Law Commons^™

L'Interprétation Systémique: Le Liant Du Droit International, Giovanni Distefano, Petros C. Mavroidis

Faculty Scholarship

Systemic Interpretation in International and WTO Law: The Glue of the International Legal Order

The authors endeavour to emphasis the paramount role of systemic interpretation, provided for and codified in Article 31 (3) c) of the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, in the light of both general international and WTO Law. This short essay ultimately leads to the confirmation that this hermeneutics method accrues by all means to the cementation of the international legal order.

International Antitrust Cooperation And The Preference For Nonbinding Regimes, Anu Bradford

Faculty Scholarship

Today, multinational corporations operate in increasingly international markets, yet antitrust laws regulating their competitive conduct remain national. Thus, corporations are subject to divergent antitrust regimes across the various jurisdictions in which they operate. This increases transaction costs, causes unnecessary delays, and raises the likelihood of conflicting decisions. The risks inherent in multi-jurisdictional regulatory review were prominently illustrated in the proposed GE/Honeywell acquisition, which failed following the European Union’s (“EU”) decision to prohibit the transaction despite its earlier approval in the United States. Inconsistent remedies imposed on Microsoft following parallel investigations by both the U.S. and EU authorities serve as another …

Article Iii, Agency Adjudication, And The Origins Of The Appellate Review Model Of Administrative Law, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

American administrative law is grounded in a conception of the relationship between reviewing courts and agencies modeled on the relationship between appeals courts and trial courts in civil litigation. This appellate review model was not an inevitable foundation of administrative law, but it has had far-reaching consequences, and its origins are poorly understood. This Article details how the appellate review model emerged after 1906 as an improvised response by the U.S. Supreme Court to a political crisis brought on by aggressive judicial review of decisions of the Interstate Commerce Commission. Once the jeny-built model was in place, Congress signaled its …

Federalism And Federal Agency Reform, Gillian E. Metzger

Faculty Scholarship

This Article assesses three major preemption decisions from the 2008-2009 Term – Altria Group, Inc. v. Good, Wyeth v. Levine, and Cuomo v. Clearing House Ass'n – for their implications about the role of the states in national administrative governance. The Article argues the decisions are centrally concerned with using state law and preemption analysis to improve federal administration and police against federal agency failure. Federalism clearly factors into the decisions as well, but it does so more as a mechanism for enhancing federal agency performance than as a principle worth pursuing in its own right.

The decisions' …

Rethinking The Laws Of Good Faith Purchase, Alan Schwartz, Robert E. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay is a comparative economic analysis of the disparate doctrines governing the good faith purchase of stolen or misappropriated goods. We argue that prior treatments have misconceived the problem. An owner will take optimal precautions to prevent theft if she is faced with the loss of her goods; and a purchaser will make an optimal investigation into his seller's title if faced with the loss of the goods. An owner and a buyer cannot both be faced with the full loss, however. This presents a problem of "double moral hazard" and it cannot be solved in a first-best efficient …

Minority Practice, Majority's Burden: The Death Penalty Today, James S. Liebman, Peter Clarke

Faculty Scholarship

Although supported in principle by two-thirds of the public and even more of the States, capital punishment in the United States is a minority practice when the actual death-sentencing practices of the nation's 3000-plus counties and their populations are considered This feature of American capital punishment has been present for decades, has become more pronounced recently, and is especially clear when death sentences, which are merely infrequent, are distinguished from executions, which are exceedingly rare.

The first question this Article asks is what forces account for the death-proneness of a minority of American communities? The answer to that question – …

Privileges Or Immunities, Philip A. Hamburger

Faculty Scholarship

What was meant by the Fourteenth Amendment's Privileges or Immunities Clause? Did it incorporate the U.S. Bill of Rights against the states or did it do something else? In retrospect, the Clause has seemed to have the poignancy of a path not taken – a trail abandoned in the Slaughter-House Cases and later lamented by academics, litigants, and even some judges. Although wistful thoughts about the Privileges or Immunities Clause may seem to lend legitimacy to incorporation, the Clause actually led in another direction. Long-forgotten evidence clearly shows that the Clause was an attempt to resolve a national dispute about …

Universal Exceptionalism In International Law, Anu Bradford, Eric A. Posner

Faculty Scholarship

A trope of international law scholarship is that the United States is an "exceptionalist" nation, one that takes a distinctive (frequently hostile, unilateralist, or hypocritical) stance toward international law. However, all major powers are similarly "exceptionalist," in the sense that they take distinctive approaches to international law that reflect their values and interests. We illustrate these arguments with discussions of China, the European Union, and the United States. Charges of international-law exceptionalism betray an undefended assumption that one particular view of international law (for scholars, usually the European view) is universally valid.

Lightened Scrutiny, Bert I. Huang

Faculty Scholarship

The current anxiety over judicial vacancies is not new. For decades, judges and scholars have debated the difficulties of having too few judges for too many cases in the federal courts. At risk, it is said, are cherished and important process values. Often left unsaid is a further possibility: that not only process, but also the outcomes of cases, might be at stake. This Article advances the conversation by illustrating how judicial overload might entail sacrifices of first-order importance.

I present here empirical evidence suggesting a causal link between judicial burdens and the outcomes of appeals. Starting in 2002, a …

Randomization And The Fourth Amendment, Bernard Harcourt, Tracey L. Meares

Faculty Scholarship

Randomized checkpoint searches are generally taken to be the exact antithesis of reasonableness under the Fourth Amendment. In the eyes of most jurists checkpoint searches violate the central requirement of valid Fourth Amendment searches – namely, individualized suspicion. We disagree. In this Article, we contend that randomized searches should serve as the very lodestar of a reasonable search. The notion of "individualized" suspicion is misleading; most suspicion in the modem policing context is group based and not individual specific. Randomized searches by definition are accompanied by a certain level of suspicion. The constitutional issue, we maintain, should not turn on …

Can Joe The Plumber Support Redistribution? Law, Social Preferences, And Sustainable Policy Design, Gillian Lester

Faculty Scholarship

How does one win popular support for laws designed specifically to redistribute economic wealth? One can hardly gainsay that this is a – perhaps the – defining issue for domestic policy in the age of President Obama. Even as the recent financial crisis has exposed the need for a reliable social safety net, attempts to respond through the political and legislative arenas have triggered increasingly hostile responses among conservatives, populists, Massachusetts voters, and incipient tea partiers. The puzzle of how to attract and preserve public support for law reform aimed at redistribution – of both income and risk – is …

The Last Plank: Rethinking Public And Private Power To Advance Fair Housing, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

The persistence of housing discrimination more than forty years after the passage of the federal Fair Housing Act (FHA) of 1968 is among the most intractable civil rights puzzle. For the most part, this puzzle is not doctrinal: the Supreme Court has interpreted the FHA only a handful of times over the last two decades – a marked contrast to frequent doctrinal contestations over the statutory scope and constitutionality of federal laws governing employment discrimination and voting rights. Instead, the central puzzle is the inefficacy of the FHA's enforcement regime given that, in formal terms, the regime is the strongest …

Subsidizing The Press, David M. Schizer

Faculty Scholarship

Through beat reporting and investigative journalism, reporters monitor the foundational institutions of our society. This reporting has value even to those who never buy a newspaper or read a website. For example, subscribers and nonsubscribers alike benefit when government officials respond to a critical news story by eliminating an abusive practice. Yet unfortunately, the professional press is experiencing a severe economic crisis. Layoffs are pervasive, and news organizations across the nation are on the brink of insolvency. As a result, a number of commentators have proposed government subsidies for the press. Yet if the press becomes financially dependent on the …

Systemic Risk After Dodd-Frank: Contingent Capital And The Need For Regulatory Strategies Beyond Oversight, John C. Coffee Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

Because the quickest, simplest way for a financial institution to increase its profitability is to increase its leverage, an enduring tension will exist between regulators and systemically significant financial institutions over the issues of risk and leverage. Many have suggested that the 2008 financial crisis erupted because flawed systems of executive compensation induced financial institutions to increase leverage and accept undue risk. But that begs the question why such compensation formulas were adopted. Growing evidence suggests that shareholders favored these formulas to induce managers to accept higher risk and leverage. Shareholder pressure, then, is a factor that could cause the …

Profiling Originalism, Jamal Greene, Nathaniel Persily, Stephen Ansolabehere

Faculty Scholarship

Originalism is a subject of both legal and political discourse, invoked not just in law review scholarship but also in popular media and public discussion. This Essay presents the first empirical study of public attitudes about originalism. The study analyzes original and existing survey data in order to better understand the demographic characteristics, legal views, political orientation, and cultural profile of those who self-identfy as originalists. We conclude that rule of law concerns, support for politically conservative issue positions, and a cultural orientation toward moral traditionalism and libertarianism are all significant predictors of an individual preference for originalism. Our analysis …

The Genesis Of The Gats (General Agreement On Trade In Services), Juan A. Marchetti, Petros C. Mavroidis

Faculty Scholarship

The Uruguay Round services negotiations saw the light of day amidst pressures from lobbies in developed countries, unilateral retaliatory actions, and ideological struggle in the developing world. The final outcome, the GATS, certainly characterized by a complex structure and awkward drafting here and there, is not optimal but is an important first step towards the liberalization of trade in services. This article traces the GATS negotiating history, from its very beginning in the late 1970s, paying particular attention to the main forces that brought the services dossier to the multilateral trading system (governments, industries, and academics), and the interaction between …

Medical Malpractice Mediation: Benefits Gained, Opportunities Lost, Carol B. Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

In the past decade, the United States healthcare system has begun to use mediation to facilitate communication between patients and physicians after an adverse medical event, to ease tensions among members of care-giving teams, to resolve medical malpractice claims, and to help family members and medical professionals make awesome and wrenching decisions at the end of life. Implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 will produce new controversies and increase the need for mediation. Patients, families, physicians, nurses, other healthcare professionals, and administrators will require help managing the disagreements that arise as they adapt to the …

Reasons: Explanatory And Normative, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

‘A reason’ has two meanings: explanatory reasons are facts that contribute to an explanation (of anything explained); normative reasons are facts that favour and guide responses, in one’s emotions, beliefs, actions, etc., to how things are. The two kinds of reasons are connected by their connection to the capacity of Reason, or rationality, and by the normative/explanatory nexus, i.e. by the fact that normative reasons can explain the response that they favour. Normative reasons are — potentially — explanatory reasons, but the explanations they provide are of a special kind that presupposes their normative character. The chapter builds on …

What Happened In Iowa?, David Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

Reply to Nicole Mansker & Neal Devins, Do Judicial Elections Facilitate Popular Constitutionalism; Can They?, 111 Colum. L. Rev. Sidebar 27 (2011).

November 2, 2010 is the latest milestone in the evolution of state judicial elections from sleepy, sterile affairs into meaningful political contests. Following an aggressive ouster campaign, voters in Iowa removed three supreme court justices, including the chief justice, who had joined an opinion finding a right to same-sex marriage under the state constitution. Supporters of the campaign rallied around the mantra, “It’s we the people, not we the courts.” Voter turnout surged to unprecedented levels; the national …

A Model Of Optimal Corporate Bailouts, Antonio E. Bernardo, Eric L. Talley, Ivo Welch

Faculty Scholarship

We analyze incentive-efficient government bailouts within a canonical model of intra-firm moral hazard. Bailouts exacerbate the moral hazard of firms and managers in two ways. First, they make them less averse to failing. Second, the taxes to fund bailouts dampen their incentives. Nevertheless, if third-party externalities from keeping the firm alive are strong, bailouts can improve welfare. Our model suggests that governments should use bailouts sparingly, where social externalities are large and subsidies small; eliminate incumbent owners and managers to improve a priori incentives; and finance bailouts through redistributive taxes on productive firms instead of forcing recipients to repay in …

Left, Right, And Center: Strategic Information Acquisition And Diversity In Judicial Panels, Matthew L. Spitzer, Eric L. Talley

Faculty Scholarship

This paper develops and analyzes a hierarchical model of judicial review in multimember appellate courts. In our model, judicial panels acquire information endogenously, through the efforts of individual panelists, acting strategically. The resulting equilibria strongly resemble the empirical phenomena collectively known as "panel effects" – and in particular the observed regularity with which ideological diversity on a panel predicts greater moderation in voting behavior (even after controlling for the median voter's preferences). In our model, non-pivotal panel members with ideologies far from the median have the greatest incentive to acquire additional policy-relevant information where no one on a unified panel …

Radical Thought From Marx, Nietzsche, And Freud, Through Foucault, To The Present: Comments On Steven Lukes’S In Defense Of "False Consciousness", Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

Steven Lukes offers a precise, succinct, and forceful defense of the idea of "false consciousness" in his provocative essay by that name, In Defense of "False Consciousness" People can be systematically mistaken about their own best interest, Lukes contends – or, in his words, "they can have systematically distorted beliefs about the social order and their own place in it that work systematically against their interests." It is not just that sometimes people knowingly but regretfully make compromises, nor simply that they face no alternative choices; people are at times factually mistaken about what will promote their best interest. "There …

"European Copyright Code" – Back To First Principles (With Some Additional Detail), Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

The "Wittem Group" of copyright scholars has proposed a "European Copyright Code," to "serve as an important reference tool for future legislatures at the European and national levels." Because, notwithstanding twenty years of Directives and a growing ECJ caselaw, copyright law in EU Member States continues to lack uniformity, the Wittem Group’s endeavor should be welcomed, at least as a starting point for reflection on the desirable design of an EU copyright regime. Whether or not the proposed Code succeeds in influencing national or Community legislation, it does offer an occasion to consider the nature of the rights that copyright …

Is Internet Exceptionalism Dead?, Tim Wu

Faculty Scholarship

Is there such a thing as Internet exceptionalism? If so, just what is the Internet an exception to? It may appear technical, but this is actually one of the big questions of our generation, for the Internet has shaped the United States and the world over the last twenty years in ways people still struggle to understand. The question is not merely academic. The greatest Internet firms can be succinctly defined as those that have best understood what makes the Internet different.

Making Willing Bodies: Manufacturing Consent Among Prisoners And Soldiers, Creating Human Subjects, Patriots, And Everyday Citizens, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

In March 1944, doctors at the University of Chicago began infecting volunteer convicts at Stateville Prison with a virulent strand of malaria to test the effectiveness and side-effects of potent anti-malarial drugs. According to Dr. Alf Alving, the principal investigator, malaria "was the number-one medical problem of the war in the Pacific" and "we were losing far more men to malaria than to enemy bullets." This refrain would rehearse one of the most productive ways of speaking about prisoner experimentation. The Stateville prisoners became human once again and regained their citizenship and political voice by sacrificing their bodies to the …

Contract, Uncertainty, And Innovation, Ronald J. Gilson, Charles F. Sabel, Robert E. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

Contract today increasingly links entrepreneurial innovations to the efforts and finance necessary to transform ideas into value. In this chapter, we describe the match between a form of contract that “braids”1 formal and informal contractual elements in novel ways and the process by which innovation is pursued.

Juvenile Incarceration And The Pains Of Imprisonment, Jeffrey Fagan, Aaron Kupchik

Faculty Scholarship

After legislatures criminalized a major portion of juvenile delinquency in the 1980s and 1990s, large numbers of incarcerated youth began serving their sentences in adult correctional facilities. To understand the ramifications of this practice, prior research studies compared the correctional experiences of youth in juvenile and adult facilities. Yet this research often minimized the pains of imprisonment for youth in juvenile facilities, based on the contrast to adult facilities and the toxic conditions of confinement within them. In this Article, we contribute to this literature by analyzing data from interviews with 188 young men incarcerated in juvenile and adult facilities …

Incarceration And The Economic Fortunes Of Urban Neighborhoods, Jeffrey Fagan, Valerie West

Faculty Scholarship

New research has identified the consequences of high rates of incarceration on neighborhood crime rates, but few studies have looked beyond crime to examine the collateral effects of incarceration on the social and economic well being of the neighborhoods themselves and their residents. We assess two specific indicia of neighborhood economic well-being, household income and human capital, dimensions that are robust predictors of elevated crime, enforcement and incarceration rates. We decompose incarceration effects by neighborhood racial composition and socio-economic conditions to account for structural disadvantages in labor force and access to wealth that flow from persistent patterns of residential segregation. …

Public Sex, Same-Sex Marriage, And The Afterlife Of Homophobia, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

The summer of 2011 marked an important turning-point in the geography and politics of sex: public sex, previously a domain dominated by the specter of a hypersexualized gay man, became the province of the irresponsible, foolish, and self-destructive heterosexual man, such as Anthony Weiner. Meanwhile, homosexuals were busy domesticating their sexuality in the private domain of the family. Just as hetero-sex shamefully seeped out into the open, homo-sex disappeared from view into the dignified pickets of private kinship. In this essay I examine the panic that unfolded in connection with Representative Weiner’s tweets as a kind of afterlife of homophobia; …

The Curious Relationship Of Marriage And Freedom, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

This essay explores why and how today’s marriage equality movement for same-sex couples might benefit from lessons learned by African Americans when they too were allowed to marry for the first time in the immediate post-Civil War era. Why has the right to marry, rather than say, employment rights, educational opportunity or political participation, emerged as the preeminent vehicle by and through which the freedom, equality and dignity of gay men and lesbians is being fought in the present moment. Why marriage? In what ways are the values, aspirations, and even identity of an oppressed community shaped when they are …