Digital Commons Network^™

Marbury And The Administrative State, Henry Paul Monaghan

Faculty Scholarship

Marbury v. Madison's prominence as a constitutional decision has long deflected interest in examining its other implications. But prior to proclaiming judicial competence to invalidate an act of Congress, the Court sustained judicial authority to enforce the specific statutory duties of administrative officials. Had the doctrine of separation of powers been understood from the beginning to bar any judicial control of administrative power, the constitutional scheme would have gone seriously awry at the outset. Congressional directives either would have been subordinated to the will of the executive department or would have generated collateral and unseemly struggles between the two …

Rescuing The Private Attorney General: Why The Model Of The Lawyer As Bounty Hunter Is Not Working, John C. Coffee Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

Forty years ago, Judge Jerome Frank coined the term "private Attorney General" to recognize the role of private litigation in the enforcement of law. In the intervening years, the "private attorney general" concept has become both a cliche and a crutch, receiving polite lip service from nearly all, but critical analysis from relatively few. As most college sophomores know, the private attorney general is someone who sues "to vindicate the public interest" by representing collectively those who individually could not afford the costs of litigation; and, as every law student knows, our society places extensive reliance upon such private attorneys …

How Empty Is The Idea Of Equality, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

The nature of equality and the relationship between equality and justice have long been puzzling to social and legal philosophers. One manifestation of these problems of understanding is uncertainty among lawyers and judges about the significance of legal norms formulated in the language of equality, most notably the equal protection clause of the Constitution. In an elaborately reasoned, imaginative, and richly referenced recent article, Peter Westen has urged the arresting conclusion that the idea of equality is empty, empty in the sense that any normative conclusion derived from the idea could be reached more directly by reliance on normative judgments …

The 1982 Minimum Tax Amendments As A First Step In The Transition To A "Flat-Rate" Tax, Michael J. Graetz

Faculty Scholarship

The massive body of tax legislation enacted in the first two years of the Reagan Administration offers little guidance for predicting the future direction of United States tax policy. Dramatically different Congressional coalitions – each led by the President – passed by very narrow margins the nation's largest tax reduction (the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981) and then the next year enacted the largest peacetime tax increase (the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982). In each case, short-term political and fiscal concerns dominated the debates. The 1981 legislation reduced taxes in an effort to stimulate economic activity …

The Mitigation Principle: Toward A General Theory Of Contractual Obligation, Charles J. Goetz, Robert E. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

The duty to mitigate is a universally accepted principle of contract law requiring that each party exert reasonable efforts to minimize losses whenever intervening events impede contractual objectives. Although applications of the mitigation principle pervade the specific rules of contract, it is startling how many questions remain unanswered as to precisely what efforts the mitigation duty requires and what point in time the obligation arises. For example, under what circumstances does mitigation require an injured party to deal with the contract breacher? Why does the duty to minimize losses mature only after the breach, even if the injured party became …

Why Lawyers Should Be Allowed To Advertise: A Market Analysis Of Legal Services , Geoffrey C. Hazard Jr., Russell G. Pearce, Jeffrey W. Stempel

Faculty Scholarship

Last August, the American Bar Association adopted the Model Rules of Professional Conduct which significantly altered the ABA' position on lawyer advertising. It is still unclear how the states will respond to the ABA's new position, and the debate about the propriety of lawyer advertising continue. In the authors' view, both sides of the debate have overlooked an important point: For purposes of analyzing the advertising problem, legal services are of two types, and the effect of advertising on the legal services market will vary with the type of service involved."Individualized" services involve legal matters that pose a significant risk …

Behind Closed Doors, Peter G. Fish

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Legal Accountability And The Ncaa, John C. Weistart

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Pure Comparative Law And Legal Science In A Mixed Legal System, Lawrence G. Baxter

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Book Review, Administrative Law, Lawrence G. Baxter

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Competitive Process And Gray Market Goods, The , Jacqueline Nolan-Haley

Faculty Scholarship

Although it has the appearance of benefiting the consumer, the phenomenon of gray market goods is, for the most part, a species of unfair competition. Where an exclusive distribution contract between foreign and domestic entities enhances interbrand competition and satisfies a rule of reason analysis, it should be considered a protectable property interest. There is little justification for permitting gray market imports to interfere with that interest by taking advantage of the good will associated with the distribution, marketing, warranties and servicing provided by the United States distributor. The antitrust goal of promoting long-run consumer interests is not advanced by …

Constitutional Politics: A Rejoinder, Walter E. Dellinger Iii

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Computers And The Law, James Hambleton, David Matone

Faculty Scholarship

The Computer can manipulate information and retrieve it in ways which traditional sources of legal research cannot. Using a traditional legal research book, the attorney is tied to the indexing and abstracting which the legal editor has used. Searching for a case on Ford Pinto crashes, where does the attorney start? Are these cases indexed under "Automobiles," "Products Liability," or "Torts?" The attorney has to second guess the indexer.

Using the computer, the attorney is not tied to any indexing system. Rather than containing just digest paragraphs or abstracts, the computer database holds the full text of case decisions. By …

Leveling The Road From Borg-Warner To First National Maintenance: The Scope Of Mandatory Bargaining, Michael C. Harper

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court's most recent effort to distinguish nonmandatory bargaining topics, First National Maintenance Corp. v. NLRB, ¹⁹ illustrates the Court's lack of clarity in this area and vindicates Cox's and Wellington's criticisms of the Court's approach in Borg-Warner. In First National Maintenance (F.N.M.), the Court held that an employer's decision "to shut down part of its business purely for economic reasons" was outside the scope of mandatory bargaining.²⁰ The Court could cite no evidence that Congress intended to prevent employee representatives from obtaining full effective bargaining over such decisions, nor did it articulate any general principle to …

The Exercise Of Executive Discretion: A Study Of A Regional Office Of The Department Of Labor, Michael C. Harper

Faculty Scholarship

Writing for a recent symposium on empirical research in administrative law, Professor Paul Verkuil noted that such research "casts light on one of the dark corners of the law. The vast majority of administrative decisions are of the informal variety, meaning they take place outside the reach of generic administrative procedure acts and frequently outside the courts themselves."' We are only beginning to appreciate how vast is this dark corner and how varied the possible modes of illumination.

This essay casts some additional light into the corner by reporting on a study of the exercise of executive discretion by a …

Seizing The Middle Ground Between Rules And Standards In Design Defect Litigation: Advancing Directed Verdict Practice In The Law Of Tort, Aaron Twerski

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Bargaining In The Shadow Of The Law: A Testable Model Of Strategic Behavior, Robert Cooter, Stephen G. Marks, Robert Mnookin

Faculty Scholarship

Part I describes the framework of the model. Part II discusses the domination of psychological effects by tangible variables, which is the basis for comparative statics. Part III explains the table of predictions, and Part IV applies the predictions to externalities and rules for real-locating payoffs from trial. There is little mathematics in the text. The mathematical reader can refer to the Appendix for a brief presentation of our model, or to a companion paper on file with this Journal which develops the mathematics at length.

Pretrial Procedure Under The Massachusetts Rules Of Criminal Procedure, Eric D. Blumenson, Eva Nilsen

Faculty Scholarship

The Massachusetts Rules of Criminal Procedure became effective on July 1, 1979. While many of their provisions helpfully codify previously existing practice and case law, the Rules have in some areas effected a major transformation of criminal procedure. This article examines the changes wrought by the Rules in the pretrial arena, with emphasis on those areas that remain somewhat unfamiliar to the practitioner or untested against constitutional challenge in the courts. While the Rules appear to have done an admirable job of simplifying and rationalizing the criminal trial process, their emphasis on mutuality and reciprocity have in some cases created …

"Value" Judgments: Accounts Receivable Financing And Voidable Preference Under The New Bankruptcy Code, Neil B. Cohen

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

A Critique Of John Hart Ely's Quest For The Ultimate Constitutional Interpretivism Of Representative Democracy, James E. Fleming

Faculty Scholarship

Contemporary constitutional theory, John Hart Ely argues in Democracy and Distrust, is dominated by a false dichotomy between "clause-bound interpretivism" and "noninterpretivism." Clausebound interpretivists, such as the late Justice Hugo Black, believe that "judges deciding constitutional issues should confine themselves to enforcing norms that are stated or clearly implicit in the written Constitution" (p. 1). Noninterpretivists, such as the Supreme Court that produced the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade,2 contend that "courts should go beyond that set of references and enforce [substantive] norms that cannot be discovered within the four comers of the document" (p. 1). The genius of …

The Tax Benefit Of Bliss, Alan L. Feld

Faculty Scholarship

In recent years the Supreme Court has limited its substantive decisions in federal income tax matters.^I For the most part, the handful of tax cases it has considered each year deal with collection, liens, or other issues peripheral to doctrinal development in the tax area.² The Court's recent decision in Diedrich v. Commissioner,³ however, dealt with a realization question involving net gifts; and its grant of certiorari consolidating the cases of Bliss Dairy, Inc. v. United States and Hillsboro National Bank v. Commissioner⁴ promises a continuing interest in substantive tax law. Bliss Dairy will enable the …

Nonjudicial Foreclosure Under Deed Of Trust May Be A Fraudulent Transfer Of Bankrupt's Property: Durrett V. Washington National Insurance Co., Franklin G. Snyder

Faculty Scholarship

In theory, the substantive rights of secured creditors such as mortgagees are affected much less by bankruptcy proceedings than those of unsecured creditors. In practice, however, bankruptcy proceedings have affected mortgagees. Filing a bankruptcy petition automatically stays pending foreclosures. Trustees in bankruptcy also can set aside foreclosures of certain liens obtained by unsecured creditors and certain mortgages and deeds of trust executed in the year preceding bankruptcy. The decision in Durrett adds yet another weapon to the bankruptcy trustee's arsenal: the power to void nonjudicial foreclosure sales even though the sale is proper and final under state law.

The Free Speech Metamorphosis Of Mr. Justice Holmes, David S. Bogen

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Scope Of Section 1985(3) In Light Of Great American Federal Savings And Loan Association V. Novotny: Too Little Too Late?, Taunya Lovell Banks

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Book Review (Reviewing Bruce A. Ackerman & William T. Hassler, Clean Coal/Dirty Air (1981)), John C. Dernbach, Thomas Y. Au

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Life And Death Decisions In The Nursery: Standards And Criteria For Withholding Lifesaving Treatment From Infants, Steven R. Smith

Faculty Scholarship

That the conduct of human affairs does not always conform to the requirements of the law is a surprise to no one. But in few areas of critical life and death decisions is there such a disparity between commonly recognized principles of law and developing medical practice as exists in the area of withholding lifesaving medical care from infants, notably defective infants. The law is said to restrict physicians and parents from withholding lifesaving treatment from infants for the purpose of causing their deaths. Yet it is reported that it is not uncommon for lifesaving treatment to be denied severely …

A Graphic Review Of The Free Speech Clause, William W. Van Alstyne

Faculty Scholarship

This work acts as a spring board for the study of the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment. It builds useful graphical representations of complex constitutional theories from the ground up, allowing students to follow both development and the application of these theories.

Commentary: Constitutional Law, Joel Gora

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Model Rules Of Professional Conduct A Perspective, Geoffrey C. Hazard, Jr., Thomas Z. Hayward Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Case Against Shark Repellent Amendments: Structural Limitations On The Enabling Concept, Ronald J. Gilson

Faculty Scholarship

The tactical history of the tender offer movement resembles an unrestrained arms race. Faced with offeror assaults in the form of Saturday night specials, various types of bear-hugs, godfather offers, and block purchases, target management responded with equally intriguing defensive tactics: the black book, reverse bear-hug, sandbag, show stopper, white knight, and, drawing directly on military jargon, the scorched earth. But however varied the labels given particular defensive strategies, they share the common characteristic of being responsive: They are available only after an offer is made and the battle for the target's independence joined. From the target's perspective, what was …