering resources and networks, or suffered because other states …

Trade, Law And Product Complexity, Katharina Pistor, Daniel Berkowitz, Johannes Moenius

Faculty Scholarship

How does the quality of national institutions that enforce the rule of law influence international trade? Anderson and Marcouiller argue that bad institutions located in the importer’s country deter international trade because they enable economic predators to steal and extort rents at the importer’s border. We complement this research and show how good institutions located in the exporter’s country enhance international trade, in particular, trade in complex products whose characteristics are difficult to fully specify in a contract. We argue that both exporter and importer institutions affect international as well as domestic transaction costs in complex and simple product markets. …