Law Commons^™

Report Of The Commission Of Enquiry Into Certain Allegations Of Cruelty And Human Rights Abuse Against Anc Prisoners And Detainees By Anc Members, Motsuenyane Commission Of Inquiry, Margaret A. Burnham, Bernard E. Harcourt, David E. Loftis, Samuel M. Motsuenyane, David M. Zamchiya

Faculty Projects

The Motsuenyane Commission of Inquiry was appointed by the President of the African National Congress of South Africa (ANC), Dr. Nelson Mandela, to investigate allegations of human rights abuses and alleged disappearances among its members. Its terms of reference were dated the 12th January, 1993. This is a historic event insofar as it is the first time that a liberation movement has engaged an independent commission to review allegations that its members violated human rights guarantees within its ranks.

Subsidiarity And The European Community, George Bermann

Faculty Scholarship

The notion of subsidiarity in European federalism labors from all manner of burdens. It seems elusive by nature, commentators claiming that they do not know what subsidiarity means or, if they do, that they do not see in it anything new. At the same time subsidiarity has been presented at least in some quarters as a panacea for the Community's current malaise. It clearly is not that. Even if subsidiarity has not been oversold, it is almost certainly overexposed, a condition that the present Article is unlikely to cure.

My purpose in this Article is simply to help make some …

Anti-Lesbian And -Gay Right Wing Initiatives: A Strategy For Response, Mary Newcombe, Suzanne B. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

The increasing visibility and political activism of the lesbian and gay community in this country has sparked a vicious backlash intended to reinforce restrictive notions of social morality and to stifle expressions of lesbian and gay identity. While this backlash has flourished in mainstream institutions, as in the U.S. Senate's hearings on lifting the military's ban against lesbians and gay men, it has also been incited on a grassroots level across the country by the Christian right wing, which has involved itself intimately in exploiting popular inclinations and reinforcing discrimination at the federal and local levels.

The Mind In The Major American Law School, Lee C. Bollinger

Faculty Scholarship

Legal scholarship is significantly, even qualitatively, different from what it was some two or three decades ago. As with any major change in intellectual thought, this one is composed of several strands. The inclusion in the legal academic community of women and minorities has produced, not surprisingly, a distinctive and at times quite critical body of thought and writing. The emergence of the school of thought known as critical legal studies has renewed and extended the legal realist critique of law of the first half of the century. But more than anything else it is the interdisciplinary movement in legal …

What Difference Does It Make Whether Corporate Managers Have Public Responsibilities?, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

Alan Wolfe's thoughtful paper resonates with what I think we should call the Washington and Lee School of corporate jurisprudence.' It elaborates on that School's brilliant intellectual history of legal theorizing about the corporation and on its powerful critique of conservative arguments against managerial responsiveness to nonshareholder interests.

It also shares, I fear, a tendency to overestimate the practical stakes of abstract concepts of the corporation and fiduciary duties. This tendency takes three forms: first, a historical picture that portrays recent developments as a promising departure rather than business-as-usual; second, an assumption that certain abstract conceptions of the corporation (for …

The Eclipse Of Reason: A Rhetorical Reading Of Bowers V. Hardwick, Kendall Thomas

Faculty Scholarship

In a careful and compelling reading of the text of the Supreme Court's opinion in Bowers v. Hardwick, Janet Halley provides a meticulous map of the misprisions by which the Hardwick Court "exploit[s] confusion about what sodomy is in ways that create opportunities for the [judicial] exercise of homophobic power." According to Professor Halley, the duplicitous mechanisms the Hardwick Court marshals in reasoning about sodomy entail a mobilization of two "incommensurable articulations": the idea of the sodomitical act, on the one hand, and that of personal identity, on the other.

Professor Halley rightly insists that an anti-homophobic critique …

Sectoral Strategies And Participant Commitments: The Keys To Effective Trade And Industrial Policies, Robert E. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

The declining competitiveness of the U.S. manufacturing sector of the most important causes of the decline in real wages and the stagnation in the level of the median family incomes which have plagued the United States since about 1973. Although the reports of the decline in American living standards were greeted with some skepticism when they first appeared in the work of the Economic Policy Institute ("EPI") in 1985, they have now achieved a high level of prominence on the national policy agenda. More recent studies by EPI and other research groups urge two cures for the decline. First, employment …

A Morality Fit For Humans, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

I believe that it was opposition to utilitarianism which first bred arguments claiming in one way or another that a view of morality according to which morality is very demanding is mistaken just be-cause morality cannot be so demanding. On first hearing, this type of argument is liable to seem suspect. Humans should be fit for morality, and unfortunately too often they are not – one is inclined to say. If we find morality too demanding the fault is with us and not with morality. The idea of human morality, in the sense of a morality fit for humans …

Investment Companies As Guardian Shareholders: The Place Of The Msic In The Corporate Governance Debate, Ronald J. Gilson, Reinier Kraakman

Faculty Scholarship

Comparative corporate governance is both necessary and hard. Recent scholarship has identified the political and historical contingency of the American pattern of corporate governance. The Berle-Means corporation, with its separation of management and risk bearing and the attendant agency conflict between managers and shareholders, is now widely recognized as being as much a creature of the American pattern of law and politics as the handiwork of neutral market forces. This recognition underscores the need to place the American experience in a comparative perspective. Other patterns of corporate governance can provide both insights into the operation of our own and a …

Understanding The Japanese Keiretsu: Overlaps Between Corporate Governance And Industrial Organization, Ronald J. Gilson, Mark J. Roe

Faculty Scholarship

We aim here for a better understanding of the Japanese keiretsu. Our essential claim is that to understand the Japanese system – banks with extensive investment in industry and industry with extensive cross-ownership – we must understand the problems of industrial organization, not just the problems of corporate governance. The Japanese system, we assert, functions not only to harmonize the relationships among the corporation, its shareholders, and its senior managers, but also to facilitate productive efficiency.

Who Rules At Home: One Person/One Vote And Local Governments, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

Twenty-five years ago, in Avery v Midland County, the United States Supreme Court extended the one person/one vote requirement to local governments. Avery and subsequent decisions applying federal constitutional standards to local elections suggested a change in the legal status of local governments and appeared to signal a shift in the balance of federalism. Traditionally, local governments have been conceptualized as instrumentalities of the states. Questions of local government organization and structure were reserved to the plenary discretion of the states with little federal constitutional oversight. In contrast, Avery assumed that local governments are locally representative bodies, not simply …

The Item Veto In State Courts, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

Contemporary debates about state constitutional law have concentrated on the role of state constitutions in the protection of individual rights and have paid less attention to the state constitutional law of government structure.This is ironic since the emergence of a state jurisprudence of individual rights has been hampered by the similarity of the texts of the state and federal constitutional provisions concerning individual rights, whereas many state constitutional provisions dealing with government structure have no federal analogues, and thus state jurisprudence in this area is free to develop outside the dominating shadow of the Federal Constitution and the federal courts. …

The Political Economy Of The Wagner Act: Power, Symbol, And Workplace Cooperation, Mark Barenberg

Faculty Scholarship

To shed light on the legal debate over new forms of workplace collaboration, this Article reexamines the origins of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. Professor Barenberg concludes that the Wagner Act scheme was profoundly cooperationist, not adversarial as is conventionally assumed. Revisionist historiography shows that, contrary to the claims of public choice theorists, Senator Wagner's network of political entrepreneurs was the decisive force in the conception and enactment of the new labor policy, amidst interest group paralysis and popular unrest. Drawing on original archival materials and oral histories, Professor Barenberg reconstructs the progressive ideology of Wagner and his …

Editing, Carol Sanger

Faculty Scholarship

In May 1993, I published a book review of Richard Posner's Sex and Reason. The review was modest in length and in purpose, part of an informal division of labor undertaken by the many critics of Sex and Reason. It challenged Judge Posner's claim that an economic analysis of sex was something new and argued that women have been making rational choices with regard to sex and reproduction for quite a long time, something that Judge Posner's book seemed to miss and misunderstand throughout.

Readers of the review (the members of my MCI Friends and Family Plan) have …

The Prospects Of Pension Fund Socialism, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

A substantial portion of corporate shareholdings in the United States is held by pension funds that secure retirement benefits for broad segments of the workforce. A number of commentators have argued that the assets secured by these pension funds should be used to promote the creation of a more democratic and egalitarian economy. Specifically, pension assets could be invested in projects that are deemed socially worthwhile, wielded in strategic "corporate campaigns" against companies resisting unionization, or directed toward allowing workers to obtain control over their own companies. This program of employing pension assets in the pursuit of a more democratic …

Further Reflections On Libertarian Criminal Defense, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

Since David Luban's is the work on legal ethics that I admire and agree with most, there is an element of perversity in my vehement critique of his arguments on criminal defense. I am therefore especially thankful for his gracious and thoughtful response. Nevertheless, I remain convinced that Luban is mistaken in excepting criminal defense from much of the responsibility to substantive justice that we both think appropriate in every other sphere of lawyering.

Pluralism, The Prisoner's Dilemma, And The Behavior Of The Independent Judiciary, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

Discussions of Thayer's conception of judicial review, as this symposium amply demonstrates, tend to be normative. Professor Nick Zeppos's paper, which offers more of a positive analysis, is therefore a welcome addition. Zeppos's paper includes three especially valuable insights. First, he demonstrates the close parallel between Thayer's theory of judicial review and the Supreme Court's Chevron doctrine. The former would have the judiciary enforce clear constitutional commands but otherwise defer to legislative understandings of constitutional meaning; the latter would have courts enforce clear legislative commands but otherwise defer to administrative interpretations of statutes. Second, he offers evidence that in both …

What He Was For, Eben Moglen

Faculty Scholarship

It will be said frequently in the years to come that an era in American history died when Thurgood Marshall left us. It will take some time for us to absorb the truth, for our sadness to be replaced by desperation. More than an era closed when his gallant heart failed him at last; in every corner of our battered country, maimed as it is by years of recklessly cultivated hatred, we lost the voice that constantly called us to attend to the work of our salvation.

Equality And Diversity: The Eighteenth-Century Debate About Equal Protection And Equal Civil Rights, Philip A. Hamburger

Faculty Scholarship

Living, as we do, in a world in which our discussions of equality often lead back to the desegregation decisions, to the Fourteenth Amendment, and to the antislavery debates of the 1830s, we tend to allow those momentous events to dominate our understanding of the ideas of equal protection and equal civil rights. Indeed, historians have frequently asserted that the idea of equal protection first developed in the 1830s in discussions of slavery and that it otherwise had little history prior to its adoption into the U.S. Constitution. Long before the Fourteenth Amendment, however – long before even the 1830s …

The Political Economy Of Female Violent Street Crime, Deborah Baskin, Ira Sommers, Jeffrey A. Fagan

Faculty Scholarship

Ten years after the U.S. Attorney General's Task Force on Violent Crime considered problems of violence in the United States, and on the heels of a National Academy Sciences report on violence, the nation seems poised to begin a new "war on violence." Past "wars" on crime problems, including the recently stalemated "war on drugs" have focused primarily on males. This one promises to be no different. Violence continues to be viewed as the province of young males in urban areas. According to the Uniform Crime Reports, over 75% of homicide victims in 1990 were males, and over 85% of …

Private Insurance, Social Insurance, And Tort Reform: Toward A New Vision Of Compensation For Illness And Injury, Kenneth S. Abraham, Lance Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

The United States does not have a system for compensating the victims of illness and injury; it has a set of different institutions that provide compensation. We rely on both tort law and giant programs of public and private insurance to compensate the victims of illness and injury. These institutions perform related functions, but the relationships among them are far from coherent. Indeed, the institutions sometimes work at cross-purposes, compensating some victims excessively and others not at all.

The absence of a coherent system of compensation is reflected even in suggested reforms of existing institutions. Proposals to reform tort law …

Cunning Stunts: From Hegemony To Desire A Review Of Madonna's Sex, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

What is sex? Is it an accidental or contingent property that every person can be said to have? I am brunette and female, but the Pope is bald and male. Or, is sex more constitutive, that is, an essential part of who we are? In this respect, the claim is often made that women experience the world ditfierently than men. Or, is sex something we do?

If we consider sex as an adjective, can we or should we be able to manipulate it like a new hair style? Or does the notion of sexual malleability trivialize the significance …

Challenges To The Doctrine Of Free Trade, Jagdish N. Bhagwati

Faculty Scholarship

The doctrine of free trade is facing new challenges today. As one surveys the policy arena, questions are raised about free trade by those who worry about Japan (and today this includes many more than the "revisionists") and who argue that free trade with Japan is not gainful. Several environmentalists as well oppose free trade with passion. These concerns relate to what now is called the absence of "level playing fields": "fair trade" as a precondition of free trade is the battle cry.

There is also the fear that free trade, even if efficient, hurts the unskilled and thus immiserizes …

Reel Time/Real Justice, Kimberlé W. Crenshaw

Faculty Scholarship

Like the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings a few months before, the Rodney King beating, the acquittal of the Los Angeles police officers who "restrained" him and the subsequent civil unrest in Los Angeles flashed Race across the national consciousness and the gaze of American culture momentarily froze there. Pieces of everyday racial dynamics briefly seemed clear, then faded from view, replaced by presidential politics and natural disasters.

This Essay examines in more depth what was exposed during the momentary national focus on Rodney King. Two main events – the acquittal of the police officers who beat King and the civil …

The Promise Of Participation, Susan P. Sturm

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Owen Fiss's seminal work, The Civil Rights Injunction, inspired a generation of scholars and practitioners to flesh out the significance of his insights. With remarkable prescience, he captured a moment in intellectual and legal history and created a vocabulary that continues to shape the debate over the court's role in public law litigation. The Allure of Individualism continues the Fiss tradition of capturing a singular, emblematic issue and sketching with broad strokes the contours of emerging debate. His springboard is Martin v. Wilks, a case that aptly frames the current dilemmas and choices posed by structural injunction litigation. Martin …

New Myths And Old Realities: The American Law Institute Faces The Derivative Action, John C. Coffee Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

Nothing in The American Law Institute's (ALI) Principles of Corporate Governance: Analysis and Recommendations (Principles) proved more controversial than the effort to develop fair and balanced standards for the derivative action. Only the topic of corporate takeovers seems to evoke an equally intense level of emotion among corporate lawyers. Not surprisingly then, Part VII (Remedies) of the Principles attracted the same attention from critics that a lightning rod does in a thunderstorm.

Unlike other ALI Restatements, however, the Principles also encountered a professional opposition, which lobbied against its adoption, both inside and outside the ALI, on behalf of various outside …

Lawyers At The Prison Gates: Organizational Structure And Corrections Advocacy, Susan Sturm

Faculty Scholarship

The rise of the public interest law movement ushered in an era of intense debate over the best way to provide legal representation to those unable to afford private counsel. This debate has involved two related dimensions of public interest representation. First, advocates and observers of public interest practice disagree over the proper role of lawyers acting on behalf of poor and underrepresented clients. They offer competing visions of representation spanning a continuum, from providing equal access to the courts for as many poor people as possible, to attacking the causes and effects of poverty and powerlessness.

The second dimension …

Corrective Justice For Moderns, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

Once when I was reading a Soviet commentary on criminal procedure, a friend noticed the cyrillic title and asked whether the Russian book was fiction or nonfiction. My initial tendency was to give the straight response, "Nonfiction, of course," but then I thought about what I was reading and began to laugh. Now if someone asked me whether Jules Coleman's Risks and Wrongs was fiction or nonfiction, I would want to give the straight reply. Thinking about the book, however, I hesitate. And I do not laugh.

It is becoming more and more difficult these days to distinguish fiction from …

Natural Rights, Natural Law, And American Constitutions, Philip A. Hamburger

Faculty Scholarship

Natural rights and natural -law are ideas that frequently seem to have something in common with the elusive shapes of a Rorschach test. They are suggestive of well-defined, recognizable images, yet they are so indeterminate that they permit us to see in them what we are inclined to see. Like Rorschach's phantasm-inducing ink blots, natural rights and natural law are not only suggestive but also indeterminate – ideas to which each of us can plausibly attribute whatever qualities we happen to associate with them. For this reason, we may reasonably fear that natural rights and natural law are ideas often …

Chaos Theory And The Justice Paradox, Robert E. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

"[T]he laws have mistakes, and you can't go writing up a law for everything that you can imagine."

"When you reach an equilibrium in biology you're dead."

As we approach the Twenty-First Century, the signs of social disarray are everywhere. Social critics observe the breakdown of core structures – the nuclear family, schools, neighborhoods, and political groups. As these traditional social institutions have disintegrated, the law has expanded to fill the void. There are more laws, more lawyers, and more use of legal mechanisms to accomplish social goals than at any other time in history. The custodians and interpreters of …