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Full-Text Articles in Law

States Of Terror, States Of Consent: Philip Bobbitt's Strategic Transnational Politics For The Twenty-First Century, Kenneth Anderson Jul 2008

States Of Terror, States Of Consent: Philip Bobbitt's Strategic Transnational Politics For The Twenty-First Century, Kenneth Anderson

Book Reviews

American University, WCL Research Paper No. 2008-64Abstract:This essay is a book review from the Times Literary Supplement of Philip Bobbitt's widely remarked and admired Terror and Consent. The review compares Bobbitt's unabashedly strategic view of the response of democratic states to terrorism, and contrasts it with more narrowly cost-benefit analysis-driven approaches to responding to terrorism. The review criticizes 'tactical' approaches to terrorism as too focused upon 'event driven catastrophism'. The review considers Bobbitt's analysis of the changing nature of states, and the rise of what he calls the 'market-state'. The essay ends by querying whether the market-state, as Bobbitt conceives …


Miscalculating Welfare, Michael B. Dorff, Kimberly Kessler Ferzan Mar 2008

Miscalculating Welfare, Michael B. Dorff, Kimberly Kessler Ferzan

All Faculty Scholarship

In their quest to maximize efficiency, law and economics scholars often produce novel, creative, and counterintuitive legal rules. Indeed, legal economists have argued for baby selling, against anti-discrimination laws in the workplace, and for insider trading. In this essay, we discuss some concerns about this form of legal scholarship that privileges the creative and counterintuitive over the fair, mundane, and intuitive. Drawing on a range of empirical evidence, this essay argues that the failure to include, and to give sufficient weight to, fairness preferences undermines legal economists' policy recommendations. Specifically, after setting forth three examples of this phenomenon, in the …


The Argentine Financial Crisis: State Liability Under Bits And The Legitimacy Of The Icsid System, William W. Burke-White Jan 2008

The Argentine Financial Crisis: State Liability Under Bits And The Legitimacy Of The Icsid System, William W. Burke-White

All Faculty Scholarship

This essay examines the jurisprudence of the International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) arbitral tribunals in a series of cases brought against the Republic of Argentina in the wake of the 2001-2002 Argentine financial collapse. The essay considers the ICSID tribunals' treatment of non-precluded measures provisions in Argentina's bilateral investment treaties (BITs) and the customary law defense of necessity and argues that the ICSID tribunals have sought to radically narrow the opportunities available to states to craft policy responses to emergency situations while strengthening investor protections beyond the intent of the states parties to the BITs under …


Trouble Counting Votes - Comparing Voting Mechanisms In The United States And Selected Other Countries, Frank Emmert, Christopher Page, Antony Page Jan 2008

Trouble Counting Votes - Comparing Voting Mechanisms In The United States And Selected Other Countries, Frank Emmert, Christopher Page, Antony Page

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.


Moral Spillovers: The Effect Of Moral Violations On Deviant Behavior, Elizabeth Mullen, Janice Nadler Jan 2008

Moral Spillovers: The Effect Of Moral Violations On Deviant Behavior, Elizabeth Mullen, Janice Nadler

Faculty Working Papers

Two experiments investigated whether outcomes that violate people's moral standards increase their deviant behavior (the moral spillover effect). In Study 1, participants read about a legal trial in which the outcome supported, opposed or was unrelated to their moral convictions. Relative to when outcomes supported moral convictions, when outcomes opposed moral convictions people judged the outcome to be less fair, were more angry, were less willing to accept the outcome, and were more likely to take a borrowed pen. In Study 2, participants who recalled another person's moral violation were more likely to cheat on an experimental task relative to …


Coordinating In The Shadow Of The Law: Two Contextualized Tests Of The Focal Point Theory Of Legal Compliance, Richard H. Mcadams, Janice Nadler Jan 2008

Coordinating In The Shadow Of The Law: Two Contextualized Tests Of The Focal Point Theory Of Legal Compliance, Richard H. Mcadams, Janice Nadler

Faculty Working Papers

In situations where people have an incentive to coordinate their behavior, law can provide a framework for understanding and predicting what others are likely to do. According to the focal point theory of expressive law, the law's articulation of a behavior can sometimes create self-fulfilling expectations that it will occur. Existing theories of legal compliance emphasize the effect of sanctions or legitimacy; we argue that, in addition to sanctions and legitimacy, law can also influence compliance simply by making one outcome salient. We tested this claim in two experiments where sanctions and legitimacy were held constant. Experiment 1 demonstrated that …


The Hanging Chads Of Corporate Voting, Marcel Kahan, Edward B. Rock Jan 2008

The Hanging Chads Of Corporate Voting, Marcel Kahan, Edward B. Rock

All Faculty Scholarship

Never has voting been more important in corporate law. With greater activism among shareholders and the shift from plurality to majority voting for directors, the number of close votes is rising. But is the basic technology of corporate voting adequate to the task? In this Article, we first examine the incredibly complicated system of US corporate voting, a complexity that is driven by the underlying custodial ownership structure, by dispersed ownership and large trading volumes, and by the rise in short-selling and derivatives. We identify three ways in which things predictably go wrong: pathologies of complexity; pathologies of ownership; and …


When Should Original Meanings Matter?, Richard A. Primus Jan 2008

When Should Original Meanings Matter?, Richard A. Primus

Articles

Constitutional theory lacks an account of when each of the familiar sources of authority-text, original meaning, precedent, and so on-should be given weight. The dominant tendency is to regard all sources as potentially applicable in every case. In contrast, this Article proposes that each source of authority is pertinent in some categories of cases but not in others, much as a physical tool is appropriate for some but not all kinds of household tasks. The Article then applies this approach to identify the categories of cases in which original meaning is, or is not, a valid factor in constitutional decisionmaking.