Digital Commons Network^™

Lawyers And Community Economic Development, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

The Articles in this symposium and the experiences they report show that, for lawyers, Community Economic Development (CED) has become a more expansive and more complex subject than it was when we discovered it two decades or so ago.

The Articles and the experiences are particularly revealing about what I would guess have been the two central preoccupations of lawyers in the field. The first, of course, is what we mean by community, and more specifically, how a community can become – or be regarded as – a legal and political actor. The second concerns lawyer accountability. Progressive lawyers have …

The Imagination Of James Boyd White, Lee C. Bollinger

Faculty Scholarship

For several decades, James Boyd White has been a unique voice in the law. It is a voice of extraordinary intellectual range, of erudition, and of deep commitment to a life of self-understanding and of humane values. His point of access is language – all language, in every context. Armed by a lifetime of thought about words, he justifiably has regarded no field or discipline or communicative activity as foreign and outside his ken. Whoever reads him must feel his sense of intellectual empowerment that our world, sectioned as it is by expertise, would deny us.

Theorizing The Law/Politics Distinction: Neutral Principles, Affirmative Action, And The Enduring Insight Of Paul Mishkin, Neil S. Siegel, Robert C. Post

Faculty Scholarship

Early in his career Mishkin saw that the law could be apprehended from two distinct and in part incompatible perspectives: from the internal perspective of a faithful practitioner and from the external perspective of the general public. If the social legitimacy of the law as a public institution resides in the latter, the legal legitimacy of the law as a principled unfolding of professional reason inheres in the former. Mishkin came to believe that although the law required both forms of legitimacy, there was nevertheless serious tension between them, and he dedicated his scholarly career to attempting to theorize this …

Access To Scientific And Technological Knowledge: Unesco's Past, Present And Future Roles, Jerome H. Reichman, Paul F. Uhlir, Heather J. Ritch

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Politics Of Risk: Pre-Litigation Site Assessment In Houston, Texas, Gregg P. Macey

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Missing Monitor In Corporate Governance:The Directors’& Officers’ Liability Insurer, Tom Baker, Sean J. Griffith

Faculty Scholarship

This article reports the results of empirical research on the monitoring role of directors’ and officers’ liability insurance (D&O insurance) companies in American corporate governance. Economic theory provides three reasons to expect D&O insurers to serve as corporate governance monitors: first, monitoring provides insurers with a way to manage moral hazard; second, monitoring provides benefits to shareholders who might not otherwise need the risk distribution that D&O insurance provides; and third, the “bonding” provided by risk distribution gives insurers a comparative advantage in monitoring. Nevertheless, we find that D&O insurers neither monitor corporate governance during the life of the insurance …

Predicting Corporate Governance Risk: Evidence From The Directors' & Officers' Liability Insurance Market, Tom Baker, Sean J. Griffith

Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines how liability insurers transmit and transform the content of corporate and securities law. Directors' & Officers' (D&O) liability insurers are the financiers of shareholder litigation in the American legal system, paying on behalf of the corporation and its directors and officers when shareholders sue. The ability of the law to deter corporate actors thus depends upon the insurance intermediary. How, then, do insurers transmit and transform the content of corporate and securities law in underwriting D& 0 coverage?In this Article, we report the results of an empirical study of the D&O underwriting process. Drawing upon in-depth interviews …

The True Lex Mercatoria: Private Law Beyond The State, Ralf Michaels

Faculty Scholarship

Is there an anational lex mercatoria, a "global law without a state?" The debate seems infinite. Some argue that the rules, institutions, and procedures of international arbitration have now achieved a sufficient degree both of autonomy from the state and of legal character that they represent such an anational law. Others respond that whatever law merchant may exist is really state law—dependent on national norms and the freedom of contract they provide, and on the enforceability of arbitral awards by national courts. This paper suggests that the dichotomy of anational law and state law is false. Although an anational law …

Mertonianism Unbound?: Imagining Free, Decentralized Access To Most Cultural And Scientific Material, James Boyle

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Emerging Culture Of Health Care: Improving End-Of-Life Care Through Collaboration And Conflict Engagement Among Health Care Professionals, Debra Gerardi

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Emerging Culture Of Health Care: From Horizontal Violence To True Collaboration, Debra Gerardi, Mary Kunes Connell

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Architecture Of Inclusion: Interdisciplinary Insights On Pursuing Institutional Citizenship, Susan Sturm

Faculty Scholarship

Structural inequality has captured the attention of academics, policymakers, and activists. This structural reorientation is occurring at a time of judicial retrenchment and political backlash against affirmative action. These developments have placed in sharp relief the mismatch between structural diagnoses and the dominant legal frameworks for addressing inequality. Scholars, policymakers, and activists are faced with the pressing question of what to do now. They share a need for new frameworks and strategies, growing out of a better understanding of institutional and cultural change.

I am honored that the Harvard Journal of Law & Gender has used the publication of The …

Model Uncertainty And The Deterrent Effect Of Capital Punishment, Ethan Cohen-Cole, Steven N. Durlauf, Jeffrey Fagan, Daniel Nagin

Faculty Scholarship

The reintroduction of capital punishment after the end of the Supreme Court moratorium has permitted researchers to employ state level heterogeneity in the use of capital punishment to study deterrent effects. However, no scholarly consensus exists as to their magnitude. A key reason this has occurred is that the use of alternative models across studies produces differing estimates of the deterrent effect. Because differences across models are not well motivated by theory, the deterrence literature is plagued by model uncertainty. We argue that the analysis of deterrent effects should explicitly recognize the presence of model uncertainty in drawing inferences. We …

A Reader's Companion To Against Prediction: A Reply To Ariela Gross, Yoram Margalioth, And Yoav Sapir On Economic Modeling, Selective Incapacitation, Governmentality, And Race, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

From parole prediction instruments and violent sexual predator scores to racial profiling on the highways, instruments to predict future dangerousness, drug-courier profiles, and IRS computer algorithms to detect tax evaders, the rise of actuarial methods in the field of crime and punishment presents a number of challenging issues at the intersection of economic theory, sociology, history, race studies, criminology, social theory, and law. The three review essays of "Against Prediction" by Ariela Gross, Yoram Margalioth, and Yoav Sapir, raise these challenges in their very best light. Ranging from the heights of poststructuralist and critical race theory to the intricate details …

Can There Be A Theory Of Law?, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

The paper deals with the possibility of a theory of the nature of law as such, a theory which will be necessarily true of all law. It explores the relations between explanations of concepts and of the things they are concepts of, the possibility that the law has essential properties, and the possibility that the law changes its nature over time, and that what is law at a given place and time depends on the culture and concepts of that place and time. It also considers the possibility of understanding the institutions, such as the law, of cultures whose concepts …

Building Criminal Capital Behind Bars: Peer Effects In Juvenile Corrections, Patrick J. Bayer, Randi Hjalmarsson, David Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

This paper analyzes the influence that juvenile offenders serving time in the same correctional facility have on each other's subsequent criminal behavior. The analysis is based on data on over 8,000 individuals serving time in 169 juvenile correctional facilities during a two-year period in Florida. These data provide a complete record of past crimes, facility assignments, and arrests and adjudications in the year following release for each individual. To control for the non-random assignment to facilities, we include facility and facility-by-prior offense fixed effects, thereby estimating peer effects using only within-facility variation over time. We find strong evidence of peer …

Latino Inter-Ethnic Employment Discrimination And The Diversity Defense, Tanya K. Hernandez

Faculty Scholarship

With the growing racial and ethnic diversity of the U.S. population and workforce, scholars have begun to address the ways in which coalition building across groups not only will continue to be necessary but also will become even more complex. Recent scholarship has focused on analyzing how best to promote effective coalition building. Thus far, scholars have not examined what that growing racial and ethnic diversity will mean in the context of individual racial and ethnic discrimination claims. What will antidiscrimination litigation look like when all the parties involved are non-White but nonetheless plaintiffs allege that a racial hierarchy exists …

Repairing Family Law, Clare Huntington

Faculty Scholarship

Scholars in the burgeoning field of law and emotion have paid surprisingly little attention to family law. This gap is unfortunate because law and emotion has the potential to bring great insights to family law. This Article begins to fill this void, and inaugurate a larger debate about the central role of emotion in family law, by exploring the intriguing and significant consequences for the regulation of families that flow from a theory of intimacy first articulated by psychoanalytic theorist Melanie Klein. According to Klein, individuals love others, inevitably transgress against those they love out of hate and aggression, feel …

An Answer To The Question: "What Is Poststructuralism?", Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

What is poststructuralism? It has always struck me as odd that so many critical theorists are reluctant to offer an answer to this question. In this essay, I unpack the term and provide a synoptic answer. Poststructuralism, I suggest, is a style of critical reasoning that focuses on the moment of ambiguity in our systems of meaning, as a way to identify the ethical choices that we make when we overcome the ambiguity and move from indeterminacy to certainty of belief in our efforts to understand, interpret, and shape our environment. Post-structuralism concentrates on the moment when we impose meaning …

The International Criminal Tribunal For Rwanda As The Theater: The Social Negotiation Of The Moral Authority Of International Law, Maya Steinitz

Faculty Scholarship

The international criminal courts (ICCs) - the ad hoc International Criminal Tribunals for the Former-Yugoslavia and for Rwanda, the recently-established permanent International Criminal Court, and hybrid internationalized tribunals such as the Special Court for Sierra Leone - are the international community's attempt to address the worst of the criminal manifestations of racism, nationalism and large-scale xenophobia. Based on five months of ethnographic research at the international criminal tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), analyzed using Erving Goffman's dramaturgical framework, this article examines the means through which moral authority is constructed and communicated by the ICTR. Specifically, the article advances the argument that …

The Expressive Capacity Of International Punishment: The Limits Of The National Law Analogy And The Potential Of International Criminal Law, Robert D. Sloane

Faculty Scholarship

Modern international criminal law (ICL) developed in the aftermath of World War II as an alternative to the proposal, espoused by Winston Churchill among others, that major Axis war criminals be summarily executed on sight. Because of this pedigree and the unconscionable nature of the crimes, ICL jurisprudence and scholarship have largely neglected the paramount question fundamental to any criminal justice system: the justifications for and legitimate goals of punishment. Insofar as a coherent jurisprudence of ICL sentencing can be said to exist at all, it remains correspondingly impoverished and unprincipled - comparable in some respects to that of the …

The Constitution In A Postmodern Age, Calvin R. Massey

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Disparity Rules, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

In 1992, Congress required states receiving federal juvenile justice funds to reduce racial disparities in the confinement rates of minority juveniles. This provision, now known as the disproportionate minority contact standard (DMC), is potentially more far-reaching than traditional disparate impact standards: It requires the reduction of racial disparities regardless of whether those disparities were motivated by intentional discrimination orjustified by "legitimate" agency interests. Instead, the statute encourages states to address how their practices exacerbate racial disadvantage.

This Article casts the DMC standard as a partial response to the failure of constitutional and statutory standards to discourage actions that produce racial …

Regime Theory, Anu Bradford

Faculty Scholarship

Regime theory is an approach within international relations theory, a sub-discipline of political science, which seeks to explain the occurrence of co-operation among States by focusing on the role that regimes play in mitigating international anarchy and overcoming various collective action problems among States (International Relations, Principal Theories; State; see also Co-operation, International Law of). Different schools of thought within international relations have emerged, and various analytical approaches exist within the regime theory itself (see Sec. F.3 below). However, typically regime theory is associated with neoliberal institutionalism that builds on a premise that regimes are central in facilitating international co-operation …

End Natural Life Sentences For Juveniles, Jeffrey A. Fagan

Faculty Scholarship

In 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court in Roper v. Simmons (125 S. Ct. 1183) banned executions of persons who commit capital murder before they reach age 18. Roper overturned death sentences for 72 people in 18 states (Streib, 2005). Most (but not all) were resentenced to natural life or life in prison without the possibility of parole (or JLWOP). Juvenile justice advocates now want to extend Roper’s maturity heuristic, proportionality analysis, aversion to errors, and deference to international laws and norms to argue for a constitutional ban on natural life sentences for adolescent offenders. This move could have a far …

The Race To The Center And Other Lessons Of Globalization, Jagdish N. Bhagwati

Faculty Scholarship

An Interview with Kenta Tsuda, New York, NY, 1 June 2006.

]agdish Bhagwati is a professor of economics and law at Columbia University and senior fellow in international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. His publications include The Economics of Underdeveloped Countries and In Defense of Globalization. He is the founder of the Journal of International Economics and Economics & Politics.

The Cost Of Norms: Tax Effects Of Tacit Understandings, Alex Raskolnikov

Faculty Scholarship

Most human interactions take place in reliance on tacit understandings, customary practices, and other legally unenforceable agreements. A considerable literature studying these informal arrangements (commonly referred to as social norms) has a decidedly positive flavor, arguing that many, if not most, of these norms are welfare enhancing. This Article looks at the less-appreciated darker side of social norms. It combines an analysis of modern sophisticated tax planning techniques with existing empirical studies of commercial relationships to reveal a disturbing connection. By relying on tacit understandings rather than express contractual terms, many taxpayers shift some of their tax liabilities to those …

Blogging While Untenured And Other Extreme Sports, A. Christine Hurt, Tung Yin

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Theory And Anti-Theory In The Work Of Allan Farnsworth, Wayne R. Barnes

Faculty Scholarship

When Allan Farnsworth passed away on January 31, 2005, the world lost a titan in the field of contracts. Farnsowrth has been described as “the great contemporary American scholar, and one of a handful of great world scholars, on the law of agreement...[He] was...perhaps The Authority on the law of contracts and much more.” Similarly, others have called him “the premiere figure in American Contracts law scholarship since the passing of Corbin and Dawson. The treatise and his half of the Second Restatement would be quite a contribution if there was nothing else.” Farnsworth’s casebook is perennially the most widely-adopted …

Private Law And State-Making In The Age Of Globalization, Daniela Caruso

Faculty Scholarship

The rise of post-national entities, such as the institutions of the European Union and of free-trade regimes, bears no obvious relation to the traditional pillars of western private law (mostly contracts, torts, and property doctrines). The claim of this article is that the global diffusion of private law discourse contributes significantly to the emergence of new centers of authority in the global arena. The article tests the impact of private law arguments in three contexts - the growing legitimacy of regional human rights adjudication, the consolidation of the institutions of the European Union, and the higher binding force of international …