Law Commons^™

No More Blood, Kerry Abrams

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Local Evidence In Constitutional Interpretation, Brandon L. Garrett

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court frequently relies on state law when interpreting the U.S. Constitution. What is less understood is the degree and manner in which the Supreme Court and other federal courts look not to state law, but to local law. Although it has largely gone unnoticed, there is a robust practice of acknowledging and accounting for local law in the course of constitutional interpretation. To take an example, one area in which the Supreme Court has examined local enforcement patterns is in death penalty jurisprudence. In 2015, Justice Stephen Breyer, dissenting in Glossip v. Gross, cited to empirical data to …

Seeking An Objective For Regulating Insider Trading Through Texas Gulf Sulphur, James D. Cox

Faculty Scholarship

Data summarized in the opening of this article document that inside trading is a growth industry. And, as deals get ever bigger, the growth curve becomes steeper as more the data confirms intuition that the more who know about a good thing the more who will seek to harvest its benefits. Even though insider trading appears to have thrived during the fifty years after Texas Gulf Sulphur, we gather in this symposium to celebrate the decision. But why? As developed below, the Second Circuit’s landmark decision gave way to the Supreme Court’s erection of a fiduciary framework that this article …

A New Guard At The Courthouse Door: Corporate Personal Jurisdiction In Complex Litigation After The Supreme Court’S Decision Quartet, David W. Ichel

Faculty Scholarship

In a quartet of recent decisions, the Supreme Court substantially reshaped the analysis of due process limits for a state's exercise of personal jurisdiction over corporations for the first time since its groundbreaking 1945 decision in International Shoe Co. v. Washington. The Court's decision quartet recasts the International Shoe continuum of corporate contacts for which it would be "reasonable" for the state to exercise jurisdiction based on "traditional notions of fair play and substantial justice" into a more rigid bright-line dichotomy between "general" and "specific" jurisdiction: for a state to exercise general (or all-purpose) jurisdiction over any suit, regardless of …

Building Multilateral Anticorruption Enforcement: Analogies Between International Trade & Anti-Bribery Law, Rachel Brewster, Christine Dryden

Faculty Scholarship

In the last twenty years, the United States government has put substantial resources behind the fight against .foreign bribery by using the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) to prosecute unilaterally foreign and domestic companies who engage in corruption abroad. The United States is not entirely alone in this effort, but other countries have been far less vigorous in investing resources in investigations and prosecuting cases. Because of the unilateral and extraterritorial nature of FCPA prosecutions, these cases are sometimes controversial as foreign governments resist American influence in their commercial relations.

In response to this international tension, as well as a …

Securitization Ten Years After The Financial Crisis: An Overview, Steven L. Schwarcz

Faculty Scholarship

This symposium issue examines securitization a decade after the 2008 financial crisis. Prior to the crisis, securitization was one of America’s dominant means of financing. Many observers, however, blamed securitization for causing the crisis, sparking regulation that arguably has been overly restrictive and, in some cases, even punitive. Where are we now?

Challenges Facing Judges Regarding Expert Evidence In Criminal Cases, Paul W. Grimm

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The United States As An Idea: Constitutional Reflections, H. Jefferson Powell

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Brief Of Professor Ernest A. Young As Amicus Curiae In Support Of Plaintiff Appellant Urging Reversal, Ernest A. Young

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Sustaining Collective Self-Governance And Collective Action: A Constitutional Role Morality For Presidents And Members Of Congress, Neil S. Siegel

Faculty Scholarship

In the United States today, the behavior of the political branches is generally viewed as more damaging to the American constitutional system than is the behavior of the federal courts. Yet constitutional law scholarship continues to focus primarily on judges and judging. This Article suggests that such scholarship should develop for presidents and members of Congress what it has long advocated for judges: a role morality that imposes normative limits on the exercise of official discretion over and above strictly legal limits. The Article first grounds a role morality for federal elected officials in two purposes of the U.S. Constitution …

Beyond The Bosses' Constitution: The First Amendment And Class Entrenchment, Jedediah Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court’s “weaponized” First Amendment has been its strongest antiregulatory tool in recent decades, slashing campaign-finance regulation, public-sector union financing, and pharmaceutical regulation, and threatening a broader remit. Along with others, I have previously criticized these developments as a “new Lochnerism.” In this Essay, part of a Columbia Law Review Symposium, I press beyond these criticisms to diagnose the ideological outlook of these opinions and to propose an alternative. The leading decisions of the antiregulatory First Amendment often associate free speech with a vision of market effi­ciency; but, I argue, closer to their heart is antistatist fear of entrench­ment …

Regulating Complacency: Human Limitations And Legal Efficacy, Steven L. Schwarcz

Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines how insights into limited human rationality can improve financial regulation. The Article identifies four categories of limitations—herd behavior, cognitive biases, overreliance on heuristics, and a proclivity to panic—that undermine the perfect-market regulatory assumptions that parties have full information and will act in their rational self-interest. The Article then analyzes how insights into these limitations can be used to correct resulting market failures. Requiring more robust disclosure and due diligence, for example, can help to reduce reliance on misleading information cascades that motivate herd behavior. Debiasing through law, such as requiring more specific, poignant, and concrete disclosure of …

U.S. War Powers And The Potential Benefits Of Comparativism, Curtis A. Bradley

Faculty Scholarship

There is no issue of foreign relations law more important than the allocation of authority over the use of military force. This issue is especially important for the United States given the frequency with which it is involved in military activities abroad. Yet there is significant uncertainty and debate in the United States over this issue — in particular, over whether and to what extent military actions must be authorized by Congress. Because U.S. courts in the modern era have generally declined to review the legality of military actions, disputes over this issue have had to be resolved, as a …

Does Contract Law Need Morality?, Kimberly D. Krawiec, Wenhao Liu

Faculty Scholarship

In The Dignity of Commerce, Nathan Oman sets out an ambitious market theory of contract, which he argues is a superior normative foundation for contract law than either the moralist or economic justifications that currently dominate contract theory. In doing so, he sets out a robust defense of commerce and the market-place as contributing to human flourishing that is a refreshing and welcome contribution in an era of market alarmism. But the mar-ket theory ultimately falls short as either a normative or prescriptive theory of contract. The extent to which law, public policy, and the-ory should account for values …

Presidential Control Over International Law, Curtis A. Bradley, Jack L. Goldsmith

Faculty Scholarship

Presidents have come to dominate the making, interpretation, and termination of international law for the United States. Often without specific congressional concurrence, and sometimes even when it is likely that Congress would disagree, the President has developed the authority to:

(a) make a vast array of international obligations for the United States, through both written agreements and the development of customary international law;

(b) make increasingly consequential political commitments for the United States on practically any topic;

(c) interpret these obligations and commitments; and

(d) terminate or withdraw from these obligations and commitments.

While others have examined pieces of this …

Why Do Prosecutors Say Anything? The Case Of Corporate Crime, Samuel W. Buell

Faculty Scholarship

Criminal procedure law does not require prosecutors to speak outside of court. Professional regulations and norms discourage and sometimes prohibit prosecutors from doing so. Litigation often rewards strategic and tactical maintenance of the element of surprise. Institutional incentives encourage bureaucrats, especially those not bound by procedural requirements of administrative law, to decline to commit themselves to future action. In the always exceptional field of corporate crime, however, the Department of Justice and federal line prosecutors have developed practices of signaling and describing their exercise of discretion through detailed press releases, case filings, and policy documents. This contribution to a symposium …

The Price Of Law: The Case Of The Eurozone's Collective Action Clauses, Elena Carletti, Paolo Colla, Mitu Gulati, Steven Ongena

Faculty Scholarship

Do markets value contract protections? And does the quality of a legal system affect such valuations? To answer these questions we exploit a unique experiment whereby, after January 1, 2013, newly issued sovereign bonds of Eurozone countries under domestic law had to include Collective Action Clauses (CACs) specifying the minimum vote needed to modify payment terms. We find that CAC bonds trade at lower yields than otherwise similar no-CAC bonds; and that the quality of the legal system matters for this differential. Hence, markets appear to see CACs as providing protection against the legal risk embedded in domestic-law sovereign bonds.

Political Norms, Constitutional Conventions, And President Donald Trump, Neil S. Siegel

Faculty Scholarship

This symposium Essay argues that what is most troubling about the conduct of President Trump during and since the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign is not any potential violations of the U.S. Constitution or federal law. There likely have been some such violations, and there may be more. But what is most troubling about President Trump is his disregard of political norms that had previously constrained presidential candidates and Presidents, and his flouting of nonlegal but obligatory “constitutional conventions” that had previously guided and disciplined occupants of the White House. These norms and conventions, although not “in” the Constitution, play a …

Whose Lands? Which Public?: The Shape Of Public-Lands Law And Trump's National Monument Proclamations, Jedediah Britton-Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

President Trump issued a proclamation in December 2017 purporting to remove two million acres in southern Utah from national monument status, radically shrinking the Grand-Staircase Escalante National Monument and splitting the Bears Ears National Monument into two residual protected areas. Whether the President has the power to revise or revoke existing monuments under the Antiquities Act, which creates the national monument system, is a new question of law for a 112-year-old statute that has been used by Presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to Barack Obama to protect roughly fifteen million acres of federal land and hundreds of millions of marine acres. …

If We Pay Football Players, Why Not Kidney Donors, Philip J. Cook, Kimberly D. Krawiec

Faculty Scholarship

Ethicists who oppose compensating kidney donors claim they do so because kidney donation is risky for the donor’s health, donors may not appreciate the risks and may be cognitively biased in other ways, and donors may come from disadvantaged groups and thus could be exploited. However, few ethical qualms are raised about professional football players, who face much greater health risks than kidney donors, have much less counseling and screening concerning that risk, and who often come from racial and economic groups deemed disadvantaged. It thus seems that either ethicists—and the law—should ban both professional football and compensated organ donation, …

Southeast Of What? Reflections On Seals' Success, Thomas B. Metzloff

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Race And Representation Revisited: The New Racial Gerrymandering Cases And Section 2 Of The Vra, Guy-Uriel Charles, Luis Fuentes-Rohwer

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Do Heads Roll? An Empirical Analysis Of Ceo Turnover And Pay When The Corporation Is Federally Prosecuted, Brandon L. Garrett, Nan Li, Shrivaram Rajgopal

Faculty Scholarship

Does the criminal prosecution of a corporation affect the CEO? Or do criminal actions directed at the organization itself pose few consequences for the individuals at the top, and the CEO in particular? While CEOs are rarely themselves prosecuted, organizations could discipline CEOs through paycuts or outright replacing the CEO in response to a criminal prosecution. We sought to examine whether and how that occurs. We focus our analysis on a dataset of public companies that settled criminal cases brought by federal prosecutors from 2000-2014. We compared those companies to the larger set of companies in the Execucomp database of …

The Proficiency Of Experts, Brandon L. Garrett, Gregory Mitchell

Faculty Scholarship

Expert evidence plays a crucial role in civil and criminal litigation. Changes in the rules concerning expert admissibility, following the Supreme Court's Daubert ruling, strengthened judicial review of the reliability and the validity of an expert's methods. Judges and scholars, however, have neglected the threshold question for expert evidence: whether a person should be qualified as an expert in the first place. Judges traditionally focus on credentials or experience when qualifying experts without regard to whether those criteria are good proxies for true expertise. We argue that credentials and experience are often poor proxies for proficiency. Qualification of an expert …

International Corporate Prosecutions, Brandon L. Garrett

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Reliable Application Of Fingerprint Evidence, Brandon L. Garrett

Faculty Scholarship

In November 2017, a state appellate court did something almost unprecedented: It held that a trial judge made an error by admitting testimony on latent fingerprinting. In State v. McPhaul, the North Carolina appellate panel found error in admitting expert testimony, based on the lack of evidence that the expert reliably reached conclusions about the fingerprint evidence. The panel did not reverse the defendant's conviction, however, finding the error to be harmless. The ruling has broader significance for as-applied challenges to the forensic testimony commonly used in criminal cases, in which judges have often not carefully examined reliability either for …

Introduction: Forensic Fail, Brandon L. Garrett

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Trafficking Victim Protection Act: The Best Hope For International Human Rights Litigation In The U.S. Courts?, Sara Sun Beale

Faculty Scholarship

The article focuses on uses Alien Tort Statute as a vehicle for litigating human rights abuses in both civil and criminal prosecutions in the U.S. Topics discussed include developments in International Criminal Law in addressing human rights violations; judicial attitudes that could affect the interpretation of the Trafficking Victim Protection Act; and Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain court case on the same.

The Constitutionality Of A National Wealth Tax, Dawn Johnsen, Walter Dellinger

Faculty Scholarship

Economic inequality threatens America’s constitutional democracy. Beyond obvious harms to our nation’s social fabric and people’s lives, soaring economic inequality translates into political inequality and corrodes democratic institutions and values. The coincident, relentless rise of money in politics exacerbates the problem. As elected officials and candidates meet skyrocketing campaign costs by devoting more and more time to political fundraising—and independent expenditures mushroom—Americans lose faith and withdraw from a system widely perceived as beholden to wealthy individuals and corporate interests.

The United States needs innovative approaches to help rebuild foundational, shared understandings of American democracy, the American Dream, and opportunity and …

Individual Autonomy In Corporate Law, Elisabeth De Fontenay

Faculty Scholarship

The field of corporate law is riven with competing visions of the corporation. This Article seeks to identify points of broad agreement by negative implication. It examines two developments in corporate law that have drawn widespread criticism from corporate law scholars: the Supreme Court's recognition of corporate religious rights in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby and the Nevada legislature's decision to eliminate mandatory fiduciary duties for corporate directors and officers. Despite their fundamental differences, both resulted in expanding individual rights or autonomy within the corporation-for shareholders and managers, respectively.

The visceral critiques aimed at these two developments suggest a broadly shared …