Law Commons^™

Race, Gender, And Sexual Harassment, Kimberlé W. Crenshaw

Faculty Scholarship

I would like to thank Anita Hill and express my deep respect to her for having the courage to shatter the silence on sexual harassment. I am certain that I speak for millions of women in saying that I have been inspired and renewed by her strength and integrity.

I have looked forward to addressing you tonight on a critical issue at this very important juncture in our political history. Sexual harassment has captured our attention over the last several weeks and has of course galvanized women in a way that scarcely could have been imagined only a few short …

The Relevance Of Coherence, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

Coherence is in vogue. Coherence accounts of truth and of knowledge have been in contention for many years. Coherence explanations of morality and of law are a newer breed. I suspect that like so much else in practical philosophy today they owe much of their popularity to John Rawls. His writings on reflective equilibrium, while designed as part of a philosophical strategy which suspends inquiry into the fundamental questions of moral philosophy, had the opposite effect. They inspired much constructive reflection about these questions, largely veering toward coherence as the right interpretation both of reflective equilibrium and of moral philosophy. …

The Ethics Of Criminal Defense, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

A large literature has emerged in recent years challenging the standard conception of adversary advocacy that justifies the lawyer in doing anything arguably legal to advance the client's ends. This literature has proposed variations on an ethic that would increase the lawyer's responsibilities to third parties, the public, and substantive ideals of legal merit and justice.

With striking consistency, this literature exempts criminal defense from its critique and concedes that the standard adversary ethic may be viable there. This paper criticizes that concession. I argue that the reasons most commonly given to distinguish the criminal from the civil do not …

Minor Changes: Emancipating Children In Modern Times, Carol Sanger, Eleanor Willemsen

Faculty Scholarship

Parents and their teenage children don't always get along. At some time during adolescent development, parents may turn into embarrassments and teenagers into domestic terrorists. For most families this is a phase. Adolescence is endured, the child accomplishes some degree of separation from parents, and the transition to adulthood advances.

In some families, however, the period is more like a siege than a phase. Conflict may last longer and be more strifeful, more intense. If the family is incapable or unwilling to resolve the tensions, an intractability may set in. In these cases, domestic tranquility seems attainable only when the …

Benign Restraint: The Sec's Regulation Of Execution Systems, David M. Schizer

Faculty Scholarship

To the handful of traders who founded the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in 1792 – and perhaps even to the securities traders of the 1960's – today's securities markets would be virtually unrecognizable. New communications and data processing technologies, the globalization of investment portfolios, and a surge in trading volume have created new needs and possibilities. As a result, revolutionary advances have occurred in the design and performance of execution systems: the technologies (computers, telephones, modems) and formats (auction-based stock exchanges, dealer-based "over-the-counter" markets, computerized single price auctions) that traders use to conduct trades. These advances enable trades on …

Beyond The Privacy Principle, Kendall Thomas

Faculty Scholarship

In Bowers v. Hardwick, the U.S. Supreme Court was asked to ad-dress the constitutionality of a Georgia criminal statute prohibiting certain private sexual practices by consenting adults. The Georgia citizens who brought the suit sought a judgment regarding the constitutionality of the statute on its face, but the Court resolutely avoided consideration of that issue. The Court took the view that the only federal question properly before it was the constitutional validity of the law as applied to private, sexual activity by consenting adults of the same gender, or what it called "homosexual sodomy." Having thus limited the scope …

M Is For The Many Things, Carol Sanger

Faculty Scholarship

People have gotten quite a few things about mothers and motherhood wrong over the last 700 or so years. Educators, historians, jurists, philosophers, physicians, social workers, and theologians have been telling us what mothers are like: what they need, how they feel, what pleases them, how and how well they think. Mothers didn't love their children in the fifteenth century and loved them too much in the 1950s. Black mothers felt no pain in childbirth, and white mothers felt no pleasure in intercourse. The obligations of motherhood, physical and social, have been used to explain why women should not work, …

The Reasonable Woman And The Ordinary Man, Carol Sanger

Faculty Scholarship

Nineteen ninety-one was a seismic year for sexual harassment. The first localized shift occurred in January, when the Ninth Circuit established that the standard by which sexual harassment in the workplace would be judged was no longer the reasonable man or even the reasonable person but rather the reasonable woman. In October a larger audience felt a much stronger jolt when Anita Hill spoke before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Hill testified that Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her while she worked for him at the Department of Education and at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Her testimony …

Surveillance Schemes: The Gatt's New Trade Policy Review Mechanism, Petros C. Mavroidis

Faculty Scholarship

In 1986 the Contracting Parties to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) launched the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations, the most ambitious round of trade negotiations to date. The Contracting Parties to the GATT agreed in the Punta Del Este Declaration to introduce into the GATT system three new sectors for negotiation: services, trade-related intellectual property rights (TRIPs), and trade-related investment measures (TRIMs). In addition, for the first time in GATT history, the Contracting Parties agreed to devote a negotiating group exclusively to negotiating the tricky aspects of international trade in agricultural products. Another goal of the …

Foreword, Lee C. Bollinger

Faculty Scholarship

The mass media are too important to American democracy, too capable of causing injury, and too easy a target for the perennial wish to find a scapegoat for the country's ills ever to be very far from the center of public attention and debate. That is certainly true today. And, though every generation probably thinks that it stands at a crossroads on the question what to do with the media, I would nevertheless venture to say that the issues of our time are more serious, and more complex, than ever before. One can safely predict, in any event, that we …

The Individualized-Consideration Principle And The Death Penalty As Cruel And Unusual Punishment, Ronald J. Mann

Faculty Scholarship

The Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits infliction of "cruel and unusual punishments." The Supreme Court established the basic principles applying this amendment to the death penalty during a six-year period in the 1970's. First, in 1972, in Furman v. Georgia, the Court invalidated all then-existing death penalty statutes. Second, in 1976, in Gregg v. Georgia and its companions, the Court upheld some of the statutes promulgated in response to Furman but invalidated others. Finally, in 1978, in Lockett v. Ohio, the Court invalidated an Ohio statute because it failed to give the sentencer a sufficient …

The Role Of Institutional Factors In Protecting Individual Liberties, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

Questions about the efficacy of the Bill of Rights cry out for serious comparative legal scholarship. Robert Ellickson and Frank Easterbrook suggest that one might approach these questions by looking at different state constitutions. One might also look more seriously at the different constitutional regimes around the world, and try to draw some judgments about what impact, if any, different types of constitutional arrangements have on individual rights. We have heard expressions of skepticism about this approach, but there has been very little serious comparative scholarship by constitutional law scholars in this country. The scholarly tradition in America has been …

Revisiting Overton Park: Political And Judicial Controls Over Administrative Actions Affecting The Community, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

Overton Park is a 342-acre municipal park lying close to downtown Memphis, Tennessee, in one of that city's better residential areas. Citizens to Preserve Overton Park, Inc. v. Volpe is a Supreme Court decision frequently cited for its general propositions about judicial review of informal administrative action that, to the citizens of Memphis, was one way-station in a more than two-decade struggle concerning whether and where an inner-city expressway, part of Interstate 40, would be built. Overall, the story of that struggle reveals a complex brew of national and local politics about the marriage of highway convenience to urban amenity; …

Judgment And Reasoning In Adolescent Decisionmaking, Elizabeth S. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

Few people believe that five year olds and fifteen year olds think, act or make decisions in the same way. The question is whether and how the law should respond to developmental differences. Traditionally, childhood and adulthood have been two dichotomous legal categories, demarcated by the age of majority. This conception has been contested in recent years, as has the premise that all minors are incompetent to make decisions and function as legal actors. Fueled by the controversy over adolescent access to abortion, an advocacy movement has emerged that challenges the authority of parents and the state over the lives …

The Constitutional Principle Of Separation Of Powers, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court has had many occasions in recent years to consider what it calls "the constitutional principle of separation of powers." The principle in question has been effusively praised and on occasion vigorously enforced. But just what is it? The Court clearly believes that the Constitution contains an organizing principle that is more than the sum of the specific clauses that govern relations among the branches. Yet notwithstanding the many testimonials to the importance of the principle, its content remains remarkably elusive.

The central problem, as many have observed, is that the Court has employed two very different conceptions …

Rouge Et Noir Reread: A Popular Constitutional History Of The Angelo Herndon Case, Kendall Thomas

Faculty Scholarship

In 1932, Eugene Angelo Braxton Hemdon, a young Afro-American member of the Communist Party, U.S.A., was arrested in Atlanta and charged with an attempt to incite insurrection against that state's lawful authority. Some five years later, in Herndon v. Lowry, Herndon filed a writ of habeas corpus asking the U.S. Supreme Court to consider the constitutionality of the Georgia statute under which he had been convicted. Two weeks before his twenty-fourth birthday, the Court, voting 5-4, declared the use of the Georgia political-crimes statute against him unconstitutional on the grounds that it deprived Herndon of his rights to freedom …

Computer Programs In Europe: A Comparative Analysis Of The 1991 Ec Software Directive, Jerome Huet, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

Long awaited – if not feared – in the computer industry, where its elaboration had evoked heated debate, the European Council Directive of May 14, 1991 on the Legal Protection of Computer Programs (the "Directive" or "Software Directive")has imposed common principles of copyright protection on the twelve Member States of the European Community (the "EC", the "Community"). As it declares in its preamble, the Directive responds to the need to ensure the proper functioning of a single marketand, to that end, to eliminate man), of the current differences among the Member States' legal systems.

In the domain of European copyright …

Voting Rights, Home Rule, And Metropolitan Governance: The Secession Of Staten Island As A Case Study In The Dilemmas Of Local Self-Determination, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

On January 1, 1898, amid fanfare and celebration, the city of Greater New York – "the greatest experiment in municipal government the world has ever known" – was born. The consolidation of the cities, counties, and towns on the New York State side of New York Harbor into one great metropolis was a capstone to one century of rapid economic and population growth and a fitting harbinger of a new century of urban greatness for the region and, indeed, the nation. Now, with another century mark approaching, there is a distinct possibility that the City of New York, already beset …

Corporate Law: What Is The Impact Of New Ali Proposals On Shareholder Litigation, John C. Coffee Jr., Michael P. Dooley

Faculty Scholarship

When the American Law Institute's Corporate Governance Project meets this month, one of the most hotly debated agenda items is likely to be its new rules governing shareholder litigation, which are now up for final approval.

The proposed change means that corporate boards will now have to prove in court that a decision to dismiss a shareholder claim alleging self-dealing was in the corporation's best interest. In addition, the requirement for a formal "demand" on the board by shareholders will be uniform, rather than subject to excuse, as it is under Delaware law and in the majority of states.

Drafters …

Cleaning House: Environmental Hazards Can Undermine A Property's Use And Value, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

Numerous horror movies and books depict the woes that befall fictional homeowners who don't know or care that they are living too close to cemeteries or brooding woods or scenes of hauntings.

However, even the vivid imaginations of filmmakers and novelists can't conjure up some of the real-life horrors that environmental hazards can create for property owners. These hazards can destroy the value and salability of property, render it unusable for its intended purpose, and burden owners with clean-up costs, fines and lawsuits.

Fortunately, an alert eye and inexpensive tests can identify most common environmental dangers.

Zero-Sum Madison, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

Has the fabric of American constitutional law been permanently "distorted" by the Framers' preoccupation with protecting private property against redistribution? Jennifer Nedelsky thinks so. In this provocative study of how the idea of property shaped the political thought of the Framers and the institutions they designed, she argues that James Madison's constitutional philosophy was driven by fear that a future propertyless majority would seek to expropriate the holdings of a minority. To combat this danger, Madison sought to create a structure of government that would ensure the dominance of the propertied elite. Madison's obsessive fear of redistribution spread to the …

A Reply: Imperfect Bargains, Imperfect Trials, And Innocent Defendants, Robert E. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

To understand what is and is not wrong with plea bargaining, one must understand the relationship of bargains to trials. Unsurprisingly, we disagree with much of what Judge Frank Easterbrook and Professor Stephen Schulhofer say about that relationship. Most of those disagreements need not be rehearsed here; readers attentive enough to wade through their essays and ours will pick up the key points readily enough. But there is one point where the dispute is at once sharp and hidden. It has to do with the fact that both trials and bargains are flawed.

That fact might seem obvious, but the …

Getting It Right, Robert E. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

Writing a tribute for any beloved colleague who is retiring is a difficult experience. Writing about Tom Bergin, who is retiring after twenty-nine years at the Law School, is an even greater challenge. The challenge stems from Tom's legacy to his students and to his colleagues at the Law School; both the challenge and the legacy require some explanation.

Plea-Bargaining As A Social Contract, Robert E. Scott, William J. Stuntz

Faculty Scholarship

Most criminal prosecutions are settled without a trial. The parties to these settlements trade various risks and entitlements: the defendant relinquishes the right to go to trial (along with any chance of acquittal), while the prosecutor gives up the entitlement to seek the highest sentence or pursue the most serious charges possible. The resulting bargains differ predictably from what would have happened had the same cases been taken to trial. Defendants who bargain for a plea serve lower sentences than those who do not. On the other hand, everyone who pleads guilty is, by definition, convicted, while a substantial minority …

Pluralism, Paternal Preference, And Child Custody, Elizabeth S. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

Modern child custody law faces an important challenge in responding to pluralistic and evolving gender and parenting roles. Professor Scott finds rules favoring maternal custody, joint custody, and the best interests of the child wanting; she argues that the optimal response to the current pluralism in family structure is a rule that seeks to replicate past parental roles. This "approximation" standard promotes continuity and stability for children. It encourages cooperative rather than conflictual resolution of custody, thereby ameliorating the destructive effects of bargaining at divorce. It also recognizes and reinforces role change in individual families, encouraging both parents to invest …

Judicial Deference To Executive Precedent, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

In 1984, the Supreme Court adopted a new framework for determining when courts should defer to interpretations of statutes by administrative agencies. Previous decisions had looked to multiple contextual factors in answering this question. Chevron U.S., Inc. v. National Resources Defense Council, Inc. appeared to reject this approach and require that federal courts defer to any reasonable interpretation by an agency charged with administration of a statute, provided Congress has not clearly specified a contrary answer. The Court justified this new general rule of deference by positing that Congress has implicitly delegated interpretative authority to all agencies charged with enforcing …

The Rulemaking Continuum, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

The two papers we have before us tell both descriptive and normative stories about current issues of rulemaking. Each suggests, in its field of attention, pressures that operate to increase proceduralization and agency responses to those pressures, as well as an attitude toward these developments. In rulemaking, as in other activities, discretion and order are in constant tension; one might find in that tension the very engine that makes the processes of public law go. Like the studies that assisted the move away from formal rulemaking, and the perceptions underlying the Supreme Court's Vermont Yankee decision, which quieted the judicial …

No "Sweat"? Copyright And Other Protection Of Works Of Information After Feist V. Rural Telephone, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court's unanimous decision last Term in Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co. proscribed copyright protection for works of information that fail to manifest a modicum of creative originality in selection or arrangement. Discarding a long – if lately uneasy – tradition of U.S. copyright coverage of informational works that display far greater industriousness than imagination, the Court ruled that copyright does not secure the "sweat of the brow" or the investment of resources in the compilation of a work of information. The Court thus stripped away or sharply reduced the copyright protection afforded a variety …

Paradigms Lost: The Blurring Of The Criminal And Civil Law Models – And What Can Be Done About It, John C. Coffee Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

Ken Mann's professed goal is to "shrink" the criminal law. To realize this worthy end, he advocates punitive civil sanctions that would largely parallel criminal sanctions, thereby reducing the need to use criminal law in order to achieve punitive purposes. I agree (heartily) with the end he seeks and even more with his general precept that "the criminal law should be reserved for the most damaging wrongs and the most culpable defendants." But I believe that the means he proposes would be counterproductive – and would probably expand, rather than contract, the operative scope of the criminal law as an …

Reproduction Of Protected Works For University Research Or Teaching, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

The new means of reproduction for teaching and research – photocopying, downloading, optical scanning – present special challenges to intellectual property teachers. As researchers and educators, we may rejoice at the vastly enhanced access these technologies afford to an enormous, and ever-growing, diversity of materials. The convenience of the photocopier is well-known. Digital media will accelerate production and dissemination of copies. Not only will computers, scanners and facsimile machines make it easier and faster to copy, but they will facilitate the dispersal of copies to all points of the globe.

As scholars of intellectual property, we may be concerned about …