Law Commons^™

Too Close To The Rack And The Screw: Constitutional Constraints On Torture In The War On Terror, Seth F. Kreimer

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law

No abstract provided.

Building Sector-Based Consensus: A Review Of The Epa's Common Sense Initiative, Cary Coglianese, Laurie K. Allen

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law

In the late 1990s, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) conducted what the agency considered to be a "bold experiment" in regulatory reinvention, bringing representatives from six industrial sectors together with government officials and NGO representatives to forge a consensus on innovations in public policy and business practices. This paper assesses the impact of the agency's "experiment" - called the Common Sense Initiative (CSI) - in terms of the agency's goals of improving regulatory performance and technological innovation. Based on a review of CSI projects across all six sectors, the paper shows how EPA achieved, at best, quite modest ...

“Black People’S Money”: The Impact Of Law, Economics, And Culture In The Context Of Race On Damage Recoveries, Regina Austin

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law

“’Black People’s Money’: The Impact of Law, Economics, and Culture in the Context of Race on Damage Recoveries” is one of a series of articles by the author dealing with black economic marginalization; prior work considered such topics as shopping and selling as forms of deviance, street vending, restraints on leisure, and the importance of informality in loan transactions. This article deals with the linkage between the social significance of black people’s money and its material value. It analyzes the construction of “black money,” its association with cash, and the taboos and cultural practices that assure that black ...

The Effect Of Abortion Legalization On Sexual Behavior: Evidence From Sexually Transmitted Diseases, Jonathan Klick, Thomas Stratmann

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law

Unwanted pregnancy represents a major cost of sexual activity. When abortion was legalized in a number of states in 1969 and 1970 (and nationally in 1973), this cost was reduced. We predict that abortion legalization generated incentives leading to an increase in sexual activity, accompanied by an increase in sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). Using Centers for Disease Control data on the incidence of gonorrhea and syphilis by state, we test the hypothesis that abortion legalization led to an increase in sexually transmitted diseases. We find that gonorrhea and syphilis incidences are significantly and positively correlated with abortion legalization. Further, we ...

Judging Unions' Future Using A Historical Perspective: The Public Policy Choice Between Competition And Unionization, Michael L. Wachter

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law

In this paper I look at unions' future using a historical perspective and focusing on the period of union ascendancy as well as the past few decades when unions have been in decline. We know trends currently in place are unfavorable to unions. What conditions would be favorable? The rise of unions from the 1930s through the early 1950s was due to the convergence of a number of events - an economic policy that attempted to restrict competition beginning in the 1930s, the twin beliefs that labor markets were inherently noncompetitive and/or that individual workplaces were exploitative, and low union ...

Taxing Sunny Days: Adjusting Taxes For Regional Living Costs And Amenities, Michael S. Knoll, Thomas D. Griffith

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law

No abstract provided.

Getting Off The Dole: Why The Court Should Abandon Its Spending Doctrine And How A Too-Clever Congress Could Provoke It To Do So, Mitchell N. Berman

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law

No abstract provided.

Immigration And The Workplace: Immigration Restrictions As Employment Discrimination, Howard F. Chang

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law

No abstract provided.

Harm, History, And Counterfactuals, Stephen R. Perry

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law

No abstract provided.

The Bush Administration's Response To The International Criminal Court, Jean Galbraith

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law

No abstract provided.

What Do We Mean By "Judicial Independence"?, Stephen B. Burbank

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law

In this article, the author argues that the concept of "judicial independence" has served more as an object of rhetoric than it has of sustained study. He views the scholarly literatures that treat it as ships passing in the night, each subject to weaknesses that reflect the needs and fashions of the discipline, but all tending to ignore courts other than the Supreme Court of the United States. Seeking both greater rigor and greater flexibility than one usually finds in public policy debates about, and in the legal and political science literatures on, judicial independence, the author attributes much of ...

The "Public Menace" Of Blight: Urban Renewal And The Private Uses Of Eminent Domain, Wendell E. Pritchett

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law

No abstract provided.

Justification And Excuse, Law And Morality, Mitchell N. Berman

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law

Anglo-American theorists of the criminal law have concentrated on-one is tempted to say "obsessed over"-the distinction between justification and excuse for a good quarter-century and the scholarly attention has purchased unusually widespread agreement. Justification defenses are said to apply when the actor's conduct was not morally wrongful; excuse defenses lie when the actor did engage in wrongful conduct but is not morally blameworthy. A near consensus thus achieved, theorists have turned to subordinate matters, joining issue most notably on the question of whether justifications are "subjective"-turning upon the actor's reasons for acting-or "objective"-involving only facts ...

No Other Gods: Answering The Call Of Faith In The Practice Of Law, Howard Lesnick

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law

No abstract provided.

Preferences And Rational Choice: Introduction, Claire Oakes Finkelstein, Matthew D. Adler, Peter H. Huang

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law

No abstract provided.

Bringing Moral Values Into A Flawed Plea Bargaining System, Stephanos Bibas

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law

No abstract provided.

The Rise And Demise Of The Technology-Specific Approach To The First Amendment, Christopher S. Yoo

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law

No abstract provided.

New Models Of Regulation And Interagency Governance, Christopher S. Yoo

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law

No abstract provided.

Access To Networks: Economic And Constitutional Connections, Daniel F. Spulber, Christopher S. Yoo

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law

No abstract provided.

The Role Of Deterrence In The Formulation Of Criminal Law Rules: At Its Worst When Doing Its Best, Paul H. Robinson

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law

For the past several decades, the deterrence of crime has been a centerpiece of criminal law reform. Law-givers have sought to optimize the control of crime by devising a penalty-setting system that assigns criminal punishments of a magnitude sufficient to deter a thinking individual from committing a crime. Although this seems initially an intuitively compelling strategy, we are going to suggest that is a poor one; poor for two reasons. First, its effectiveness rests on a set of assumptions that on examination cannot be sustained. Second, the attempt to employ the strategy generates a good many crimogenic costs that are ...

Regionalization Of International Criminal Law Enforcement: A Preliminary Exploration, William W. Burke-White

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law

No abstract provided.

Shareholder Value And Auditor Independence, William W. Bratton

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law

This Article questions the practice of framing problems concerning auditors’ professional responsibility inside a principal-agent paradigm. If professional independence is to be achieved, auditors cannot be enmeshed in agency relationships with the shareholders of their audit clients. As agents, the auditors by definition become subject to the principal’s control and cannot act independently. For the same reason, auditors’ duties should be neither articulated in the framework of corporate law fiduciary duty, nor conceived relationally at all. These assertions follow from an inquiry into the operative notion of the shareholder-beneficiary. The Article unpacks the notion of the shareholder and tells ...

The Real-World Shift In Criminal Procedure, Stephanos Bibas

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law

No abstract provided.

The Implications Of Transition Theory For Stare Decisis, Jill E. Fisch

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law

No abstract provided.

Child Welfare And Civil Rights, Dorothy E. Roberts

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law

No abstract provided.

Where Shall We Live? Class And The Limitations Of Fair Housing Law, Wendell Pritchett

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law

This paper examines the effort to secure fair housing laws at the local, state and federal levels in the 1950s, focusing in particular on New York City and state. It will examine the arguments that advocates made regarding the role the law should play in preventing housing discrimination, and the relationship of these views to advocates' understanding of property rights in general. My paper will argue that fair housing advocates had particular conceptions about the importance of housing in American society that both supported and limited their success. By arguing that minorities only sought what others wanted - a single-family home ...

Converted Or Unconverted: To Whom Do We Preach?, Amy L. Wax

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law

No abstract provided.

Apprendi In The States: The Virtues Of Federalism As A Structural Limit On Errors, Stephanos Bibas

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law

No abstract provided.

Rethinking The Commitment To Free, Local Television, Christopher S. Yoo

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law

No abstract provided.

Is There A Role For Lawyers In Preventing Future Enrons?, Jill E. Fisch, Kenneth M. Rosen

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law

Following the collapse of the Enron Corporation, the ethical obligations of corporate attorneys have received increased scrutiny. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, enacted in response to calls for corporate reform, specifically requires the Securities and Exchange Commission to address the lawyer’s role by requiring covered attorneys to “report up” evidence of corporate wrongdoing to key corporate officers, and, in some circumstances, to the board of directors. Failure to “report up” subjects a lawyer to liability under federal law.

This Article argues that the reporting up requirement reflects a second-best approach to corporate governance reform. Rather than focusing on the ...