Digital Commons Network^™

Choice Of Law Outline For Texas Courts, James P. George

Faculty Scholarship

Several recent Texas choice of law cases have misapplied the most-significant-relationship test, the basic Texas choice of law test adopted from the Restatement (Second) of Conflict of Laws. The misapplications (none from the Texas Supreme Court) predominantly turn on the courts' improperly focusing on a single element of the seven-factor most-significant-relationship test, thereby thwarting its function as a balancing test for competing interests. Texas courts are not alone in this misunderstanding of choice of law tests. In recent years most states have moved away from the old rigid choice of law rules--easily applied, but often unfair--to the newer rules based …

Blue-Sky Merit Regulation: Benefit To Investors Or Burden On Commerce?, Roberta S. Karmel

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Bounds And Beyond: A Need To Reevaluate The Right Of Prison Access To The Courts, Steven D. Hinckley

Faculty Scholarship

The author argues that the 1977 United States Supreme Court decision in Bounds v. Smith insufficiently protects the right of prisoners to represent themselves before the courts by failing to require state and federal correctional facilities to establish and maintain adequately stocked prison law libraries and to provide prisoners with the option to use those libraries as their means of gaining meaningful access to the courts.

Use Of Comparative Risk Methods In Regulatory And Common Law, Michael S. Baram

Faculty Scholarship

Several persistent problems afflict risk decisionmaking. In the regulatory context, agencies confront the problems of how to prioritize risks for best use of their limited resources and how to determine "how safe is safe enough," or a risk limit, when action is to be taken on a particular risk.

In the trial courts hearing toxic tort actions, the jury must often determine whether an activity is "unreasonably dangerous" or a product is "defective" because of its risk attributes.

To resolve these problems, many have proposed the use of risk comparisons. Now that we can quantify risks, why not compare them …

Bargaining In The Shadow Of Eminent Domain: Valuing And Apportioning Condemnation Awards Between Landlord And Tenant, Victor P. Goldberg, Thomas W. Merrill, Daniel Unumb

Faculty Scholarship

Who has a constitutionally protected "property" interest when the government condemns land subject to a lease? Is it the landlord? The tenant? Or do both parties have property rights that entitle them to compensation? Further, how should the size of the total condemnation award be determined? Should we value the property rights of the landlord and the tenant separately and sum? Or should we value the entire parcel as if it were an undivided fee simple and apportion the award between the landlord and the tenant? If the condemnation award is based on the value of a fee simple and …

Church-State Relations And Religious Convictions, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

Since the title of my talk is hardly self-explanatory, I want to begin by outlining my topic. My overall concern is with the proper place of religious convictions in lawmaking in our society. My special focus is on the place of religious convictions in the political resolution of churchstate issues.

State-Local Relations And Constitutional Law, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

A persistent theme in the literature on state-local relations has been the plenary power of state governments and the legal powerlessness of local governments. The "black letter" rules of state-local relations are that the state governments enjoy complete hegemony over their political subdivisions, that local governments are mere "creatures" of the states, with only those powers that the states delegate to them, and there is no such thing as an "inherent right" of local self-government.

Introduction, Barbara Aronstein Black

Faculty Scholarship

It is with great pride and pleasure that I welcome the appearance of the inaugural issue of the Journal of Chinese Law.

One Hundred Fifty Cases Per Year: Some Implications Of The Supreme Court's Limited Resources For Judicial Review Of Agency Action, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

Recent writing about the Supreme Court has stressed the implications of the extraordinary growth in the Court's docket – and, even more, the growth in the overall level of judicial activity in the nation's courts – for its performance of its judicial task. Generally, this writing seeks first to determine whether the Court has been forced to bypass questions it ought normally to hear (for example, square conflicts between two of the federal circuits), editorializes about the increasing bureaucratization of the Court, and passes on to normative questions about what if anything ought to be done to ease the Court's …

Troubled Marriage Of Retirement Security And Tax Policies, Michael J. Graetz

Faculty Scholarship

This Article concentrates on equitable and distributional aspects of the retirement security problem, although the unified view taken here seems essential to an adequate assessment of the fairness or efficacy either of the three components taken together or of any one of the three. Moreover, because tax legislation serves as the dominant public mechanism for implementing national retirement policy, whether through funding Social Security via the payroll tax or providing tax incentives for both private pensions and individual savings, a unified view of retirement security policy highlights interrelationships, confluences, and potential conflicts between retirement security and tax policy concerns.

This …

Democracy, Autonomy, And Values: Some Thoughts On Religion And Law In Modern America, Frederick Mark Gedicks, Roger Hendrix

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Pyrrhic Victory: Daniel Goldman's Defeat Of Zoning In The Maryland Court Of Appeals, Garrett Power

Faculty Scholarship

Nowadays government regulation of the use of urban land is taken for granted. Such was not always the case. Some sixty years ago, the Maryland Court of Appeals held it unconstitutional for Zoning Commissioner J. Frank Crowther to deny a request for a permit to operate a tailor shop in the basement of a Eutaw Place home. This paper examines the case of Goldman v. Crowther. Goldman's story reads like a comic melodrama with a tragic ending. But the saga also illuminates the social condition - it sheds light and casts shadows on the practice of xenophobia, the nature …

Introduction To Rico, Joseph Sweeney

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Universal And The Particular In Legal Discourses, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

My target in this article is a set of views that I shall call the functionalist perspective of comparative law. Of course, the word "functionalist" stands for a number of different theories. In order to be precise about the view that I oppose, I shall set my sights on the arguments developed in Otto Kahn-Freund's inaugural lecture Comparative Law as an Academic Subject, published two decades ago.

The Idea Of The Constitution As Hard Law, William W. Van Alstyne

Faculty Scholarship

The "idea" of the Constitution is generally thought to be well declared in the famous rhetoric of its Preamble.

Thinking About Habeas Corpus, Erwin Chemerinsky

Faculty Scholarship

Hailed as the "great writ of liberty," the writ of habeas corpus protects the American citizenry from arbitrary and wrongful governmental imprisonment. The scope of the protection provided by the writ, however, has never been finally settled during it's almost 200 year existence. This is the result of failure on the part of those analyzing its scope to recognize the complexity of the issues involved and to confront the true issues that underlie its application. In this Article, Professor Chemerinsky discusses what he considers to be the four primary considerations of habeas issues; federalism, separation of powers, the purposes of …

The Modern Misunderstanding Of Original Intent, H. Jefferson Powell

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Book Review, Thomas D. Rowe Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Book Reviews, George C. Christie

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Comments On Standards Of Judicial Review, William W. Van Alstyne

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Legal Fiction, James Boyle

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Thomas Hobbes And The Invented Tradition Of Positivism: Reflections On Language, Power, And Essentialism, James Boyle

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Self-Love And The Judicial Power To Appoint A Special Prosecutor Symposium On Special Prosecutions And The Role Of The Independent Counsel, James A. Cohen

Faculty Scholarship

Judicial appointment of private attorneys as special prosecutors has occurred and is permitted to occur in a variety of contexts other than when the executive branch is faced with a potential or actual conflict of interest. Until recently, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals and, of course, district courts within the Second Circuit, have interpreted Rule 42(b) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure to permit judicial appointment of a private attorney to prosecute conduct allegedly violative of a court order as criminal contempt. Courts have been most active in appointing private attorneys as special prosecutors in cases involving counterfeit …

Aids Law: Impact Of Aids On American Schools And Prisons, The , Elizabeth B. Cooper

Faculty Scholarship

The American public largely has responded with fear and hostility rather than with knowledge and compassion to the presence of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome ("AIDS") in society. Although our reactions are changing as we learn more about the syndrome and its causitive virus, some people continue to characterize AIDS as a well-deserved punishment of those groups most often afflicted with AIDS: gay men and intravenous drug users. Many people also persist in their erroneous beliefs that AIDS can be spread through casual contact. Although much remains to be learned about AIDS, there already exists an abundance of information upon which …

Gray Market Goods: A Lighter Shade Of Black Symposium: The Controversy Over The Importation Of Gray Market Goods: Is A Resolution Forthcoming, Hugh C. Hansen

Faculty Scholarship

If a street vendor offers a famous brand-name product for a substantially lower price than one would expect, the average consumer's initial reaction might be that the product had been stolen or was "hot" - a product of the black market. While such discounted goods might indeed be stolen, sophisticated consumers have come to expect similar discounts in stores and mail-order houses throughout the country on goods not from the black market but rather from the "gray market." These products, naturally enough, are called "gray market goods" or simply "gray goods." Gray goods are brand-name products manufactured abroad which bear …

To Begin The Nation Anew: Congress, Citizenship, And Civil Rights After The Civil War, Robert J. Kaczorowski

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

In The End, Truth Will Out’...Or Will It?. ‘Merchant Of Venice,’ Act Ii, Scene 2, Donald Magnetti

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

First Amendment Rights Of Military Personnel: Denying Rights To Those Who Defend Them, Linda Sugin

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Rethinking The Class Action: A Policy Primer On Reform, John C. Coffee Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

Today, virtually everyone has a proposal for "reforming" class action litigation but both consensus and coherence are lacking. Some proposals are bluntly restrictive. For example, the Reagan Administration would reduce attorney's fees, place a ceiling on product liability, and partially repeal treble damage statutes. In the same vein, the United States Supreme Court has shown itself parsimonious on the question of fee awards, by authorizing fee waivers, approving offers of settlement that seemingly permit fee shifting against the plaintiff's attorney, and curtailing the traditional bases on which a fee award may be enhanced. Other proposals have offered essentially neutral procedural …

Rico: The Crime Of Being A Criminal Parts I And Ii, Gerard E. Lynch

Faculty Scholarship

One of the most controversial statutes in the federal criminal code is that entitled "Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations," known familiarly by its acronym, RICO. Passed in 1970 as title IX of the Organized Crime Control Act of 1970, RICO has attracted much attention because of its draconian penalties, including innovative forfeiture provisions; its broad draftsmanship, which has left it open to a wide range of applications, not all of which were foreseen or intended by the Congress that enacted it; and the sometimes dramatic prosecutions that have been brought in its name.

RICO's complexity has attracted several efforts to unscramble …