Digital Commons Network^™

Recent Developments In Conflicts Of Law Notes, Michael M. Martin

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Sociological And Human Developmental Explanations Of Crime: Conflict Or Consensus , Deborah W. Denno

Faculty Scholarship

This paper examines multidisciplinary correlates of delinquency in an attempt to integrate sociological and environmental theories of crime with human developmental and biological explanations of crime. Structural equation models are applied to assess links among biological, psychological, and environmental variables collected prospectively from birth through age 17 on a sample of 800 black children at high risk for learning and behavioral disorders. Results show that for both males and females, aggression and disciplinary problems in school during adolescence are the strongest predictors of repeat offense behavior. Whereas school achievement and family income and stability are also significant predictors of delinquency …

Trust Termination: Unborn, Living, And Dead Hands–Too Many Fingers In The Trust Pie, Gail Boreman Bird

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

A New Service On The Texas Legal Horizon: Texas Supreme Court Index, James Hambleton, Jim Paulsen

Faculty Scholarship

Since the late 1950's the Texas Supreme Court Journal has been a mainstay of Texas lawyers, offering speedy copies of all supreme court opinions as well as writ dispositions. Though the Texas Supreme Court Journal is invaluable, it does have one major deficiency. Marian Boner's Reference Guide to Texas Law and Legal History puts the problem succinctly: "There is no cumulation, and the cases are not indexed."

A new publication, Texas Supreme Court Index+, is now making a creditable bid to fill that gap. A weekly service originating in Houston, the Index+ contains up-to-date data on the …

The Common Law Powers Of Federal Courts, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

Lawmaking by federal courts has been a matter of controversy since the early days of the Republic. In the last forty years, the debate has fallen into roughly two periods, with Roe v. Wade marking the dividing line. During what might be called the "legal process" era of the 1950's and 1960's, scholarly energy was focused on Erie Railroad v. Tompkins and what was then called the "new federal common law." To be sure, important work on judicial review was also done in those years, particularly in the wake of the Supreme Court's dramatic decision in Brown v. Board of …

Retroactivity Revisited, Michael J. Graetz

Faculty Scholarship

In three prior articles, I considered transitional problems of changes the tax law. My general analysis and its specific application to the adoption of a consumption tax were criticized last year in this journal by Avishai Shachar. By taking liabilities explicitly into account in considering tax transition rules, Shachar extended the fundamental principles generated by my theory of legal transitions. Shachar, however, misunderstood or mischaracterized much of my earlier work.

In this comment, I respond briefly to Shachar's criticisms. In Part I, I set out the context and conclusions of my general theory and suggest that Shachar agrees with its …

The Limits Of Expanded Choice: An Analysis Of The Interactions Between Express And Implied Contract Terms, Charles J. Goetz, Robert E. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

Although trade and its defining terms lie at the very core of contract law, perceptions of the state's involvement in the exchange process remain peculiarly incomplete. Everyone understands that the state supplies the fundamental property-defining rules for pre-trade endowments. For instance, governmentally provided rules of tort, nuisance, and civil rights establish basic boundaries of what initially belongs to an individual and, hence, what he has to offer in exchange. When an exchange subsequently takes place, however, the parties themselves assume an important part of the burden of communicating what rights are being given and received. Although the state's general rules …

The Metamorphosis Of Legal Education Symposium On Legal Education, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Brook's remarks this morning provide a context for my own. I mean to say a word or two for the classical era. One of the characteristics of legal education over the past half century or so, one that we ought not give up, has been its passion for order in a chaotic world. Striking as it is to say that "a passion for order ill suits a chaotic world," the world has ever been chaotic – and that passion, our principal defense. The question is, with what principles of order do we exercise that passion, to subdue unruly fact. …

The Unfaithful Champion: The Plaintiff As Monitor In Shareholder Litigation, John C. Coffee Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

When the legal history of the 1970's is written, it will note a significant shift in the way courts perceived shareholder litigation. Only a generation ago, the Supreme Court described the derivative action as "the chief regulator of corporate management." Even into the 1960's, those issues involving shareholder litigation that percolated up to the Supreme Court were typically resolved so as to extend the availability of a litigation remedy by removing arbitrary or overbroad barriers to the plaintiff.

The Development Of The Law Of Seditious Libel And The Control Of The Press, Philip A. Hamburger

Faculty Scholarship

This article presents a new account of the development of the law of seditious libel from the late sixteenth century to the early eighteenth. It also outlines a new version of the relationship between the government and the press during that period. The article argues that it was the gradual erosion, during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, of the legal foundations of the government's policies toward the press that eventually made necessary a new policy based on the law of libel. In the midsixteenth century, the Crown possessed a wide variety of means for dealing with the printed press, …

Price Adjustment In Long-Term Contracts, Victor P. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

After parties enter into a contract, changed circumstance might result in one of them being dissatisfied with the price. Anticipating this, the parties could include a price adjustment mechanism in the agreement. If the mechanism is imperfect, some dissatisfaction will remain. This dissatisfaction may result in litigation with the dissatisfied party asking the court either to excuse performance or revise the contract price. For example, large changes in fuel prices since 1973 generated considerable litigation.

In this paper, I suggest a framework for analyzing price adjustment in private contracts. Contrary to most economists and lawyers, I argue that price adjustment …

The Invention And Reinvention Of Welfare Rights, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

This essay contrasts the jurisprudence of welfare entitlement developed by social workers during and after the New Deal with the lawyers' welfare jurisprudence of the past two decades.

I find this contrast interesting for two reasons. First, it brings to light an episode in the intellectual history of the American welfare state that lawyers have ignored – the development of an understanding of welfare as a legal right by another profession long before Charles Reich's The New Property and the literature that followed it made such a notion current among lawyers. Second, the contrast between the social workers' and the …

Legal Informality And Redistributive Politics, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

Until recently, one of the most consistent themes in both right and left critiques of the legal system has been the repudiation of procedural formality, that is, of specialized, rule-bound procedures. The left critique portrayed formality as facilitating the manipulation of the legal system by the privileged to the disadvantage of others. Both right and left critiques portrayed formality as expressing and fostering alienation and antagonism.

In recent years, however, attitudes toward formality on the left have become increasingly complex and ambivalent. This development may be partly a reaction to the rising prominence of a conservative rhetoric that links proposals …

Taking Bureaucracy Seriously, Henry Paul Monaghan

Faculty Scholarship

The Federal Courts: Crisis and Reform can be viewed as not one but two "books." "Book I" (pp. 1-192), which reflects Judge Posner's well-known commitment to the interplay of law and economics, adds to the literature on the explosive and unremitting growth of litigation in the inferior federal courts during the last quarter-century. Noting this situation with alarm, Judge Posner seeks to identify the dimensions of the "crisis," to evaluate some current proposals for reform, and to advance some of his own. “Book II” (pp. 192-340) is quite different. Considerably less reliant upon law and economics, it addresses the substance …

Paradoxes In Legal Thought, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

Traditional legal thought has generated few anomalies, antinomies, and paradoxes. These factual and logical tensions arise only when theorists press for a complete and comprehensive body of thought. Discrete, unconnected solutions to problems and particularized precedents spare us the logical tensions that have troubled scientific inquiry.

Anomalies arise from data that do not fit the prevailing scientific theory. Paradoxes and antinomies, on the other hand, reflect problems of logical rather than factual consistency. To follow Quine's definitions, paradoxes are contradictions that result from overlooking an accepted canon of consistent thought. They are resolved by pointing to the fallacy that generates …

The Right And The Reasonable, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

As the common law relies on the concept of "reasonableness," the civil law relies on the concept of "Right." Professor Fletcher argues that reliance on reasonableness enables the common law to develop rules that can be voiced in a single standard. Such rules permit what Professor Fletcher terms 'flat" legal thinking. In contrast, the civil law's reliance on the concept of Right leads it to develop rules that proceed in two stages: the first rule asserts an absolute right; the second, a limitation based upon criteria other than Right. The application of such rules proceeds by what Professor Fletcher terms …

Constitutional Fact Review, Henry Paul Monaghan

Faculty Scholarship

Bose Corp. v. Consumers Union of United States held that the clearly erroneous standard of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 52(a) does not prescribe the scope of appellate review of a finding of actual malice in defamation cases governed by New York Times Co. v. Sullivan. Rather, as a matter of "federal constitutional law," appellate courts "must exercise independent judgment and determine whether the record establishes actual malice with convincing clarity." Thus, in addition to the familiar judicial duty to "say what the law is," the first amendment imposes a special duty with respect to law application: both …

Writ Writing Revisited: The Auto-Cite Approach, James Hambleton, Jim Paulsen

Faculty Scholarship

The November 1984 issue of the Texas Bar Journal contains an article discussing Texas writs of error and writ history ("Does West Write the Right Writs?"). The article examines the two most commonly used sources for Texas writ history: the West Writs of Error and Discretionary Review Tables, and Shepard's Texas Citations. The conclusion was that both contain a number of significant error and omissions.

Actually, there is a third and generally more accurate source for recent Texas writ history. Marketed by Lawyers' Cooperative, the same folks who publish A.L.R. and the Lawyer's Edition of the U.S. Reports, …

Equalities Real And Ideal: Affirmative Action In Indian Law Review, Lance Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

American legal scholars have devoted surprisingly little effort to studying India. In India, as in America, judges, lawyers, and legislators have had to shape a transplanted legal system with English roots. Both countries have adapted English legal institutions to conditions far more heterogeneous – ethnically, racially, linguistically,and geographically – than those of the mother country. It thus seems no accident that India's constitutional structure parallels that of the United States in so many ways. For example, India has a written constitution that embodies principles of federalism and separation of powers, and that provides for judicially enforced guarantees of individual rights. …

Trespass, Nuisance, And The Costs Of Determining Property Rights, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

The right to exclude intrusions by others, we have it on high authority, is "one of the most essential sticks in the bundle of rights that are commonly characterized as property." Yet the right to exclude is not one right; it is itself a collection or "bundle" of rights. With respect to property in land, for example, the right to exclude depends to a large extent on whether the intrusion in question is subject to the common law of trespass or of nuisance. Generally speaking, when the intrusion is governed by trespass, then there is no exception for de minimis …

The Natural Duty To Obey The Law, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

In this Article, Professor Greenawalt examines the strengths and weaknesses of arguments asserting the existence of a natural duty to obey the law. He begins by defining "natural duty," and then investigates this concept in the theories of John Finnis, John Rawls, Tony Honore, Philip Soper, and John Mackie. Drawing upon the similarities of these theories, Professor Greenawalt questions the nature, reach, and force of the natural duty to obey, considering, among other things, whether the duty extends to laws that are unjust or to laws with which few others comply, and examining more generally when duties should be understood …

Massachusetts And The Judges: Judicial Independence In Perspective, Barbara Aronstein Black

Faculty Scholarship

This is an essay about an incident that took place in the Province of Massachusetts Bay during the period 1772-1774, an incident that I will call the Affair of the Royal Salary. Close relative of the Stamp Act Crisis, The Boston Tea Party, even the Boston Massacre, the Affair of the Royal Salary similarly involved a clash between the forces of popular government and those of imperial government; like its better known cousins it is part of the story of the coming of the American Revolution in Massachusetts. In addition, since the Salary around which the Affair developed was intended …

Distrust Of Democracy, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

The current rediscovery of state constitutions has had a singular and curious feature: it has been focused largely on state constitutional provisions that are analogous, if not identical, to provisions of the United States Constitution. Scholars and jurists have devoted their attention to state protections of speech, state equal protection clauses, state privileges against self-incrimination, and state proscriptions of cruel and unusual punishments, and have developed interpretations of these texts that diverge from those adopted by the United States Supreme Court in construing comparable federal constitutional provisions. These attempts to play state variations on federal constitutional themes have not been …

The Pathological Perspective And The First Amendment, Vincent A. Blasi

Faculty Scholarship

Constitutions are designed to control, or at least influence, future events – political events, adjudicative events, to some extent even interactions between private parties. Yet the future is unknowable, largely unpredictable, and inevitably variable. At any moment there exists a short-run future, a long-run future, and a future in between. The future is virtually certain to contain some progress, some regression, some stability, some volatility. How is a constitution supposed to operate upon this vast panoply?

That is a question that ought to loom large in the deliberations of persons who propose and ratify new constitutions and new constitutional amendments. …

The Government's Enforcement Of Draft Registration: Prosecution Or Persecution?, Joel Gora

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Intellectual Development Of The American Doctrine Of Judicial Review, Pnina Lahav

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Charting The Future Course For Corporate Management Of Health Risks, Michael S. Baram

Faculty Scholarship

Corporations engage in technological activities of benefit to society, but thereby also create new health risks for workers, consumers, and communities. Government regulatory agencies deal with this chronic problem by conducting risk analyses and imposing various duties on private firms. Despite agency efforts and corporate compliance, health risks continue to arise and take their toll. To what extent will private firms voluntarily assume greater responsibility for preventing these health risks? This question is of increasing social importance, because the limitations of regulatory efforts are now obvious, whereas health risks are now being identified at what appears to be an increasing …

Political Interference In Law School Clinical Programs: Reflections On Outside Interference And Academic Freedom, Elizabeth M. Schneider

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Defining Filartiga: Characterizing International Torture Claims In United States Courts, James Paul George

Faculty Scholarship

Since the Nuremburg trials and the attendant worldwide reaction to Nazi attrocities, the world has taken an increasing interest in preventing government torture. Whenever legal fictions such as national borders and other sovereignty concepts have acted as barriers to torture prevention, the world has responded, slowly and incrementally, with new legal fictions to overcome those barriers. A recent case in a United States federal court, Filartiga v. Pena-Irala, is a significant new increment toward the prevention of torture and more generally the international protection of human rights. Filartiga holds that torture, long prohibited by virtually all nations' laws and …

Redeployment Of Tax Expenditures For Housing, Alan L. Feld

Faculty Scholarship

This article assesses housing-related tax expenditures and evaluates some of the proposals for changes in these programs, so as to make better use of tax aids for housing.