Law Commons^™

Neutral Citation, Court Web Sites, And Access To Case Law, Peter W. Martin

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

In 1994 the Wisconsin Bar and Judicial Council together urged the Wisconsin Supreme Court to take two dramatic steps with the combined aim of improving access to state case law: 1) adopt a new system of neutral citation and 2) establish a digital archive of decisions directly available to all publishers and the public. The recommendations set off a storm, and the Wisconsin court deferred decision on the package. In the years since those events, the background conditions have shifted dramatically. Neutral citation has been endorsed by the AALL and ABA and formally adopted in over a dozen states, including …

Harmonizing Preferential Rules Of Origin In The Wto System, John J. Barceló Iii

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Preferential arrangements (bilateral and multilateral free trade areas and GSP systems (preferences for developing countries)) are emerging everywhere in the world trading system and are causing concern because they discriminate against non-members and add complexity, distortions and inconsistency to the global system. Rules of origin (ROOs) linked to these arrangements are a significant part of the problem. More and more they have become the source in their own right of distortions in trade patterns, complexity, non-transparency and inconsistency. This essay argues that WTO members should authorize negotiations seeking to harmonize preferential ROOs (rules of origin linked to preferential arrangements) around …

Restoring The Right Constitution?, Eduardo M. Peñalver

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

After years of relative neglect, the past few decades have witnessed a dramatic renewal of interest in the natural law tradition within philosophical circles. This natural law renaissance, however, has yet to bear much fruit within American constitutional discourse, especially among commentators on the left. In light of its low profile within contemporary constitutional debates, an effort to formulate a natural law constitutionalism is almost by definition an event worthy of sustained attention. In "Restoring the Lost Constitution," Randy Barnett draws heavily upon a natural law theory of constitutional legitimacy to argue in favor of a radically libertarian reading of …

The Definition And Jurisdiction Of The Crime Of Aggression And The International Criminal Court, Buhm-Suk Baek

Cornell Law School J.D. Student Research Papers

The United Nations Diplomatic Conference of Plenipotentiaries on the Establishment of an International Criminal Court that was held in Rome to establish the International Criminal Court in 1998 finally adopted the Rome Statute with the participation of 160 countries. The Rome Statute of the ICC entered into force on 1 July 2002 and has been ratified by 100 States. What was considered not so long ago merely a dream of a few people has become a reality after the strenuous efforts of the UN over 50 years. However, one central issue still remains unresolved in the Rome Status. It is …

Reconstructing Richard Epstein, Eduardo M. Peñalver

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Towards A Common Law Originalism, Bernadette Meyler

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Originalists' emphasis upon William Blackstone's "Commentaries on the Laws of England" tends to suggest that the common law of the Founding era consisted in a set of determinate rules that can be mined for the purposes of constitutional interpretation. This Article argues instead that disparate strands of the common law, some emanating from the colonies and others from England, some more archaic and others more innovative, co-existed at the time of the Founding. Furthermore, jurists and politicians of the Founding generation were not unaware that the common law constituted a disunified field; indeed, the jurisprudence of the common law suggested …

Lawyers, Citizens, And The Internal Point Of View, W. Bradley Wendel

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Imagine two citizens, one of whom obeys the law only in order to avoid being sanctioned for noncompliance, the other of whom looks to the law for guidance, and regards legal directives as legitimate reasons for action in themselves. These two hypothetical citizens represent Oliver Wendell Holmes' metaphorical bad man and H.L.A. Hart's puzzled man, respectively. Both citizens take the law into account in their practical reasoning, but they are concerned with very different kinds of reasons created by law. Hart argues that the bad citizen's point of view is inadequate to capture the law's distinctive normativity. In response, some …

Michelman As Doctrinalist, Gregory S. Alexander

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Beyond Interstate Recognition In The Same-Sex Marriage Debate, Gary J. Simson

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The national same-sex marriage debate has been dominated for the past decade by the interstate recognition issue. This article seeks to shift the focus of the debate to same-sex marriage prohibitions themselves and their incompatibility with several limitations of federal constitutional law.

After showing the legal irrelevance of the Defense of Marriage Act to the interstate recognition issue, the article addresses the proper resolution of that choice-of-law issue through the lens of a well-known New York Court of Appeals decision. In that case, despite New York's ban on uncle-niece marriage, the New York high court - one of the most …

Kelo's Moral Failure, Laura S. Underkuffler

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Inside The Bankruptcy Judge's Mind, Jeffrey J. Rachlinski, Chris Guthrie, Andrew J. Wistrich

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

In this paper, we extend our prior work on generalist judges to explore whether specialization leads to superior judicial decision making. To do so, we report the results of a study of federal bankruptcy judges. In one prior study of bankruptcy judges, Ted Eisenberg reported evidence suggesting that bankruptcy judges, like generalist judges, are susceptible to the "self-serving" or "egocentric" bias when making judgments. Here, we report evidence showing that bankruptcy judges are vulnerable to anchoring and framing effects, but appear largely unaffected by the omission bias, a debtor's race, a debtor's apology, and "terror management" or "mortality salience."'

Because …

Torture As A Problem In Ordinary Legal Interpretation, Alan Hyde

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

American legal discourse on torture takes for granted some, usually all, of the following propositions, that make discussion of torture more difficult than it should be. Torture is assumed to present unusually difficult problems of definition, full of vague concepts, fine lines, gray areas, murky moral dilemmas, "dirty hands." This vagueness is thought to be even more of a problem for the attendant concept of "cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment." The legal sources of either prohibition are assumed to be dubious under American law. Prohibiting torture is, perhaps for these reasons, thought to require moral justification not necessarily required of …

Do Juries Add Value?: Evidence From An Empirical Study Of Jury Trial Waiver Clauses In Large Corporate Contracts, Theodore Eisenberg, Geoffrey P. Miller

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

We study jury trial waivers in a data set of 2,816 contracts contained as exhibits in Form 8-K filings by reporting corporations during 2002. Because these contracts are associated with events deemed material to the financial condition of SEC-reporting firms, they likely are carefully negotiated by sophisticated, well-informed parties and thus provide presumptive evidence about the value associated with the availability of jury trials. Only a small minority of contracts, about 20 percent, waived jury trials. An additional nine percent of contracts had arbitration clauses that effectively preclude jury trials though the reason for arbitration clauses need not specifically relate …

Economic Emergency And The Rule Of Law, Bernadette A. Meyler

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Academic work extolling the merits of the "rule of law" both domestically and internationally abounds today, yet the meanings of the phrase itself seem to proliferate. Two of the most prominent contexts in which rule of law rhetoric appears are those of economic development and states of emergency. In the area of private law, dissemination of the rule of law across the globe and, in particular, among emerging market countries is often deemed a prerequisite for enhancing economic development, partly because it ensures that foreign investments will not be summarily expropriated and that contractual rights will not be frustrated by …

Reverse-Erie, Kevin M. Clermont

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Traditional Erie is like a false front on a movie set, with nobody seeing the unfinished rear side. That other side depicts the extent of federal law applicable in state courts, which is determined under a doctrine called reverse-Erie. While everyone has an Erie theory and stands ready to debate it, almost no one has a theory of reverse-Erie, and no one at all has developed a clear choice-of-law methodology for it. Reverse-Erie, often misunderstood, mischaracterized, and misapplied by judges and commentators, goes strangely ignored by most scholars. And it goes ignored even though it holds a key to understanding …

Ex Ante Choices Of Law And Forum: An Empirical Analysis Of Corporate Merger Agreements, Theodore Eisenberg, Geoffrey P. Miller

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Legal scholars have focused much attention on the incorporation puzzle—why business corporations so heavily favor Delaware as the site of incorporation. This paper suggests that the focus on the incorporation decision overlooks a broader but intimately related set of questions. The choice of Delaware as a situs of incorporation is, effectively, a choice of law decision. A company electing to charter in Delaware selects Delaware law (and authorizes Delaware courts to adjudicate legal disputes) regarding the allocation of governance authority within the firm. In this sense, the incorporation decision is fundamentally similar to any setting in which a company selects …

Can Jury Trial Innovations Improve Juror Understanding Of Dna Evidence?, B. Michael Dann, Valerie P. Hans, David H. Kaye

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

A single spot of blood on a pink windowsill will tell investigators who broke a windowpane, turned a lock, and kidnapped 2-year-old Molly Evans from her bedroom in the middle of the night. An expert witness will testify that the DNA profile of the blood evidence recovered from the windowsill was entered into CODIS, an electronic database of DNA profiles. That process yielded a “hit,” identifying the defendant as the most likely source of the blood inside Molly’s room.

But will jurors be able to understand the expert’s intricate analysis and use it to reach a verdict? And what—if any—steps …

Insurers, Illusions Of Judgment & Litigation, Chris Guthrie, Jeffrey J. Rachlinski

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Insurers play a critical role in the civil justice system. By providing liability insurance to parties who would otherwise be untenable as defendants, insurers make litigation possible. Once litigation materializes, insurers provide representation, pay legal fees, and often play a central role in resolving disputes through settlement or adjudication. In this paper, we explore empirically how these key litigation players make important decisions in the litigation process, like evaluating a case, deciding whether to settle, and if so, on what terms. We find that insurers that have been shown to distort litigation decision making, appear to make decisions in a …

Use It Or Pretenders Will Abuse It: The Importance Of Archival Legal Information, Theodore Eisenberg

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Archival information about the legal system should inform policymaking. Despite claims of soaring civil damages awards, modem historical data show no to little growth in tort awards and no real growth in punitive damages awards. The data also show a dramatic forty-year decline in trial rates from more than ten percent of case dispositions to less than two percent. The decline needs to be explained in part by using archival data. Contrary to perceptions underlying the Class Action Fairness Act of 2005, little systematic evidence exists that state and federal courts process class actions significantly different. These results contradict the …

Educating Students About The Critiquing Process In A Lawyering Skills Class, Joel Atlas

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The extreme performance anxiety of first-year law students along with the alien experience of receiving copious comments on their writing creates a potent, and potentially paralyzing, potion for stress. With that as a backdrop, lawyering skills teachers ought to educate students about the process of critiquing they will experience in a lawyering skills course.

Why (Only) Esops?, Robert C. Hockett

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Social Reproduction And Religious Reproduction: A Democratic-Communitarian Analysis Of The Yoder Problem, Josh Chafetz

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

In 1972, Wisconsin v. Yoder presented the Supreme Court with a sharp clash between the state's interest in social reproduction through education -- that is, society's interest in using the educational system to perpetuate its collective way of life among the next generation -- and the parents' interest in religious reproduction -- that is, their interest in passing their religious beliefs on to their children. This Article will take up the challenge of that clash, a clash which continues to be central to current debates over issues like intelligent design in the classroom. This Article engages with the competing theories …

Through A Glass Darkly: Van Orden, Mccreary, And The Dangers Of Transparency In Establishment Clause Jurisprudence, Laura S. Underkuffler

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Constitutional Avoidance In The Executive Branch, Trevor W. Morrison

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

When executive branch actors interpret statutes, should they use the same methods as the courts? This Article takes up the question by considering a rule frequently invoked by the courts-the canon of constitutional avoidance. In addition to being a cardinal principle of judicial statutory interpretation, the avoidance canon also appears regularly and prominently in the work of the executive branch. It has played a central role, for example, in some of the most hotly debated episodes of executive branch statutory interpretation in the "war on terror." Typically, executive invocations of avoidance are supported by citation to one or more Supreme …

Regulating Lobbyists: Law, Ethics, And Public Policy, Vincent R. Johnson

Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy

No abstract provided.

Everything Lawyers Know About Polygamy Is Wrong, Shayna M. Sigman

Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy

No abstract provided.

A Modern Disaster: Agricultural Land, Urban Growth, And The Need For A Federally Organized Comprehensive Land Use Planning Model, Jess M. Krannich

Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy

No abstract provided.

Correcting For Kelo: Social Capital Impact Assessments And The Re-Balancing Of Power Between Desperate Cities, Corporate Interests, And The Average Joe, Asmara Tekle Johnson

Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy

No abstract provided.

To Dream Or Not To Dream: A Cost-Benefit Analysis Of The Development, Relief, And Education For Alien Minors (Dream) Act, Youngro Lee

Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy

No abstract provided.

Constitutional Avoidance In The Executive Branch, Trevor W. Morrison

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

When executive actors interpret statutes, the prevailing assumption is that they can and should use the tools that courts use. Is that assumption sound? This Article takes up the question by considering a rule frequently invoked by the courts - the canon of constitutional avoidance.

Executive branch actors regularly use the avoidance canon. Indeed, some of the most hotly debated episodes of executive branch statutory interpretation in recent years - including the initial torture memorandum issued by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, the President's signing statement regarding the McCain Amendment's ban on the mistreatment of detainees, and the …