Law Commons^™

Law, Share Price Accuracy And Economic Performance: The New Evidence, Merritt B. Fox, Randall Morck, Bernard Yeung, Artyom Durnev

Faculty Scholarship

Mandatory disclosure has been at the core of U.S. securities regulation since its adoption in the early 1930s. For many decades, this fixture of our financial system was accepted with little examination. Over the last twenty years, however, mandatory disclosure has been subject to intensifying intellectual crosscurrents. Some commentators hold out the U.S. system as the standard for the world. They argue that adoption by other countries of a U.S.-styled system, with its greater corporate transparency, would enhance their economic performance. Other commentators, in contrast, insist that the U.S. mandatory disclosure regime represents a mistake, not a model. These crosscurrents …

Policy Recommendations For Dispute Prevention And Dispute Settlement In Transatlantic Relations: Legal Perspectives, George A. Bermann

Faculty Scholarship

The concrete case studies and general policy analyses that were the subject of inquiry in the conferences culminating in the present volume have predictably generated a series of distinctly legal – as well as political – reflections on dispute prevention and dispute settlement in the transatlantic arena. One of the merits of the dual (concrete and abstract) approach that has been adopted for these conferences is its capacity to provide a check against the risks that would result either from divorcing this study from the realities of disputes or from relying exclusively on potentially idiosyncratic dispute scenarios. The recommendations to …

Punishment, Proportionality, And Jurisdictional Transfer Of Adolescent Offenders: A Test Of The Leniency Gap Hypothesis, Aaron Kupchik, Jeffrey A. Fagan, Akiva Liberman

Faculty Scholarship

In the past two decades, nearly every state has expanded its authority and simplified its procedures to transfer adolescent offenders from juvenile to criminal (adult) courts. As a result, the use of jurisdictional transfer has grown steadily. These developments reflect popular and political concerns that punishment in juvenile courts is too lenient for serious crimes committed by adolescents. Yet there is mixed evidence that expanded transfer authority has produced more certain or severe punishments for adolescents prosecuted in criminal courts. Some empirical studies show that adolescents transferred to criminal court are more likely to be convicted, sentenced to prison, and …

Frictions And Tax-Motivated Hedging: An Empirical Exploration Of Publicly-Traded Exchangeable Securities, William M. Gentry, David M. Schizer

Faculty Scholarship

As financial engineering becomes more sophisticated, taxing income from capital becomes increasingly difficult. We offer the first empirical study of a high profile strategy known as "taxfree hedging," which offers economic benefits of a sale without tnggering tax. We explore nontax costs that taxpayers face when hedging by issuing so-called "DECS," "PHONES," and other publicly-traded exchangeable securities. Focusing on 61 transactions between 1993 and 2001, we shed light on why taxpayers might prefer to hedge through private "over-the-counter" transactions: An offering of exchangeable securities is announced in advance and implemented all at once, triggering an almost 4 percent decline in …

Professional Identity: Comment On Simon, Daniel C. Richman

Faculty Scholarship

Lord Brougham – the icon of zealous advocacy, who saw it as his duty to “save [his royal] client by all means and expedients and at all hazards and costs to other persons and, among them, to himself” – would not last long in a Cuban criminal court today. The question is, how comfortable would he be in a drug treatment court? Could he do his job? How well would he do it? Would he want to? And should we care if he couldn't and wouldn't?

These are all questions raised by William Simon's trenchant exploration of the challenges that …

Screening Versus Plea Bargaining: Exactly What Are We Trading Off?, Gerard E. Lynch

Faculty Scholarship

I was delighted to be invited to comment on Ronald Wright and Marc Miller's important and instructive article, The Screening/Bargaining Tradeoff. Those familiar with the authors' work, including their original and fascinating criminal procedure casebook, will be unsurprised by many of the article's virtues, including a focus on empirical examination of real-world practice and (perhaps a special case of that more general virtue) attention to practices at the state and local level, where most criminal law enforcement actually occurs. Wright and Miller develop some interesting insights into the potential for changes in plea bargaining practices that have frequently been …

Bi-Polar And Polycentric Approaches To Human Rights And The Environment, Michael Burger

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

Within the well-established human rights system, there exist at least three ways to promote environmental ends (each of which is discussed further in Section III below): (1) mobilizing existing rights to achieve environmental ends; (2) reinterpreting existing rights to include environmental concerns; and (3) creating new rights, such as the right to a clean environment. To justify engaging in any one of these processes, an advocate must recognize both their moral legitimacy and legal utility. As one author has argued, "the justification for rights is to be found in the way in which they enable us to address a key …

The Study Of Chinese Law In The United States: Reflections On The Past And Concerns About The Future, Stanley B. Lubman

Hong Yen Chang Center for Chinese Legal Studies

I am pleased to write in honor of Bill Jones by reflecting here on the study of Chinese law, which has occupied us both since the early 1960s and has since grown far beyond its narrow scope at that time. In the pages that follow, I first survey the development and current state of the field by reviewing American scholarship on some major areas of Chinese law from those early days up to the present. I am also pleased to use this review as a vehicle for noting, in particular, some of Bill's contributions to our inquiries. Some related activities …

Employee Stock Ownership After Enron: Proceedings Of The 2003 Annual Meeting, Association Of American Law Schools Section On Employee Benefits, Norman P. Stein, Colleen E. Medill, Susan J. Stabile, Jeffrey N. Gordon, Louis H. Diamond, Damon Silvers, Patricia E. Dilley

Faculty Scholarship

This session is entitled "Employee Stock Ownership After Enron," and I assume that title has drawn into this room people who know something about either Enron or employee stock, or both. For our purposes, the Enron story has as its focus the Enron 401(k) plan, which was the principal retirement plan for most Enron employees. Employees could make elective contributions to the 401(k) plan, which offered nineteen investment options, one of which was Enron stock. The 401(k) plan also provided that Enron would match employee contributions up to 3 percent of compensation. Enron's match, however, was made in Enron stock. …

Reciprocal Effects Of Crime And Incarceration In New York City Neighborhoods, Jeffery Fagan, Valerie West, Jan Holland

Faculty Scholarship

The concentration of incarceration in social groups and areas has emerged in the past decade as a topic of research and policy interest. This interest was fueled by several factors: persistent continued growth of incarceration through the 1990s, even as crime rates fell nationally for over seven years; persistent racial disparities in incarceration; assessments of the collateral consequences of incarceration that potentially aggravate the causal dynamics that lead to elevated crime rates; rapid growth in the number of returning prisoners to their communities; an influx that may strain social control in neighborhoods where social and economic disadvantages have already created …

From The Ne'er-Do-Well To The Criminal History Category: The Refinement Of The Actuarial Model In Criminal Law, Bernard Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

Criminal law in the United States experienced radical change during the course of the twentieth century. The dawn of the century ushered in an era of individualization of punishment. Drawing on the new science of positive criminology, legal scholars called for diagnosis of the causes of delinquency and for imposition of individualized courses of remedial treatment specifically adapted to these diagnoses. States gradually developed indeterminate sentencing schemes that gave corrections administrators and parole boards wide discretion over treatment and release decisions, and by 1970 every state in the country and the federal government had adopted a system of indeterminate sentencing. …

What Did They Do And What Does It Mean? The Three-Judge Court's Decision In Mcconnell V. Fec And The Implications For The Supreme Court, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

My role at this symposium is to provide a brief overview of the three-judge court's decision in McConnell v. FEC, review the opinions, piece together what the court actually decided, and see how the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 ("BCRA") now stands. I will try to do that briefly, while giving a few general comments about what the court's opinions tell us about the state of campaign finance law today. As a preliminary matter, the three-judge court's opinions provide us with two radically different world views – almost two different intellectual universes – for thinking about campaign finance …

Thinking About Feminism, Social Justice, And The Place Of Feminist Law Journals: A Letter To The Editor, Suzanne B. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

Dear Editors:

You, like the editors who came before you, have staked a place in an invigorating and challenging conversation about the transformative potential of feminist approaches to social justice.1 As you envision and edit your journal, fundamental questions about the purpose of feminist scholarship and the value of retaining an autonomous space for feminist jurisprudence loom large.

Not surprisingly, The Bluebook will provide little guidance on these topics. Instead, consistent with the feminist enterprise,2 you will need to search out sources, both within and outside of the law school library, to spark your critical thinking. Ideally these will ensure …

Federalism And The Future Of Health Care Reform, Richard Briffault, Sherry Glied

Faculty Scholarship

An important theme in the ongoing health care reform debate is federalism. During the battle over the Clinton Health Plan in 1993–94, the question of which level of government — federal or state — should take the leading role in health policy was almost as contentious as the particular proposals for extending access to quality health care and controlling health care costs. With the failure in 1994 to achieve comprehensive legislation at the national level, many policymakers and commentators gave fresh attention to the states as potential agents for health care reform.

Of Legal Transplants, Legal Irritants, And Economic Development, Katharina Pistor, Daniel Berkowitz

Faculty Scholarship

The collapse of the socialist system has given way to unprecedented economic and legal reforms in the former socialist countries. Over the past decade they have enacted new legislation in all areas of the law, drawing heavily on legal models from developed market economies, including common law and civil law countries. While the transplanted laws now on the books is largely consistent with Western practice, the enforcement of these new laws is often ineffective (Berkowitz, Pistor, and Richard, 2003).

Publishing Privacy: Intellectual Property, Self-Expression, And The Victorian Novel, Jessica Bulman-Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

The relationship between privacy and intellectual property has resurfaced with a twist at the turn of the twenty-first century. If Victorian authors regarded intellectual property as private, contemporary proposals instead urge us to regard private information as property. In response to technological developments that have facilitated unprecedented invasions of individuals’ privacy, some scholars have advocated legally classifying private information as a form of property. These scholars insist that the best way to respond to privacy violations, particularly corporate commodification of personal data, is to invest people with property rights that would furnish control over their personal information. Insofar as intellectual …

Atkins, Adolescence, And The Maturity Heuristic: Rationales For A Categorical Exemption For Juveniles From Capital Punishment, Jeffrey A. Fagan

Faculty Scholarship

In Atkins v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court voted six to three to bar further use of the death penalty for mentally retarded offenders. The Court offered three reasons for banning the execution of the retarded. First, citing a shift in public opinion over the thirteen years since Penry v. Lynaugh, the Court in Atkins ruled that the execution of the mentally retarded is "cruel and unusual punishment" prohibited by the Eighth Amendment. Second, the Court concluded that retaining the death penalty for the mentally retarded would not serve the interest in retribution or deterrence that is essential to capital …

The Cyberian Captivity Of Copyright: Territoriality And Authors' Rights In A Networked World, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

In this essay, the point of view I wish to take is that of authors who create or disseminate works over digital networks. I believe that their situation reflects both perspectives. Like the Avignon popes and the fifth century Roman emperors, authors might be considered displaced persons, because others might cast their works into the digital Empyrean, disconnected from physical points of attachment to any particular jurisdiction. But, like the Germanic tribes that crossed the Rhine River late in December 406, at least some authors might also be considered the displacers, because they choose to exploit the newly-found technological irrelevance …

Establishing Religious Ideas: Evolution, Creationism, And Intelligent Design, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

In this article, I first sketch the basic conflict between evolutionary theory and creationism and describe the opposition of creationists to the teaching of standard evolutionary theory. I then state the basic educational and constitutional questions

about evolution, standard creationism, and "intelligent design." After exploring of five fundamental premises that, in combination, generate the most troubling questions about science, religion, and the public schools, I turn to claims of miracles. Like assertions that God has intervened in natural processes of development, these claims suppose that God transcends or violates scientific principles; their investigation suggests that scientific principles; their investigation suggests …

Reflections On The Life And Work Of Justice Byron R. White, Lance Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

I am honored to be at this distinguished law school. Lee Irish and I were law clerks for Justice White the same year, at a time when a Justice only had two law clerks. Those were the days when the people older than us, who had been clerks when there was only one clerk in each office, would say, "You don't have the same experience, because the Justice is dealing with two of you so it is not as intense." Of course, now with as many as four clerks in each office, it is different still.

Lee and I had …

Local Institutions, Foreign Investment And Alternative Strategies Of Development: Some Views From Practice, Tamara Lothian, Katharina Pistor

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay summarizes the major insights gained from a panel discussion with legal practitioners about the relevance of local institutions to foreign direct investors. The Essay offers a critique of policy conclusions drawn from empirical studies that suggest a positive correlation between legal institutions and foreign investment flows. It points out that the data used in these studies are far too general to allow policy conclusions and that neither the data nor the policy conclusions are sufficiently attuned to the challenges or opportunities that foreign direct investment projects face on the ground. According to the results of the panel discussion, …

Private Information, Self-Serving Biases, And Optimal Settlement Mechanisms: Theory And Evidence, Seth A. Seabury, Eric L. Talley

Faculty Scholarship

The law and economics literature on suit and settlement has tended to focus on two alternative conceptual models. On the one hand, the "optimism" model of pre-trial negotiation attempts to explain settlement failure as an artifact of unfounded optimism by one or both parties. The idea that bargaining agents can adopt such non-rational biases receives support from experimental evidence. On the other hand, the "private information" model of pre-trial bargaining portrays settlement failures as an artifact of strategic information rent extraction. It finds support in some experimental evidence as well. This paper presents (for the first time) a mechanism-design approach …

An Appreciation Of Jonathan I. Charney, Lori Fisler Damrosch

Faculty Scholarship

Jon Charney preceded me into the academic world by a dozen years and already had a well-established reputation in international law when I was a brand-new law teacher. At the time we met in 1984, Jon was tackling some of the most ambitious topics in the theory and practice of international law, and he reached out to others for collegial engagement on those subjects. From the mid-1980s, he and I worked together on three collaborative books and on many projects for the American Society of International Law and the American Journal of International Law.

From Violent Crime To Terrorism: The Changing Basis Of The Federal, State And Local Law Enforcement Dynamic, Daniel C. Richman

Faculty Scholarship

Two lines of questions dominate discussions about how the nation ought to respond at home to the new (or rather newly perceived) terrorist threat: How do we ensure that information about potential terrorist activities is effectively gathered, shared, and used? And how do we ensure that the Government neither abuses the investigative authority we give it, nor demands more authority than it needs? Each line can profitably be pursued in its own terms. Yet to keep the conversations separate is to miss seeing how the very process of creating an effective domestic intelligence network may introduce a salutary level of …

Privatization As Delegation, Gillian E. Metzger

Faculty Scholarship

Recent expansions in privatization of government programs mean that the constitutional paradigm of a sharp separation between public and private is increasingly at odds with the blurred public-private character of modern governance. While substantial scholarship exists addressing the administrative and policy impact of expanded privatization, heretofore little effort has been made to address this disconnect between constitutional law and new administrative reality. This Article seeks to remedy that deficiency. It argues that current state action doctrine is fundamentally inadequate to address the constitutional challenge presented by privatization. Current doctrine is insufficiently keyed to the ways that privatization involves delegation of …

Emotional Harm In Housing Discrimination Cases: A New Look At A Lingering Problem, Victor M. Goode, Conrad Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

With the United States Supreme Court's condemnation of legal segregation in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, and a vigorous civil rights movement that led to the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the nation entered the beginning of a new era in race relations. This, and future civil rights legislation, would be characterized by the development of a national agenda for ending discrimination and promoting equality. One area that was not included in this initial congressional effort, but later found its way into the legislative agenda, was the subject of housing discrimination. Despite the relatively few debates …

Engineering A Venture Capital Market: Lessons From The American Experience, Ronald J. Gilson

Faculty Scholarship

The venture capital market and firms whose creation and early stages were financed by venture capital are among the crown jewels of the American economy. Beyond representing an important engine of macroeconomic growth and job creation, these firms have been a major force in commercializing cutting-edge science, whether through their impact on existing industries as with the radical changes in pharmaceuticals catalyzed by venture-backed firms' commercialization of biotechnology, or by their role in developing entirely new industries as with the emergence of the Internet and World Wide Web. The venture capital market thus provides a unique link between finance and …

Learning From Conflict: Reflections On Teaching About Race And Gender, Susan Sturm, Lani Guinier

Faculty Scholarship

In 1992 had been teaching for four years at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. I taught voting rights and criminal procedure, subjects related to what I had done as a litigator. Preparing for class meant reading many of the same cases I had read preparing for trial. Some were even cases I had tried. Teaching offered me a fresh chance to read those cases with new interest. I could see the subtle linkages between cases that I had not previously noticed. From the distance of the academy, I observed the evolution of the doctrine without feeling overcome by the …

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 …

Harnessing Information Technology To Improve The Environmental Impact Review Process, Michael B. Gerrard, Michael Herz

Faculty Scholarship

In 1970, when the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) was enacted, the new and exciting information management technologies were the handheld four-function calculator and the eight-track tape cassette. Three decades later, after the personal computer, the digital revolution, and the World Wide Web, the implementation of NEPA is still stuck in the world of 1970. Other aspects of the bureaucracy have seen reform-the E-Government Strategy, an E-Government Act, the creation of a new Office of Electronic Government within the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and, to focus on the environmental arena, the breathtaking success of the web-based Toxic Release …