Law Commons^™

Digital Security In The Expository Society: Spectacle, Surveillance, And Exhibition In The Neoliberal Age Of Big Data, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

In 1827, Nicolaus Heinrich Julius, a professor at the University of Berlin, identified an important architectural mutation in nineteenth-century society that reflected a deep disruption in our technologies of knowledge and a profound transformation in relations of power across society: Antiquity, Julius observed, had discovered the architectural form of the spectacle; but modern times had operated a fundamental shift from spectacle to surveillance. Michel Foucault would elaborate this insight in his 1973 Collège de France lectures on The Punitive Society, where he would declare: “[T]his is precisely what happens in the modern era: the reversal of the spectacle into surveillance…. …

Article 41 And The Right To Appeal, Benjamin L. Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

Extensive discussion of the Chinese Constitution focuses on the ways in which the Constitution is under-enforced or not implemented. This essay takes a different approach, examining one clause that is arguably at times over-enforced, providing for constitutional authorization for challenging legal determinations outside the legal system. This essay’s focus is Article 41 of the 1982 Constitution, which protects the rights of citizens to file complaints (shensu 申诉) against illegal conduct of state actors. My goal in this essay is to examine the ways in which the concept of shensu is used to provide a basis for challenges to state action …

Letter From The U.S.: Exclusive Rights, Exceptions, And Uncertain Compliance With International Norms – Part I (Making Available Right), Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

This Letter from the U.S. addresses U.S. compliance with its international obligation to implement the “making available right” set out in art. 8 of the 1996 WIPO Copyright Treaty. The “umbrella solution” which enabled member states to protect the “making available to the public of [authors’] works in such a way that members of the public may access these works from a place and at a time individually chosen by them” through a combination of extant exclusive rights, notably the distribution right and the public performance right, has not in the U.S. afforded secure coverage of the full scope of …

International Academy Of Comparative Law Welcome Note, George A. Bermann

Faculty Scholarship

On behalf of the International Academy of Comparative Law (IACL) – its full membership as well as its executive committee - I warmly welcome the Russian Law Journal to the world of comparative legal scholarship and inquiry. Comparative law may be more difficult to undertake today than in years past, due to the emergence of so many new nations and regional groupings, but it is for that very reason more important than ever.

Law Reform Agenda As Ali Approaches Its Centennial, Lance Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

The American Law Institute and I are happy and proud that the Brooklyn Law School and its Law Review chose to hold an important conference about ALI work, to persuade such an outstanding group of scholars to write such varied and interesting papers, and now to publish their work. I am especially happy because, as I near the end of my service as ALI Director, these papers give me an opportunity to reflect on the projects, perfect and imperfect, that the ALI accomplished (or attempted and failed to accomplish) in our effort to improve the American legal system.

Introduction, George A. Bermann

Faculty Scholarship

It is an honor to introduce this special issue of the Columbia Journal of European Law devoted to the legal method of the European Court of Justice (ECJ). That the issue consists of a single article should come as no surprise to anyone acquainted with Judge Koen Lenaerts, whose keen appreciation of the workings of the Court is quite simply unrivaled.

Reaching Out For Green Policies: National Environmental Policies In The Wto Legal Order, Petros C. Mavroidis

Faculty Scholarship

The WTO does not squarely address the issue of jurisdictional ambit of national policies (affecting trade). And yet, absent some agreement as to what trading nations can and cannot do, the WTO loses much of its effectiveness. In the absence of explicit regulation of the issue in the WTO contract, one would reasonably expect WTO Members to behave in line with the postulates governing allocation of jurisdiction embedded in public international law. WTO practice evidences neither an explicit acceptance nor a refusal of these rules.

Health Rights In The Balance: The Case Against Perinatal Shackling Of Women Behind Bars, Brett Dignam, Eli Y. Adashi

Faculty Scholarship

Rationalized for decades on security grounds, perinatal shackling entails the application of handcuffs, leg irons, and/or waist shackles to the incarcerated woman prior to, during, and after labor and delivery. During labor and delivery proper, perinatal shackling may entail chaining women to the hospital bed by the ankle, wrist, or both. Medically untenable, legally challenged, and ever controversial, perinatal shackling remains the standard of practice in most US states despite sustained two-decades-long efforts by health rights legal advocates, human rights organizations, and medical professionals. Herein we review the current statutory, regulatory, legal, and medical framework undergirding the use of restraints …

In Plain View, Christina D. Ponsa-Kraus

Faculty Scholarship

In this tightly argued and thoroughly engaging article, Gregory Ablavsky makes the case for a revisionist history of the U.S. Constitution that places Native American Indians at its center. While it isn’t hard to show that conventional constitutional histories largely neglect Indians, it isn’t easy to prove that such neglect is not benign. That is, it’s one thing to argue that standard accounts should include a discussion of Indians, but it’s another thing entirely to make a convincing case that core constitutional understandings would be fundamentally altered if historians fully and prominently integrated the history of relations with Indians into …

Deals Or No Deals: Integrating Transactional Skills In The First Year Curriculum, Lynnise E. Pantin

Faculty Scholarship

This article joins a growing body of scholarship on the pedagogy of transactional law and skills. This article challenges the traditional pedagogy of teaching law students to think like a lawyer and argues that law schools should shift the analytical framework of a litigation-dominated model, which is typically taught in the first year, to a model that incorporates transactional skills teaching into the first year law school curriculum. This approach will (1) create a greater balance of skills taught in the first year and (2) address the mandate to train more practice-ready lawyers. This article argues that the best place …

Leveraging Antidiscrimination, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

As the Civil Rights Act of 1964 turns fifty, antidiscrimination law has become unfashionable. Civil rights strategies are posited as not up to the serious task of addressing contemporary problems of inequality such as improving mobility for low-wage workers or providing access into entry-level employment. This Article argues that there is a danger in casting aside the Civil Rights Act as one charts new courses to address inequality. This Article revisits the implementation strategies that emerged in the first decade of the Act to reveal that the Act was not limited to addressing formal discrimination or bias, but rather drew …

In Re Sanders And The Resurrection Of Stanley V. Illinois, Joshua Gupta-Kagan

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay begins by reviewing Stanley v. Illinois, and outlines how that foundational case originally recognized parental rights in foster care cases yet became understood primarily as a private adoption case. Second, it explains how, simultaneously, family courts developed the One-Parent Doctrine and a related doctrine making it difficult to transfer custody of a child from an abusive or neglectful parent in one state to a non-offending parent in another. Both doctrines violate Stanley by allowing the State to take custody of children without ever proving parental unfitness. Cases adopting these doctrines literally ignore Stanley. Third, this Essay …

New York Environmental Legislation And Regulations In 2013, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

New laws were signed by Governor Andrew Cuomo in 2013 regarding notice requirements in the Brownfield Cleanup Program, Bottle Bill enforcement, mercury thermostats, oversized lobsters, shark fins, and Eurasian boars, among other things. On the regulatory front, the state promulgated final regulations concerning New York’s participation in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative and regulatory relief for certain dairy farms, and proposed regulations for liquefied natural gas facilities and invasive species.

This annual survey describes new environmental laws that were enacted in New York in 2013, as well as several significant regulatory developments. The survey identifies the laws by their chapter …

Money Market Funds Run Risk: Will Floating Net Asset Value Fix The Problem?, Jeffrey N. Gordon, Christopher M. Gandia

Faculty Scholarship

The instability of money market mutual funds (“MMF”), a relatively new form of financial intermediary that connects short-term debt issuers with funders who want daily liquidity, became manifest in the financial crisis of 2007-2009. The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, a major issuer of money market debt, led one large fund to “break the buck” (that is, violate the $1 net asset valuation convention (“NAV”)) and triggered a run on other funds that was staunched only by major interventions from the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve. One common reform proposal has been to substitute “floating NAV” for “fixed NAV,” on …

Compulsory Sexuality, Elizabeth F. Emens

Faculty Scholarship

Asexuality is an emerging identity category that challenges the assumption that everyone is defined by some type of sexual attraction. Asexuals – those who report feeling no sexual attraction to others – constitute one percent of the population, according to one prominent study. In recent years, some individuals have begun to identify as asexual and to connect around their experiences interacting with a sexual society. Asexuality has also become a protected classification under the antidiscrimination law of one state and several localities, but legal scholarship has thus far neglected the subject.

This Article introduces asexuality to the legal literature as …

Extraterritorial Avoidance Actions: Lessons From Madoff, Edward R. Morrison

Faculty Scholarship

The Madoff case continues to provide fertile ground for testing boundaries of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code (Code). In July 2014, Judge Rakoff issued an important decision regarding the extraterritorial scope of the Code’s avoidance rules. The Trustee for the Madoff Estate, Irving Picard, sought to recover cash withdrawn by “feeder funds.” These funds pooled customer assets, invested them in Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities (Madoff Securities), withdrew proceeds from the investment prior to Madoff’s SIPA filing, and distributed the proceeds to customers before the funds themselves collapsed. The funds are located abroad: one, Fairfield Sentry, is a British Virgin Islands …

Rethinking Privacy, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

Anxiety about surveillance and data mining has led many to embrace implausibly expansive and rigid conceptions of privacy. The premises of some current privacy arguments do not fit well with the broader political commitments of those who make them. In particular, liberals seem to have lost touch with the reservations about privacy expressed in the social criticism of some decades ago. They seem unable to imagine that preoccupation with privacy might amount to a “pursuit of loneliness” or how “eyes on the street” might have reassuring connotations. Without denying the importance of the effort to define and secure privacy values, …

Judicial Leadership In Family Court: A Cautionary Tale, Jane M. Spinak

Faculty Scholarship

For the past 35 years I have been practicing in, teaching, and writing about the Family Court. The problem-solving court movement in the last two decades – with its proliferation of drug courts, mental health courts, and veterans courts, to name a few – renewed my interest in the historical roots of the family court because of the parallels between the original juvenile court and the recent problem solving court movement. One of the key elements – perhaps the defining element – in both is the role of the judge as the leader of the court. That is what I …

The Tax Reform Road Not Taken – Yet, Michael J. Graetz

Faculty Scholarship

The United States has traveled a unique tax policy path, avoiding value added taxes (VATs), which have now been adopted by every OECD country and 160 countries worldwide. Moreover, many U.S. consumption tax advocates have insisted on direct personalized taxes that are unlike taxes used anywhere in the world. This article details a tax reform plan that uses revenues from a VAT to substantially reduce and reform our nation’s tax system. The plan would (1) enact a destination-based VAT; (2) use the revenue produced by this VAT to finance an income tax exemption of $100,000 of family income and to …

A Reply To "Hollow Spaces", George A. Bermann, Jack J. Coe Jr., Christopher R. Drahozal, Catherine A. Rogers

Faculty Scholarship

This short essay responds to Chip Brower's thoughtful and meticulous critique of Tentative Draft No. 2 of the Restatement Third of the U.S. Law of International Commercial Arbitration. While we appreciate the concerns he raises, we disagree with the conclusions he draws both about the Restatement and the drafting process. We address here what we understand to be Professor Brower's major criticisms of the work.

Exceptional Authorship: The Role Of Copyright Exceptions In Promoting Creativity, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

A lawyer for an immense copyright-exploiting corporation, casting himself as a defender of authors’ rights, challenged his interlocutor’s incredulity with the following assertion: given today’s diversity of authors, ‘more of them depend on limitations and exceptions than on exclusive rights’. Some might cringe at the resemblance of this credo to Orwell’s ‘Freedom Is Slavery!’ Nonetheless, I would like to take seriously the proposition that today’s authors need copyright exceptions and limitations more than they need exclusive rights.

First, I will test the proposition by examining what one might call authorship-oriented exceptions, from ‘fair abridgement’ in early English cases to the …

"Keep Government Out Of My Medicare": The Search For Popular Support Of Taxes And Social Spending, Gillian Lester

Faculty Scholarship

Despite the broad reach of the American welfare state, Americans continue to have conflicted and contradictory attitudes about the role of the state in mediating economic equality through both taxation and social spending. This chapter identifies several key themes that help explain these contradictions. Specifically, information about taxes and spending is complex and hard to understand, cognitive biases and limitations hamper people’s ability to process information in a way that is always consistent, and affective and symbolic factors influence social attitudes about taxes and government benefits. This chapter explores the implications of these insights for public policy, including the possibility …

The Anxiety Of Influence: The Evolving Regulation Of Lobbying, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

Lobbying has long been a source of anxiety. As early as the mid-nineteenth century courts expressed concern about the “designing and corrupt men” who sought to wield “secret influence.” Lobbying is a multi-billion dollar business today, but the association of “lobbying” with improper influence is so strong that the American League of Lobbyists – the lobbyists’ trade association – recently renamed itself to drop the word “lobbyist.” Yet, courts have also long recognized that people have a legitimate interest in being able to influence government action, and that they may need to be able to hire agents to help them, …

Intellectual Property Experimentalism By Way Of Competition Law, Tim Wu

Faculty Scholarship

Competition law and Intellectual Property have divergent intellectual cultures – the former more pragmatic and experimentalist; the latter influenced by natural law and vested rights. The US Supreme Court decision in Federal Trade Commission v. Actavis is an intellectual victory for the former approach, one that suggests that antitrust law can and should be used to introduce greater scrutiny of the specific consequences of intellectual property grants.

Fee-Shifting Bylaw And Charter Provisions: Can They Apply In Federal Court? – The Case For Preemption, John C. Coffee Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

In the first months after a decision of the Delaware Supreme Court upholding a fee-shifting bylaw under which the unsuccessful plaintiff shareholder was required to reimburse all defendants for their legal and other expenses in the litigation, some 24 public companies adopted a similar provision – either by means of a board-adopted bylaw or by placing such a provision in their certificate of incorporation (in the case of companies undergoing an IPO). In effect, private ordering is introducing a one-sided version of the “loser pays” rules. Indeed, as drafted, these provisions typically require a plaintiff who is not completely successful …

Fifteen Years Of Supreme Court Criminal Procedure Work: Three Constitutional Brushes, Daniel C. Richman

Faculty Scholarship

This essay – written in connection with a French National Research Agency project on “Neo or Retro Constitutionalisms” – is an effort to pull together the last fifteen years of Supreme Court criminal procedure cases expanding constitutional protections. It identifies three different styles: thin and clear doctrinal lines on miniature doctrinal canvases that have only passing connections to criminal justice realities; episodic and self-limiting engagements with a potentially larger regulatory space; and a grand style that hints at sweeping structural ambitions but collaborates with other regulatory authorities. Readers undoubtedly can come up with more than three styles. But, in any …

Comment On The Definition Of "Eligible Organization" For Purposes Of Coverage Of Certain Preventive Services Under The Affordable Care Act, Robert P. Bartlett, Richard M. Buxbaum, Stavros Gadinis, Justin Mccrary, Stephen Davidoff Solomon, Eric L. Talley

Faculty Scholarship

This comment letter was submitted by U.C. Berkeley corporate law professors in response to a request for comment by the Health and Human Services Department on the definition of "eligible organization" under the Affordable Care Act in light of the Supreme Court's decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby. "Eligible organizations" will be permitted under the Hobby Lobby decision to assert the religious principles of their shareholders to exempt themselves from the Affordable Care Act's contraceptive mandate for employees.

In Hobby Lobby, the Supreme Court held that the nexus of identity between several closely-held, for-profit corporations and their shareholders holding “a …

Street Stops And Police Legitimacy: Teachable Moments In Young Urban Men's Legal Socialization, Tom Tyler, Jeffrey Fagan, Amanda Geller

Faculty Scholarship

An examination of the influence of street stops on the legal socialization of young men showed an association between the number of police stops they see or experience and a diminished sense of police legitimacy. This association was not primarily a consequence of the number of stops or of the degree of police intrusion during those stops. Rather, the impact of involuntary contact with the police was mediated by evaluations of the fairness of police actions and judgments about whether the police were acting lawfully. Whether the police were viewed as exercising their authority fairly and lawfully shaped the impact …

The Nordic Model Of Corporate Governance: The Role Of Ownership, Ronald J. Gilson

Faculty Scholarship

It is commonplace to credit the invention of the public corporation as an important engine of economic growth. The creation of a long-lived vehicle that gave investors both tradable shares and limited liability allowed talented managers to raise capital to fund enterprise. Writing in 1926, the Economist magazine heralded this role:

The economic historian of the future may assign to the nameless inventor of the principle of limited liability, as applied to trading corporations, a place of honor with Watt and Stephenson, and other pioneers of the Industrial Revolution. The genius of these men produced the means by which man’s …

Normativity: The Place Of Reasoning, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

It is more or less common ground that an important aspect of the explanation of normativity relates it to the way Reason (our rational powers), reasons (for beliefs, emotions, actions, etc.) and reasoning, with all its varieties and domains, are inter-connected. The relation of reasoning to reasons is the topic of this this paper. It does not start from a tabula rasa. It presupposes that normativity has to do with the ability to respond rationally to reasons, and with responding to reasons with the use of our rational powers. The question is where does reasoning fit in?

I will compare …