Digital Commons Network^™

Work As A Masculinity Contest, Jennifer L. Berdahl, Marianne Cooper, Peter Glick, Robert W. Livingston, Joan C. Williams

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Merging Ahead, Increase Speed: A Pilot Of Funder-Driven Nonprofit Restructuring, Robert L. Fischer, Claudia J. Coulton

Faculty Scholarship

Nonprofit agencies face increasing competition for scarce funding resources. Many agencies are considering ways to restructure themselves, often via mergers and acquisitions, as a way to become more effective and competitive. This case study examines a pilot initiative in Cleveland, Ohio, in which philanthropic funders invited and supported nonprofits in the pursuit of significant restructuring efforts. Health and human service nonprofits were recruited into a three-phase facilitated pilot that assisted the agency executive directors and boards in determining what type of restructuring was feasible and desirable. Overall, 75 nonprofits participated in some part of the pilot, 17 of which formally …

The Importance Of Institutional Design For Distributed Local-Level Governance Of Groundwater: The Case Of California’S Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, Dave Owen, Michael Kiparsky, Anita Milman, Andrew T. Fisher

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Courts As Institutional Reformers: Bankruptcy And Public Law Litigation, Kathleen G. Noonan, Jonathan C. Lipson, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

This article compares two spheres in which courts induce and oversee the restructuring of organizations that fail systematically to comply with their legal obligations: bankruptcy reorganization and public law litigation (civil rights or regulatory suits seeking structural remedies). The analogies between bankruptcy and public law litigation (PLL) have grown stronger in recent years as structural decrees have evolved away from highly specific directives to “framework” decrees designed to induce engagement with stakeholders and make performance transparent. We use the comparison with bankruptcy, where the value and legitimacy of judicial intervention are better understood and more accepted, to address prominent criticisms …

Pharmaceutical M&A Activity: Effects On Prices, Innovation, And Competition, Barak D. Richman, Will Mitchell, Elena Vidal, Kevin Schulman

Faculty Scholarship

The rise of blockbuster pharmaceutical acquisitions has prompted fears that unprecedented market concentration will weaken competition. Two of the most prominent concerns focus on the upstream and downstream ends of the pharmaceutical industry: (1) the concern that these mergers will concentrate the market for discovery and will therefore lead to fewer discoveries; and (2) the concern that merging large marketing, sales, and distribution forces will strengthen the hands of select pharmaceutical manufacturers and weaken downstream competition. Having considered potential dynamic effects in the industry and conducted a series of preliminary interviews with knowledgeable observers, though, this Article argues that neither …

The Importance Of Institutional Design For Distributed Local-Level Governance Of Groundwater: The Case Of California’S Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, Dave Owen, Michael Kiparsky, Anita Millman, Andrew T. Fisher

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

R&D Tax Incentives--Growth Panacea Or Budget Trojan Horse?, Stephen E. Shay, J. Clifton Fleming Jr., Robert J. Peroni

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Information Technology And Learning On-The-Job, James Bessen

Faculty Scholarship

Economists disagree how much technology raises demand for workers with pre-existing skills. But technology might affect wages another way: through skills learned on the job. Using instrumental variables on 9 panels of workers from 1989 to 2013, this paper estimates that workers who use information technology (IT) have wage growth that is about 2% greater than non-IT workers, all else equal, implying substantial learning. This effect persists over time, implying sustained productivity growth from IT. Also, it benefits workers both with and without college degrees. Because many more college-educated workers use IT, college wages grow faster, contributing to economic inequality.

How Computer Automation Affects Occupations: Technology, Jobs, And Skills, James Bessen

Faculty Scholarship

This paper investigates basic relationships between technology and occupations. Building a general occupational model, I look at detailed occupations since 1980 to explore whether computers are related to job losses or other sources of wage inequality. Occupations that use computers grow faster, not slower. This is true even for highly routine and mid-wage occupations. Estimates reject computers as a source of significant net technological unemployment or job polarization. But computerized occupations substitute for other occupations, shifting employment and requiring new skills. Because new skills are costly to learn, computer use is associated with substantially greater within-occupation wage inequality.

The Development And Evolution Of The U.S. Law Of Corporate Criminal Liability And The Yates Memo, Sara Sun Beale

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Occam's Phaser: Making Proportional Discovery (Finally) Work In Litigation By Requiring Phased Discovery, Michael Murphy

Faculty Scholarship

This is an article about solving the problem of expensive electronic discovery in litigation by simply learning the most important facts first. Judges and parties often complain that the scope of information included in fact discovery in civil litigation is overinclusive and disproportionate to size of the dispute, resulting in overly expensive costs. The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure recently changed again to further emphasize the use of “proportional” limits in discovery, but provide little practical mechanism for parties, lawyers, and judges to make discovery “right-sized.” This Article proposes that parties should be required to “phase” discovery by first setting …

Corporate Control And Idiosyncratic Vision, Zohar Goshen, Assaf Hamdani

Faculty Scholarship

This Article offers a novel theory of corporate control. It does so by shedding new light on corporate-ownership structures and challenging the prevailing model of controlling shareholders as essentially opportunistic actors who seek to reap private benefits at the expense of minority shareholders. Our core claim is that entrepreneurs value corporate control because it allows them to pursue their vision (i.e., any business strategy that the entrepreneur genuinely believes will produce an above-market rate of return) in the manner they see fit. We call the subjective value an entrepreneur attaches to her vision the entrepreneur’s idiosyncratic vision. Our framework identifies …

The Corporation As Courthouse, Rory Van Loo

Faculty Scholarship

Despite the considerable attention paid to mandatory arbitration, few consumer disputes ever reach arbitration. By contrast, institutions such as Apple’s customer service department handle hundreds of millions of disputes annually. This Article argues that understanding businesses’ internal dispute processes is crucial to diagnosing consumers’ procedural needs. Moreover, businesses’ internal processes interact with a larger system of private actors. These actors include ratings websites that mete out reputational sanctions. The system also includes other corporations linked to the transaction, such as when American Express adjudicates a contested sale between a shopper and Home Depot. This vast private order offers promise to …

Law Enforcement As Political Question, Zachary S. Price

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Tools For Change: Boosting The Retention Of Women In The Stem Pipeline, Joan C. Williams, Katherine W. Phillips, Erika V. Hall

Faculty Scholarship

This study details how gender bias plays out in everyday workplace interactions in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). It is based on in-depth interviews with 60 women scientists of color (chiefly professors), and a survey of 557 women scientists (of all races). Different types of gender bias were reported at different rates. Prescriptive gender bias was most common (76.3% of women interviewed reported it), followed by descriptive gender bias (66.7%) and gender bias triggered by motherhood (64.0%); just over half of the women interviewed (55.3%) reported situations in which gender bias against women fueled conflicts among women. The survey …

Polishing The Apple: A Holistic Approach To Developing Public Health Law Educators As Leaders Of Change, Debra Gerardi

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Institutional Triage: Reflections On Being Acquired, Aric K. Short

Faculty Scholarship

On June 25, 2012, I walked into the dean's office at Texas Wesleyan University School of Law. He and I had been summoned by our university president to a hastily called meeting to discuss the law school's "academic program." Since I helped oversee our academic program as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the time, I was not particularly looking forward to the meeting. I assumed there would be bad news of some sort.

Instead, we were told that Texas Wesleyan University ("TWU") and Texas A&M University ("TAMU") were in negotiations that, it was expected, would result in a "strategic …

Linking Patent Reform And Civil Litigation Reform, Greg Reilly

Faculty Scholarship

Patent reform increasingly focuses on discovery. Discovery is perceived as disproportionately expensive and burdensome in patent cases. Excessive discovery is said to fuel so-called “patent trolls” and impose an unhealthy tax on innovation and competition. These supposedly exceptional problems have led to exceptional patent-only reform proposals, such as delaying most discovery for over a year and reversing the seventy-five-year-old allocation of discovery costs.

Treating patent litigation as exceptional has a siloing effect. Patent reform debates ignore parallel debates over general civil litigation reform that raise the same arguments about disproportionately expensive and burdensome discovery and propose their own set of …

Article Ix: The Promise And Limits Of Home Rule, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

Article IX of New York State’s constitution establishes the basic constitutional framework for addressing questions of local power, local government organization, and state-local and interlocal relations in the Empire State. Premised on a commitment to “[e]ffective local self-government,” the “home rule amendment” added to the state constitution in 1963 and unamended since then, has bolstered local control over local government organization and personnel and has provided a firmer foundation for local law-making in New York. But it has not succeeded in enabling New York’s local units – its counties, cities, towns and villages – to function as efficient, effective, locally …

Enduring Hierachies In American Legal Education, Olufunmilayo B. Arewa, Andrew P. Morriss, William D. Henderson

Faculty Scholarship

Although much attention has been paid to U.S. News & World Report's rankings of U.S. law schools, the hierarchy it describes is a long-standing one rather than a recent innovation. In this Article, we show the presence of a consistent hierarchy of U.S. law schools from the 1930s to the present, provide a categorization of law schools for use in research on trends in legal education, and examine the impact of U.S. News's introduction of a national, ordinal ranking on this established hierarchy. The Article examines the impact of such hierarchies for a range of decision making in law school …

Right-Skilling: Rabbis And The Rabbinic Role For A New Century, Barak D. Richman, Daniel Libenson

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter applies Clayton Christensen's model of organizational innovation to Jewish contexts. It observes a parallel between the many challenges that currently confront U.S. healthcare and American Jewry: a mismatch in the skills acquired by professionals and the needs expressed by the broader public; expensive institutions with high fixed costs that are struggling to provide value and maintain sustainable revenues; a failure to respect individual autonomy and cultural mores; and a disenfranchised public that suffers from high costs and unmet demand for meaningful services. It then applies Christensen's adapted model for the healthcare sector to American Jewish institutions, suggesting reforms …

Correcting Criminal Justice Through Collective Experience Rigorously Examined, James S. Liebman, David Mattern

Faculty Scholarship

Federal and state law confers broad discretion on courts to administer the criminal laws, impose powerful penalties, and leave serious criminal behavior unpunished. Each time an appellate court reviews a criminal verdict, it performs an important systemic function of regulating the exercise of that power. Trial courts do the same when, for example, they admit or exclude evidence generated by government investigators. For decades, judicial decisions of this sort have been guided by case law made during the Supreme Court's Criminal Procedure Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. It is becoming increasingly clear, however, that the rule-bound, essentially bureaucratic regulatory …

Systematically Thinking About Law Firm Ethics: Conference On The Ethical Infrastructure And Culture Of Law Firms, Susan Saab Fortney

Faculty Scholarship

To advance the discourse related to law firm ethics and the impact of formal controls and informal influences on lawyer conduct, we convened on April 5, 2013 the Conference on the Ethical Infrastructure and Culture of Law Firms ("Conference" or "Symposium"). The Conference, conducted under the auspices of the Hofstra Law Review and the Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University's Institute for the Study of Legal Ethics, was funded in part by the Abraham J. Gross '78 Conference and Lecture Fund at the Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University. Experts who have studied issues …

Changed Circumstances: The Federal Rules Of Civil Procedure And The Future Of Institutional Reform Litigation After Horne V. Flores, Catherine Y. Kim

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Professional Learning Communities And Collaborative Teams: Tools To Jump-Start The Learning Outcomes Assessment Process, Sharon Sandeen

Faculty Scholarship

The legal community has talked for years about proposed changes to the American Bar Association's (ABA) standards for the accreditation of law schools to include some form of learning outcomes assessment (LOA).' Although it is still unclear if and when comprehensive new standards will take effect and, more importantly, when law schools will be required to fully implement LOA processes, it is never too early to help law students meet their full potential since the essential purpose of LOA is to improve student learning. Moreover, current ABA Standard 203 (Strategic Planning and Assessment) requires law schools to regularly assess their …

Policing, Crime, And Legitimacy In New York And Los Angeles: The Social And Political Contexts Of Two Historic Crime Declines, Jeffrey Fagan, John Macdonald

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter tells the story of policing, crime, and the search for legitimacy over the past two decades in Los Angeles and New York City. Throughout this complex political, normative, and legal landscape, crime rates dropped dramatically in each city to levels not seen since the early 1960s. The chapter begins with a discussion of the evolution of policing in the two cities, assessing reciprocal and dynamic changes that reflected both the crises of crime epidemics and crises within the police. Next, it examines the role of litigation on the evolution of policing. Policing regimes in each city were challenged …

System Adjustments, Brendan S. Maher

Faculty Scholarship

This invited Essay considers the future of law data and system reform.

Transfer Pricing And Business Restructurings — Intangibles, Synergies, And Shelters, Richard Thompson Ainsworth, Andrew Shact

Faculty Scholarship

Transfer pricing in business restructuring is attracting global attention. In the past two years two key policy-making groups have released three substantive documents on this topic. The Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) issued two position statements while the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) issued one. While restructurings are a very common commercial practice, until recently it has been uncommon to apply transfer pricing criteria when examining them in detail.

Essentially, the OECD has overlooked that a unique and valuable intangible is created during the restructuring process. By not acknowledging that this intangible in the mix, the OECD fails …

Full Participation: Building The Architecture For Diversity And Public Engagement In Higher Education, Susan P. Sturm, Timothy Eatman, John Saltmarsh, Adam Bush

Faculty Scholarship

This catalyst paper offers a conceptual framework for connecting a set of conversations about change in higher education that often proceed separately but need to be brought together to gain traction within both the institutional and national policy arenas. By offering a framework to integrate projects and people working under the umbrella of equity, diversity, and inclusion with those working under the umbrella of community, public, and civic engagement, we aim to integrate both of these change agendas with efforts on campus to address the access and success of traditionally underserved students. We also hope to connect efforts targeting students, …

Overeducated Achievatrons Unite!, Joan C. Williams

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.