Law Commons^™

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

Faculty Scholarship

At least 21 million people globally are victims of human trafficking, typically involving either sexual exploitation or forced labor. This form of modern-day slavery tends to increase after natural disasters or conflicts where large numbers of people are displaced from their homes and become highly vulnerable. In the decades to come, climate change will very likely lead to a large increase in the number of people who are displaced and thus vulnerable to trafficking. The Paris Climate Agreement of 2015 established objectives to limit global temperature increases, but the voluntary pledges made by nearly every country fall far short of …

Requiem, Henry Paul Monaghan

Faculty Scholarship

Besides being brief, it is not apparent what one should say. No doubt due to my own upbringing, I cannot view this an occasion for a celebration of a life that ended just a handful of hours ago. Nor do I view this an occasion for a discussion of John's work. The New York Times provided a splendid account of that. I would add only that John received an honorary LL.D. from Yale six months ago. The opening sentence of the accompanying citation said it all: "Your work set the standard for constitutional law scholarship for our generation." I am …

Equality And The Forms Of Justice, Susan Sturm

Faculty Scholarship

Justice and equality are simultaneously noble and messy aspirations for law. They inspire and demand collective striving toward principle, through the unflinching comparison of the "is" and the "ought." Yet, law operates in the world of the practical, tethered to the realities of dispute processing and implementation. The work of many great legal scholars and activists occupies this unstable space between principle and practice. Owen Fiss is one such scholar, attempting to straddle the world of the here-and-now and the imagined and then deliberately constructed future, the contours of which have been established during the founding moments of our constitutional …

Poison Pills And The European Case, Jeffrey N. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Coates has given us a welcome opportunity to revisit the question of shareholder rights plans, or poison pills. It is interesting to evaluate a revisionist's view of an important empirical debate – but less because of the role that empirical evidence may have played in the evolution of U.S. corporate law doctrine and more because of the relevance of that debate to a world, especially Europe, that is waking up to the vigorous market in corporate control. If contested takeovers involving target firms such as Gucci, Telecom Italia, Paribas, and Mannesman are headline grabbing events in 1999 and 2000, …

International Aspects Of Fundamental Tax Reconstructing: Practice Or Principle, Michael J. Graetz

Faculty Scholarship

The globalization of economic activity, including the expansion of international trade, the amazing ability of international capital markets to transfer capital rapidly across borders, and the movement in Europe toward greater economic unification, have made it more difficult for nations independently to fashion tax laws that properly balance their own equity, economic efficiency and simplicity goals. This is what makes this conference to analyze the international aspects of recent proposals to replace the federal income tax with some form of consumption tax, with particular emphasis on the Nunn-Domenici "USA" tax and the Armey-Shelby flat tax ("flat tax"), so important. As …

The Bylaw Battlefield: Can Institutions Change The Outcome Of Corporate Control Contests?, John C. Coffee Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

What, if anything, can institutional investors do to influence the course and outcome of corporate control contests? The traditional answer was relatively little. To be sure, institutions could tender their shares in a tender offer or vote in a proxy contest to oust the incumbent board, but such a role was essentially reactive and contingent. It required that an offer actually be made before institutions could respond on an after-the-fact basis. Similarly, institutions have occasionally conducted precatory proxy campaigns calling upon the board to redeem its poison pill, but management was free to ignore these requests (and has done so).

Constitutional Control Over War Powers: A Common Core Of Accountability In Democratic Societies?, Lori Fisler Damrosch

Faculty Scholarship

My first opportunity to read John Hart Ely's ideas on war powers came in 1988, when he published the antecedent of one chapter of War and Responsibility as an article in the Columbia Law Review titled Suppose Congress Wanted a War Powers Act that Worked. The punctuation – without a question mark – makes an important point: The verb "suppose" invites us not to speculate about a counterfactual hypothetical, but rather to assume that Congress must want its own creation to work. Professor Ely's project was to show Congress how to fix it.

But it was already evident in 1988, …

The Dark Secret Of Progressive Lawyering: A Comment On Poverty Law Scholarship In The Post-Modern, Post-Reagan Era, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

In 1971, Stephen Wexler argued in "Practicing Law for Poor People" that what poverty lawyers should be doing was, in a word, organizing. I Wexler flaunted a tough-minded disdain, not only for individual claim assertion, but also for the purely individual concerns of particular clients. Instead, he advocated efforts to assist the poor to collective power.

In his 1977 diagnosis of the state of poverty practice, Gary Bellow argued that what legal services lawyers should be doing was "focused case pressure." He proposed aggregating small housing or welfare claims in order to generate pressure on institutions engaged in systemic misconduct …