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University at Buffalo School of Law

Journal

Civil justice

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Full-Text Articles in Law

Constitutionalizing Class Inequality: Due Process In State Farm, Martha T. Mccluskey Dec 2008

Constitutionalizing Class Inequality: Due Process In State Farm, Martha T. Mccluskey

Buffalo Law Review

This essay takes a step toward building a story of economic class in U.S. constitutional law, as part of a special essay issue of the Buffalo Law Review developed from a series of workshops titled ClassCrits: Toward a Critical Analysis of Economic Inequality, sponsored by the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy at the University at Buffalo. The essay focuses on the 2003 U.S. Supreme Court decision in State Farm Mutual Insurance Co. v. Campbell, one of a series of recent cases using the due process clause of the 14th Amendment to limit punitive damage awards against corporate defendants …


The Substantive Politics Of Formal Corporate Power, Martha T. Mccluskey Jan 2006

The Substantive Politics Of Formal Corporate Power, Martha T. Mccluskey

Buffalo Law Review

Corporations increasingly dominate the U.S. civil justice system, as Marc Galanter explains in his recent article, Planet of the APs: Reflections on the Scale of Law and its Users, 53 Buffalo L. Rev. 1369 (2006). My article builds on Galanter's discussion of corporate legal power by subjecting it to a critical legal perspective. In the conventional legal framework, corporations' privileged position appears to be an intractable puzzle, not an urgent injustice. That is because corporate power seems to be the generally necessary byproduct of a generally benign form (large, complex, legalistic organizations) or of generally benign, widely-shared normative principles (economic …