Law Commons^™

A Stag Hunt Account And Defense Of Transnational Labour Standards---A Preliminary Look At The Problem, Alan Hyde

Rutgers Law School (Newark) Faculty Papers

Transnational labor standards are modeled as cooperative solutions to the class of strategic dilemmas known as Stag Hunts, in which all actors would gain from a cooperative solution, but only if all cooperate. If you think a partner will defect, your best strategy is also to defect. Intuitively, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh will all be better off if none of their children work and all go to school; however if one defects from this agreement it will capture a stream of foreign investment linked to child labor. Understanding Stag Hunts explains why transnational labor standards are found both in genuinely …

Who Speaks For The Working Poor?: A Preliminary Look At The Emerging Tetralogy Of Representation Of Low-Wage Service Workers, Alan Hyde

Rutgers Law School (Newark) Faculty Papers

Recent advocacy campaigns for low-wage service workers in New York City reveal a new pattern of representation by legal avocacy groups (like National Employment Law Project or law school clinics), governmental actors (like the state Attorney General or New York City Council), and immigrant rights groups. Such campaigns have won important economic and legal victories for Mexican workers in Korean greengroceries, West African delivery personnel for supermarkets and drug chains, and domestic workers. They have not, however, institutionalized workplace or political representation for these groups. Unions have either been passive, outmaneuvered, or played negative roles in these campaigns. This pattern …

Employment Discrimination In A High Velocity Labor Market, Alan Hyde

Rutgers Law School (Newark) Faculty Papers

Silicon Valley employers employ few African-Americans, Latino/as, or older workers, yet do not fit the usual paradigms of employment discrimination: they exhibit no taste for uniformity and do not employ job tournaments or internal labor markets. A new model of employment discrimination attributes disparate hiring in Silicon Valley to a combination of: demands for specific skill sets at hiring (the opposite of the subjective criteria that have long beguiled scholars of discrimination) and concomitant refusal to train; hiring through networks of personal contacts; and rewards to career paths that alternate employment with self-employment. Overcoming the disparate impact of these employment …

The Paperless Chase: Electronic Voting And Democratic Values, Daniel P. Tokaji

The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law Working Paper Series

The 2000 election ignited a fierce controversy over the machinery used for voting. Civil rights advocates have called for the replacement of outdated paper-based voting equipment, like the infamous “hanging chad” punch card. Yet the introduction of paperless technology, especially electronic “touchscreen” machines, has induced widespread concern that software might be rigged to alter election results. This article examines the debate over electronic voting, which raises fundamental questions about the democratic values that should guide the administration of elections. It frames the debate by defining four equality norms embodied in federal voting rights laws and the Constitution. Electronic voting has …

Occupation Failures And The Legality Of Armed Conflict: The Case Of Iraqi Cultural Property, Mary Ellen O'Connell

The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law Working Paper Series

US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld dismissed the looting of the Iraqi National Museum in April 2003 by remarking, “stuff happens.” In doing so, he gave an early indication that in planning to invade Iraq, the Bush Administration failed to take seriously the legal obligations of an occupying power. Occupying powers have a variety of binding legal obligations, including obligations to stop looting, protect cultural property, and protect persons in detention. Yet, the Administration sent a wholly inadequate force to fulfill those obligations, and, more seriously, the force received no direct and imperative orders to do so. As a result, …

Justice In The Palestine-Israel Conflict, John B. Quigley

The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law Working Paper Series

Military-territorial conflicts are typically addressed by the international community on the basis of considerations of justice, meaning relevant standards accepted by the community of states for conduct among states and peoples. If such standards are followed, resulting agreements stand a greater chance of providing for a lasting peace. In the conflict over historic Palestine, considerations of justice have had to compete with considerations of major-power policy, from early twentieth century to the present. When negotiations re-commence, the international community should ensure that they be conducted with considerations of justice at the forefront. If that approach is taken, in particular regarding …

The New Canon: Using Or Misusing Foreign Law To Decide Domestic Intellectual Property Claims , Edward S. Lee

The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law Working Paper Series

This Article provides the first in-depth analysis of the use of foreign authorities to resolve issues related to domestic statutes, particularly focusing on intellectual property (IP) statutes. The study of IP statutes provides a fertile area of research because of the increased pressures for international protection of IP. The Article criticizes the current approach U.S. courts have taken to using foreign authorities in this area, which can best be described as ad hoc. The Article then sets forth a framework by which U.S. courts can decide, more systematically, when to rely on foreign authorities in IP cases. The Article fills …

Uk Competition Appeal Tribunal Rules On Oft’S Duty To Refer Mergers For Investigation, Suyong Kim

Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr Antitrust Series

On 3 December 2003, the Competition Appeal Tribunal in the UK upheld an application by IBA Health Ltd for judicial review against the Office of Fair Trading's decision not to refer the anticipated merger between iSoft Plc and Torex Plc to the Competition Commissionfor detailed investigation. This is the first case under the new merger control provisions in the Enterprise Act 2002 to come before the Tribunal for judicial review under Section 120 of that Act.

Defining Dicta, Michael Abramowicz, Maxwell Stearns

George Mason University School of Law Working Papers Series

In recent decades, legal scholars have devoted substantially greater attention to studying the origin and nature of stare decisis than to defining the distinction between holding and dicta. This appears counter-intuitive when one considers, first, that stare decisis applies only to holdings of announced precedents, and second, that beyond problematic and rudimentary intuitions, the legal system has failed to develop meaningful definitions of these terms. While lawyers, legal scholars, and jurists likely assume that they can identify dicta when they see it, a careful analysis that categorizes the range of judicial assertions in need of proper characterization reveals that defining …

Neutrality Agreements And Card Check Recognition: Prospects For Changing Paradigms, James J. Brudney

The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law Working Paper Series

This article is the first comprehensive treatment of neutrality agreements, which are themselves the most important development in Labor Law for decades. The labor movement's new approach to organizing displaces NLRB-supervised elections with negotiated agreements that provide (i) for employers to remain neutral during an upcoming union campaign, and (ii), in most instances, for employees to decide if they want to be represented through signing authorization cards rather than through a secret ballot election. The article demonstrates the substantial, perhaps predominant, role played by this new contractually-based approach over the past 5-10 years; it also explains why so many employers …

Conceptualizing Blakely, Douglas A. Berman

The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law Working Paper Series

The Supreme Court’s decision in Blakely v. Washington has generated impassioned judicial and academic criticisms, perhaps because the “earthquake” ruling seems to announce a destructive rule in search of a sound principle. Read broadly, the jury trial rule articulated in Blakely might be thought to cast constitutional doubt on any and all judicial fact-finding at sentencing. Yet judicial fact-finding at sentencing has a long history, and such fact-finding has been an integral component of modern sentencing reforms and seems critical to the operation of guideline sentencing. The caustic reaction to Blakely reflects the fact that the decision has sowed confusion …

Foreseeing Greatness? Measurable Performance Criteria And The Selection Of Supreme Court Justices, James J. Brudney

The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law Working Paper Series

This article contributes to an ongoing debate about the feasibility and desireability of measuring the "merit" of appellate judges--and their consequent Supreme Court potential--by using objective performance variables. Relying on the provocative and controversial "tournament criteria" proposed by Professors Stephen Choi and Mitu Gulati in two recent articles, Brudney assesses the "Supreme Court potential" of Warren Burger and Harry Blackmun based on their appellate court records. He finds that Burger's appellate performance appears more promising under the Choi and Gulati criteria, but then demonstrates how little guidance these quantitative assessments actually provide when reviewing the two men's careers on the …

Evaluating The Role Of Brown Vs. Board Of Education In School Equalization,, Orley C. Ashenfelter, William J. Collins, Albert Yoon

Princeton Law and Public Affairs Research Paper Series

In this paper we study the long-term labor market implications of school resource equalization before Brown and school desegregation after Brown. For cohorts born in the South in the 1920s and 1930s, we find that racial disparities in measurable school characteristics had a substantial influence on black males’ earnings and educational attainment measured in 1970, albeit one that was smaller in the later cohorts. When we examine the income of male workers in 1990, we find that southern-born blacks who finished their schooling just before effective desegregation occurred in the South fared poorly compared to southern-born blacks who followed behind …

The Article 82 Ec Abuse Concept: What Scope Is There For Modernization?, Ulrich Quack, James Burling, John Ratliff, Antonio Capobianco, Suyong Kim, William Kolasky

Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr Antitrust Series

On 30 September 2004, Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP, the University of Nyenrode, and Global Competition Review co-sponsored a seminar on the reform of Article 82 EC by the European Commission. The seminar raised a great deal of interest amongst members of the legal community and attracted a large attendance. The speakers included some of the most well-known top-level policy makers, academics, and practitioners in the field of competition law. Over the last two years, there have been numerous calls for modernization of the way in which Article 82 of the EC Treaty is applied by the European …

Whistle Blowing, Ben Depoorter, Jef De Mot

George Mason University School of Law Working Papers Series

For law enforcement purposes corruption and fraud are hard battles. Because of the highly secretive and premeditated nature of these crimes, prime witnesses are themselves often implicated in the fraudulent transaction. Promises of immunity and whistle blowing rewards are often required to resolve these information asymmetries. These insights have set a trend, both in scholarship and law enforcement practice, towards reward-based approaches (carrots), as an alternative or complement to punishment based deterrence (sticks). Applying the U.S. False Claims Act (FCA) as an analytical framework, we provide a critical review of the efficiency limitations of whistle blowing. More specifically, the formal …

The Law And Economics Of Cybersecurity: An Introduction, Mark F. Grady, Francesco Parisi

George Mason University School of Law Working Papers Series

One of the most controversial theoretical issues of our time is the governance of cybersecurity. Computer security experts, national security experts, and policy analysts have all struggled to bring meaningful analysis to cybersecurity; however, the discipline of law & economics has yet to be fully applied to the issue. This introduction presents work by leading national scholars who examine this complex national security challenge from a law and economics perspective. The focus spans from a discussion of pure market solutions to public-private issue analysis, providing a valuable basis for policy considerations concerning the appropriate governmental role on the issue of …

Putting Humpty Dumpty Back Together: Pricing In Anticommons Property Arrangements, Ben Depoorter, Sven Vanneste

George Mason University School of Law Working Papers Series

Recently, a new theory has drawn considerable attention in the literature on common property. A number of scholars have pointed to the danger of excessive propertization in the context of what are termed "anticommons" property regimes. Although this theory has found its way into numerous legal and economic applications, the empirical and cognitive foundations of the theory of fragmentation remain unexplored. Based on experimental data, this Article conducts an investigation into the social and personal processes involved in the anticommons.

The results confirm the theoretical proposition that anticommons deadweight losses increase with the degree of complementarity between individual parts and …

The Unsolvable Dilemma Of A Paretian Policymaker, Giuseppe Dari-Mattiacci, Nuno Garoupa

George Mason University School of Law Working Papers Series

In this paper, we argue that social decisionmaking is subject to a fundamental conflict between consistency and completeness. We show that a consistent welfarist method of policy assessment, that is, one that never violates the Pareto principle, may be incomplete in the sense of being incapable of providing a solution to important social welfare problems.

Judicial Power & Civil Rights Reconsidered, David E. Bernstein, Ilya Somin

George Mason University School of Law Working Papers Series

Michael Klarman's "From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality" is an important contribution to the scholarly literature on both the history of the civil rights struggle and judicial power more generally. Klarman argues that for much of the twentieth century, the Supreme Court was very reluctant to rule in favor of African American civil rights claimants, and had little impact when it did.

Klarman is right to reject traditional accounts that greatly exaggerated the Supreme Court's willingness and ability to protect minorities. However, he overstates his case. The Court's views on the …

On Kamisar, Killing, And The Future Of Physician-Assisted Death, Norman L. Cantor

Rutgers Law School (Newark) Faculty Papers

In a famous 1958 article, Yale Kamisar brilliantly examined the hazards of abuse and of slippery slope extensions that subsequently, for 46 years, served to thwart legalization of physician-assisted death (PAD). This paper shows that during the same period law and culture have effectively accepted a variety of ways for stricken people to hasten death, with physicians involved in diverse roles. Those ways include rejection of nutrition and hydration, terminal sedation, administration of risky analgesics, and withholding or withdrawal of medical life support.

If these existing lawful modes of hastening death were widely acknowledged, the pressure to legalize voluntary active …

Does Soft Dollar Brokerage Benefit Portfolio Investors: Agency Problem Or Solution?, Stephen M. Horan, D. Bruce Johnsen

George Mason University School of Law Working Papers Series

With soft dollar brokerage, institutional portfolio managers pay brokers “premium” commission rates in exchange for rebates they use to buy third-party research. One hypothesis views this practice as a reflection of the agency problem in delegated portfolio management; another views it as a contractual solution to the agency problem that aligns the incentives of investors, managers, and brokers where direct monitoring mechanisms are inadequate. Using a database of institutional money managers, we find that premium commission payments are positively related to risk-adjusted performance, suggesting that soft dollar brokerage is a solution to agency problems. Moreover, premium commissions are positively related …

A Culturally Correct Proposal To Privatize The British Columbia Salmon Fishery, D. Bruce Johnsen

George Mason University School of Law Working Papers Series

Canada now faces two looming policy crises that have come to a head in British Columbia. The first is long-term depletion of the Pacific salmon fishery by mobile commercial ocean fishermen racing to intercept salmon under the rule of capture. The second results from Canadian Supreme Court case law recognizing and affirming “the existing aboriginal and treaty rights of the aboriginal peoples of Canada” under Section 35(1) of the Constitution Act, 1982. This essay shows that the economics of property rights provides a joint solution to these crises that would promote the Canadian commonwealth by way of a privatization auction …

Hyperownership In A Time Of Biotechnological Promise: The International Conflict To Control The Building Blocks Of Life, Sabrina Safrin

Rutgers Law School (Newark) Faculty Papers

This article addresses the corrosive interplay between the patent-based and the sovereign- based systems of ownership of genetic material. In patent-based systems, genetic material is increasingly “owned” by corporations or research institutions which obtain patents over such material. In sovereign-based systems, the national government owns or extensively controls such material. As more patents issue for synthesized genes in developed countries through the patent system, more raw genetic material is legally enclosed by the governments of developing nations, which house most of the world’s wild or raw genetic material. This interactive spiral of increased enclosure results in the sub-optimal utilization, conservation …

Theory And Practice Of Competition Advocacy At The Ftc, James C. Cooper, Paul A. Pautler, Todd J. Zywicki

George Mason University School of Law Working Papers Series

This article was prepared as part of a recent symposium celebrating the Ninetieth Anniversary of the founding of the Federal Trade Commission. In addition, fall 2004 marks the Thirtieth Anniversary of a pivotal moment in the establishment of the modern advocacy program at the FTC, Chairman Lewis Engman’s speech on the economic burden that inefficient transportation regulation policies were imposing on the American economy. Although the FTC has been involved in advocacy activities since its founding, Engman’s speech symbolized a new aggressiveness on the part of the FTC in using its expertise to work with other governmental actors at all …

Judicial Globalization In The Service Of Self-Government, Martin S. Flaherty

Princeton Law and Public Affairs Research Paper Series

This working paper considers potential justifications for the democratic legitimacy of what Anne-Marie Slaughter has termed, “judicial globalization” – the reliance by U.S. judges on international and foreign legal materials in the interpretation of domestic law. Toward this end the paper offers two and a half tentative answers, one distinctive to the U.S., the other(s) with general applicability. The distinctively American response, however conservative in theory, suggests that the original understanding of the Constitution supports a strong presumption that the Constitution, and Federal law generally, be interpreted in a way that is consistent with international law, particularly with regard to …

Rents, Dissipation, And Lost Treasures With N Parties, Giuseppe Dari-Mattiacci, Eric Langlais, Francesco Parisi

George Mason University School of Law Working Papers Series

The rent-seeking literature is unanimous on the fact that, in a rent-seeking context, the rent dissipation increases with the number of potential participants. In this paper we analyze the participants' choice to enter the game and their levels of efforts. We show that the usual claim - that the total dissipation approaches the entire value of the rent - applies only when participants are relatively weak. In the presence of strong competitors, the total dissipation actually decreases, since participation in the game is less frequent. We also consider the impact of competitors' exit option, distinguishing between redistributive rent-seeking and productive …

Wine Wars: The 21st Amendment And Discriminatory Bans To Direct Shipment Of Wine , Todd J. Zywicki

George Mason University School of Law Working Papers Series

This essay is actually a series of posts from the Volokh Conspiracy weblog (www.volokh.com) that discusses the policy and constitutional issues surrounding a question that the Supreme Court will hear this term, whether discriminatory barriers to the interstate direct shipment of wine are constitutional. Because of the timeliness of the issue, the essay is presented in this unusual and informal format so as to be available to the public more rapidly than through the traditional law review format. This essay” reviews the historical evidence and ratification history of the 21st Amendment, and concludes that the answer is unambiguously no.

The …

Obesity And Advertising Policy, Todd J. Zywicki, Debra Holt, Maureen Ohlhausen

George Mason University School of Law Working Papers Series

It is clear that Americans are getting fatter, both adults and children. This development has led some to call for a ban on food advertising directed at children. There are numerous practical and constitutional difficulties with such a policy. This article poses a more fundamental question - even if feasible, would restricting food advertising do anything to reduce obesity or even slow its trends? The article also considers whether the social costs of banning advertising could outweigh the social benefits of such an action.

This article provides a review of the literature on the fundamental causes of the American obesity …

Soft Negligence And Cause In Fact: A Comment On Ganuza And Gomez, Giuseppe Dari-Mattiacci

George Mason University School of Law Working Papers Series

Lowering the standard of negligence below the first-best socially optimal level has been shown by Ganuza and Gomez (2004) to increase the level of care taken by judgment proof injurers. In this paper, I consider a more complex model of negligence in which cause in fact is taken into account, and I show that this conclusion holds when the injurer’s care reduces the magnitude of the accidental harm but not when the injurer’s care reduces the probability of the accident. Thus, such soft negligence strategies aimed at tackling the adverse effects of judgment proofness need to be conditioned to the …

The Constitution In Two Dimensions: A Transaction Cost Analysis Of Constitutional Remedies. , Eugene Kontorovich

George Mason University School of Law Working Papers Series

This Article reveals the underappreciated role of liability rules in constitutional law. Conventional constitutional theory insists that constitutional entitlements require, by their nature, property rule protection. That is, they can only be taken with the owner's consent; nonconsensual takings can be enjoined. This Article shows that many constitutional values are in fact protected by liability rules, which allow for forced transfers followed by payment of compensation. Substantive entitlements form one dimension of constitutional law. The various ways in which they are protected against transfers form the second dimension. The full picture of constitutional law only emerges from looking at both. …