Law Commons^™

Eroding "Checks" On Presidential Authority – Norms, The Civil Service, And The Courts, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

Susan Rose-Ackerman's "Executive Rulemaking and Democratic Legitimacy: 'Reform' in the United States and the United Kingdom's Route to Brexit" insightfully illuminates important differences between parliamentary and presidential systems of government in relation to executive bodies' production of the large volume of secondary legislation common, indeed inevitable, for both. Agreeing heartily with her conclusion that the weakness of parliamentary engagement with secondary legislation, and limited judicial review of its production, counsels greater provision for public participation and transparency of action at the agency level, there is little for me to add. Aware, too, as she remarks, that others have dealt more …

The Trump Administration And Administrative Law, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

Shortly after the 2018 mid-term elections ended a two-year period of "unified government," under the Republican party,1 twenty one law professors from around the country met at Chicago-Kent College of Law to discuss the seven papers contained in this edition of its Law

Review. Commentaries written in response to each of these papers will appear in the next edition of the Law Review. For those reading any of these essays in the interval between publication of this and the commentary issue, this necessary inconvenience is regrettable; the commentaries (and ensuing open discussion) were enriching and, indeed, have contributed to the …

If Only We Knew What We Know, Conrad Johnson, Brian Donnelly

Faculty Scholarship

This article contributes to the broader themes surrounding law and technology raised in this symposium by taking a look at lawyering and knowledge management. This topic is presented both as a theory and with a case study. The first part provides a brief summary of the basic lawyering paradigm used in the Lawyering in the Digital Age Clinic at Columbia Law School – that all lawyering activities can be understood within the context of gathering, managing and presenting information. The second category of the paradigm is expanded upon to review the activity of managing knowledge. Then, knowledge management is positioned …

A Requiem For Sam's Bank, Ronald J. Mann

Faculty Scholarship

This paper situates Wal-Mart's failed application to form a banking subsidiary in the context of payments policy. Generally, I argue that permitting Wal-Mart to have a bank would have a salutary effect on the relatively uncompetitive market for payment networks. The dominant position of Visa and MasterCard, in which payments are priced above cost to subsidize credit, inevitably will give way to a world in which payment services are priced at cost, or even below cost as a loss-leader to attract customers to other goods and services. Entry into this market by Wal-Mart would be likely to spur more robust …

A Marriage Of Convenience? A Comment On The Protection Of Databases, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

Daniel Gervais concluded his analysis of the protection of databases with three options for the future. I would like to examine a fourth. Let us assume no future flurry of national or supranational legislative activity because the content of databases is in fact already being protected. Not through copyright or sui generis rights, but through other means. Databases are an object of economic value, and they will conveniently wed whatever legal theory or theories will achieve the practical objective of preventing unauthorized exploitation of the works' contents. To beat the marriage metaphor into the ground, I'd like to suggest that, …

Foreign Authority, American Exceptionalism, And The Dred Scott Case, Sarah H. Cleveland

Faculty Scholarship

At least since Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in 1831, the idea that America is distinctive from other nations has permeated much political and social commentary. The United States has been variously perceived as unique in its history, its culture, its national values, its social movements, and its social and political institutions. While the term technically refers only to distinctiveness or difference, "exceptionalism" may have positive or negative aspects – what Harold Koh has called "America's Jekyll-and-Hyde exceptionalism." In the legal realm, claims of exceptionalism have been offered to support what Michael Ingnatieff identifies as "legal isolationism" – or refusal by …

Draft Convention On Jurisdiction And Recognition Of Judgments In Intellectual Property Matters, Rochelle Cooper Dreyfuss, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

The proposed Hague Convention on Jurisdiction and Foreign Judgments in Civil and Commercial Matters is currently drafted to cover most fields of private litigation, including intellectual property. However, as those following the Hague process are aware, the Convention has run into considerable difficulties. There is currently reason to be concerned that it may not be promulgated at all, or that if it is promulgated, that it will be reduced in scope and cover only select areas of litigation, likely not to include intellectual property. This proposal is meant to spur the intellectual property bar to consider whether it would be …

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 …

Teaching Reasoning, Vincent A. Blasi

Faculty Scholarship

Reasoning skills of a certain sort are taught well in the traditional law school curriculum. No matter how good her previous education, the typical law student surely acquires an improved facility at testing propositions by considering hypothetical applications. Many students learn a lot about linguistic indeterminacy, unintended consequences, the allocation of decision-making responsibility, and how much turns on which questions are asked and how they are framed. It is a rare, indeed obtuse, person who completes a legal education still temperamentally inclined to refute unwelcome ideas when distinguishing them will do.

Where legal education falls short, I think, is with …

Capture Theory And The Courts: 1967-1983, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

The Administrative Procedure Act ("APA") is a framework statute, not a complete code. Its central provisions are rather spare, and a number of important questions are not covered at all. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that the judicial gloss on the APA has taken on a large significance over time. It should also come as no surprise that this interpretative mantle has assumed a different shape with different generations of judges. In this respect, our experience with the APA parallels that with the Constitution. Occasionally there is a feint in the direction of enforcing the "original understanding" of the …

Presidential Rulemaking, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

One of the prominent issues during the 1992 presidential campaign was abortion, in particular the federal government's role in financing counseling activities that might promote it. In the Bush Administration, the Department of Health and Human Services had adopted a controversial regulation to withhold federal funds from any family planning or other medical service that included counseling about abortion in its activities; the Clinton campaign promised to rescind that regulation if Clinton were elected President. Shortly after his election, in a prominent White House ceremony, President Clinton announced that he had directed the rescission of the prior rule and the …

Liability-Based Fee-Shifting Rules And Settlement Mechanisms Under Incomplete Information, Eric Talley

Faculty Scholarship

Recent years have seen a debate over litigation reform grow increasingly agitated. Attorneys, judges, academics, and politicians now readily and regularly disagree about how or whether to combat the debilitating litigiousness commonly purported to infect the American Bar. Within this debate, few reform proposals have received as much attention as "fee-shifting" provisions, which, in their most popular incarnation, reallocate litigation costs (particularly attorney's fees) based on the outcome of the liability phase of a trial. This attention is perhaps justified, given the nonuniformity of such rules among industrialized nations. For instance, in the British Commonwealth and much of Continental Europe, …

On Public Reason, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

Since the publication of A Theory of Justice in 1971, John Rawls has refined, qualified, and enriched his political philosophy, responding generously and with patient analytical care to difficulties posed by critics. Political Liberalism embodies the major developments in Rawls's thought during those two decades. Rawls continues to be a strong defender of political liberalism, but in various respects his philosophical claims are more modest than those he offered in 1971, and the political life he recommends involves more accommodation to the diverse perspectives and ways of life one expects to find in liberal democracies. In most of the chapters …

Home Rule, Majority Rule, And Dillon's Rule, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

Clayton Gillette's In Partial Praise of Dillon's Rule, or, Can Public Choice Theory Justify Local Government Law? is an ambitious attempt to breathe new life into an old local government law chestnut through the analytical tools of modern political economy. Gillette asserts that because the Rule permits state judges to invalidate local legislation that results from "one-sided lobbying," Dillon's Rule increases the allocational efficiency of local decision making and reduces the deadweight losses attendant on special interest pursuit of rent-seeking ordinances. According to Gillette, Dillon's Rule checks the danger of special interest abuse of local politics by constraining local …

The Role Of The United States Senate Concerning "Self-Executing" And "Non-Self-Executing Treaties", Lori Fisler Damrosch

Faculty Scholarship

This essay concerns a pattern in treaty actions of the U.S. Senate which tends to weaken the domestic legal effect of treaties. Under this pattern, the Senate qualifies its consent to U.S. ratification of the treaty with a declaration or other condition to the effect that the treaty shall be non-self-executing, or otherwise expresses its intention that the treaty shall not be used as a direct source of law in U.S. courts. Such qualifications, referred to hereinafter as "non-self-executing declarations," give rise to important questions about the place of the affected treaties within the fabric of U.S. law, especially in …

When The Judge Is Not The Primary Official With Responsibility To Read: Agency Interpretation And The Problem Of Legislative History, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

As the other pages of this journal reflect, writing about statutory interpretation commonly builds on unarticulated assumptions about the occasion for interpretation, the identity of the interpreter, and the character of the interpreted text. In this paradigm, the occasion for interpretation is a litigated case – an episode has occurred for which the application of the statute is problematic. The interpreter is a judge, a person who resolves litigation – typically episodic, typically backwards – working outside of politics, and bearing no generic responsibility (that is, responsibility outside the decision of the case before her) for the statutory regime. And …

The Ninth Amendment And The Unwritten Constitution: The Problems Of Constitutional Interpretation, Andrzej Rapaczynski

Faculty Scholarship

This article is about two things; one general, the other specific. The general point is about the nature of interpretation and of the constraints that the text places on interpretation. The specific is about the ninth amendment.

My general claim about interpretation is that no textual provision by itself seriously constrains how it is going to be interpreted. This, I argue, is true not just about the open-ended provisions like the ninth amendment, but quite generally, about all textual provisions. The fact that no text by itself constrains interpretation, however, does not mean that interpretation is unconstrained; only that constraints …