Digital Commons Network^™

Through Bankruptcy With The Creditors' Bargain Heuristic, Robert E. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

It is a commonplace, but nonetheless true: the study of bankruptcy has attained a new respectability in American law schools. After years of modest enrollments and few genuine scholarly contributions, bankruptcy courses are now fully subscribed and many young academics are turning their attention to the technical complexities and conceptual underpinnings of modern bankruptcy law. A number of factors contribute to this new-found glamour. Most obviously, the enactment of the new Bankruptcy Code has fueled scholarly interest in reporting its modifications and changes and in exploring its theoretical unity. Simultaneously, there has been increasing resort to the bankruptcy process to …

State Law Wrongs, State Law Remedies, And The Fourteenth Amendment, Henry Paul Monaghan

Faculty Scholarship

Parratt v. Taylor is among the most puzzling Supreme Court decisions of the last decade, and the lower federal courts have been thrown into considerable confusion in their efforts to implement it. In large part, this confusion stems from the fact that Parratt decided two independent points: first, the negligent loss or destruction of property by state officials could constitute a "deprivation" thereof for purposes of the due process clause of the fourteenth amendment; and second, the existence of an adequate state remedy to redress the wrong meant that the deprivation was not "without due process of law." In this …

Rethinking The Theory Of Legal Rights, Jules S. Coleman, Jody S. Kraus

Faculty Scholarship

In the economic approach to law, legal rights are designed, in part, to overcome the conditions under which markets fail. In correcting for market failure, economic analysis endorses two rules for assigning legal rights. The first specifies the allocation of rights under conditions of rational cooperation, full information and zero transaction costs. Provided that exchange is available and that obstacles to exercising it are insignificant, rational cooperators will negotiate around inefficiencies. Under these conditions, legal rights are not assigned in order to establish optimal levels of resource deployment directly; rather, they establish well-defined entitlements or negotiation points which create a …

With Liberty And Justice For All: An Essay On Agent Orange And Choice Of Law, Aaron Twerski

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Is Proof Of Statistical Significance Relevant?, David H. Kaye

Faculty Scholarship

The classic treatises on evidence note that the court or jury must weigh the evidence, and upon weighing it, determine whether the plaintiff or the defendant prevails. Some courts, however, have indicated that statistical evidence should not be admitted unless it is subjected to a procedure known as 'hypothesis testing.' There are many rather mechanical procedures for performing these tests and a number of judges, attorneys, and law professors have suggested that hypothesis testing provides an objective, scientific means of settling disputed questions on which statistical evidence is brought to bear. Yet, many circumstances arise in which courts or administrators …

On The 'Usefulness' Of Suspect Classifications, James W. Ellis

Faculty Scholarship

Reviewing discrimination in legal decisions.

Crime Talk, Rights Talk, And Double-Talk: Thoughts On Reading Encyclopedia Of Crime And Justice (Review Essay), Michael E. Tigar

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Joys Of Law Library Management Are Without Number, Jenni Parrish

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Private Adjudicators And The Public Interest: The Expanding Scope Of International Arbitration, William W. Park

Faculty Scholarship

When Solomon arbitrated a child custody dispute, the baby almost perished.' Today's arbitrator probably could not propose such a drastic award. Yet courts may refuse to compel arbitration of some disputes for fear that societal interests may suffer a fate similar to that which would have befallen the baby under Solomon's initial judgment. The parties to the dispute are not free to compromise rights other than their own.

The Connection Between Law And Morality: Comments On Dworkin, David B. Lyons

Faculty Scholarship

Our discussions yesterday seemed haunted by a contrast--never quite formulated--between Natural Law and Legal Positivism. The standard interpretation turns on the idea of a "necessary connection" between law and morality. Positivism has often been understood to hold, and Natural Law to deny, that there can be unjust laws.

Crisis? What Crisis?, Jack M. Beermann

Faculty Scholarship

Bureaucracy is a favorite target for criticism from the left and the right. Bureaucratization of an organization is claimed to cause excessive reliance upon rigid rules or the absence of rules altogether.' Few people want to be part of a large bureaucracy and fewer still want to depend on a bureaucracy for important benefits or policymaking. In recent years, the business of the federal judiciary has increased dramatically. Congress has attempted to meet the rising caseload by increasing the number of federal judges and assistants. As the federal court system becomes more and more like administrative bureaucracies, the question has …

American Income Tax Aspects Of Trans-Border Securities Investment, William W. Park

Faculty Scholarship

Encouraging investment of foreign capital in securities issued by American companies does not always marry well with preserving the integrity of the tax system. The interaction between the anonymity sought by some foreign investors and the disclosure required to enforce the law reminds one of the prophet Ezekiel's vision of a wheel within a wheel, and Shakespeare's Hamlet, which contains a play within a play. For today's topicwhich claims neither the elegance of Shakespeare's drama nor the obscure fascination of Ezekiel's vision--contains a problem within a problem.

The Right Of Elderly Patients To Refuse Life-Sustaining Treatment, George J. Annas, Leonard H. Glantz

Faculty Scholarship

Some legislation, such as law permitting living wills, has addressed the problem of decisions regarding life-sustaining treatment for the elderly. Most of the developing law on the subject is, however, being made by the courts, often in prospective decisions about treatment. These rulings have followed a variety of approaches to the ends of protecting incompetent patients and enforcing the right of the competent to make their own decisions.

Curtiss-Wright Comes Home: Executive Power And National Security Secrecy, Harold Edgar, Benno C. Schmidt Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

Collectively we face no greater challenge than maintaining sensible perspectives on national security issues. Central to this task is the need to achieve a tolerable balance between secrecy and openness in public debate on such issues. There are real threats to our nation, and we would be foolish to ignore them; history teaches that no culture is guaranteed survival. Yet, how to respond to such threats must be profoundly controversial. The virtue of liberal society is that it values highly the realization of private preferences; the sacrifice of those desires to attain another's vision of collective security will never be …

Religiously Based Premises And Laws Restrictive Of Liberty, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

My subject concerns the connection between religious premises and political decisions that restrict people's liberty. This topic has implications for the constitutionality of laws adopted on religious grounds, and I sketch the most important of these implications at the conclusion of this article. My main focus, however, is the proper attitudes of citizens and legislators in our liberal democracy, and, in particular, whether they should rest their judgments on religious premises. In addressing this issue, I concentrate on the responsibilities of citizens and on laws restricting consenting sexual acts and abortions. My main burden is to illustrate two radically different …

Distinguishing Justifications From Excuses, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

Ann swings her arm and injures Ben. She faces moral condemnation and legal liability unless she can offer an explanation that absolves her of full blame. She might make a claim of justification that, despite initial appearances, her action was desirable or proper, or she might make a claim of excuse that she does not bear full responsibility for injuring Ben. If Ann is fully justified, she will not be subject to blame or to classification as a weak or defective person. If Ann is excused, she may be regarded as wholly or partly free of blame, but she will …

Natural Law And Political Choice: The General Justification Defense – Criteria For Political Action And The Duty To Obey The Law, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

During most of this century, a distinct separation has existed between natural law perspectives and perspectives about the nature of law and about social choices that have dominated American law schools. One could find elaborations of natural law in Catholic law schools and periodicals, but these expressions exercised little influence on the mainstreams of legal thought. In the last two decades, non-Catholics have grown to realize that they have much to learn from natural law approaches, and natural lawyers have tried to enhance their own understandings by references to other perspectives. I am emboldened to proceed by my strong belief …

The Limits Of Rationality And The Place Of Religious Conviction: Protecting Animals And The Environment, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

When people hold religious views that have implications for moral choices and for the desirable uses of law, may they properly rely on those religious views in our liberal democracy? The commonly expressed ideas that church and state are separate and that no group should impose its religious views on others may seem to suggest that political dialogue and bases for political decisions should be wholly nonreligious. This position, which is the main target of this Article, receives articulate defense among prominent social philosophers. This Article urges a different position: that no commonly shared ground of decision is available for …

Banning The Bomb: Law And Its Limits, Lori Fisler Damrosch

Faculty Scholarship

We can all agree with the contributors to this volume that nuclear weapons present the threat of unimaginable devastation that could bring an end to civilization and even to life on this planet. The grim calculations and stark images come back again and again, but they cannot be repeated too often: over 50,000 weapons in the United States and Soviet arsenals, each with a destructive force dwarfing the explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki; radiation effects producing indescribable suffering and death; environmental damage that defies quantification or prediction; the specter of nuclear winter rendering the earth uninhabitable. No rational being can …

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 …

Economics Of Public Use, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

The fifth amendment to the United States Constitution, as well as most state constitutions, provides that private property shall not be taken "for public use" unless just compensation is paid. American courts have long construed this to mean that some showing of "publicness" is a condition precedent to a legitimate exercise of the power of eminent domain. Thus, when a proposed condemnation of property lacks the appropriate public quality, the taking is deemed to be unconstitutional and can be enjoined. In practice, however, most observers today think the public use limitation is a dead letter. Three recent decisions, upholding takings …

Shareholders Versus Managers: The Strain In The Corporate Web, John C. Coffee Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

"We have entered the era of the two-tier, front-end loaded, bootstrap, bust-up, junk-bond takeover." —Martin Lipton

Until recently, takeovers typically involved larger firms digesting smaller firms, a process that most theorists have assumed was driven by the pursuit of synergistic gains. Lately, however, this dynamic has dramatically reversed itself. To a considerable extent, the large conglomerate is now the target, and such prototypical conglomerate firms as General Foods, Richardson-Vicks, Beatrice, Revlon, SCM, CBS,USX, and Anderson, Clayton and Co. have either been acquired or forced to restructure themselves within the last three years alone. The new bidder in turn tends to …

Dworkin: A New Link In The Chain, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

This book brings together nineteen of the articles published by Professor Dworkin over the last eight years, mostly in the New York Review of Books, but also in learned journals and collections. Three articles, none of them of major importance, have not been published before: Can a Liberal State Support Art? (pp. 221-36), On Interpretation and Objectivity (pp. 167-80), and Civil Disobedience and Nuclear Protest (pp. 104-18). Several pieces published during the last few years are not included, of which the most important is an article on equality.

Introduction To The Edwin S. Cohen Tax Symposium: An Overview Of Business Taxation, Michael J. Graetz

Faculty Scholarship

It is an honor and pleasure for me to be here today to launch this symposium on current tax reform topics in honor of Edwin S. Cohen on the occasion of his retirement from the University of Virginia as Professor of Law. This is the second occasion I have been asked to speak honoring Ed Cohen on his retirement and, knowing him well, I look forward to many more of his retirements in years ahead.

My assignment today is to provide a brief overview of issues in business taxation. I was tempted simply to repeat the program for this symposium, …

The Lawyer As Informer, Gerard E. Lynch

Faculty Scholarship

From the schoolyard "tattletale" to the police officer's "confidential informant" to the Pentagon "whistle blower," our society is deeply ambivalent toward those who report the wrongdoing of others to the authorities. On the one hand, society values informers. Without informers, serious misbehavior would certainly escape correction. The police officers' code of silence with respect to fellow officers' crimes, for example, may be a major obstacle to eliminating police corruption and brutality. On the other hand, society scorns informers as betrayers of confidence. Even one who violates an antisocial pact such as the police officers' code of silence is viewed as …

Error And Rationality In Individual Decisionmaking: An Essay On The Relationship Between Cognitive Illusion And The Management Of Choice, Robert E. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

How do individuals make choices? In recent years, economists, psychologists and legal academics have searched for answers to various aspects of this question. One topic of recent interest, for example, concerns a lingering problem in information theory: Does consumer inability to process "too much" information cause market failure? The normative implications of this question raise significant policy issues. If consumers' cognitive circuits can become overloaded, then information disclosure is less appealing than direct regulation as a solution to problems of market failure.

Negligence, Causation And Information, Stephen G. Marks

Faculty Scholarship

This note suggests a model to unify, in a simple information-based framework, the notion of negligence and the various notions of causation. In effect, the model demonstrates that negligence, probabilistic cause and cause-in-fact represent an identical concept applied to different information sets. This note uses the unified framework to develop a simple algorithm for the practical application of the principles of causation in the law of negligence.

Confidence In Probability: Burdens Of Persuasion In A World Of Imperfect Knowledge, Neil B. Cohen

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Dog And His Shadow: A Response To Overcast And Evans, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

Aesop's Fable, "The Dog and the Shadow," begins with a dog walking over a bridge with a piece of meat in his mouth. Looking down into the stream, he sees his shadow. Thinking it is a bigger dog, with a piece of meat twice the size of his own, the greedy dog decides to get it. Snarling, he opens his mouth to attack. At that moment the meat falls from his mouth, into the stream. The dog realizes his mistake, and sadly says to himself, "Grasp at the shadow and lose the substance."

Drs. Overcast and Evans have not yet …

A Moderate And Restrained Federal Product Liability Bill: Targeting The Crisis Areas For Resolution, Aaron D. Twerski

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.