Law Commons^™

Report On Offense Grading In Pennsylvania, Paul H. Robinson, Criminal Law Research Group, University Of Pennsylvania Law School

All Faculty Scholarship

The Pennsylvania Legislature's Senate Judiciary Committee and House Judiciary Committee jointly commissioned this study of the criminal offense grading scheme contained in Pennsylvania criminal statutes. This Final Report, which was presented to a joint session of the two Committees on December 15, 2009, examines the extent to which current Pennsylvania law defines offenses with offense grades that are inconsistent with the relative seriousness of the offense as compared to other offenses, based upon an empirical survey of Pennsylvania residents. It also examines whether some offenses include within a single grade forms of conduct of very different degrees of seriousness, for …

Regulatory Theory, Matthew D. Adler

All Faculty Scholarship

This chapter reviews a range of topics connected to the justification of government regulation, including: the definition of “regulation”; welfarism, Kaldor-Hicks efficiency, and the Pareto principles; the fundamental theorems of welfare economics and the “market failure” framework for justifying regulation, which identifies different ways in which the conditions for those theorems may fail to hold true (such as externalities, public goods, monopoly power, and imperfect information); the Coase theorem; and the different forms of regulation.

Chronicling The Complexification Of Negotiation Theory And Practice, Carrie Menkel-Meadow

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The essay reviews the content of twenty-five years of the Harvard Program on Negotiation's Negotiation Journal, identifying themes and issues explored on its pages in the past, the current issues challenging the field’s scholars and practitioners, and the issues likely to confront us in the future. It argues that while we in the field hoped for simple, elegant, and universal theories of negotiation and conflict resolution, the last twenty-five years have demonstrated the increasing complexification of negotiation theory and practice, from increased numbers of parties and issues, and dilemmas of intertemporal commitments, ethics, accountability, and relationships of private action to …

When And How (If At All) Does Law Constrain Official Actions?, Frederick F. Schauer

Sibley Lecture Series

University of Virginia Harrison Distinguished Professor of Law Frederick Schauer delivered the University of Georgia School of Law's 105th Sibley Lecture. Schauer's lecture titled "When and How (If at All) Does Law Constrain Official Action?" took place Wednesday, Oct. 28, at 4:30 p.m. in the Hatton Lovejoy Courtroom. According to Schauer, although Americans claim to live in a country whose decisions are highly influenced by law and courts, the reality may be quite different. "Across the political spectrum officials and public figures are politically and reputationally rewarded for doing the right thing even if it violates the law and punished …

How (Not) To Think Like A Punisher, Alice G. Ristroph

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article examines the several and sometimes contradictory accounts of sentencing in proposed revisions to the Model Penal Code. At times, sentencing appears to be an art, dependent upon practical wisdom; in other instances, sentencing seems more of a science, dependent upon close analysis of empirical data. I argue that the new Code provisions are at their best when they acknowledge the legal and political complexities of sentencing, and at their worst when they invoke the rhetoric of desert. When the Code focuses on the sentencing process in political context, it offers opportunities to deploy both practical wisdom and empirical …

Hope In The Law, Annelise Riles

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Speak Clearly And Carry A Big Stock Of Dollar Reserves: Sovereign Risk, Ideology, And Presidential Elections In Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, And Venezuela, Anthony Petros Spanakos, Lucio Remuzat Renno Junior

Department of Political Science and Law Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Partisan theories of political economy expect that bondholders will panic with the election of a left-wing presidential candidate. The latter seems to be what happened in Brazil in the 2002 presidential elections. However, quantitative analysis of perceptions of sovereign credit risk in Argentine, Brazilian, Mexican, and Venezuelan presidential elections from 1994 until 2007 shows no real evidence of a link between partisanship and perceptions of risk, even if the left-right divide is further broken down into left, center-left, center-right, right. Instead, international and domestic economic fundamentals have a stronger influence on risk evaluations. Qualitative analysis of the individual presidential elections …

All That You Can’T Leave Behind: Making And Administering Laws In The Select Government Localities Of Komenda, Cape Coast, And Accra, Andrew Freeman

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This paper is an attempt to understand how laws are created and maintained on the local level in Komenda, Cape Coast, and Accra. It explains how bylaws are created in those localities through the use of the General Assemblies. The paper then examines the judicial system in those same areas. Komenda uses an Arbitration Committee. Cape Coast and Accra both have a Circuit Court and a High Court. After detailing how the legislative and court system function, the paper compares and contrasts the different ways that the legislative and judicial branches are executed.

Theorizing Transnational Law - Observations On A Birthday, Susanne Baer

Articles

There are many ways to theorize transnational law. As always, there is a mainstream, and there are “sidestreams.” However, it may be more interesting to consider from which direction such theories develop. Here, in appreciation of what the German Law Journal did to transnational legal conversations, I suggest to consider three directions in transnational legal studies: (1) theorizing from above; (2) theorizing from below; and (3) theorizing from inside. As you will see, much of the theories are in the German Law Journal (GLJ).

Recent Developments In Common Intention: Lee Chez Kee V Pp [2008] 3 Slr 447 [Case Note], Nathaniel Yong Ern Khng, Siyuan Chen

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The Court of Appeal recently delivered an important judgment on liability for common intention. This criminal law doctrine has demanded clarification for some time, especially in regards to what is commonly known as “twin crime” situations, ie, situations where there is a primary criminal act as well as a collateral criminal act incidental to the main goal of the participants to the primary crime. In the “twin crime” situation, the participants would have intended to commit the primary criminal act but not all would have shared in the intention of one or more unidentified members of the group to also …

From Clampdown To Limited Empowerment: Hard And Soft Law In The Calibration And Regulation Of Religious Conduct In Singapore, Eugene K. B. Tan

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The focus of Singapore's response to terrorism post 9/11 has been to reach out to the “moderate, mainstream” Muslims as a bulwark against societal implosion. This article examines the broad-based endeavor toward “religious moderation.” While coercive draconian legislation remain the mainstay against extremists and radicals, the mobilization of soft law, aspirational norms, and values are consciously woven into the state's endeavors to enhance society's resilience and cohesion. They also seek to regulate religious conduct at a time when the state wishes to entrench secularism as a cornerstone of the governance of a multi-racial, multireligious society. Rights and regulation are not …

Bankruptcy Phobia, David A. Skeel Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

As the recent economic crisis has unfolded, bankruptcy has offered possible solutions at several key junctures. The first of these solutions, often referred to as mortgage modification, was geared toward homeowners who faced the loss of their homes in the months—now several years—since the start of the subprime crisis On the corporate side, Chapter 11 was an obvious alternative when large nonbank financial institutions like Bear Stearns and AIG stumbled in 2008. But regulators repeatedly balked, and the one exception to the avoidance of bankruptcy at all costs—Lehman Brothers—was anomalous. This aversion to bankruptcy, which seems to pervade all sides …

Impeaching A Federal Judge: Some Lessons From History, Arthur D. Hellman

Testimony

In August 2014, Federal District Judge Mark Fuller was arrested on a charge of misdemeanor battery after his wife called 911 from an Atlanta hotel room and told the operator, “He’s beating on me.” Judge Fuller has agreed to enter a pre-trial diversion program; if he completes the program, the criminal case against him will be dismissed. But Judge Fuller may face other consequences. The Acting Chief Judge of the Eleventh Circuit has initiated proceedings under the federal judicial misconduct statute. And some members of Congress and editorial writers have said that if Judge Fuller does not resign from the …

Transparency And Public Participation In The Rulemaking Process: Recommendations For The New Administration, Cary Coglianese, Heather Kilmartin, Evan Mendelson

All Faculty Scholarship

Each year, federal regulatory agencies create thousands of new rules that affect the economy. When these agencies insulate themselves too much from the public, they are more likely to make suboptimal decisions and decrease public acceptance of their resulting rules. A nonpartisan Task Force on Transparency and Public Participation met in 2008 to identify current deficiencies in agency rulemaking procedures and develop recommendations for the next presidential administration to improve the quality of regulations and the legitimacy of regulatory proceedings. This report summarizes the Task Force's deliberations, indicating ways that federal agencies could do a better job of seeking citizen …

Evolutionary Theory And The Origin Of Property Rights, James E. Krier

Law & Economics Working Papers Archive: 2003-2009

Legal scholars have never settled on a satisfactory account of the evolution of property rights. The touchstone for virtually all discussion, Harold Demsetz’s Toward a Theory of Property Rights, has a number of well-known (and not so well-known) shortcomings, perhaps because it was never intended to be taken as an evolutionary explanation in the first place. There is, in principle at least, a pretty straightforward fix for the sort of evolutionary approach pursued by followers of Demsetz, but even then that approach – call it the conventional approach – fails to account for very early property rights, right at the …

Why Paretians Can’T Prescribe: Preferences, Principles, And Imperatives In Law And Policy, Robert C. Hockett

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Recent years have witnessed two linked revivals in the legal academy. The first is renewed interest in articulating a normative “master principle” by which legal rules might be evaluated. The second is renewed interest in the prospect that a variant of Benthamite “utility” might serve as the requisite touchstone. One influential such variant now in circulation is what the Article calls “Paretian welfarism.”

This Article rejects Paretian welfarism and advocates an alternative it calls “fair welfare.” It does so because Paretian welfarism is inconsistent with ethical, social, and legal prescription, while fair welfare is what we have been groping for …

Prosecutorial Regulation Versus Prosecutorial Accountability, Stephanos Bibas

All Faculty Scholarship

No government official has as much unreviewable power or discretion as the prosecutor. Few regulations bind or even guide prosecutorial discretion, and fewer still work well. Most commentators favor more external regulation by legislatures, judges, or bar authorities. Neither across-the-board legislation nor ex post review of individual cases has proven to be effective, however. Drawing on management literature, this article reframes the issue as a principal-agent problem and suggests corporate strategies for better serving the relevant stakeholders. Fear of voters could better check prosecutors, as could victim participation in individual cases. Scholars have largely neglected the most promising avenue of …

Equality, Conscience, And The Liberty Of The Church: Justifying The Controversiale Per Controversialius, Patrick Mckinley Brennan

Working Paper Series

This paper considers the central normative claim of Martha Nussbaum’s Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America’s Tradition of Religious Equality, viz., that the U.S. Constitution’s religion clauses should be construed to provide equal (and extensive) protection to the vulnerable human faculty called conscience. The paper argues that Nussbaum’s argument from Rawlsian political liberalism that leads to her normative constitutional claim amounts, perversely, to an attempt to justify the controversial by the more controversial. The paper goes on to argue that while equality and conscience are concepts that are reasonably contested, Nussbaum illegitimately gives them priority over the also reasonably …

The Indivisible Constitution, Kermit Roosevelt Iii

All Faculty Scholarship

In The Invisible Constitution, Laurence Tribe argues that many of our most deeply-held constitutional convictions are not to be found in the words of the Constitution itself. They are, instead, part of what he calls the invisible Constitution. This review essay argues that although that claim is true, it is not worth spending a book on. Moreover, its very truth—the fact that certain “invisible” constitutional propositions are as central and well-established as textual ones—undermines the value of treating the “invisible” Constitution as a qualitatively different entity.

The Myth Of Equality In The Employment Relation, Aditi Bagchi

All Faculty Scholarship

Although it is widely understood that employers and employees are not equally situated, we fail adequately to account for this inequality in the law governing their relationship. We can best understand this inequality in terms of status, which encompasses one’s level of income, leisure and discretion. For a variety of misguided reasons, contract law has been historically highly resistant to the introduction of status-based principles. Courts have preferred to characterize the unfavorable circumstances that many employees face as the product of unequal bargaining power. But bargaining power disparity does not capture the moral problem raised by inequality in the employment …

The Neal Report And The Crisis In Antitrust, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

The Neal Report, which was commissioned by Lyndon Johnson and published in 1967, is rightfully criticized for representing the past rather than the future of antitrust. Its authors completely embraced a theory of competition and industrial organization that had dominated American economic thinking for forty years, but was just in the process of coming to an end. The structure-conduct-performance (S-C-P) paradigm that the Neal Report embodied had in fact been one of the most elegant and most tested theories of industrial organization. The theory represented the high point of structuralism in industrial organization economics, resting on the proposition that certain …

Rewarding Prosecutors For Performance, Stephanos Bibas

All Faculty Scholarship

Prosecutorial discretion is a problem that most scholars attack from the outside. Most scholars favor external institutional solutions, such as ex ante legislation or ex post judicial and bar review of individual cases of misconduct. At best these approaches can catch the very worst misconduct. They lack inside information and sustained oversight and cannot generate and enforce fine-grained rules to guide prosecutorial decisionmaking. The more promising alternative is to work within prosecutors' offices, to create incentives for good performance. This symposium essay explores a neglected toolbox that head prosecutors can use to influence line prosecutors: compensation and other rewards. Rewards …

Social Facts, Constitutional Interpretation, And The Rule Of Recognition, Matthew D. Adler

All Faculty Scholarship

This essay is a chapter in a volume that examines constitutional law in the United States through the lens of H.L.A. Hart’s “rule of recognition” model of a legal system. My chapter focuses on a feature of constitutional practice that has been rarely examined: how jurists and scholars argue about interpretive methods. Although a vast body of scholarship provides arguments for or against various interpretive methods --such as textualism, originalism, “living constitutionalism,” structure-and-relationship reasoning, representation-reinforcement, minimalism, and so forth -- very little scholarship shifts to the meta-level and asks: What are the considerations that jurists and scholars bring to bear …

Rebuilding The Public-Private City: Regulatory Taking's Anti-Subordination Insights For Eminent Domain And Redevelopment, Audrey Mcfarlane

All Faculty Scholarship

The eminent domain debate, steeped in the language of property rights, currently lacks language and conceptual space to address what is really at issue in today's cities: complex, fundamental disagreements between market and community about Development. The core doctrinal issue presented by development is how can we acknowledge the subordination of citizens who happen to live in areas that are attractive to wealthier citizens. In particular, how should we address the political process failure reflected in the privatized methods of decisionmaking that typify redevelopment? The conceptual language and analytical construct for appropriately addressing these issues come from critical race theory …

The Legacy Of The 9/11 Fund And The Minnesota I-35w Bridge-Collapse Fund: Creating A Template For Compensating Victims Of Future Mass-Tort Catastrophes, Michael K. Steenson

Faculty Scholarship

The purpose of this article is to analyze and compare the 9/11 Fund and the Minnesota bridge-collapse compensation scheme for purposes of illustrating the necessary components of any future compensation schemes legislatures consider adopting in cases involving other catastrophes. This article first sets out the primary issues that must be addressed when considering a compensation scheme. It then examines the choices made in the 9/11 Fund and Minnesota’s bridge-collapse compensation scheme. A brief comparison of the two compensation schemes follows to provide the framework for considering the components of future compensation schemes.

Faith And Politics In The Post-Secular Age: The Promise Of President Obama, Francis J. Mootz Iii

McGeorge School of Law Scholarly Articles

If the modern era is properly characterized as the 'age of secularism' - a time when constitutional democracies finally have shed the last vestiges of church authority from the political realm and embrace a rationalist and humanist perspective - then the United States appears to be outside the Western mainstream. In this paper I explore how the relationship between politics and religious faith in the United States might be seen as part of the narrative of secularism that defines most other Western countries, even as the differences in the American experience might suggest an evolution of this narrative. My thesis …

Chicago, Post-Chicago, And Neo-Chicago, Daniel A. Crane

Reviews

Of all of Chicago's law and economics conquests, antitrust was the most complete and resounding victory. Chicago, of course, is a synecdoche for ideological currents that swept through and from Hyde Park beginning in the 1950s and reached their peak in the 1970s and 1980s. From early roots in antitrust and economic regulation, the Chicago School branched outward, first to adjacent fields like securities regulation, corporate law, property, and contracts, and eventually to more distant horizons like sexuality and family law. Predictably, the Chicago School exerted its greatest influence in fields closely tied to commercial regulation. But never did Chicago …

The Number Of States And The Economics Of American Federalism, Steven G. Calabresi, Nicholas K. Terrell

Faculty Working Papers

In 1789 it was possible to speak of a federation of distinct States joined together for their mutual advantage, but today it is rather the Nation that is divided into subnational units. What caused this shift in focus from the States to the Federal Government? Surely the transformation from a collection of thirteen historically separate States clustered along the Atlantic seaboard to a group of fifty States largely carved out of Federal territory has played a role. Building on previous analysis of the economics of federalism, this essay considers the dynamic effects of increasing the number of states on the …

Original Intention And Public Meaning In Constitutional Interpretation, Richard Kay

Faculty Articles and Papers

In recent years academic explanations of the originalist approach to constitutional interpretation have shifted the relevant inquiry from the subjective intent of the constitution-makers to the original public meaning of the Constitution's words. This article is a critical analysis of that development. In the actual course of adjudication by honest and competent judges either method should usually yield the same result. The reliance on public meaning, however, distracts the interpreter from the connection between the normative force of the Constitution and the founding events, a link that is essential to the legitimacy of constitutional judicial review. In the hands of …

The Invention Of Legal Primitivism, Steven Wilf

Faculty Articles and Papers

This Article addresses a different sort of legal transplant - one in which outside legal doctrines are imported in order to be cabined, treated as normative counterpoints, and identified as the legal other. Legal primitivism is a kind of anti-transplant. It heightens the persistent differences between a dominant legal system and its understanding of primitive rules. An often ignored legal literature depicting legal primitivism emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century and in the early twentieth century. Mapping the differences between America’s modern legal system and its antecedents, this immense literature, which included works by Oliver Wendell Holmes, …