Law Commons^™

Custom's Method And Process: Lessons From Humanitarian Law, Monica Hakimi

Faculty Scholarship

A central question in the literature on customary international law (CIL) goes to method: what is the proper method for “finding” CIL – that is, for determining that particular norms qualify as CIL? The traditional method is to identify a widespread state practice, plus evidence that states believe that the practice reflects the law (opinio juris). That method has long been criticized as incoherent, unworkable, and out of touch with modern sensibilities. Thus, much of the CIL literature addresses its perceived problems. The principal goals of this literature are to help resolve whether norms that are claimed to …

Autonomous Weapons Systems And Transparency: Towards An International Dialogue, Sarah Knuckey

Faculty Scholarship

The international debate around autonomous weapons systems (AWS) has addressed the potential ethical, legal and strategic implications of advancing autonomy, and analysis has offered myriad potential concerns and conceivable benefits. Many consider autonomy in selecting and engaging targets to be potentially revolutionary, yet AWS developments are nascent, and the debates are, in many respects and necessarily, heavily circumscribed by the uncertainty of future developments. In particular, legal assessments as to whether AWS might be used in compliance with the conduct of hostilities rules in international humanitarian law (IHL) are at present largely predicated upon a forecast of future facts, including …

Opinion Of Justice Katherine Franke In Obergefell V. Hodges, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Jack Balkin has assembled a group of 9 scholars and advocates to write opinions in the Obergefell v. Hodges case for a forthcoming volume, What Obergefell Should Have Said (Yale University Press 2017). Balkin writes for the majority of the Court and I provide a concurrence along with a short commentary explaining my approach and reasoning. In summary, I conclude that: Laws barring same-sex couples from eligibility for licensure as civil marriages violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because they find their origin in and perpetuate notions of heterosexual supremacy, and have the aim and effect …

Preserving The Corporate Superego In A Time Of Activism: An Essay On Ethics And Economics, John C. Coffee Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

This essay focuses on the impact of recent changes in corporate governance on ethical behavior within the public corporation. It argues that a style of corporate behavior – one characterized by a risk tolerant, even reckless, pursuit of short-term profits and a disregard for the interests of non-shareholder constituencies – is attributable in significant part to recent changes in corporate governance, including the rise of hedge fund activism, greater use of incentive compensation, and the appearance of blockholder directors. It then surveys feasible responses intended to strengthen the role of the boards as the corporation’s conscience and superego. Given the …

Appraising The "Merger Price" Appraisal Rule, Albert H. Choi, Eric L. Talley

Faculty Scholarship

This paper develops an auction design framework to study how best to measure “fair value” in post-merger appraisal proceedings. Our inquiry spotlights an approach recently embraced by some courts benchmarking fair value against the merger price itself. We show that merger price deference effectively nullifies the role that appraisal can potentially play in establishing a de facto reserve price for company auctions, thereby depressing both acquisition prices and target shareholders’ expected welfare relative to both the optimal appraisal policy and a variety of other valuation measures. We also examine conditions under which deference to the merger price can be optimal. …

Ask For The Moon, Settle For The Stars: What Is A Reasonable Period To Comply With Wto Awards?, Petros C. Mavroidis, Niall Meagher, Thomas J. Prusa, Tatiana Yanguas

Faculty Scholarship

The World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute settlement process allows a defending Member a “reasonable period of time” (RPT) to implement any findings that its contested measures are inconsistent with WTO law. If agreement on this RPT cannot be reached, Article 21.3(c) of the Understanding on Rules and Procedures Governing the Settlement of Disputes (DSU) provides for the possibility of arbitration on the length of the RPT. The DSU provides limited guidelines on the RPT, stating only that it should not normally exceed 15 months. In practice, Arbitrators have developed the standard that the RPT should reflect the shortest possible period …

Private Standards And The Wto: Reclusive No More, Petros C. Mavroidis, Robert Wolfe

Faculty Scholarship

Private standards are increasing in number, and they affect trade, but their status in the WTO remains problematic. Standards-takers are typically countries with little bargaining power, who cannot affect their terms of trade and thus, even if they possess domestic antitrust laws, will find it hard to persuade standard-setters to take account of their interests. Our concern is to bring more of these standards within the normative framework of the trade regime – that is, we worry that these private forms of social order can conflict with the fundamental norms of transparency and non-discrimination. The WTO membership has consumed itself …

The United States, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

The United States is an example of how three branches of government can stall and derail reform initiatives. The judiciary in particular is central to the US experience with political finance reform, repeatedly striking down legislation on party finance, despite consensus from executive and legislative branches. The most recent Supreme Court ruling, in April 2014, struck down one of the last remaining federal regulations, on the overall campaign contribution limits for individuals. At a subnational level, the United States does, however, see significant variations in terms of regulations on the flow of money into politics at a state level. In …

The Politics Of Global Humanitarianism: R2p Before And After Libya, Michael W. Doyle

Faculty Scholarship

The responsibility to protect (R2P) is both a license for and a leash against forcible intervention. It succeeded in widening the scope of legitimate armed intervention by licensing some (protective) interventions but only because it was seen as a leash against other (exploitative) interventions. This chapter traces the origins of the R2P doctrine in the Kosovo and ICISS reports, highlights the special features of the 2005 Outcome Document, notes how the doctrine was strengthened in practice by careful attention to non-coercive measures in Myanmar, Kenya, and Guinea, and then examines the landmark case of its use to sanction and then …

The Guise Of The Bad, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

My topic is the possibility of acting in the belief that the action is bad and for the reason that it is, as the agent believes, bad. On route, I examine another question – namely whether agents can, without having any relevant false beliefs, perform actions motivated by the badness of those actions. The main worry is the compatibility of action for the sake of the bad with the thesis of the Guise of the Good (roughly that actions undertaken with an intention to perform them are undertaken because they are, as the agents see things, good in some respects). …

Granting Exemptions From Legal Duties: When Are They Warranted And What Is The Place Of Religion?, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

In what follows, I focus on when exemptions from legal duties are called for and whether religion should be a crucial ingredient. I concentrate especially on the present controversy over same-sex marriage, and how far people and organizations should be required to afford those couples equal status. But other kinds of exemptions can help us understand various general questions and provide key insights about this intense concern of our time.

My basic conclusions are these: religious convictions and practices do matter but only sometimes should they be legally distinguished from other bases. Considering all that is at stake, certain exemptions …

Minimum Fees For The Self-Employed: A European Response To The "Uber-Ized" Economy?, Eva Grosheide, Mark Barenberg

Faculty Scholarship

In advanced market economies in Europe and North America, a large and growing percentage of the workforce is self-employed. This group earns a contractual fee from clients, rather than a wage or salary from employers, one form of the so-called "Uberization" of the labor market. Through an analysis of the Court of Justice of the European Union's (CJEU) rulings, this Article explores whether minimum fees for the self-employed could be implemented without infringing European Union (EU) competition law. In particular, it lays out four possible legal mechanisms – what the paper dubs "U-turns" – that swerve around the social harms …

On Family Law Localism: A Comment On Sean Hannon Williams's Sex In The City, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

In his Article “Sex in the City,” Professor Sean Hannon Williams addresses the problems of enormous trial court discretion and concomitant unpredictable and inconsistent decisions found in divorce cases by proposing that local governments adopt nonbinding “rules of thumb” that would guide judges in exercising that discretion with respect to issues such as child custody, property division, and income support. He contends that this proposal would fit within the existing legal framework of state-local relations and would advance the goals of both family law reform and local empowerment with respect to family issues. Specifically, he urges that local legislative action …

Short-Termism And Long-Termism, Michal Barzuza, Eric L. Talley

Faculty Scholarship

A significant debate in corporate law and finance concerns the role of activist investors (especially hedge funds) in corporate governance. Activists, it is often alleged, imprudently privilege short term earnings over superior (but less liquid) long term investments. Activists counter that they target managers who unjustifiably cling to questionable strategies. While this debate is hardly new, it has grown increasingly fractious of late. We analyze the activism debate within a theoretical securities-market setting. In our framework – which draws from an emerging literature in empirical and experimental finance – managers are differentially overconfident (causing them to favor long-term projects), while …

Firearm Legislation And Firearm Mortality In The Usa: A Cross-Sectional, State-Level Study, Bindu Kalesan, Matthew Mobily, Olivia Keiser, Jeffrey Fagan

Faculty Scholarship

In an effort to reduce firearm mortality rates in the USA, US states have enacted a range of firearm laws to either strengthen or deregulate the existing main federal gun control law, the Brady Law. We set out to determine the independent association of different firearm laws with overall firearm mortality, homicide firearm mortality, and suicide firearm mortality across all US states. We also projected the potential reduction of firearm mortality if the three most strongly associated firearm laws were enacted at the federal level.

Group Threat, Police Officer Diversity And The Deadly Use Of Police Force, Joscha Legewie, Jeffrey Fagan

Faculty Scholarship

Officer-involved killings and racial bias in policing are controversial political issues. Prior research indicates that (perceived) group threat related to political mobilization, economic competition, and the threat of black crime are is an important explanations for variations in police killings across cities in the United States. We argue that a diverse police force that proportionally represents the population it serves mitigates group threat and thereby reduces the number of officer-involved killings. Count models support our argument. They show that group threat is largely driven by the threat of black crime. Black-on-white homicides increase officer-involved killings of African Americans but black-on-black …

Climate Change And Human Trafficking After The Paris Climate Agreement, Michael Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

Climate change is a major contributor to migration and displacement. Persistent drought forced as many as 1.5 million Syrian farmers to move to overcrowded cities, contributing to social turmoil and ultimately a civil war that drove hundreds of thousands of people to attempt to cross the Mediterranean into Europe. Drought also worsened refugee crises in the Sahel, the Horn of Africa and other parts of the continent. Climate change can cause displacement in multiple ways. No reliable estimates exist of the number of people who will be displaced partly or wholly by climate change, due to uncertainties concerning the rate …

Justice And Accountability: Activist Judging In The Light Of Democratic Constitutionalism And Democratic Experimentalism, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

This essay examines the charge that activist judging is inconsistent with democracy in the light of two recent perspectives in legal scholarship. The perspectives – Democratic Constitutionalism and Democratic Experimentalism – suggest in convergent and complementary ways that the charge ignores or oversimplifies relevant features of both judging and democracy. In particular, the charge exaggerates the pre-emptive effect of activist judging, and it implausibly conflates democracy with electoral processes. In addition, it understands consensus as a basis for judicial legitimacy solely in terms of pre-existing agreement and ignores the contingent legitimacy that can arise from the potential for subsequent agreement.

Variation In Boilerplate: Rational Design Or Random Mutation?, Stephen J. Choi, G. Mitu Gulati, Robert E. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

Standard contract doctrine presumes that sophisticated parties choose their terminology carefully because they want courts or counterparts to understand what they intended. The implication of this “Rational Design” model of rational behavior is that courts should pay careful attention to the precise phrasing of contracts. Using a study of the sovereign bond market, we examine the Rational Design model as applied to standard-form contracting. In NML v. Argentina, federal courts in New York attached importance to the precise phrasing of the boilerplate contracts at issue. The industry promptly condemned the decision for a supposedly erroneous interpretation of a variant of …

The Challenges Of Fitting Principled Modern Government – A Unified Public Law – To An Eighteenth Century Constitution, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

The papers presented at a fall 2016 conference at Cambridge University, The Unity of Public Law?, generally addressed issues of judicial review in the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, often from a comparative perspective and the view that unifying impulses in “public law” arose from the common law. Accepting what Justice Harlan Fisk Stone once characterized as the ideal of “a unified system of judge-made and statute law woven into a seamless whole by [judges],” The Common Law in the United States, 50 Harvard L Rev 4 (1936), this paper considers a variety of issues that have complicated maintaining …

A Machine Learning Classifier For Corporate Opportunity Waivers, Gabriel V. Rauterberg, Eric L. Talley

Faculty Scholarship

Rauterberg & Talley (2017) develop a data set of “corporate opportunity waivers” (COWs) – significant contractual modifications of fiduciary duties – sampled from SEC filings. Part of their analysis utilizes a machine learning (ML) classifier to extend their data set beyond the hand-coded sample. Because the ML approach is likely unfamiliar to some readers, and in the light of its great potential across other areas of law and finance research, this note explains the basic components using a simple example, and it demonstrates strategies for calibrating and evaluating the classifier.

Impact Investing As A Form Of Lobbying And Its Corporate-Governance Effects, Andrzej Rapaczynski

Faculty Scholarship

Impact investment is attractive to many because it seems to combine support for progressive causes with an apparent commitment to the principles of a market economy. In fact, however, a rational impact investor is not simply creating demand for certain types of corporate actions; he/she is attempting to use corporate governance mechanisms to influence fiduciary decisions of the management. The cost of this tactic for the health of the capitalist economy is potentially very considerable. The American capitalist system relies heavily on a relatively fragile corporate governance arrangement in which the agency problems of a modern corporation are minimized by …

Can A Little Representation Be A Dangerous Thing?, Colleen F. Shanahan, Anna E. Carpenter, Alyx Mark

Faculty Scholarship

Access to justice interventions that provide a little representation, including nonlawyer representation and various forms of limited legal services, may be valuable solutions for low- and middle-income Americans. However, a thoughtful approach to improving access to justice efforts should recognize that a little representation may have risks. In particular, one potential risk of a little representation is that while it provides assistance with a discrete legal need in a specific moment, the nature of the assistance is incompatible with challenging the law. As a result, individual litigants do not have the benefit of legal challenges in their own cases and …

Lawyers, Power, And Strategic Expertise, Colleen F. Shanahan, Anna E. Carpenter, Alyx Mark

Faculty Scholarship

The only sound in a courtroom is the hum of the ventilation system. It feels as if everyone in the room is holding their breath …. Litigants are uneasy in the courthouse, plaintiffs and defendants alike. They fidget. They keep their coats on. They clutch their sheaves of paper-rent receipts and summonses, leases and bills. You can always tell the lawyers, because they claim the front row, take off their jackets, lay out their files. It's not just their ease with the language and the process that sets them apart. They dominate the space.

This empirical study analyzes the experience …

Beyond Options, Edward R. Morrison, Anthony J. Casey

Faculty Scholarship

Scholars and policymakers now debate reforms that would prevent a bankruptcy filing from being a moment that forces valuation of the firm, crystallization of claims against it, and elimination of junior stakeholders’ interest in future appreciation in firm value. These reforms have many names, ranging from Relative Priority to Redemption Option Value. Much of the debate centers on the extent to which reform would protect the non-bankruptcy options of junior stakeholders, or harm the non-bankruptcy options of senior lenders. We argue that this focus on options misplaced. Protecting options is neither necessary nor sufficient for advancing the goal of a …

Family Defense And The Disappearing Problem-Solving Court, Jane M. Spinak

Faculty Scholarship

Problem-solving courts began to flourish in the early 1990s with the creation of criminal drug courts as alternatives to standard criminal court practices. In the drug courts, defendants would receive treatment rather than incarceration and be monitored closely within the court. Family Court Treatment Parts (FCTPs) were developed in the late 1990s in New York State, fully embracing the three key components of the problem-solving drug court model: (1) an activist judge who helps to fashion, and then closely monitor, dispositions; (2) a team of lawyers, social workers, and court personnel who try to identify and then work toward commons …

Early Prerogative And Administrative Power: A Response To Paul Craig, Philip A. Hamburger

Faculty Scholarship

What does English experience imply about American constitutional law? My book, Is Administrative Law Unlawful?, argues that federal administrative power generally is unconstitutional. In supporting this conclusion, the book observes that eighteenth-century Americans adopted their constitutions not only with their eyes on the future, but also looking over their shoulder at the past – especially the English past. This much should not be controversial. There remain, however, all sorts of questions about how to understand the English history and its relevance for early Americans.

In opposition to my claims about American law, Paul Craig lobs three critiques from across the …

Reflections On Obergefell And The Family-Recognition Framework's Continuing Value, Suzanne B. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

Unlike a typical law review essay, I offer reflections here based largely on my own past work in LGBT rights advocacy. Together with related scholarship, I rely on these experiences to argue that the 'family recognition" framework underlying earlier advocacy has value going forward, even after the Supreme Court's ruling in favor of nationwide marriage equality.

In Memoriam – Marvin A. Chirelstein, Barbara Aronstein Black, Stephen B. Cohen, Michael J. Graetz, Roberta Romano, Carol Sanger, Robert E. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

Marvin Chirelstein was my good friend long before he was my colleague, and Ellen is one of my closest friends-it's a friendship that's lasted through oh! so many ups and downs for all of us for oh! so many years. As a sign of how good a friend I considered Marvin, I will report that he is the only person I have ever permitted to call me Babs!

The Equipoise Effect, Bert Huang

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay explores an overlooked way to use the remedy of disgorgement in torts, contracts, and regulation. It begins with a reminder that disgorging net gains does not force the liable actor to take a loss; by definition, it allows him to break even. As a matter of incentives, it places him in a sort of equipoise. This equipoise effect has a logical upshot that might seem counterintuitive: Substituting disgorgement for any other remedy, part of the time, can emulate the incentive effect of using that other remedy all of the time.

In theory, then, courts or regulators can sometimes …