Law Commons^™

Criminalized Students, Reparations, And The Limits Of Prospective Reform, Amber Baylor

Faculty Scholarship

Recent reforms discourage schools from referring students to criminal law enforcement for typical disciplinary infractions. Though rightly celebrated, these reforms remain mere half-measures, as they emphasize prospective decriminalization of student conduct without grappling with the harm to generations of former students – disproportionately Black – who have been targeted by criminalizing policies of the past. Through the lens of reparations theory, this Article sets out the case for retroactive and reparations-based redress for the criminalization of students. Reparations models reposition moral norms. They acknowledge state harm, clarify the losses to criminalized students, allow for expansive forms of redress, and cast …

Mandatory Disclosure And Individual Investors: Evidence From The Jobs Act, Colleen Honisberg, Robert J. Jackson Jr., Yu-Ting Forester Wong

Faculty Scholarship

One prominent justification for the mandatory disclosure rules that define modem securities law is that these rules encourage individual investors to participate in stock markets. Mandatory disclosure, the theory goes, gives individual investors access to information that puts them on a more equal playing field with sophisticated institutional shareholders. Although this reasoning has long been cited by regulators and commentators as a basis for mandating disclosure, recent work has questioned its validity. In particular, recent studies contend that individual investors are overwhelmed by the amount of information required to be disclosed under current law, and thus they cannot and do …

Public Symbol In Private Contract: A Case Study, Anna Gelpern, Mitu Gulati

Center for Contract and Economic Organization

This Article revisits a recent shift in standard form sovereign bond contracts to promote collective action among creditors. Major press outlets welcomed the shift as a milestone in fighting financial crises that threatened the global economy. Officials said it was a triumph of market forces. We turned to it for insights into contract change and crisis management. This article is based on our work in the sovereign debt community, including over 100 interviews with investors, lawyers, economists, and government officials. Despite the publicity surrounding contract reform, in private few participants described the substantive change as an effective response to financial …

The Disputed Quality Of Software Patents, John R. Allison, Ronald J. Mann

Faculty Scholarship

We analyze the characteristics of the patents held by firms in the software industry. Unlike prior researchers, we rely on the examination of individual patents to determine which patents involve software inventions. This method of identifying the relevant patents is more laborious than the methods that previous scholars have used, but it produces a data set from which we can learn more about the role of patents in the software industry. In general, we find that patents the computer technology firms obtain on software inventions have more prior art references, claims, and forward citations than the patents that the same …

An Empirical Investigation Of Liquidation Choices Of Failed High Tech Firms, Ronald J. Mann

Faculty Scholarship

Perhaps it is merely a reflection of my interests, but to my mind, empirical research requires a certain risk-preferent boldness. I like projects that explore how and why particular businesses make important decisions. After I identify a topic, I typically try to gather as much qualitative and quantitative information about it as I can, with the expectation that when I have learned a great deal about the topic something interesting will emerge that relates in some important way to an ongoing academic debate. Those projects usually do not begin with a specific hypothesis to prove or disprove-often either answer will …

Misstatements Of Fact In Adam Vangrack's Student Note: A Letter To The Editors Of The Washington University Law Quarterly, Jeffery Fagan, James S. Liebman, Valerie West

Faculty Scholarship

The Quarterly's Fall 2001 issue published a Note reviewing our report, A Broken System: Error Rates in Capital Cases, 1973-1995. That Note has three inaccuracies that are so clear and frequently repeated, and are the result of such clear cite-checking lapses, that remedial steps are required. These matters do not involve differences of opinion, judgment, or interpretation between us and the Note's author. Matters of that sort are appropriately addressed in a response. All instead are misstatements of fact that result from the Quarterly's failure to fulfill its basic obligation to check the accuracy of verifiable factual statements it …

Vangrack's Explanations: Treating The Truth As A Mere Matter Of "Form", Jeffery Fagan, James S. Liebman, Valerie West

Faculty Scholarship

We welcome criticism by responsible scholars and readers, and the chance to address it in journals that enforce appropriate standards of accuracy and integrity. We have done just that in exchanges in Judicature and the Indiana Law Journal.

But the inaccuracies in Adam VanGrack's Note, and new problems with his present explanation, lead us to conclude that it is not useful to exchange views with him in the Washington University Law Quarterly. Beyond all is Mr. VanGrack's dismissal of matters serious enough to trigger an extraordinary instruction to explain himself in print, and to prompt him to rescind …

Japan's Experience With Deposit Insurance And Failing Banks: Implications For Financial Regulatory Design?, Curtis J. Milhaupt

Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines three decades of Japanese experience with deposit insurance andfailing banks, and analyzes the implications of that experience for bank safety net reform in other countries. To date, the literature and policy debate on deposit insurance have been heavily colored by U.S. banking history and have focused almost exclusively on explicit deposit protection schemes. Analysis of Japan's safety net experience suggests that (a) deposit insurance, for all its flaws, is superior to the real-world alternative-implicit government protection of depositors and discretionary regulatory intervention in bank distress, (b) a well-designed explicit deposit insurance system that includes a credible bank …

Corporate Governance And Economic Efficiency: When Do Institutions Matter?, Ronald J. Gilson

Faculty Scholarship

Until the 1980s, corporate governance was largely the province of lawyers. It was a world of specific rules – more or less precise statutory requirements governing shareholder meetings, the election of directors, notice requirements and the like – that were essentially unrelated to what corporations actually do. From this perspective, the corporation's productive activity was simply a black box onto which standard governance structures were superimposed with little effect on what took place within. Corporate law was "trivial" or, as Bayless Manning so evocatively portrayed it, simply "great empty corporation statutes – towering skyscrapers of rusted girders internally welded together …

F. Hodge O'Neal Corporate And Securities Law Symposium: Path Dependence And Comparative Corporate Governance, Ronald J. Mann, Curtis J. Milhaupt

Faculty Scholarship

The study of institutions, and particularly the study of institutions that societies use to govern business enterprises, is at a point of transition. In the last two or three decades, scholars focusing on economic principles to define appropriate legal rules and corporate institutions rose up to challenge the traditional orthodoxy of corporate governance found in the Berle and Means corporation.

One of the most exciting trends in the literature rests upon the "increasing marginal returns" school of economics associated with Brian Arthur and the Santa Fe Institute. The traditional neoclassical economic theory of production, familiar from decades of undergraduate and …

Textualism And The Future Of The Chevron Doctrine, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

The last decade has been a remarkable one for statutory interpretation. For most of our history, American judges have been pragmatists when it comes to interpreting statutes. They have drawn on various conventions – the plain meaning rule, legislative history, considerations of statutory purpose, canons of construction – "much as a golfer selects the proper club when he gauges the distance to the pin and the contours of the course." The arrival of Justice Scalia on the Supreme Court has changed this. Justice Scalia is a foundationalist, insisting that certain interpretational tools should be permanently banned from judicial use. What …

For Mert Bernstein, Inventor Of A Field, Lance Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

Life brings odd cycles and conjunctions.

More than twenty years ago, as a brand new law teacher, I was assigned by Dean Derek Bok to teach "urban law." I said, "Derek, what is that?" He said: "You have been Assistant to Mayor Lindsay of New York for two years. You figure it out."

Time, Property Rights, And The Common Law, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

The fee simple is often defined as an estate or interest of "potentially infinite duration." This way of speaking suggests that property rights are fixed and permanent – indeed, that they last forever. Similarly, property rights are regarded in classical liberal thought as sources of stability and security that foster individual autonomy and protect owners against the vicissitudes of life. This too suggests that property rights are not contingent upon a particular temporal context, but rather are impervious to the passage of time.

When we look at the common law, however, we quickly discover a much more complex relationship between …