Digital Commons Network^™

Retirement Security And Tax Policies: A Reply, Michael J. Graetz

Faculty Scholarship

In an Article published in the April 1987 issue of the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, I urged that the three major components of this nation's retirement income system – Social Security, and income tax preferences for both employer-sponsored pension plans and individual retirement savings – be analyzed as a comprehensive national retirement income security program. I demonstrated that such an integrated view of this tripartite retirement security system reveals serious problems both with Social Security and with the generally applauded "tax expenditure" provisions for private pensions and individual savings. Viewing the three elements as a unified retirement security arrangement …

Reflections On Holding And Dictum, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

The aim of these reflections, which adopt the perspectives of ordinary judges and lawyers, is to try to help clarify what is uncontroversial about the distinction between holding and dictum, to explain what is troublesome about it, to provide – in fairly sketchy form – a way of understanding the authority of various legal formulations that do not fit indisputably or wholly comfortably in the category of holding or that of dictum, and to suggest a conceptual vocabulary for expressing the practical realities I consider.

In the autumn of 1986, I taught a course in Legal Method for beginning students …

Demarginalizing The Intersection Of Race And Sex: A Black Feminist Critique Of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory And Antiracist Politics, Kimberlé W. Crenshaw

Faculty Scholarship

One of the very few Black women's studies books is entitled All the Women Are White; All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us are Brave. I have chosen this title as a point of departure in my efforts to develop a Black feminist criticism because it sets forth a problematic consequence of the tendency to treat race and gender as mutually exclusive categories of experience and analysis. In this talk, I want to examine how this tendency is perpetuated by a single-axis framework that is dominant in antidiscrimination law and that is also reflected in feminist theory and …

The Single European Act: A Constitution For The Community?, George A. Bermann

Faculty Scholarship

If proof were needed that the European Economic Community is still the product of a careful tempering of integrationist impulses with preoccupations of national sovereignty, the recently ratified Single European Act (Single Act or Act) amply supplies it. Although the Single Act represents the most comprehensive revision to date of the Treaty of Rome (EEC Treaty), which established the European Economic Community (European Community or Community), it also reflects the continuing vitality of the view that functional change within the Community takes priority in time over structural and institutional reform. Rather than place European integration on a new set of …

Delaware's Intermediate Standard For Defensive Tactics: Is There Substance To Proportionality Review?, Ronald J. Gilson, Reinier Kraakman

Faculty Scholarship

The courts have long struggled with a standard for reviewing management's efforts to deter or defeat hostile takeovers. The usual standards of review in corporate law, the business judgment rule and the intrinsic fairness test, do not seem adequate when courts must evaluate defensive measures that implicate both management's business acumen and its loyalty to shareholder interests. Because evaluating a sale of the company is a complex business decision, management's response to a takeover bid resembles the normal business decisions that the business judgment rule largely insulates from judicial review.At the same time, however, a hostile takeover creates a potential …

Seasoned To The Use, Carol Sanger

Faculty Scholarship

Two recent novels, Presumed Innocent and The Good Mother, have more in common than critical success, longevity on best-seller lists and big-name movie adaptations. Both books are about law: Presumed Innocent is a tale of murder in the big city; The Good Mother is the story of a custody fight over a little girl. Central characters in both books are lawyers. Turow is a lawyer, and Miller thanks lawyers. While the books could be classified in other ways – Presumed Innocent as mystery, The Good Mother as women's fiction – each meets a suggested genre specification of a legal novel: …

Wisconsin Sentence Modification: A View From The Trial Court, Kate Kruse, Kim E. Patterson

Faculty Scholarship

In Wisconsin, trial courts have discretion to modify a defendant's criminal sentence if the defendant introduces a "new factor." Published Wisconsin case law gives little guidance on what constitutes a new factor. The Wisconsin Supreme Court has declined to find a new factor present in every case it has published since defining "new factor" in 1978. Because of ambiguous and conflicting rulings, the standards for both prongs of the new factor definition remain unclear. This Comment attempts to shed light on the new factor requirement for sentence modification by examining Wisconsin trial court decisions on a limited sample of sentence …

Wanted: An Ethos Of Personal Responsibility—Why Codes Of Ethics And Schools Of Law Don't Make For Ethical Lawyers, Daniel S. Kleinberger

Faculty Scholarship

This article: (1) argues that neither codes of professional ethics nor traditional modes of law school teaching do much to produce ethical lawyers; (2) asserts that ethics codes and the presuppositions of the adversary system work to alienate lawyers from a sense of individual responsibility; (3) critiques the conceptual connection between the adversary system and codes of lawyer ethics; (4) critiques the conventional approach to teaching legal ethics in law schools; (5) invokes the approach to ethical analysis championed by the German sociologist and social theorist Max Weber; and (6) explains how that approach, coupled with traditional tools of legal …

Ethos And Conscience—A Rejoinder, Daniel S. Kleinberger

Faculty Scholarship

In “Wanted: An Ethos of Personal Responsibility,” Professor Kleinberger sought to prompt debate about the moral preconceptions of the legal profession. Professor Morawetz responded in his essay, “Layers and Conscience.” This article responds, commenting on Morawetz’s arguments that (1) excessive pessimism about lawyer morality is unfounded and counterproductive; (2) the public’s antipathy toward lawyers is inevitable given the role lawyers play in our society; (3) codes of ethics can and do have an uplifting influence on the morals of lawyers; and (4) law schools can and do train moral judgment.

Enforcement Of Arbitration Agreements In Securities Fraud Disputes, Robert A. Lusardi

Faculty Scholarship

In this Article, the Author discusses the Supreme Court's increased willingness in recent years to rely on the arbitral process for the resolution of securities disputes, and its willingness to enforce pre-dispute arbitration agreements under the Arbitration Act.

Autopsy Of A Murder: Using Simulation To Teach First Year Criminal Law, Stacy Caplow

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Bias Crimes: Unconscious Racism In The Prosecution Of Racially Motivated Violence, Tanya K. Hernandez

Faculty Scholarship

Within the past four years, a perceived surge of "bias crimes" has seized the nation's attention. Bias crimes, physical acts of violence used as an outlet for prejudiced hostilities, are usually street crimes spontaneously committed by casual clusters of "normal people on the street" with very little advanced planning. This Note focuses on the physical injuries to persons that result from bias crimes. Such physical injuries represent cog- nizable harms that can be redressed through criminal statutes.'

Book Review - A Guide To Legal Research In Virginia (Edited By John D. Eure), Steven D. Hinckley

Faculty Scholarship

Review of A Guide to Legal Research in Virginia, edited by John D. Eure. Charlottesville, VA: Committee on Continuing Legal Education, Virginia Law Foundation, 1989.

Qualified Immunity In Section 1983 Cases: The Unanswered Questions, Kit Kinports

Faculty Scholarship

Part I of this Article describes the general policies underlying qualified immunity and the Court's decisions defining the scope of the defense. Part II then addresses two answered questions concerning Harlow v. Fitzgerald's impact on the substantive content of the qualified immunity defense: Is immunity available to the defendant who actually knows that her conduct is infringing the plaintiff's constitutional rights, even if the law governing those rights is not yet clearly established? And should a court take into account the nature of the defendant's governmental responsibilities and other circumstances surrounding her conduct in determining whether the right she …

Monopoly Sports Leagues, Stephen F. Ross

Faculty Scholarship

This Article argues that the government should break up both Major League Baseball and the NFL to provide for competing economic entities in each sport. Part I details the harm monopoly sports leagues cause in several different markets and explains why a competitive league structure can correct such harms. Part II discusses why regulatory solutions are poor substitutes for competition as a means of redressing these harms. Part III explains why neither baseball nor football is a "natural monopoly" and argues that no persuasive evidence suggests that rival leagues cannot exist in those sports. Part IV examines how the antitrust …

Reaganist Realism Comes To Detriot, Stephen F. Ross

Faculty Scholarship

Part I of this article discusses Detroit Newspapers and explains how in deferring to the Attorney General's interpretation of the Newspaper Preservation Act, Judge Silberman disregarded every applicable technique of statutory interpretation typically used to resolve the issue. Indeed, each of these techniques suggests that Attorney General Meese's interpretation of the Act was incorrect. This part of the article also demonstrates why deference to Meese was particularly inappropriate in light of the generally accepted justifications for judicial deference to administrative interpretations of statutes.

Part II explains that Detroit Newspapers is one of several opinions by conservative Reagan judicial appointees that …

The Mandatory/Enabling Balance In Corporate Law: An Essay On The Judicial Role, John C. Coffee Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

A half-filled glass of water can be described as either half full or half empty. The structure of American corporate law – partly enabling, partly mandatory in character – can be viewed in much the same way. Some commentators see American corporate law as primarily composed of mandatory rules that the shareholders themselves cannot waive or modify, In their view, this mandatory component compensates both for the absence of true bargaining among the parties and for the inevitable divergence of interests between the principals (the shareholders) and their agents (the managers and directors). Conversely, other commentators, to whom this Article …

Free Speech Justifications, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

This Article sets out what I believe are the relevant justifications for free speech, the term "free speech" being meant to cover both freedom of speech and freedom of the press. These are the justifications one might use to assess whether communications fall within a political or judicial principle of free speech and how great the protection of the communications that are covered should be. Such assessments are undertaken in a longer study that is mainly about the ways in which different uses of language affect the application of principles of freedom of speech to the criminalization of behavior. That …

Harry Kalven, The Proust Of The First Amendment, Lee C. Bollinger

Faculty Scholarship

Reading A Worthy Tradition makes one nostalgic. For the generation of scholars who cut their first amendment teeth on Harry Kalven's articles, this book offers the experience of a recaptured past. The question is, however, does it offer anything more?

The Rebuilding Of Duke University's Law School, 1925-1947, Part 2, Robert F. Durden

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

"Willfulness" And "Ignorance" In Federal Criminal Law, Michael E. Tigar

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Environmental Quality: Three Ways To Decide How Much To Spend, Marcia R. Gelpe

Faculty Scholarship

Federal and state laws limiting environmental emissions reflect three approaches to deciding how much money to spend on improving environmental quality. The balancing approach estimates the benefits of limiting emissions and the costs of meeting various limits, then sets limits at levels where benefits justify costs. The cost ignoring approach sets emissions limits at levels necessary to prevent environmental harm, without considering the costs of meeting those limits. Technology-based standards limit emissions to levels attainable using the best pollution control technology, as long as no significant environmental effects are known to occur at those levels. In this article, the author …

The Popular Image Of The American Lawyer: Some Thoughts On Its Eighteenth And Nineteenth Century Intellectual Bases, James W. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

This essay explores the ambiguous position lawyers occupy in the popular mind in America by identifying some of the ideas which contributed to the schizophrenic popular attitude toward the legal profession in the period between the American Revolution and the Civil War. Many of the stock anti-lawyer themes and many of the intellectual sources of the profession's strength are clearly visible by the end of this period. The Author explores this problem, first by relating it to recent scholarship in American history describing the struggle between republicanism and liberalism at the time of the Founding. The way the profession was …

Reconsidering Role Assumption In Clinical Education, Minna J. Kotkin

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Manufacturing Matters: The Myth Of The Postindustrial Economy, Jagdish N. Bhagwati

Faculty Scholarship

Messrs. Cohen and Zysman are political scientists. They are the resident gurus at BRIE (Berkeley Roundtable on International Economy). While they doubtless enjoy imported French cheese, especially with the Zinfandel from the local vineyards, they get the goose pimples watching movies on their Japanese VCRs. They are worried sick by America's alleged deindustrialization. This book is their effort to say why and to startle a complacement nation into an active policy to defend its industries.

The Development Of The Nineteenth-Century Consensus Theory Of Contract, Philip A. Hamburger

Faculty Scholarship

The consensus theory is well known. According to consensus theory, contract is the product of the consensus or "meeting of the minds" of contracting parties; if there is no consensus, there is no contract. Today, even after repeated challenges, consensus theory continues to be important and even essential in many approaches to contract.

The role of the parties' consensus was not always apparent in case law. Until well into the nineteenth century, the most important remedy for breach of contract in both England and America was the action for breach of promise known as "assumpsit." As a result, lawyers typically …

Evaluating Child Care Legislation: Program Structures And Political Consequences, Lance Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

The American political system is not good at choosing among worthy goals and then adopting programs well designed to achieve the desired purposes. Scholars and activists continue to debate the success and failure of the last quarter century of efforts to reduce inequality and achieve other social reforms. But we have no well developed methodology for evaluating proposed programs and attempting to predict their likely consequences.

This Article asks what we know about choosing legal structures for programmatic efforts that seek social change. In particular, it asks whether we can predict relationships between different ways of pursuing public ends and …

Choosing One's Family: Can The Legal System Address The Breadth Of Women's Choices Of Intimate Relationships, Barbara Cox

Faculty Scholarship

In discussing the legal system's response to alternative families seeking an extension of traditional family benefits, this paper is divided into two main sections. The first section summarizes the Madison experience in trying to pass a comprehensive alternative family rights ordinance. It takes an in-depth look at the entire process from the grassroots pressures on the M.E.O.C. which resulted in formation of the task force to the Common Council's enactment of two minor sections of the proposed ordinance. It will analyze the political and legal process used in an effort to obtain significant reform in the definition of family within …

Notice-And-Comment Rights For Administrative Decisions Affecting International Trade: Heightened Need, No Response, William Araiza

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Efficient Remedies For Breach Of Warranty, Kenneth Chapman, Michael J. Meurer

Faculty Scholarship

This article attempts to suggest valuable refinements and extensions of the economic theory of warranty by explicitly considering the choice of remedies for breach of warranty in conjunction with the choice of warranty protection itself. In particular, it offers explanations for the prevalence of replacement terms rather than refund terms in warranties. Economists studying the general issue of breach of contract have noted that the choice of remedy has important implications for risk sharing, renegotiation, transaction-specific investment, and the incentive to breach.5 This article derives much of its insight from the recognition that work on the economics of contract breach …