Law Commons^™

The Erotic Of Torts, Carol Sanger

Faculty Scholarship

"What kind of feminist would be accused of sexual harassment?" asks Jane Gallop (p. 1). Gallop quickly provides her own challenging answer: "the sort of feminist ... that ... do[es] not respect the line between the intellectual and the sexual" (p. 12). Gallop is firm and unrepentant about not respecting this line: "I sexualize the atmosphere in which I work. When sexual harassment is defined as the introduction of sex into professional relations, it becomes quite possible to be both a feminist and a sexual harasser" (p. 11). Figuring out what this means – and what its implications are for …

The Wto Legal System: Sources Of Law, David Palmeter, Petros C. Mavroidis

Faculty Scholarship

Modern discussions of the sources of international law usually begin with a reference to Article 38 (1) of the Statute of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which provides:

The Court, whose function is to decide in accordance with international law such disputes as are submitted to it, shall apply:

1. international conventions, whether general or particular, establishing rules expressly recognized by the contesting states;
2. international custom as evidence of a general practice accepted as law;
3. the general principles of law recognized by civilized nations;
4. subject to the provisions of Article 59, judicial decisions and the teachings of the most highly …

Reflections In A Distant Mirror: Japanese Corporate Governance Through American Eyes, Ronald J. Gilson

Faculty Scholarship

For the last ten years, Japanese corporate governance has served as a distant mirror in whose reflection American academics could better see the attributes of their own system. As scholars came to recognize that the institutional characteristics of the American and Japanese systems were politically and historically contingent, other countries' approaches became serious objects of study, rather than just way stations on the road to convergence. One learned about one's own system from the choices made by others.

As it came to be conceived, the Japanese corporation of the 1980s represented quite a different method of organizing production. Styled the …

Our Administrative System Of Criminal Justice, Gerard E. Lynch

Faculty Scholarship

Bill Tendy was already a legend among federal prosecutors when I first served as an Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York in the early 1980s. To us youngsters, Bill even then seemed a survivor from another era, when prosecutors really did resemble the tough-talking Hollywood DAs played by actors like Brian Donleavy – while we felt more like insecure young lawyers who should be played by Michael J. Fox or Calista Flockhart.

Partly, of course, this was just a function of age and experience; hard as it was to imagine, there must have been a …

Towards A Model Penal Code, Second (Federal?): The Challenge Of The Special Part, Gerard E. Lynch

Faculty Scholarship

The Model Penal Code is among the most successful academic law reform projects ever attempted. In the first two decades after its completion in 1962, more than two-thirds of the states undertook to enact new codifications of their criminal law, and virtually all of those used the Model Penal Code as a starting point. The Model Penal Code was influential in a variety of different ways. First, the very notion of a systematic codification of criminal law received a dramatic boost from the Model Penal Code. Apart from the degree to which any particular state recodification resembled the Model Penal …

Comparative Law In The New European Community, George Bermann

Faculty Scholarship

As a member and leader of America's immediate post-war generation of comparative lawyers, Rudolf Schlesinger viewed the then European Economic Community (Community) as an unprecedentedly important arena for the theory and practice of comparative law. He was right in doing so. As we know, the Community initially faced the prospect, among other things, of harmonizing the laws of six continental European countries, representing distinct branches of the European civil law tradition. Then, within a dozen years, the Community expanded to pick up members that stood on the outskirts of the European civil law tradition (Denmark) and squarely within the common …

Recent Publications: Puerto Rico, Christina D. Ponsa-Kraus

Faculty Scholarship

Ask yourself why you are reading a review of a book about a colony called Puerto Rico in a journal on international law. Isn't Puerto Rico a self-governing Commonwealth? Isn't it part of the United States? If you decide to buy the book, ask yourself where in the bookstore you should look for it. In the international relations section? The U.S. history section? A turn-of-the-century Supreme Court case analyzing the status of Puerto Rico (and other territories "acquired" by the United States in 1901) may provide some guidance: Puerto Rico is "foreign in a domestic sense."' Perhaps the bookstore has …

The European Intergovernmental Conference: An American Perspective, George A. Bermann

Faculty Scholarship

Peter Herzog's career-long interest in the European Communities makes it especially appropriate to include in this festschrift a contribution on what has become the principal mechanism for reforming the treaties that constitute those Communities. I refer of course to the "intergovernmental conferences," or "IGCs" for short. As this festschrift goes to press, the fifteen Member States are submitting the results of the latest IGC – the 1997 Treaty of Amsterdam – to their respective national ratification processes.

As its name suggests, the intergovernmental conference is a gathering of representatives of the Member States to discuss and eventually agree upon amendments …

Reflections On The Papers Presented By Weiler, Goebel, And Meyers & Levie, George A. Bermann

Faculty Scholarship

The preceding papers amply demonstrate that an important step in the progressive integration of the European Union can be a compelling one without being an easy one. The transition to economic and monetary union (EMU) in Europe is precisely such a step. In this brief comment, I hope merely to show that, however powerful may be the case for economic and monetary union, passage to it is both generating institutional misgivings and entailing what could be institutional mistakes.

I begin with the case for economic and monetary union, which I consider to be a very strong one indeed. Not many …

Use Of Force And Constitutionalism, Lori Fisler Damrosch

Faculty Scholarship

Are constitutional democracies more inclined than other kinds of regimes to observe the international law of the United Nations Charter on use of force? Are they relatively more vulnerable to unlawful behavior by others? How can constitutional democracies ensure fidelity to their underlying constitutional principles when they engage in multinational military operations for preservation or restoration of international peace? These and related questions at the intersection of the international and national legal orders merit careful attention as political structures around the world undergo post-Cold War transformation.

Crime In Public Housing: Clarifying Research Issues, Jeffrey A. Fagan, Tamara Dumanovsky, J. Phillip Thompson, Garth Davies

Faculty Scholarship

In recent years, crime and public housing have been closely linked in our political and popular cultures. Tragic episodes of violence have reinforced the notion that public housing is a milieu with rates of victimization and offending far greater than other locales. However, these recent developments belie the complex social and political evolution of public housing from its origins in the 1930s, through urban renewal, and into the present.

Stereotypes abound about public housing, its management, residents, and crime rates. In reality, variation is the norm, and it is these variations that affect crime. The study of crime in public …

Modern Mail Fraud: The Restoration Of The Public/Private Distinction, John C. Coffee Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

Over their long history, the mail and wire fraud statutes have gone through repeated periods of rapid expansion and contraction. The 1970s saw the flowering of the "intangible rights doctrine," an exotic flower that quickly overgrew the legal landscape in the manner of the kudzu vine until by the mid- 1980s few ethical or fiduciary breaches seemed beyond its potential reach. That doctrine was radically pruned by the Supreme Court in 1987 in the McNally decision, which held that the federal mail and wire fraud statutes reached only those schemes that intentionally sought to deprive their victims of money or …

Understanding The Choice Between Public And Private Equity Financing Of Early Stage Companies: A Comment On Barry And Turki, Ronald J. Gilson

Faculty Scholarship

This Comment considers the results of Barry and Turki's research data that indicates that investments perform differently depending on whether innovation is financed by private or public equity investment. The Comment posits two hypotheses for the differential performance. The first highlights ex ante differences between private and public subsamples, that is that the financing choice separates good prospects from bad. The second hypothesis focuses on ex post differences in performance that results from differences in governance structure and incentives created by the structure of public and private equity investment. The ex ante separation hypothesis and the ex post performance hypothesis …

The Political Economy Of Statutory Reach: U.S. Disclosure Rules In A Globalizing Market For Securities, Merritt B. Fox

Faculty Scholarship

This Article addresses the appropriate reach of the U.S. mandatory securities disclosure regime. While disclosure obligations are imposed on issuers, they are triggered by transactions: the public offering of, or public trading in, the issuers' shares. Share transactions are taking on an increasingly transnational character. The barriers to a truly global market for equities continue to lessen: financial information is becoming increasingly globalized and it is becoming increasingly inexpensive and easy to effect share transactions abroad. There are approximately 41,000 issuers of publicly traded shares in the world. For an ever larger portion of these issuers, there will be significant …

Electronic Rights In Belgium And France: General Association Of Professional Journalists Of Belgium V. Central Station (Brussels Court Of First Instance, October 16, 1996; Brussels Court Of Appeals, October 28, 1997); Union Of French Journalists V. Sdv Plurimedia (Strasbourg Court Of Grand Instance, February 3, 1998) Symposium On Electronic Rights In International Perspective, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

Like many national presses in Europe, the Belgian press divides ideologically. Each daily newspaper represents the views of a political party, or expresses the perspective of a political or religious belief. Newspaper readers therefore tend to select the newspaper that most closely corresponds to their world-view. Ten publishers of Belgian dailies and weeklies formed a consortium, Central Station, to operate a website that would offer a crossection of all the participating periodicals' articles on a variety of subjects. The articles would appear in print in their separate newspapers in the morning, but would be available that evening on the Central …

Emerging Statutory And Constitutional Tools For States To Resist Federal Environmental Regulation, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

This is a time of high tensions between the federal government and the states over environmental regulation. The flashpoints include actions by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) against states that enact laws shielding environmental audit reports from discovery; the withdrawal of several states from certain regulatory reform programs and delegated programs; and EPA accusations that some states are ignoring many violations of the pollution control laws, and loud denials by state representatives.

The Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution and the complex of federal environmental statutes enacted in the 1970s and 1980s still give Washington the upper hand in …

Symposium On Electronic Rights In International Perspective: Introduction, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

Recent litigation in the U.S., Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France has placed at issue the electronic publishing rights of employee and freelance journalists, contributors to print periodicals. In all five national controversies, the proprietors of the print publications, without securing the writers' express authorization, disseminated their articles in a variety of electronic media, including CD-ROM, third-party databases, and websites. Judicial resolution of the disputes required parsing the respective rights, under local copyright law (and in some cases, labor law as well), of the authors of the contributions to the periodicals, and of the copyright owners of the collective works …

Ownership Of Electronic Rights And The Private International Law Of Copyright, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

When, in response to a French decision upholding the rights of employee journalists to prevent the publisher's unauthorized licensing of electronic rights in the journalists' articles, French newspaper publishers yearn for "American-style copyright," they must imagine a work-made-for-hire nirvana in which publishers dispose of all rights in contributions to their periodicals, heedless of (and legally shielded from) authors' pesty claims for payment or control. To the extent that the work-made-for-hire doctrine applies, the publishing paradise conjured up by these French fantasies of law "reform" is very real indeed. Under U.S. copyright law, employee creators are not statutory "authors;" their employer …

New York State's Brownfields Programs: More And Less Than Meets The Eye, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

New York, as the nation's second most populous state, and one of its oldest and most urban, has an abundance of brownfields-slightly contaminated properties that were formerly used for industrial purposes, but that are now unused or underused, and ripe for redevelopment if they can be cleaned up. Thus, it may be surprising that New York is one of the few states without a comprehensive statute or regulation for the voluntary cleanup of brownfields.

There is, however, more here than meets the eye. New York has three important programs and several smaller ones that provide procedures, money, or incentives for …

Individual Responsibility For The Investment Of Retirement Savings: A Cautionary View, Jeffrey N. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

These papers, including ones presented earlier this morning, raise questions about an adequate regime of consumer protection in an era in which responsibility for retirement savings and investment decisionmaking is being devolved, increasingly, to individuals. This shift to individual responsibility has also characterized many Social Security reform proposals, previously a bedrock system of publicly determined benefit levels. I find this devolution troubling; I think it is odd for individuals to have this responsibility. Individuals are not good risk bearers of market volatility, both in a financial sense and in a psychological sense. The consequence is that unless individuals are locked …

Why Now Is Not The Time For Constitutional Amendment: The Limited Reach Of City Of Boerne V. Flores, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

When the Supreme Court eviscerated the protection of the Free Exercise Clause in Employment Division v. Smith, religious groups and individuals dismayed by the decision chose to pursue statutory relief rather than a constitutional amendment. Now that the Supreme Court has decided in City of Boerne v. Flores that the resulting statute, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA or the "Act"), cannot be justified as a congressional exercise of power under the Fourteenth Amendment, many who care deeply about religious liberty may turn to the amendment process as an alternative. Although disappointed by the Flores decision, I believe it is …

Secret Knowledge Of Genocide: British Failure To Disclose The Killing Of Jews In 1941, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

In the late summer and early autumn of 1941, the British military intercepted coded German radio messages that revealed that German troops were killing large numbers of Jewish civilians in German-occupied parts of the Soviet Union. The British did not make this knowledge public at that time, nor did they use their still classified records during the war crimes trials after the end of World War II.

Commentators more expert than I have addressed themselves to the question of whether the British had a legal obligation to disclose the information from the coded messages. These remarks concentrate on the possible …

A Response To The Video, Charles F. Sabel

Faculty Scholarship

Let me preface my remarks by informing you that I am not a lawyer. That means that there are things I don't get and things that I'll say that you may not grasp immediately, because there are certain assumptions we don't share. To illustrate that, let me just tell you, I don't even get lawyer jokes.

For example, when I saw the movie So Goes A Nation, and Sam Sue says, "Law schools teach basic skills," I didn't realize that was a joke until you all laughed at it. So there are many subtleties of this sort that escape me. …

Police, Community Caretaking, And The Fourth Amendment, Debra A. Livingston

Faculty Scholarship

The local police have multiple responsibilities, only one of which is the enforcement of criminal law. Police gather eyewitness accounts in the aftermath of a shooting, but they also assist lost children in locating their parents. Police identify and arrest those who have committed felonies, but they also respond to heart attack victims and help inebriates find their way home. Sometimes police check on the well-being of elderly citizens. As Professor Goldstein said some twenty years ago, "The total range of police responsibilities is extraordinarily broad .... Anyone attempting to construct a workable definition of the police role will typically …

Police Patrol, Judicial Integrity, And The Limits Of Judicial Control, Debra A. Livingston

Faculty Scholarship

I want to thank St. John's for inviting me to be part of this reexamination of Terry v. Ohio – and particularly for this opportunity to participate in a roundtable discussion on the relationship between stop and frisk doctrine and the substantive law. This is an important and timely topic and I am happy to see it being discussed in such a serious venue.

When I was preparing my remarks for today, I thought I should call them, "Terry and the Substantive Law: A Hard, Hard Problem." Fortunately, I have sworn off titles with colons, so I settled on "Police …

Judicial Resolution Of Issues About Religious Conviction, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

What can judges and lawyers learn about religion from those whose field is religious studies, and from others who can illuminate the phenomenon of religion? Using examples provided in Winnifred Fallers Sullivan's paper, I want to place this general question within the fabric of free exercise law.

What I say assumes that some legal issues she raises have reasonably clear answers. Given the cavalier way the Supreme Court turned free exercise law upside down in Employment Division v. Smith, and given its harsh reception of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), which had received overwhelming Congressional support, little in this …

Deutsche Telekom, German Corporate Governance, And The Transition Costs Of Capitalism, Jeffrey N. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

In November 1996, Deutsche Telekom AG, the government-owned German telephone company, sold common stock representing approximately 25 percent of the company in a global stock offering that raised approximately DM 20 billion ($13 billion), the largest equity offering ever in Europe. In selling off this equity stake, the German government (i.e., the Federal Republic) had a number of motives. First, the sale was an important step in converting a government-run telephone monopoly into a nimble competitor in the emerging European and world telecommunications market. In anticipation of a fully competitive European telecommunications regime in 1998, Deutsche Telekom ("DT") had been …

A New Age Of Federalism, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

Federalism has been in the news a lot over the past few years. The Republican-controlled Congress has enacted restrictions on the imposition of unfunded federal mandates on state governments and has passed significant welfare reform, one of the keys to which is greater state freedom in the implementation of welfare programs. The President, although often seen as resisting the more extreme Republican proposals for devolution, is himself something of an advocate for states’ rights. Clinton was a governor before he was President, and in that capacity he experienced a number of frustrations with federal red tape. Perhaps as a result, …

Property And The Right To Exclude, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court is fond of saying that "the right to exclude others" is "one of the most essential sticks in the bundle of rights that are commonly characterized as property." I shall argue in this Essay that the right to exclude others is more than just "one of the most essential" constituents of property – it is the sine qua non. Give someone the right to exclude others from a valued resource, i.e., a resource that is scarce relative to the human demand for it, and you give them property. Deny someone the exclusion right and they do not …

High-Level, "Tenured" Lawyers, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

Government lawyers can be broadly categorized as either political or civil service appointees. The political appointees constitute a thin layer at or near the top of the hierarchy of government lawyers. They include, most prominently, presidential appointees – "Officers of the United States" who must be nominated and confirmed by the Senate prior to their appointment. They also include a variety of lesser lawyers who are exempt from most of the civil service laws. Such exempt "inferior Officers" include, for example, the lawyers in the White House Counsel's office and so-called "Schedule C" lawyers who hold positions "of a confidential …