Law Commons^™

Private International Law Aspects Of Authors' Contracts: The Dutch And French Examples, Jane C. Ginsburg, Pierre Sirinelli

Faculty Scholarship

Copyright generally vests in the author, the human creator of the work. But because, at least until recently, most authors have been ill-equipped to commercialize and disseminate their works on their own, the author has granted rights to intermediaries to market her works. Since most authors are the weaker parties to publishing, production, or distribution contracts, the resulting deal may favor the interests of the intermediary to the detriment of the author’s interests. Many national copyright laws have introduced a variety of corrective measures, from the very first copyright act, the 1710 British Statute of Anne, which instituted the author’s …

Bank Resolution In The European Banking Union: A Transatlantic Perspective On What It Would Take, Jeffrey N. Gordon, Wolf-Georg Ringe

Faculty Scholarship

The project of creating a Banking Union is designed to overcome the fatal link between sovereigns and their banks in the Eurozone. As part of this project, political agreement for a common supervision framework and a common resolution scheme has been reached with difficulty. However, the resolution framework is weak, underfunded and exhibits some serious flaws. Further, Member States' disagreements appear to rule out a federalized deposit insurance scheme, commonly regarded as the necessary third pillar of a successful Banking Union. This paper argues for an organizational and capital structure substitute for these two shortcomings that can minimize the systemic …

Hobby Lobby: Its Flawed Interpretive Techniques And Standards Of Application, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

At the end of June 2014, the Supreme Court decided one of the most publicized controversies of decades. In a decision covering two cases, widely referred to as Hobby Lobby, the Court held that closely held for-profit corporations, based on their owners' religious convictions, have a right under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) to decline to provide employees with insurance that covers contraceptive devices that may prevent a fertilized egg "from developing any further by inhibiting its attachment to the uterus."

The result has been widely approved by those who favor an extensive scope for religious liberty and …

Presidential Administration And The Traditions Of Administrative Law, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

American administrative law has long been characterized by two distinct traditions: the positivist and the process traditions. The positivist tradition emphasizes that administrative bodies are created by law and must act in accordance with the requirements of the law. The process tradition emphasizes that agencies must act in accordance with norms of reasoned decisionmaking, which emphasize that all relevant interests must be given an opportunity to express their views and agencies must explain their decisions in a public and articulate fashion. In the twentieth century, American administrative law achieved a grand synthesis of these two traditions, with the result that …

Agencies, Polarization, And The States, Gillian E. Metzger

Faculty Scholarship

Political polarization is all the rage. Yet administrative agencies are strikingly absent from leading accounts of contemporary polarization. To the extent they appear, it is largely as acted-upon entities that bear the fallout from the congressional-presidential confrontations that polarization fuels, or as the tools of presidential unilateralism. This failure to incorporate administrative agencies into polarization accounts is a major omission. Agencies possess broad grants of preexisting authority that they can use to reshape governing policy and law, often at presidential instigation, thereby putting pressure on Congress to respond. In the process, they can construct new alliances and arrangements that have …

From Contract To Status: Collaboration And The Evolution Of Novel Family Relationships, Elizabeth S. Scott, Robert E. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

The past decade has witnessed dramatic changes in public atti- tudes about and legal status for same-sex couples who wish to marry. These changes demonstrate that the legal conception of the family is no longer limited to traditional marriage. They also raise the possibility that other relationships – cohabiting couples and their children, voluntary kin groups, multigenerational groups, and polygamists – might gain legal recognition as families. This Article probes the challenges faced by aspiring families and the means by which they could attain their goal. It builds on the premise that the state remains committed to social-welfare criteria for …

Uncivil Obedience, Jessica Bulman-Pozen, David E. Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

Scholars and activists have long been interested in conscientious law-breaking as a means of dissent. The civil disobedient violates the law in a bid to highlight its illegitimacy and motivate reform. A less heralded form of social action, however, involves nearly the opposite approach. As a wide range of examples attest, dissenters may also seek to disrupt legal regimes through hyperbolic, literalistic, or otherwise unanticipated adherence to their formal rules.

This Article asks how to make sense of these more paradoxical protests, involving not explicit law-breaking but rather extreme law following. We seek to identify, elucidate, and call attention to …

Introduction: The Place Of Agencies In Polarized Government, Cynthia R. Farina, Gillian E. Metzger

Faculty Scholarship

Peter Strauss's The Place of Agencies in Government: Separation of Powers. and the Fourth Branch reshaped contemporary thinking about the constitutionality of federal administrative government. When the article appeared in 1984, the Reagan Revolution was in full swing. Reagan's overtly antiregulatory policy stance and his Administration's advocacy of a highly formalist and originalist style of constitutional interpretation fundamentally challenged the post-New Deal administrative state. Aggressive interpretation of Article II led to controversial strategies of White House control: centralized rulemaking review, appointment of agency heads loyal to the President's (anti)regulatory agenda, and attacks on institutions of administrative independence such as the …

Article Ix: The Promise And Limits Of Home Rule, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

Article IX of New York State’s constitution establishes the basic constitutional framework for addressing questions of local power, local government organization, and state-local and interlocal relations in the Empire State. Premised on a commitment to “[e]ffective local self-government,” the “home rule amendment” added to the state constitution in 1963 and unamended since then, has bolstered local control over local government organization and personnel and has provided a firmer foundation for local law-making in New York. But it has not succeeded in enabling New York’s local units – its counties, cities, towns and villages – to function as efficient, effective, locally …

Loser Pays: The Latest Installment In The Battle-Scarred, Cliff-Hanging Survival Of The Rule 10b-5 Class Action, John C. Coffee Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

When I was an upper-year student at Yale Law School in the late 1960s, I was sometimes as undermotivated as contemporary upper-year law students regularly appear to be. But there was then an appropriate role model for us: a graduate student, brimming with efficiency and self-discipline, who occupied a carrel in the law library, seemingly working day and night on a special research project. He had piled law review articles and cases a foot or more about his carrel, and anyone walking by could see that he seemed obsessed with something called Rule 10b-5. I had dimly heard of this …

An Introduction: Adapting To A Rapidly Changing World, Monica Hakimi, Natalie L. Reid, Samuel Witten

Faculty Scholarship

The 2015 American Society of International Law (ASIL) Annual Meeting aimed to assess how international law is and should be adapting to the profound global changes that are now underway. The Meeting took place against a dramatic backdrop of events: the rapid expansion of the so-called Islamic State in Syria and Iraq; a security and refugee crisis in the Middle East; escalating conflict in Eastern Ukraine and Crimea; an Ebola crisis in West Africa; and the build-up to a widely anticipated round of negotiations on climate change. These and similar geopolitical developments raise serious questions about the continued relevance and …

Save Birds Now Or Birds Later, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

Due to a combination of climate change, habitat loss, water diversions, pesticides and other toxics, and other factors, the Earth is now facing the sixth mass extinction event in its geological history, on a par with the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs and much else.

The international goal for fighting climate change, as adopted and reaffirmed at several United Nations climate conferences, is to keep global average temperatures from rising more than two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial conditions. Even an increase at that level would have very negative consequences to humans as well as other species — the low-lying island …

Rules Of Thumb For Intercreditor Agreements, Edward R. Morrison

Faculty Scholarship

Intercreditor agreements frequently restrict the extent to which subordinated creditors can participate in the bankruptcy process by, for example, contesting liens of senior lenders, objecting to a cash collateral motion, or even exercising the right to vote on a plan of reorganization. Because intercreditor agreements can reorder the bargaining environment in bankruptcy, some judges have been unsure about their enforceability. Other judges have not hesitated to enforce the agreements, at least when they do not restrict the voting rights of subordinated creditors. This essay argues that intercreditor agreements are controversial because they pose a trade-off: they reduce bargaining costs (by …

We (Still) Need To Talk About Aereo: New Controversies And Unresolved Questions After The Supreme Court's Decision, Rebecca Giblin, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

Recent judicial interpretations of U.S. copyright law have prompted businesses to design technologies in ways that enable the making and transmission of copies of works to consumers while falling outside the scope of the owner's exclusive rights. The archetypal example is Aereo Inc.'s system for providing online access to broadcast television, which the Supreme Court has now ruled results in infringing public performances by Aereo.

In previous work we urged the Court to develop a principled reading of the transmit clause focusing on the particular use rather than on the technical architecture of the delivery service (Giblin & Ginsburg, "We …

Putting Disclosure To The Test: Toward Better Evidence-Based Policy, Talia B. Gillis

Faculty Scholarship

Financial disclosures no longer enjoy the immunity from criticism they once had. While disclosures remain the hallmark of numerous areas of regulation, there is increasing skepticism as to whether disclosures are understood by consumers and do in fact improve consumer welfare. Debates on the virtues of disclosures overlook the process by which regulators continue to mandate disclosures. This article fills this gap by analyzing the testing of proposed disclosures, which is an increasingly popular way for regulators to establish the benefits of disclosure. If the testing methodology is misguided then the premise on which disclosures are adopted is flawed, leaving …

Distributing The Responsibility To Protect, Monica Hakimi

Faculty Scholarship

Over the past several decades, the central focus of international law has shifted from protecting only sovereign states to protecting individuals. Still, the worst imaginable human rights abuses – genocides, ethnic cleansings, crimes against humanity, and systemic war crimes – occur with alarming frequency. And the international response is often slow or ineffectual.

The most recent development for addressing this problem is the ‘responsibility to protect’, an idea that has received so much attention that it now goes simply by R2P. R2P stands for two basic propositions. First, each state must protect its population from atrocities. This proposition is well …

Third-Party Beneficiaries And Contractual Networks, Alan Schwartz, Robert E. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

An increasing trend of economic agents is to form productive associations such as networks, platforms, and other hybrids. Subsets of these agents contract with each other to further their network project and these contracts can create benefits for, or impose costs on, agents who are not contract parties. Contract law regulates third party claims against contract parties with the third-party beneficiary doctrine, which directs courts to ask whether the contracting parties "intended" to benefit a particular third party. We show here what courts do with third party claims when network members fail to perform for third parties and what the …

A Comment On Metzger And Zaring: The Quicksilver Problem, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

It is a pleasure to comment on the fine institutional studies in this issue by Gillian Metzger and David Zaring. Professor Metzger explores the many ways in which financial regulation, as reflected in the regulatory functions of the Federal Reserve (the Fed), differs from mainstream administrative law, as represented by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). She describes the historical roots of the divergence, explains how it has persisted over time, and offers some intriguing thoughts about the possibilities for convergence in the future. Professor Zaring paints a fascinating portrait of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), the entity within the …

Posession As A Natural Right, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

What follows is, I hope, a tribute both to Friedrich Hayek, for whom this lecture series is named, and Richard Epstein, who was kind enough to invite me to give the lecture. Hayek has long been an inspiration for his insights about the advantages of decentralized decision making and the importance of information in understanding design of institutions. Both are recurring themes in my own work. Richard was my teacher at the University of Chicago Law School and has been a guiding light ever since. His works on nuisance law, takings, and the public trust doctrine, among others, have had …

Anticipatory Remedies For Takings, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court has rendered two lines of decisions about the remedies available for a violation of the Takings Clause. One line holds that courts have no authority to enter anticipatory decrees in takings cases if the claimant can obtain compensation elsewhere. The other line, which includes three of the Court's most recent takings cases, results in the entry of an anticipatory decree about takings liability. This Essay argues that the second line is the correct one. Courts should be allowed to enter declaratory or other anticipatory judgments about takings liability, as long as they respect the limited nature of …

Legal & Scientific Integrity In Advancing A "Land Degradation Neutral World", Shelley Welton, Michela Biasutti, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

It is no secret that the fight against desertification isn't going well. In the two decades since the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification ("UNCCD") came into force, desertification – defined as degradation in the quality of "arid, semi-arid, and dry subhumid" land areas – has worsened considerably. Recent United Nations estimates suggest that fifty-two percent of drylands currently under agricultural cultivation are moderately or severely degraded, and 12 million hectares of productive land become barren each year due to desertification and drought. And while drylands are the focus of the UNCCD, the challenge isn't limited to them: somewhere around …

From Sunshine To A Common Agent: The Evolving Understanding Of Transparency In The Wto, Petros C. Mavroidis, Robert Wolfe

Faculty Scholarship

Transparency obligations have undergone substantial transformations since the inception of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 117 1947. From an obligation to publish general laws affecting trade, the system now includes peer review by governments (in the form of monitoring and surveillance) and efforts to inform the public. These accomplishments are remarkable, but much remains to be done. Originally designed for a handful of developed countries, the global trading system now must provide an expanded knowledge base that benefits 160 member states, millions of economic actors, and hundreds of millions of citizens with inadequate resources to acquire …

Of Constituents And Contributors, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

In the stirring conclusion to his plurality opinion in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, Chief Justice Roberts pointed to the close connection between campaign contributions and what he called the "political responsiveness at the heart of the democratic process." Quoting Edmund Burke's statement in his famous Speech to the Electors of Bristol that a representative's judgment should be informed by "the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents," the Chief Justice eloquently declaimed that "[c]onstituents have the right to support candidates who share their views and concerns. Representatives are not to follow constituent orders, but can …

The Federal Reserve: A Study In Soft Constraints, Kathryn Judge

Faculty Scholarship

In response to the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression, the Federal Reserve (the Fed) took a number of unprecedented steps to try to minimize the adverse economic consequences that would follow. From providing liquidity injections to save companies like Bear Stearns and American International Group (AIG) to committing to a prolonged period of exceptionally low interest rates and buying massive quantities of longer-term securities to further reduce borrowing costs, the Fed's response to the 2007 through 2009 financial crisis (the Crisis) has been creative and aggressive. These actions demonstrated that the Fed is uniquely powerful among federal agencies, …

Intermediary Influence, Kathryn Judge

Faculty Scholarship

Ronald Coase and others writing in his wake typically assume that institutional arrangements evolve to minimize transaction costs. This Article draws attention to a powerful, market-based force that operates contrary to that core assumption: Intermediary influence." The claim builds on three observations: (1) many transaction costs now take the form of fees paid to specialized intermediaries, (2) intermediaries prefer institutional arrangements that yield higher transaction fees, and (3) intermediaries are often well positioned to promote self-serving arrangements. As a result, high-fee institutional arrangements often remain entrenched even in the presence of more-efficient alternatives.

This Article uses numerous case studies from …

Review Of Benjamin K. Sovacool And Michael H. Dworkin's Global Energy Justice: Problems, Principles, And Practices, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

Energy powers the world. Having enough energy is essential to maintaining even the most minimal quality of life. But extracting and using energy renders some places uninhabitable, and now threatens the ecological integrity of the planet.

Current energy systems involve profound injustices. These injustices can arise in the ways that energy is produced – including through local and global environmental degradation, human rights abuses, corruption, and social and military conflict. Injustice can also arise in the ways that energy is or is not available – with more than a billion people having far too little for a decent existence, while …

Through The Looking Glass To A Shared Reflection: The Evolving Relationship Between Administrative Law And Financial Regulation, Gillian E. Metzger

Faculty Scholarship

Administrative law and financial regulation have an uneasy relationship today. It was not always so. Indeed, the two were closely intertwined at the nation's birth. The Treasury Department was a major hub of early federal administration, with Alexander Hamilton crafting the first iterations of federal administrative law in his oversight of revenue generation and customs collection. One hundred and fifty years later, administrative law and financial regulation were conjoined in the New Deal's creation of the modern administrative state. This time it was James Landis, Chair of the newly formed Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and author of the leading …

The States As National Agents, Gillian E. Metzger

Faculty Scholarship

I am delighted for the chance to engage with Heather Gerken's work. I want to begin by offering tremendous kudos. I think the new nationalist school of federalism is a very exciting intellectual development. Over the years, many federalism scholars have emphasized the importance of state participation in federal programs. But Gerken's recent writings, and those of other contributors – Abbe Gluck, Jessica Bulman-Pozen, and Erin Ryan – have forced this phenomenon onto center stage, highlighting the ways that devolution advances nationalist goals. With her characteristic elegance and provocation, Gerken's Article contends that the centrality of nation-state conjoining requires casting …

Appointments, Innovation, And The Judicial-Political Divide, Gillian E. Metzger

Faculty Scholarship

The federal appointments process is having its proverbial day in the sun. The appointment and removal of federal officers figured centrally in the Supreme Court's two major recent separation-of-powers decisions, Free Enterprise Fund v. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board and National Labor Relations Board v. Noel Canning. The appointments process has featured even more prominently in the political sphere, figuring in a number of congressional-presidential confrontations. Such simultaneous top billing in the judicial and political spheres is hardly coincidental. After all, it was President Obama's use of the Recess Appointments Clause in response to pro forma sessions that triggered …

The Organizational Premises Of Administrative Law, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

The core doctrines of administrative law have not taken account of developments in the theory and practice of organization. The contours of these doctrines were set in the mid-twentieth century when the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) was passed. Although these doctrines have evolved since then, administration itself has changed more. Many of the widely perceived deficiencies of the doctrines, including some associated with overregulation and others with underregulation, seem influenced by an anachronistic understanding of organization.

Much administrative law continues to understand public administration as bureaucracy. In particular, doctrine is strongly influenced by three premises. First, the backward-looking conception of …