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Full-Text Articles in Law

Treating Wrongs As Wrongs: An Expressive Argument For Tort Law, Scott Hershovitz Nov 2017

Treating Wrongs As Wrongs: An Expressive Argument For Tort Law, Scott Hershovitz

Articles

The idea that criminal punishment carries a message of condemnation is as commonplace as could be. Indeed, many think that condemnation is the mark of punishment, distinguishing it from other sorts of penalties or burdens. But for all that torts and crimes share in common, nearly no one thinks that tort has similar expressive aims. And that is unfortunate, as the truth is that tort is very much an expressive institution, with messages to send that are different, but no less important, than those conveyed by the criminal law. In this essay, I argue that tort liability expresses the judgment …


The Cost Of The Text, Richard A. Primus Sep 2017

The Cost Of The Text, Richard A. Primus

Articles

Christopher Serkin and Nelson Tebbe's Is the Constitution Special?explores many facets of constitutional interpretation. I will focus here on their observation that constitutional interpretation is "less textual" than statutory interpretation. I place the expression "less textual" in quotation marks because "textual" could mean many things, such that it would often be problematic to characterize one interpretive exercise as more or less textual than another. In Serkin and Tebbe's view, as I understand it, mainstream constitutional interpretation is "less textual " than statutory decisionmaking in that it is less constrained by the words of particular enacted clauses. As a convenient …


The Constitutional Constant, Richard A. Primus Sep 2017

The Constitutional Constant, Richard A. Primus

Articles

According to a conventional view of the Constitution as a precommitment strategy, constitutional rules must remain fixed over time in order for the Constitution to do its work. In practice, however, constitutional rules regularly change over time, even without formal amendment. What is actually constant over time in the American constitutional system is not the content of constitutional law: it is the correspondence between the content of constitutional law and the American people’s (or at least the decision-making class’s) most powerful intuitions about issues of structure and ethos in American government. At any given time, constitutional law reflects those intuitions. …


Constructing An International Community, Monica Hakimi Aug 2017

Constructing An International Community, Monica Hakimi

Articles

What unites states and other global actors around a shared governance project? How does the group—what I will call an “international community”—coalesce and stay engaged in the enterprise? A frequent assumption is that an international community is cemented by its members’ commonalities and depleted by their intractable disagreements. This article critiques that assumption and presents, as an alternative, a theory that accounts for the combined integration and discord that actually characterize most global governance associations. I argue that conflict, especially conflict that manifests in law, is not necessarily corrosive to an international community. To the contrary, it often is a …


Contracting Out Of The Fiduciary Duty Of Loyalty: An Empirical Analysis Of Corporate Opportunity Waivers, Gabriel Rauterberg, Eric Talley Jun 2017

Contracting Out Of The Fiduciary Duty Of Loyalty: An Empirical Analysis Of Corporate Opportunity Waivers, Gabriel Rauterberg, Eric Talley

Articles

For centuries, the duty of loyalty has been the hallowed centerpiece of fiduciary obligation, widely considered one of the few “mandatory” rules of corporate law. That view, however, is no longer true. Beginning in 2000, Delaware dramatically departed from tradition by granting incorporated entities a statutory right to waive a crucial part of the duty of loyalty: the corporate opportunities doctrine. Other states have since followed Delaware’s lead, similarly permitting firms to execute “corporate opportunity waivers.” Surprisingly, more than fifteen years into this reform experiment, no study has attempted to either systematically measure the corporate response to these reforms or …


Wrongful Benefit & Arctic Drilling, Nicolas Cornell, Sarah E. Light Jun 2017

Wrongful Benefit & Arctic Drilling, Nicolas Cornell, Sarah E. Light

Articles

The law contains a diverse range of doctrines — “slayer rules” that prevent murderers from inheriting, restrictions on trade in “conflict diamonds,” the Fourth Amendment’s exclusion of evidence obtained through unconstitutional search, and many more — that seem to instantiate a general principle that it can be wrong to profit from past harms or misconduct. This Article explores the contours of this general normative principle, which we call the wrongful benefit principle. As we illustrate, the wrongful benefit principle places constraints both on whether anyone should be permitted to exploit ethically tainted goods, and who may be permitted to profit …


What Congress's Repeal Efforts Can Teach Us About Regulatory Reform, Cary Coglianese, Gabriel Scheffler Jan 2017

What Congress's Repeal Efforts Can Teach Us About Regulatory Reform, Cary Coglianese, Gabriel Scheffler

Articles

Major legislative actions during the early part of the I I 5th Congress have undermined the central argument for regulator reform measures such as the RELVS Act, a bill that would require congressional approval of all new major regulations. Proponents of the RELVS Act argue that it would make the federal regulator system more democratic by shifting responsibility for regulatoy decisions away from unelected bureaucrats and toward the people's representatives in Congress. But separate legislative actions in the opening of the 115th Congress only call this argument into question. Congress's most s 'gni/cant initiatives during this period-its derailed attempts to …


Inclusionary Takings Legislation, Gerald S. Dickinson Jan 2017

Inclusionary Takings Legislation, Gerald S. Dickinson

Articles

This Article proposes an alternative post-Kelo legislative reform effort called “inclusionary takings.” Like inclusionary zoning legislation, inclusionary takings legislation would trigger remedial affordable housing action to mitigate the phenomenon of exclusionary condemnations in dense urban areas and declining suburban localities. An inclusionary takings statute would also mandate that local municipalities and private developers provide affordable housing in new developments benefiting from eminent domain takings. Such a statute may ameliorate the phenomenon of exclusionary condemnations in dense urban areas that displaces low-income families from urban neighborhoods. An inclusionary taking, like inclusionary zoning, in other words, requires affordable housing contributions from developers …


The Work Of International Law, Monica Hakimi Jan 2017

The Work Of International Law, Monica Hakimi

Articles

This Article crystallizes and then critiques a prominent view about the role of international law in the global order. The view - what I call the "cooperation thesis" - is that international law serves to help global actors cooperate, specifically by: (1) curbing their disputes, and (2) promoting their shared goals. The cooperation thesis often appears as a positive account of international law; it purports to explain or describe what international law does. But it also has normative force; international law is widely depicted as dysfunctional when it does not satisfy the thesis. In particular, heated or intractable conflict is …