Law Commons^™

Why Autonomy Must Be Contract's Ultimate Value, Hanoch Dagan, Michael A. Heller

Faculty Scholarship

In “The Choice Theory of Contracts”, we develop a liberal theory of contract law. One core task of the book was to persuade advocates of economic analysis that they must situate their enterprise within our liberal framework. Autonomy, rightly understood, is the telos of contract.

Oren Bar-Gill pushes back strongly in “Choice Theory and the Economic Analysis of Contracts”. He offers a penetrating – perhaps devastating – critique of our approach. Bar-Gill notes the substantial convergence between choice theory and a welfarist view. If he is right, then what does choice theory add?

Our task in Part I of this …

The Democratic Deficit, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

Why democracy? Institutions of government and others must meet conditions of legitimacy. Why? and what are they? what are principles of legitimacy, like the principle of subsidiarity? and how does democracy fit in a theory of legitimacy? The paper surveys what it takes to be the seven most important advantages of democratic government: civil and political rights, more extensive opportunities for people to engage in public affairs, responsiveness to the expressed preferences of the people, stability, peaceful transfer of power, loyalty and solidarity. It then considers the role of legitimation in securing these advantages. These reflection lead to the question …

Consequential Damages And Exclusion Clauses, Victor P. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

Contracts often include language excluding compensation for consequential damages. However, the boundary between consequential and direct damages is a blurry one. Courts have used concepts like foreseeability, natural result of the breach, and collateral business in their attempts to define the boundary. Those categories, I argue, are not particularly helpful. I consider three classes of cases: wrongful termination, delay, and breach of warranty. This paper argues that lost profits, when referring to the change in value of the contract after a wrongful termination would be direct damages; the hard case involves terminated dealers who had been paid indirectly for retailing …

Competition Law Gone Global: Introducing The Comparative Competition Law And Enforcement Datasets, Anu Bradford, Adam S. Chilton, Chris Megaw, Nathaniel Sokol

Faculty Scholarship

Competition law has proliferated around the world. Due to data limitations, however, there is little systematic information about the substance and enforcement of these laws. In this paper, we address that problem by introducing two new datasets on competition law regimes around the world. First, we introduce the Comparative Competition Law Dataset, which codes competition laws in 130 jurisdictions between 1889 to 2010. Second, we introduce the Comparative Competition Enforcement Dataset, which provides data on competition agencies’ resources and activities in 100 jurisdictions between 1990 and 2010. These datasets offer the most comprehensive picture of competition law yet assembled and …

Things Have Changed (Or Have They?): Tariff Protection And Environmental Concerns In The Wto, Petros C. Mavroidis, Damien J. Neven

Faculty Scholarship

This paper considers the APEC and proposed EGA agreements which grant tariff concession in favor of "green" goods. We find that the practical significance of the APEC agreement should not be overestimated as it involves modest tariff concessions over a subset of goods which are not heavily traded. Still, these agreements involve a paradigm shift to the extent that they use tariffs concessions negotiated on a plurilateral basis as a policy instrument to meet public policy concern, instead of making market access conditional on meeting national regulations. We model the mechanism through which these tariff preferences provide incentives to change …

All Quiet In The Western (European Football) Front: Regulation Of Football In The European Continent, Petros C. Mavroidis

Faculty Scholarship

Regulation of football in Europe is, absent some piecemeal interventions (like sharing of TV rights) largely non-existent. This is the case, because the de facto regulator (UEFA, Union Européenne of Football Associations) has no mandate to comprehensively address on its own competitive balance, the focal point of football, and, in more general terms, sports regulation. Various aspects of competitive balance are part and parcel of antitrust law. European Union (EU) law thus, comes into the frame, since this is the body of law regulating antitrust in the European continent. The European Union, nevertheless, has no mandate to regulate football comprehensively, …

Critique & Praxis: A Pure Theory Of Illusions, Values, And Tactics, And An Answer To The Question: "What Is To Be Done?", Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

We are going through an unprecedented period of political instability. With the rise of the alt-right and of xenophobic sentiment, and the fallout of neoliberal government policies, our political future is at stake. These times call for the type of critical theory and praxis that gave rise to the Frankfurt School in the 1920s and to the critical ferment of the 1970s. Yet, in the face of our crises today, contemporary critical theory seems disarmed.

Critical theory is in disarray because of a wave of anti-foundational challenges in the 1960s that shattered the epistemological foundations of the Frankfurt School. The …

Do The Ends Justify The Means? Policing And Rights Tradeoffs In New York City, Amanda Geller, Jeffrey Fagan, Tom R. Tyler

Faculty Scholarship

Policing has become an integral component of urban life. New models of proactive policing create a double-edged sword for communities with strong police presence. While the new policing creates conditions that may deter and prevent crime, close surveillance and frequent intrusive police-citizen contacts have strained police-community relations. The burdens of the new policing often fall on communities with high proportions of African American and Latino residents, yet the returns to crime control are small and the risks of intrusive, impersonal, aggressive non-productive interactions are high. As part of the proffered tradeoff, citizens are often asked to view and accept these …

The Origins Of A Capital Market Union In The United States, Jeffrey N. Gordon, Kathryn Judge

Faculty Scholarship

EU policy-makers have focused on the creation of a “Capital Market Union” to advance the economic vitality of the EU in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-09 and the Eurozone crisis of 2011-13. The hope is that EU-wide capital markets will help remedy the limitations in the EU’s pattern of bank-centered finance, which, despite the launch of the Banking Union, remains tied to Member States. Capital market development will provide alternative channels for finance, which will facilitate greater resiliency, more economic integration within the EU, and more choices for savers and firms. This chapter uses the origins …

Introduction: Troubling Transparency, David E. Pozen, Michael Schudson

Faculty Scholarship

Transparency is a value in the ascendance. Across the globe, the past several decades have witnessed a spectacular explosion of legislative reforms and judicial decisions calling for greater disclosure about the workings of public institutions. Freedom of information laws have proliferated, claims of a constitutional or supra-constitutional "right to know" have become commonplace, and an international transparency lobby has emerged as a civil society powerhouse. Open government is seen today in many quarters as a foundation of, if not synonymous with, good government.

At the same time, a growing number of scholars, advocates, and regulators have begun to raise hard …

The American Express Opinion, Tech Platforms & The Rule Of Reason, Tim Wu

Faculty Scholarship

This paper makes two points. First, it describes the opinion as creating a mirror-image of the "per se" rulings, this time favoring defendants instead of plaintiffs. Second, however, it points out the narrowness of the decision. If the American Express opinion had created rules for all two-sided platforms it would have fundamentally changed much of antitrust law, by reaching so much of American commerce. For the concept of a two-sided platform is open-ended enough to conceivably describe businesses as diverse as malls, sports leagues, real estate agents, stock exchanges, and most tech platforms. However, the American Express opinion is narrower …

Last Mile For Tuna (To A Safe Harbor): What Is The Tbt Agreement All About?, Petros C. Mavroidis

Faculty Scholarship

The WTO Agreement on TBT (Technical Barriers to Trade) aims at taming NTBs (nontariff barriers), the main instrument segmenting markets nowadays. Some of the terms used to flesh out the commitments undertaken are borrowed from the GATT, and some originate in the modern regulatory reality as expressed through SDOs (standard-development organizations). It does not share a copy-cat function with the GATT, though. Alas, the WTO Appellate Body, by understanding words as ‘invariances’, e.g., interpreting them out of context (without asking what is the purpose for the TBT?), has not only exported its GATT case law, but also misapplied it into …

Identity And Social Bonds, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

I first argue that there is no problem about how to justify partialities (though there is a difficulty in justifying impartialities). Then I consider the role of consent in justifying rights and duties, using voluntary associations as a case in which consent has an important but limited role in doing so, a role determined and circumscribed by evaluative considerations. The values explain why consent can bind and bind one to act as one does not wish to do and even as one judges to be ill advised. That opens the way to an explanation of how value considerations relate to …

The “Protection Of The Competitive Process” Standard, Tim Wu

Faculty Scholarship

The antitrust law should return to a standard more realistic and suited to the legal system – the “protection of the competitive process.” It posits a basic question for law enforcement and judges. Given complained-of conduct, is that conduct actually part of the competitive process, or is it a sufficient deviation as to be unlawful? In this view, antitrust law aims to create a body of common-law rules that punish and therefore deter such disruptions – hence “protecting the competitive process.”

The Middleman’S Damages Revisited, Victor P. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

If A promises to sell to B who, in turn, promises to sell to C and either A or C breaches should B receive the gain it expected had both transactions occurred (lost profits) or the larger market/contract differential? Recent case law and commentary argues for the lost profit remedy. The argument is that there is a conflict between awarding market damages and making the nonbreacher whole. This paper argues that there is no conflict. If B were a broker, and C breached, then A would have an action against C for market damages. If B were party to the …

Measuring Scholarly Impact: A Guide For Law School Administrators And Legal Scholars, Gary M. Lucas Jr

Gary M. Lucas Jr.

The author intends for this Essay to serve as a guide for law deans and legal scholars interested in measuring the impact of legal scholarship. In addition, university administrators should find it helpful for comparing the impact of their own law faculty’s scholarship with the scholarship of law faculties at other universities. The primary obstacle to such comparisons is a dearth of publicly available information. To that end, the Essay recommends that each law school create a Google Scholar profile for its faculty and explains the procedures for doing so. By acting on this recommendation, administrators would dramatically improve our …

Measuring Scholarly Impact: A Guide For Law School Administrators And Legal Scholars, Gary M. Lucas Jr

Faculty Scholarship

The author intends for this Essay to serve as a guide for law deans and legal scholars interested in measuring the impact of legal scholarship. In addition, university administrators should find it helpful for comparing the impact of their own law faculty’s scholarship with the scholarship of law faculties at other universities. The primary obstacle to such comparisons is a dearth of publicly available information. To that end, the Essay recommends that each law school create a Google Scholar profile for its faculty and explains the procedures for doing so. By acting on this recommendation, administrators would dramatically improve our …

The Future Of State Sovereignty, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

Advances in the legalisation of international relations, and the growing number of international organisations raise the question whether state sovereignty had its day. The paper defines sovereignty in a way that allows for degrees of sovereignty. Its analysis assumes that while sovereignty has become more limited, a trend which may continue, there is no sign that it is likely to disappear. The paper offers thoughts towards a normative analysis of these developments and the prospects they offer. Advocates of progress towards world government, while wise to many of current defects, are blind to the evils that a world government will …

The Agency Costs Of Activism: Information Leakage, Thwarted Majorities, And The Public Morality, John C. Coffee Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

Few doubt that hedge fund activism has radically changed corporate governance in the United States – for better or for worse. Proponents see activists as desirable agents of change who intentionally invest in underperforming companies to organize more passive shareholders to support their proposals to change the target’s business model and/or management. So viewed, the process is fundamentally democratic, with institutional shareholders determining whether or not to support the activist’s proposals.

Skeptics respond that things do not work this simply. Actual proxy contests are few, and most activist engagements are resolved through private settlement negotiations between the activists, who rarely …

Race And The New Policing, Jeffrey Fagan

Faculty Scholarship

Several observers credit nearly 25 years of declining crime rates to the “New Policing” and its emphasis on advanced statistical metrics, new forms of organizational accountability, and aggressive tactical enforcement of minor crimes. This model has been adopted in large and small cities, and has been institutionalized in everyday police-citizen interactions, especially among residents of poorer, often minority, and higher crime areas. Citizens exposed to these regimes have frequent contact with police through investigative stops, arrests for minor misdemeanors, and non-custody citations or summons for code violations or vehicle infractions. Two case studies show surprising and troubling similarities in the …

Heading Off A Cliff? The Tax Reform Man Cometh, And Goeth, Michael J. Graetz

Faculty Scholarship

The major tax policy challenge of the 21st century is the need to address the nation’s fiscal condition fairly and in a manner conducive to economic growth. But since California adopted Proposition 13 nearly forty years ago, antipathy to taxes has served as the glue that has held the Republican coalition together. Even though our taxes as a percentage of our economy are low by OECD standards and low by our own historical experience, anti-tax attitudes have become even more important for Republicans politically, since they now find it hard to agree on almost anything else. So revenue-positive, or even …

Free Markets, State Involvement, And The Wto: Chinese State Owned Enterprises (Soes) In The Ring, Petros C. Mavroidis, Merit E. Jano

Faculty Scholarship

The WTO has struggled with the treatment of nonmarket economies (NMEs). What was a nonissue in the original GATT (because of the homogeneity of participants) became quite an issue with the accession of formally centrally planned economies, which were not transformed to market economies, at least not in the eyes of the incumbents. Contracting this issue has proved to be so far always wanting, and leaving it to adjudicators has not produced good results either. With respect to Chinese SOEs this risks continuing to be an issue, since the contractually agreed deadline (2016) after which China should not be treated …

The Utility Of Finance, Shlomit Azgad-Tromer, Eric L. Talley

Faculty Scholarship

Public Utilities Commissions (PUCs) are charged with regulating a public utility’s rates at levels that serve the public’s interest while allowing the utility’s investors to earn a rate commensurate with that expected by businesses facing similar risks. Although the process of adjusting rates for risk is a staple of modern finance, we know surprisingly little about how well accomplish their regulatory mandate when judged against the benchmarks of financial economics. This article analyzes a dozen years’ worth of gas and electric rate-setting decisions from PUCs in the United States and Canada, demonstrating empirically that allowed returns on equity (ROE) diverge …

On The Moral Significance Of Sacrifice, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

The paper offers a few reflections on moral implications of making sacrifices and of possible duties to make sacrifices. It does not provide an exhaustive or a systematic account of the subject. There are too many disparate questions, and too many distant perspectives from which to examine them to allow for a systematic let alone an exhaustive account, and too many factual issues that I am not aware of. Needless to say, the observations that follow are in part stimulated by the popularity of some views that are mistaken. I will not however examine any specific view or account of …

Informants & Cooperators, Daniel C. Richman

Faculty Scholarship

The police have long relied on informants to make critical cases, and prosecutors have long relied on cooperator testimony at trials. Still, concerns about these tools for obtaining closely held information have substantially increased in recent years. Reliability concerns have loomed largest, but broader social costs have also been identified. After highlighting both the value of informants and cooperators and the pathologies associated with them, this chapter explores the external and internal measures that can or should be deployed to regulate their use.

Some Legal Realism About Legal Theory, Jeremy Kessler, David Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

This is a brief surreply to Charles Barzun, Working for the Weekend: A Response to Kessler & Pozen, 83 U. Chi. L. Rev. Online 225 (2017), which responds to Jeremy K. Kessler & David E. Pozen, Working Themselves Impure: A Life Cycle Theory of Legal Theories, 83 U. Chi. L. Rev. 1819 (2016).

Our article Working Themselves Impure concludes by calling for lawyers to take more seriously the failure of prescriptive legal theories to produce the results they once promised. When prescriptive legal theories that fail to achieve their initial, publicly stated goals nonetheless gain and sustain broad …

Trade Agreements, Regulatory Sovereignty And Democratic Legitimacy, Bernard Hoekman, Charles F. Sabel

Faculty Scholarship

Governments increasingly are seeking to use bilateral and regional trade agreements to reduce the cost-increasing effects of differences in product market regulation. They also pursue regulatory cooperation independent of trade agreements. It is important to understand what is being done through bilateral or plurilateral mechanisms to address regulatory differences, and to identify what, if any, role trade agreements can play in supporting international regulatory cooperation. This paper reflects on experience to date in regulatory cooperation and the provisions of recent trade agreements involving advanced economies that have included regulatory cooperation. We argue for a re-thinking by trade officials of the …

Is The Future Of Law A Driverless Car? Assessing How The Data Analytics Revolution Will Transform Legal Practice, Eric L. Talley

Faculty Scholarship

Machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies (“data analytics”) are quickly transforming research and practice in law, raising questions of whether the law can survive as a vibrant profession for natural persons to enter. In this article, I argue that data analytics approaches are overwhelmingly likely to continue to penetrate law, even in domains that have heretofore been dominated by human decision makers. As a vehicle for demonstrating this claim, I describe an extended example of using machine learning to identify and categorize fiduciary duty waiver provisions in publicly disclosed corporate documents. Notwithstanding the power of machine learning techniques, however, I …

Border Adjustments And The Conservation Of Tax Planning, David M. Schizer

Faculty Scholarship

This article is based on Schizer’s keynote address at the 17th annual NYU-KPMG Tax Symposium on March 10.

In this article, Schizer argues that U.S. corporate and shareholder taxes need to be reformed, and the corporate rate should be much lower. In reforming this dysfunctional regime, according to Schizer, Congress should keep both of these taxes as a form of built-in redundancy; if one tax is avoided, the other can still be collected. More generally, Congress should be wary of Utopian solutions. Tax reform is more likely to change tax planning than to eliminate it entirely, Schizer concludes. For instance, …

Law And Corporate Governance, Robert P. Bartlett, Eric L. Talley

Faculty Scholarship

Pragmatic and effective research on corporate governance often turns critically on appreciating the legal institutions surrounding corporate entities – yet such nuances are often unfamiliar or poorly specified to economists and other social scientists without legal training. This chapter organizes and discusses key legal concepts of corporate governance, including statutes, regulations, and jurisprudential doctrines that “govern governance” in private and public companies, with concentration on the for-profit corporation. We review the literature concerning the nature and purpose of the corporation, the objects of fiduciary obligations, the means for decision making within the firm, as well as the overlay of state …