Law Commons^™

Chishimba Kambwili V Attorney General 2019/Cc/009, O'Brien Kaaba, Pamela T. Sambo

SAIPAR Case Review

The Constitutional Court on 18th February 2020 rendered its judgment in the case of Chishimba Kambwili v Attorney General 2019/CCZ/009. The petitioner, then an estranged Member of Parliament for the ruling Patriotic Front (PF), had his seat declared vacant in February 2019 by the Speaker of the National Assembly, Patrick Matibini, on the ground that by acting as a consultant for an opposition party (under which he was not elected to Parliament), he had crossed the floor.

The Constitutional Court found the action of the Speaker to have been unconstitutional as the office is not vested with power to interpret …

George Peter Mwanza And Melvin Beene V Attorney General Appeal No. 153/2016 Sc Selected Judgment No. 33 Of 2019, Ellah T.M. Siang’Andu

SAIPAR Case Review

On the 9th December 2019, the Supreme Court of Zambia delivered a landmark decision changing the human rights jurisprudence in the context of protecting and preserving the fundamental human rights of prisoners. The appellants were HIV positive and were both in custody at the Lusaka Central Prison. They petitioned the High Court contending breach of their rights to life and protection from inhuman treatment contrary to the Republican Constitution. The argument of the appellants was that the State’s failure to consider their dietary and health needs, due to the budgetary and logistical restraints, fell short of all prescribed standards for …

Abedinego Kapeshi And Another V The People Scz Selected Judgment No. 35 Of 2017, Gift Sangende

SAIPAR Case Review

In 2017, the appellants, being dissatisfied with the judgment of the Kabwe High Court appealed to the Supreme Court. They contended among other things, that the trial court erred in law to convict the appellants of murder. They further stated that the court erred in law to sentence the appellants to life imprisonment, as the sentence was excessive.

This case accorded the Supreme Court a great opportunity to discuss the belief in witchcraft and the offending conduct premised on that belief, as well as the multiple violations that are coupled with the same belief. Remarkably, the Court moved away from …

Tort As Private Administration, Nathaniel Donahue, John Fabian Witt

Cornell Law Review

What does tort law do? This Article develops an account of the law of torts for the age of settlement. A century ago, leading torts jurists proposed that tort doctrine's main function was to allocate authority between judge and jury. In the era of the disappearing trial, we propose that tort law's hidden function is to shape the process by which private parties settle. In particular, core doctrines in tort help to structure and sustain the systems of private administration by which injury claims are actually resolved. Though an observer could hardly guess it from judge-centric theories of tort or …

The Paradoxical Impact Of Scalia's Campaign Against Legislative History, Stuart Minor Benjamin, Kristen M. Renberg

Cornell Law Review

Beginning in 1985, Judge and then Justice Antonin Scalia advocated forcefully against the use of legislative history in statutory interpretation. Justice Scalia's position, in line with his textualism, was that legislative history was irrelevant and judges should avoid invoking it. Reactions to his attacks among Justices and prominent circuit judges had an ideological quality, with greater support from ideological conservatives. In this Article, we consider the role that political party and timing ofjudicial nomination played in circuit judges' use of legislative history. Specifically, we hypothesize that Republican circuit judges were more likely to respond to the attacks on legislative history …

Editor's Note, O'Brien Kaaba

SAIPAR Case Review

No abstract provided.

Corporate Law And The Myth Of Efficient Market Control, William W. Bratton, Simone M. Sepe

Cornell Law Review

In recent times, there has been an unprecedented shift in power from managers to shareholders, a shift that realizes the long-held theoretical aspiration of market control of the corporation. This Article subjects the market control paradigm to comprehensive economic examination and finds it wanting.

The market control paradigm relies on a narrow economic model that focuses on one problem only: management agency costs. With the rise of shareholder power, we need a wider lens that also takes in market prices, investor incentives, and information asymmetries. General equilibrium (GE) theory provides that lens. Several lessons follow from reference to this higher-order …

Cryptocommunity Currencies, J. S. Nelson

Cornell Law Review

What are cryptocurrencies: securities, commodities, or something else? Maybe they are a new form of established currency-a non-sovereign fiat currency. Like other self-governing bodies, the communities that issue cryptocurrencies should be judged on how well they support their currencies. This analysis is not meaningfully different from how we have evaluated traditional sovereign issuers of currency. Indeed, as traditional-sovereign-issued currency becomes entirely digital, functional distinctions between traditionally sovereign-backed flat currency and widely accepted non-sovereign fat currency start to disappear. The primary way then to distinguish the value of such currencies from each other becomes the quality of their institutional backing. Through …

Introduction, Saule T. Omarova, Diogo Magalhaes

Cornell Law Review

No abstract provided.

Defined Contribution Plans And The Challenge Of Financial Illiteracy, Jill E. Fisch, Annamaria Lusardi, Andrea Hasler

Cornell Law Review

Retirement investing in the United States has changed dramatically. The classic defined benefit (DB) plan has largely been replaced by the defined contribution (DC) plan. With the latter, individual employees' decisions about how much to save for retirement and how to invest those savings determine the benefits available upon retirement.

We analyze data from the 2015 National Financial Capability Study to show that people whose only exposure to investment decisions is by virtue of their participation in an employer-sponsored 401(k) plan are poorly equipped to make sound investment decisions. Specifcally, they suffer from higher levels of financial illiteracy than other …

Volume 105, Number 3 Table Of Contents And Front Matter

Cornell Law Review

No abstract provided.

Artificial Agents In Corporate Boardrooms, Sergio Alberto Gramitto Ricci

Cornell Law Review

Thousands of years ago, Roman businessmen often ran joint businesses through commonly owned, highly intelligent slaves. Roman slaves did not have full legal capacity and were considered property of their co-owners. Now business corporations are looking to delegate decision-making to uber-intelligent machines through the use of artificial intelligence in boardrooms. Artificial intelligence in boardrooms could assist, integrate, or even replace human directors. However, the concept of using artificial intelligence in boardrooms is largely unexplored and raises several issues. This Article sheds light on legal and policy challenges concerning artificial agents in boardrooms. The arguments revolve around two fundamental questions: (1) …

Remutualization, Erik F. Gerding

Cornell Law Review

This Article explores how returning to common law or traditional approaches to financial institution governance can inform and improve a range of financial reforms. In particular, this Article seeks to revive the use of organizational form as a tool of financial regulation. Very old varietals, including partnerships and mutual companies, decanted in new bottles can promote financial stability, lower incentives for excessive risk-taking by financial intermediaries, provide mechanisms to police their market conduct, and better align their incentives with the interests of their customers and consumers.

A Democratic Political Economy For The First Amendment, Nelson Tebbe

Cornell Law Review

In this Article, I begin building an interpretation of the First Amendment that promotes the practical conditions for a vital democracy. I argue that considerations of distributive justice do properly affect interpretation of free speech and religious liberty. This is true even assuming that those provisions have priority over ordinary law, including economic regulation.

Are Publicly Traded Corporations Disappearing?, Margaret M. Blair

Cornell Law Review

Corporate law scholars and economists have expressed concern recently about the fact that the number of publicly traded corporations in the United States has declined significantly since a peak in the late 1990s. In this Essay, in honor of the late Professor Lynn Stout, who devoted much of her career to the study of large publicly traded corporations, I show that despite a decline in the number of such corporations in the last two decades, they collectively account for about the same share of total economic activity as they have for the last six decades. While there has been turnover …

Plea Bargaining, Reconciliation And Access To Justice In Zambia: Exploring The Invisible Link, O’Brien Kaaba, Tony Zhou

Zambia Social Science Journal

This article looks at the criminal justice system in Zambia in relation to efficiency and plea bargaining. Using publicly available data, it demonstrates that the institutions under the criminal justice sector are struggling to cope with heavy caseloads. The majority of cases in this context are disposed of through plea bargaining, thereby avoiding full trial. Only a few proceed to full trial. In this respect, it can be seen that plea bargaining serves two ends: it enables deserving cases to have space for trial and it allows the rest of the cases to be disposed of efficiently, without resort to …

Resource Nationalism And Zambia’S Oscillating Mining Taxation Regime, Edna Kabala, Rosemary Mapoma, John Lungu

Zambia Social Science Journal

The parcelling and privatisation of the large state-owned mining conglomerate Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines (ZCCM) involved the signing of Development Agreements (DAs) between the Zambian government and the new private investors. These DAs were concessionary to the new investors, offering low taxation rates, tax exemptions and deductions. But in 2008, under political pressure from the opposition, then President Mwanawasa abrogated the DAs with a new Mines and Minerals Act, removing exemptions and deductions and increasing taxation rates. This action set in motion a decade long period of contestation over mining taxation in Zambia, with the introduction and retraction of numerous …

Domesticating Comity: Territorial U.S. Discovery In Violation Of Foreign Privacy Laws, Corby F. Burger

Cornell Law Review

The European Union's (EU) recently enacted General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is being billed as "the most important change in data privacy regulation in 20 years." The GDPR sets forth a stringent set of binding regulations that govern how data controllers and processors manage the private electronic data of EU citizens. In an audacious effort to ensure comprehensive privacy protection for EU citizens in a globally connected digital landscape, EU regulators have made the GDPR apply extraterritorially. The regulation extends beyond the borders of the European Union, reaching any entity that stores or processes the personal data of EU citizens …

The Six-Month List And The Unintended Consequences Of Judicial Accountibility, Miguel F. P. De Figueiredo, Alexandra D. Lahav, Peter Siegelman

Cornell Law Review

A little-known mechanism instituted to improve judicial accountability and speed up the work of the federal judiciary has led to unintended consequences, many of them unfortunate. Federal district court judges are subject to a soft deadline known as the Six-Month List (the List). By law, every judge's backlog (cases older than three years and motions pending more than six months) is made public twice a year. Because judges have life tenure and fixed salaries, a mere reporting requirement should not influence their behavior. But it does. Using the complete record of all federal civil cases between 1980 and 2017 and …

The New Migration Law: Migrants, Refugees, And Citizens In An Anxious Age, Hiroshi Motomura

Cornell Law Review

Once every generation or so, entire fields of law require a full reset. We need to step back from the fray and rethink basic premises, ask new questions, and even recast the role of law itself. This moment has come for the law governing migration. Seasoned observers of immigration and refugee law have developed answers to core questions that emerged a generation ago. But now these observers often talk past each other, and their answers often fail to engage coherently with the daunting challenges posed by migration in this anxious age.

To try to do better, I undertake four inquiries. …

Volume 105, Number 2 Table Of Contents And Front Matter

Cornell Law Review

No abstract provided.

You Might Be A Robot, Bryan Casey, Mark A. Lemley

Cornell Law Review

As robots and artificial intelligence (Al) increase their influence over society, policymakers are increasingly regulating them. But to regulate these technologies, we first need to know what they are. And here we come to a problem. No one has been able to offer a decent definition of robots arid AI-not even experts. What's more, technological advances make it harder and harder each day to tell people from robots and robots from "dumb" machines. We have already seen disastrous legal definitions written with one target in mind inadvertently affecting others. In fact, if you are reading this you are (probably) not …

Queer Eyes Don't Sympathize: An Empirical Investigation Of Lgb Identity And Judicial Decision Making, Jared Ham, Chan Tov Mcnarrara

Cornell Law Review

Do Lesbian, gay, and bisexual judicial decision makers differ from their heterosexual counterparts? Over the past decade much has been said about queer judges, with many suggesting that they cannot be impartial in cases involving LGBTQ+ parties or religious interests. To investigate these questions, this Note presents the findings of the first empirical analysis of the decision making of lesbian, gay, and bisexual judges in the United States.

Examining employment-discrimination litigation, this Note finds no evidence that a judge's sexual orientation affects the outcome of the cases they decide on the merits. Specifically, looking to one year of data from …