Digital Commons Network^™

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 …

How Investors Can (And Can't) Create Social Value, Paul Brest, Ronald J. Gilson, Mark A. Wolfson

Faculty Scholarship

Most investors throughout the world have a single goal: to earn the highest risk- adjusted financial returns. They would not accept a lower financial return from an investment that also produced social benefits.

More recently, an increasing number of socially-motivated investors have goals beyond maximizing returns. They also seek to align their investments with their social values (value alignment), and some also seek to cause the companies in which they invest to create more social value as a result of their investment (social value creation). We show in this essay that while it is relatively easy to achieve value alignment, …

Regulating Complacency: Human Limitations And Legal Efficacy, Steven L. Schwarcz

Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines how insights into limited human rationality can improve financial regulation. The Article identifies four categories of limitations—herd behavior, cognitive biases, overreliance on heuristics, and a proclivity to panic—that undermine the perfect-market regulatory assumptions that parties have full information and will act in their rational self-interest. The Article then analyzes how insights into these limitations can be used to correct resulting market failures. Requiring more robust disclosure and due diligence, for example, can help to reduce reliance on misleading information cascades that motivate herd behavior. Debiasing through law, such as requiring more specific, poignant, and concrete disclosure of …

State Authority To Preempt Local Laws Regulating Renewable Energy Projects, Michael B. Gerrard, Edward Mctiernan

Faculty Scholarship

The New York State Energy Plan, announced by Gov. Andrew Cuomo in 2015, calls for a doubling to 50 percent of the portion of the electricity used in the state that comes from renewable sources by 2030. This would lower greenhouse gas emissions, create jobs, and reduce the use of fossil fuels, especially natural gas.

Much of this new renewable energy would be generated by wind and solar projects. Some if it would be from wind facilities to be built offshore in the Atlantic Ocean; the rest would be on the land.

New York Environmental Legislation In 2017, Michael B. Gerrard, Edward Mctiernan

Faculty Scholarship

In 2017, New York State enacted multiple laws that tackle aspects of two major environmental issues facing the state: protecting water quality and advancing the state’s clean energy goals. In addition, Governor Andrew Cuomo signed laws concerning oil tankers on the Hudson, elephant welfare, food waste, and lead paint. He also approved a moratorium barring New York City’s plastic bag fee from taking effect. This annual survey reports on these developments and other environmental laws enacted in 2017.

The Right To Two Criminal Defense Lawyers, Bruce A. Green

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Sustaining Collective Self-Governance And Collective Action: A Constitutional Role Morality For Presidents And Members Of Congress, Neil S. Siegel

Faculty Scholarship

In the United States today, the behavior of the political branches is generally viewed as more damaging to the American constitutional system than is the behavior of the federal courts. Yet constitutional law scholarship continues to focus primarily on judges and judging. This Article suggests that such scholarship should develop for presidents and members of Congress what it has long advocated for judges: a role morality that imposes normative limits on the exercise of official discretion over and above strictly legal limits. The Article first grounds a role morality for federal elected officials in two purposes of the U.S. Constitution …

Political Norms, Constitutional Conventions, And President Donald Trump, Neil S. Siegel

Faculty Scholarship

This symposium Essay argues that what is most troubling about the conduct of President Trump during and since the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign is not any potential violations of the U.S. Constitution or federal law. There likely have been some such violations, and there may be more. But what is most troubling about President Trump is his disregard of political norms that had previously constrained presidential candidates and Presidents, and his flouting of nonlegal but obligatory “constitutional conventions” that had previously guided and disciplined occupants of the White House. These norms and conventions, although not “in” the Constitution, play a …

Why The Nagoya Protocol To The Cbd Matters To Science And Industry In Canada And The United States, Jerome H. Reichman

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Rights Of Marriage: Obergefell, Din, And The Future Of Constitutional Family Law, Kerry Abrams

Faculty Scholarship

In the summer of 2015 the United States Supreme Court handed down two groundbreaking constitutional family law decisions. One decision became famous overnight Obergefell v. Hodges declared that same-sex couples have the constitutional right to marry. The other, Kerry v. Din, went largely overlooked. That later case concerned not the right to marry but the rights of marriage. In particular, it asked whether a person has a constitutional liberty interest in living with his or her spouse. This case is suddenly of paramount importance: executive orders targeting particular groups of immigrants implicate directly this right to family reunification.

This Article …

Do Heads Roll? An Empirical Analysis Of Ceo Turnover And Pay When The Corporation Is Federally Prosecuted, Brandon L. Garrett, Nan Li, Shrivaram Rajgopal

Faculty Scholarship

Does the criminal prosecution of a corporation affect the CEO? Or do criminal actions directed at the organization itself pose few consequences for the individuals at the top, and the CEO in particular? While CEOs are rarely themselves prosecuted, organizations could discipline CEOs through paycuts or outright replacing the CEO in response to a criminal prosecution. We sought to examine whether and how that occurs. We focus our analysis on a dataset of public companies that settled criminal cases brought by federal prosecutors from 2000-2014. We compared those companies to the larger set of companies in the Execucomp database of …

The Proficiency Of Experts, Brandon L. Garrett, Gregory Mitchell

Faculty Scholarship

Expert evidence plays a crucial role in civil and criminal litigation. Changes in the rules concerning expert admissibility, following the Supreme Court's Daubert ruling, strengthened judicial review of the reliability and the validity of an expert's methods. Judges and scholars, however, have neglected the threshold question for expert evidence: whether a person should be qualified as an expert in the first place. Judges traditionally focus on credentials or experience when qualifying experts without regard to whether those criteria are good proxies for true expertise. We argue that credentials and experience are often poor proxies for proficiency. Qualification of an expert …

Can Rationing Through Inconvenience Be Ethical?, Nir Eyal, Paul Romain, Christopher Robertson

Faculty Scholarship

In this article, we provide a comprehensive analysis and a normative assessment of rationing through inconvenience as a form of rationing. By “rationing through inconvenience” in the health sphere, we refer to a non-financial burden (the inconvenience) that is either intended to cause or has the effect of causing patients or clinicians to choose an option for health‐related consumption that is preferred by the health system for its fairness, efficiency, or other distributive desiderata beyond assisting the immediate patient. We argue that under certain conditions, rationing through inconvenience may turn out to serve as a legitimate and, compared to direct …

Malleable Rationality, Stephanie Plamondon

Faculty Scholarship

In 1998, Christine Jolls, Cass Sunstein, and Richard Thaler published A Behavioral Approach to Law and Economics, one of the most important pieces of scholarship in decades. Their article famously proposes a departure from the neoclassical law and economics approach to legal analysis. Breaking from neoclassical law and economics’ rational actor construct, the authors apply empirical insights about human behavior to introduce the concept of a boundedly rational actor limited by cognitive constraints. Over the past two decades, the behavioral law and economics approach, with its focus on the boundedly rational actor, has contributed needed realism to legal analyses. Unfortunately, …

National Security, Immigration And The Muslim Bans, Shoba Wadhia

Faculty Scholarship

National security language has continued to guide the creation and defense of Executive Orders and related immigration policies issued in the Donald J. Trump administration. This Article builds on earlier scholarship examining the relationship between national security and immigration in the wake of September 11, 2001, under the Obama administration, and during the campaign leading to the 2016 Election. While the Article is largely descriptive, it ultimately questions the longevity of using national security to create and defend immigration law. This Article is limited in scope -- it does not provide a deep dive into the constitutionality of the Muslim …

Body Cameras And The Path To Redeem Privacy Law, Woodrow Hartzog

Faculty Scholarship

From a privacy perspective, the movement towards police body cameras seems ominous. The prospect of a surveillance device capturing massive amounts of data concerning people’s most vulnerable moments is daunting. These concerns are compounded by the fact that there is little consensus and few hard rules on how and for whom these systems should be built and used. But in many ways, this blank slate is a gift. Law and policy makers are not burdened by the weight of rules and technologies created in a different time for a different purpose. These surveillance and data technologies will be modern. Many …

Women’S Human Rights And Migration: Sex Selective Abortion Laws In The United States And India, Aziza Ahmed

Faculty Scholarship

In her compelling new book, Women's Human Rights and Migration, Sital Kalantry challenges the idea that a women's human rights framework offers a consistent and universal way to address complicated gender issues across countries. She is primarily concerned with the lives of migrant women in countries that respond to their social and cultural practices with harsh regulations designed to bring them in line with dominant ideas about gender equality. Kalantry focuses in on two issues in particular: sex-selective abortion and the veil as worn by Muslim women. Kalantry insightfully identifies a primary problem with these types of laws and …

Corporate Rights As Subplot, Larry Yackle

Faculty Scholarship

Adam Winkler makes an important contribution to the great body of academic work on corporations in American life. He concentrates on a small corner of the larger topic. He traces only the development of corporate “rights,” and he describes, but does not critique, what he uncovers. There is much to learn from this fine book. I want to applaud Winkler’s primary revelation—namely, that corporate rights are a creation of the courts, especially the Supreme Court.1 Then I want to flag what Winkler (I think) would readily acknowledge: corporate rights are not the whole of the corporate story.

The Body Politic: Federalism As Feminism In Health Reform, Elizabeth Mccuskey

Faculty Scholarship

This essay illuminates how modern health law has been mainstreaming feminism under the auspices of health equity and social determinants research. Feminism shares with public health and health policy both the empirical impulse to identify inequality and the normative value of pursing equity in treatment. Using the Affordable Care Act's federal health insurance reforms as a case study of health equity in action, the essay exposes the feminist undercurrents of health insurance reform and the impulse toward mutuality in a body politic. The essay concludes by revisiting-from a feminist perspective-scholars' arguments that equity in health insurance is essential for human …

Practice-Based Research Networks And The Mandate For Real-World Evidence, Elizabeth Hall-Lipsy, Leila Barraza, Christopher Robertson

Faculty Scholarship

The 21^st Century Cures Act encourages the Food and Drug Administration to consider “real-world evidence” in its regulation of the safety and efficacy of drugs and devices. Many have interpreted this mandate to focus on non-randomized observational research. However, we suggest that regulatory science must also move from rarefied academic hospitals to community-based settings, where the vast majority of patients in fact receive care in the fragmented U.S. healthcare system. This move is especially important if innovations are to reach, and be validated in, more diverse populations. A solution can be found in the 183 Practiced-Based Research Networks (“PBRN”), …

A Perspective On Incentives For Novel Inpatient Antibiotics: No One-Size-Fits-All, Taimur Bhatti, Ka Lum, Silas Holland, Stephanie Sassman, David Findlay, Kevin Outterson

Faculty Scholarship

The need for new “pull” incentives to stimulate antibiotic R&D is widely recognized. Due to the global diversity of health systems, combined with different challenges faced by antibiotics used in different types of healthcare settings, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Instead, different “pull” incentives should be tailored to local contexts, priorities, and antibiotic types. Policymakers and industry should collaborate to identify appropriate solutions at the local, regional, and global levels.

Corporate Personhood And The History Of The Rights Of Corporations: A Reflection On Adam Winkler’S Book We The Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights, Jack M. Beermann

Faculty Scholarship

Adam Winkler’s book We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights is an impressive work on several different levels. Because so much of the development of American constitutional law over the centuries has involved businesses, the book is a nearly comprehensive legal history of federal constitutional law. It certainly would be worthwhile reading for anyone interested in the constitutionality of economic regulation in the United States, spanning the controversies over the first and second Banks of the United States, through the Lochner era and present-day clashes over corporate campaign spending, and religiously-based exemptions to generally applicable laws such …

The Reliability Of Evidence In Evidence-Based Legislation, Sean J. Kealy, Alex Fomey

Faculty Scholarship

As evidence-based legislation develops, and as technology puts more information at our fingertips, there should be a better understanding of what exactly constitutes reliable evidence. Robert and Ann Seidman devoted their professional careers to developing the evidence-based Institutional Legislative Theory and Methodology and teaching it to legislative drafters around the world. Although ILTAM was firmly grounded in – and driven by – evidence, the question becomes what evidence is reliable and a worthy input for the methodology. Further, how can the drafter avoid the misuses of evidence such as confirmation bias and naïve beliefs? We aim to give a guide …

A Few Observations About The Curious State Of Massachusetts Labor Law: Public-Sector Unions After Janus, Maria O'Brien

Faculty Scholarship

This essay focuses on this hurried, even panicked response to Janus in Massachusetts and evaluates the likely outcome that encouraging a public union to treat member employees in one way and non-member employees in a distinctly less generous way will have for employees and the unions. I begin, in Part II, by noting (and explaining) the first and most apparent oddity in this story: why is an employer - i.e. the state - rushing to help its putative, arms-length bargaining partners? In Massachusetts, there are many different public-sector unions. School teachers, ¹³ firefighters,¹⁴ clerical workers, ¹⁵ state and local …

Pregnant Women And Equitable Access To Emergency Medical Care, Michael Ulrich

Faculty Scholarship

A diabetic patient suffering from ketoacidosis was taken from his hospital bed, removed from the hospital, and left in the parking lot without shoes or a shirt because the patient did not have health insurance and had not paid for prior services (Fedas, Alexander, and Chase-Lubitz 1991). The patient died at home the following day. A man with a steak knife in his back, wedged against his spine, was transferred from an emergency room because he was uninsured and could not pay $1,000 cash in advance to remove the knife (Annas 1986). A woman who was mistakenly identified …

Allocating Patent Litigation Risk Across The Supply Chain, Michael J. Meurer

Faculty Scholarship

The paradigmatic defendant in a patent lawsuit is a vertically integrated manufacturer. But much economic activity is conducted collaboratively by a supply chain of vertically disintegrated firms, and sometimes multiple firms are implicated in infringing activities, by making, selling, or using patented technology, or by contributing to or inducing another firm’s infringement. Often patent owners have the option of suing some or all of the members of a supply chain who contribute to the design, creation and marketing of a new technology.
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Formative Projects, Formative Influences: Of Martha Albertson Fineman And Feminist, Liberal, And Vulnerable Subjects, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

This essay, contributed to a symposium on the work of Professor Martha Albertson Fineman, argues that Fineman is a truly generative and transformative scholar, spurring people to think in new ways about key terms like “dependency,” “autonomy,” and “vulnerability” and about basic institutions such as the family and the state. It also recounts Fineman’s role in creating spaces for the generation of scholarship by others. The essay traces critical shifts in Fineman’s scholarly concerns, such as from a theory of dependency to vulnerability theory and from a gender lens to a skepticism about a focus on identities and discrimination. In …

Excavating Race-Based Disadvantage Among Class-Privileged People Of Color, Khiara Bridges

Faculty Scholarship

The aim of this article is to begin to theorize the fraught space within which class-privileged racial minorities exist — the disadvantage within their privilege. The article posits that the invisibility of the racial subordination of wealthier people of color (that is, their marginalization on account of their race) is fertile soil for the germination of post-racialism — the sense that we, as a nation, have overcome our racial problems. The dramatic visibility of the minority poor’s suffering, combined with the relative invisibility of the suffering of those minorities who are not poor, breeds the belief that class is now …

Four Principles For Digital Expression (You Won't Believe #3!), Danielle K. Citron, Neil Richards

Faculty Scholarship

At the dawn of the Internet’s emergence, the Supreme Court rhapsodized about its potential as a tool for free expression and political liberation. In ACLU v. Reno (1997), the Supreme Court adopted a bold vision of Internet expression to strike down a federal law - the Communications Decency Act - that restricted digital expression to forms that were merely “decent.” Far more than the printing press, the Court explained, the mid-90s Internet enabled anyone to become a town crier. Communication no longer required the permission of powerful entities. With a network connection, the powerless had as much luck reaching a …

Ideology Meets Reality: What Works And What Doesn't In Patient Exposure To Health Care Costs, Victor Laurion, Christopher Robertson

Faculty Scholarship

U.S. policymakers, scholars, and advocates have long displayed an ideological commitment to exposing insured patients to substantial out-of-pocket expenses. These commitments derive from both overt political ideologies, which favor individual responsibility and oppose redistribution of wealth and risks, as well as more-subtle ideological commitments of academic economists, which link observed patterns of consumption to value-claims about welfare. In this symposium contribution, we document those ideological commitments and juxtapose them with a review of the scientific evidence about the actual effects of patient cost-sharing. We find, as economic theory predicts, that patients exposed to healthcare costs consume less healthcare. However, a …