Law Commons^™

Chevron's Domain, Thomas W. Merrill, Kristin E. Hickman

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court's decision in Chevron U.S.A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Counsel, Inc. dramatically expanded the circumstances in which courts must defer to agency interpretations of statutes. The idea that deference on questions of law is sometimes required was not new. Prior to Chevron, however, courts were said to have such a duty only when Congress expressly delegates authority to an agency "to define a statutory term or prescribe a method of executing a statutory provision.^" Outside this narrow context, whether courts would defer to an agency's legal interpretation depended upon multiple factors that courts evaluated in …

Nixon V. Shrink Missouri Government Pac: The Beginning Of The End Of The Buckley Era?, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

In Nixon v. Shrink Missouri Government PAC, the Supreme Court emphatically reaffirmed a key element of the campaign finance doctrine first articulated in Buckley v. Valeo a quarter-century earlier that governments may, consistent with the First Amendment, impose limitations on the size of contributions to election campaigns. Shrink Missouri was significant because the Eighth Circuit decision reversed by the Supreme Court had sought to strengthen the constitutional protection provided to contributions and had invalidated limitations on donations to Missouri state candidates that were actually higher than the limits on donations to federal candidates that the Supreme Court had previously …

Berne Without Borders: Geographic Indiscretion And Digital Communications, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

This lecture examines the role of borders in the Berne Convention at the time of the treaty's first passage in 1886, and today. The later 19th century was an era of increasing commerce and communication among countries whose domestic production and reproduction of works of authorship had vastly increased, thanks in part to new technologies, such as photography, lithography, and high-speed printing. But at that time, the frontiers between nations often frustrated authors' hopes for control over, or at least compensation for, the international exploitation of their works. Authors' rights ceased at their national boundaries; the world beyond foreboded not …

Taking Care, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

Care must be taken when human needs are expressed in the odd dialect of legal rights. This delicate act of translation – from private need to public obligation – demands acute sensitivity to the ways in which public responsibility inaugurates a new and complex encounter with a broad array of public preferences that deprive dependent subjects of primary stewardship over the ways in which their needs are met. Both Martha Fineman and Joan Williams have taken on the difficult project of making the ethical and political case for transforming dependency and care – from private or domestic need to public …

Copyright And Control Over New Technologies Of Dissemination, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

The relationship of copyright to new technologies that exploit copyrighted works is often perceived to pit copyright against progress. Historically, when copyright owners seek to eliminate a new kind of dissemination, and when courts do not deem that dissemination harmful to copyright owners, courts decline to find infringement. However, when owners seek instead to participate in and be paid for the new modes of exploitation, the courts, and Congress, appear more favorable to copyright control over that new market. Today, the courts and Congress regard the unlicensed distribution of works over the Internet as impairing copyright owners' ability to avail …

Second Generation Employment Discrimination: A Structural Approach, Susan Sturm

Faculty Scholarship

The judiciary's traditional rule-based approach has been successful in reducing overt discrimination against women and people of color. It has been less effective in addressing more subtle and complex forms of workplace inequity. These second generation forms of bias result from patterns of interaction, informal norms, networking, mentoring, and evaluation. Drawing on the potential of recent Supreme Court decisions, Professor Sturm proposes a structural regulatory solution to this problem of second generation employment discrimination. Her approach links the efforts of courts, workplaces, employees, lawyers, and mediating organizations to construct a regime that encourages employers to engage in effective problem solving. …

The Role Of Law In The Functioning Of Federal Systems, George A. Bermann

Faculty Scholarship

Federal systems are about the distribution of legal and political power, but law is not only one of the currencies of federalism, it is also one of federalism's most important supports; this chapter considers the role that law plays in establishing and enforcing the system by which both legal and political power are distributed within the USA and the EU. Bermann explores the various ways in which the courts can, and choose to, enforce the principles of federalism beyond the classical ‘political’ and ‘procedural’ safeguards provided by the institutional structures themselves and the constraints on the deliberative process. He describes …

Clean Air, Clean Processes? The Struggle Over Air Pollution Law In The People's Republic Of China, William P. Alford, Benjamin L. Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

This Article commences in Part I by introducing law-making in China before reconstructing the drafting process and attendant political battles leading up to the revision of China's principal air pollution law in 1995 – which, as Ackerman and Hassler observed with reference to the United States, can be every bit as messy as the soiled air such efforts are intended to address. Part II then examines the institutional factors that ultimately are critical to an understanding of why the 1995 APPCL, as promulgated, fell well short of its original authors' objectives but set in motion a process that over time …

The Dynamic Analytics Of Property Law, Michael A. Heller

Faculty Scholarship

The standard property trilogy of private, commons, and state has become so outdated that it now impedes imagination and innovation at the frontiers of ownership. This essay suggests two approaches – creating new ideal types and synthesizing existing ones – that may help update our static property metaphors. Using these dynamic approaches to property analytics, legal theory can move beyond polarizing oppositions that have made jurisprudential debates unsolvable and rendered concrete problems invisible.

Reasoning With Rules, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

What is special about legal reasoning? In what way is it distinctive? How does it differ from reasoning in medicine, or engineering, physics, or everyday life? The answers range from the very ambitious to the modest. The ambitious claim that there is a special and distinctive legal logic, or legal ways of reasoning, modes of reasoning which set the law apart from all other disciplines. Opposing them are the modest, who claim that there is nothing special to legal reasoning, that reason is the same in all domains. According to them, only the contents of the law differentiate it from …

The Securities Globalization Disclosure Debate, Merritt B. Fox

Faculty Scholarship

A global market is developing for the shares of an increasing portion of the world’s 41,000 publicly-traded issuers. This trend has given rise to an active debate concerning what United States policy should be toward regulation of their disclosure practices. This Article is a comment on this debate through the eyes of an active participant

On Insider Trading, Markets, And Negative Property Rights In Information, Zohar Goshen, Gideon Parchomovsky

Faculty Scholarship

Few issues have sparked as much debate and disagreement among Law and Economics scholars as the prohibition on insider trading. Ironically, the Supreme Court's attempts in Chiarella v. United States, Dirks v. Securities and Exchange Commission, and, most recently, in United States v. O'Hagan to clarify the scope and content of the ban on insider trading, and the subsequent reaction of the Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"), have only added fuel to the fire of the academic debate already raging on the issue.

The most intriguing feature of the debate on insider trading is that all contributors seek to promote …

Lucas Rosa V. Park West Bank And Trust Company, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

In July of 1998 something rather mundane happened: Lucas Rosa walked into Park West Bank in Holyoke, Massachusetts and asked for a loan application. Since it was a warm summer day, and because she wanted to look credit-worthy, Rosa wore a blousey top over stockings. Suddenly, the mundane transformed into the exceptional: When asked for some identification, Rosa was told that no application would be forthcoming until and unless she went home, changed her clothes and returned attired in more traditionally masculine/male clothing. Rosa, a biological male who identifies herself as female was, it seems, denied a loan application on …

Guns, Crime, And Punishment In America, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

There are over 200 million firearms in private hands in the United States, more than a third of which are handguns. In 1993 alone, it is estimated that 1.3 million victims of serious violent crime faced an offender with a gun. In 1999, there were approximately 563,000 such victims. Estimates of defensive uses of firearms – situations where individuals used a gun to protect themselves, someone else, or their property – range from 65,000 to 2.5 million per year. Punishments for crimes committed with a firearm are severe: under the federal firearms enhancement statute, the mandatory minimum sentence for use …

Joel Feinberg On Crime And Punishment: Exploring The Relationship Between The Moral Limits Of The Criminal Law And The Expressive Function Of Punishment, Bernard Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

When I was originally approached to participate in this Symposium on the work and legacy of Joel Feinberg, I immediately began thinking about the influence of his essay The Expressive Function of Punishment on contemporary criminal law theory in the United States. That essay has contributed significantly to a growing body of scholarship associated with the resurgence of interest inexpressive theories of law. In the criminal law area, the expressivist movement traces directly and foremost to Feinberg's essay. As Carol Steiker observes, "Joel Feinberg can be credited with inaugurating the "expressivist" turn in punishment theory with his influential essay, The …

The David R. Tillinghast Lecture: Taxing International Income: Inadequate Principles, Outdated Concepts, And Unsatisfactory Policies, Michael J. Graetz

Faculty Scholarship

It is a pleasure to be here today to deliver the first David R. Tillinghast Lecture of the 21st century, a lecture honoring a man who has done much to shape and stimulate our thinking about the international tax world of the 20th.

Our nation's system for taxing international income today is largely a creature of the period 1918-1928, a time when the income tax was itself in childhood. From the inception of the income tax (1913 for individuals, 1909 for corporations) until 1918, foreign taxes were deducted like any other business expense. In 1918, the foreign tax credit (FTC) …

Unemployment Insurance And Wealth Redistribution, Gillian Lester

Faculty Scholarship

This Article evaluates the merit of liberalizing unemployment insurance eligibility as a means to achieve progressive wealth redistribution-an idea that has recently gained popularity among policymakers and legal scholars. Unemployment insurance (UI) provides temporary, partial wage replacement to workers who suffer unexpected job loss, but it tends to exclude workers who have very low wages or hours of work, or who quit for reasons considered "personal" (for example, to accommodate family demands). Professor Lester argues that while redistribution to workers who are poor or who have caregiving obligations is a desirable goal, expanding UI is a poor way to do …

Information Technology And Non-Legal Sanctions In Financing Transactions, Ronald J. Mann

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay investigates the effect of advances in information technology on the private institutions that businesses use to resolve information asymmetries in financing transactions. The first part of the Essay discusses how information technology can permit direct verification of the information, obviating the problem entirely; the Essay discusses the example of the substitution of the debit card for the check, which provides an immediate payment that obviates the need for the merchant to consider whether payment will be forthcoming when the check is presented to the bank on which it is drawn.

The second part of the Essay discusses how …

Disclosure Norms, Eric L. Talley

Faculty Scholarship

The purpose of this Article is to interrogate the relationship between judicial error and extralegal norms more formally, focusing particularly on typical corporate disclosure contexts. In so doing, I shall argue that this relationship is far less clear-cut than much of the literature suggests. Using a formal, game-theoretic model of information disclosure, I demonstrate that in the presence of judicial error, a society that benefits from extralegal norms of honest disclosure might ironically favor more expansive legal regulation than would a similarly situated society in which norms are weak or nonexistent. Thus, in contrast to the common argument that norms …

The Methodological Commitments Of Contemporary Contract Theory, Jody S. Kraus

Faculty Scholarship

Autonomy and economic theories of contract seem to provide incompatible accounts of contract law. In this Chapter, I argue that what appear to be first-order disagreements over particular contract doctrines are really implicit second-order disagreements reflecting the divergent methodological commitments of autonomy and economic theories. I argue that autonomy theories accord priority to the normative project of justifying existing contract doctrine, treat contract law as consisting in the plain meaning of doctrine, require contract theory to explain the distinctive character of contract law, and take the ex post perspective in adjudication. In contrast, economic theories accord priority to the positive …

Criminal Theory In The Twentieth Century, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

The theoretical inquiry into the foundations of criminal law in the twentieth century, in both civil and common law traditions, is assayed by the consideration of seven main currents or trends. First, the structure of offenses is examined in light of the bipartite, tripartite, and quadripartite modes of analysis. Second, competing theories of culpability – normative and descriptive – are weighed in connection with their important ramifications for the presumption of proof and the allocation of the burden of persuasion on defenses. Third, the struggle with alternatives to punishment for the control and commitment of dangerous but non-criminal persons is …

Is Article 2 The Best We Can Do?, Robert E. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

You will all be happy to know that, haying listened to my colleagues for the last three hours, I have completely forgotten what I was planning to say. But I haven't forgotten why I am here. I am the proverbial skunk at the garden party, and I hope to fulfill my role as the only skeptic in the group. I must tell you candidly, however, that I agree with everything Gail Hillebrand had to say. That doesn't mean she is going to agree with anything that I have to say, but perhaps there are two skeptics here this afternoon.

My …

William Warren, Lance Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

Don Rapson, then graduating from Columbia Law School and preferring not to be a foot-soldier in Korea, went to Dean Warren. The Dean said: "Go to General X in the Pentagon, tell him I sent you, and he will hire you as an Army lawyer." Don went to the Pentagon (it was probably easier to stroll in fifty years ago). The General said: "I never heard of Dean Warren." But after a lively talk Don was hired and supplied good professional service to his country.

Divorce, Children's Welfare, And The Culture Wars, Elizabeth S. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

Are children harmed when their parents divorce? If so, should parents' freedom to end marriage be restricted? These questions have generated uncertainty and controversy in the decades since legal restraints on divorce have been lifted. During the 1970s and 80s, the traditional conviction that parents should stay together "for the sake of the children" was supplanted by a view that children are usually better off if their unhappy parents divorce. By this account, divorcing parents should simply try to accomplish the change in status with as little disruption to their children's lives as possible. This stance has been challenged sharply …

"Project Exile" And The Allocation Of Federal Law Enforcement Authority, Daniel Richman

Faculty Scholarship

With each report of violent crime statistics (whether rising or falling) or of the latest firearms outrage, we hear the antiphony of the gun control debate. Advocates of increased federal regulation decry the inadequacies of a regime that permits relatively free access to firearms and argue that the availability of guns is itself a spur to more deadly violence. Advocates of minimal regulation, for their part, condemn measures that, they say, will primarily penalize law-abiding citizens, and instead call for more vigorous enforcement of existing laws, targeting "criminals," not their weapons. When the antiphony intrudes on funerals, the effect can …

From The White Paper To The Proposal For A Council Regulation, Petros C. Mavroidis, Damien J. Neven

Faculty Scholarship

This Paper analyses how the network of enforcers envisaged in the Proposal for a Council Regulation on the implementation of the rules on competition laid down in Articles 81 and 82 of the EC Treaty (September 2000) would operate. We identify four issues. First, we observe that the Proposal (unlike the White Paper) includes safeguards to avoid a shift of competence in favour of national competition laws, which may be questionable in terms of subsidiarity. Second, we recognise that the accountability of antitrust authorities might vary across the members of the network, so that, for instance, some authorities may be …

Sales And Elections As Methods For Transferring Corporate Control, Ronald J. Gilson, Alan Schwartz

Faculty Scholarship

Delaware case law has rendered the tender offer obsolete as a method for purchasing a company whose directors oppose the acquisition. A potential acquirer facing target opposition today must run an insurgent director slate, in the expectation that its directors are more likely to sell. The Delaware courts have not justified their preference for elections over markets as the preferred vehicle for implementing changes in control. Informal scholarly analyses ask transaction cost questions, such as whether proxy contests are more costly than takeovers. This article attempts to break new ground by asking whether there are systematic differences in the performance …

Reflections On Environmental Justice, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

Environmental justice is a very hot topic. Yesterday's New York Times on the front page of the Metropolitan section had a story stating: Mid-Sized Plants Headed to Poor Areas. The story stated, "The Pataki administration acknowledges in its own study that the electric generators that it wants to install around New York City would go into poor heavily minority communities, a finding that supports some of the arguments of the project's opponents. This is quoting an unreleased environmental justice analysis that may or may not be valid, but it certainly shows how hot a topic it is. This morning …

What Happened To Property In Law And Economics?, Thomas W. Merrill, Henry E. Smith

Faculty Scholarship

Property has fallen out of fashion. Although people are as concerned as ever with acquiring and defending their material possessions, in the academic world there is little interest in understanding property. To some extent, this indifference reflects a more general skepticism about the value of conceptual analysis, as opposed to functional assessment of institutions. There is, however, a deeper reason for the indifference to property. It is a commonplace of academic discourse that property is simply a "bundle of rights," and that any distribution of rights and privileges among persons with respect to things can be dignified with the (almost …

Mark Tushnet: The Right Questions, Philip C. Bobbitt

Faculty Scholarship

It is the most grotesque of ironies that much of twentieth-century jurisprudence has been an effort to make law into a science. This effort amounts to a reversal of a far earlier appropriation. It was the observation of regularities in gravity and the movement of the planets that reformed science and gave credence to the locution, 'the laws of nature.' Nature was "lawful" because it appeared to follow undeviatingly a certain regimen, which is to say that any deviations observed were held to be clues as to the true content of the laws that were being followed. Mathematics was the …