Digital Commons Network^™

Implementing The New Ecosystem Services Mandate: A Catalyst For Advancing Science And Policy, James Salzman, J.B. Ruhl, Iris Goodman

Faculty Scholarship

On April 10, 2008, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) jointly published final regulations defining standards and procedures for authorizing compensatory mitigation of impacts to aquatic resources the Corps permits under Section 404 of the Clean Water Act (Section 404). Prior to the rule, the Section 404 compensatory mitigation program had been administered under a mish-mash of guidances, inter-agency memoranda, and other policy documents issued over the span of 17 years. A growing tide of policy and science scholarship criticized the program's administration as not accounting for the potential redistribution of ecosystem services that …

The Reichstag Fire Trial, 1933-2008 : The Production Of Law And History, Michael E. Tigar, John Mage

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Islands Of Effective International Adjudication: Constructing An Intellectual Property Rule Of Law In The Andean Community, Laurence R. Helfer, Karen J. Alter, M. Florencia Guerzovich

Faculty Scholarship

The Andean Community - a forty-year-old regional integration pact of small developing countries in South America - is widely viewed as a failure. In this Article, we show that the Andean Community has in fact achieved remarkable success within one part of its legal system. The Andean Tribunal of Justice (ATJ) is the world's third most active international court, with over 1400 rulings issued to date. Over 90% of those rulings concern intellectual property (IP). The ATJ has helped to establish IP as a rule of law island in the Andean Community where national judges, administrative officials, and private parties …

Keynote Address: Understanding The ‘Subprime’ Financial Crisis, Steven L. Schwarcz

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Comparative Law By Numbers? Legal Origins Thesis, Doing Business Reports, And The Silence Of Traditional Comparative Law, Ralf Michaels

Faculty Scholarship

The legal origins thesis -- the thesis that legal origin impacts economic growth and the common law is better for economic growth than the civil law -- has created hundreds of papers and citation numbers unheard of among comparative lawyers. The Doing Business reports -- cross-country comparisons including rankings on the attractiveness of different legal systems for doing business -- have the highest circulation numbers of all World Bank Publications; even critics admit that they have been successful at inciting legal reform in many countries in the world. Yet, traditional comparative lawyers have all but ignored these developments.

The first …

The Silver Anniversary Of The United States’ Exclusive Economic Zone: Twenty-Five Years Of Ocean Use And Abuse, And The Possibility Of A Blue Water Public Trust Doctrine, Mary Turnipseed, Stephen E. Roady, Raphael Sagarin, Larry B. Crowder

Faculty Scholarship

Sustainably managing marine ecosystems has proved nearly impossible, with few success stories. Ecosystem management failures largely stem from the traditional sector-by-sector, issue-by-issue approach to managing ocean-borne activities—an approach that is fundamentally unable to keep pace with the dynamics of coupled human, ecologi cal and oceanographic systems. In the United States today there are over twenty federal agencies and thirty-five coastal states and territories operating under dozens of statutory authorities shaping coastal and ocean policy. Among marine ecologists and policy experts there is an emerging consensus that a major overhaul in U.S. ocean governance is necessary. This Article suggests that the …

Preamble I: Purposes, Legal Nature, And Scope Of The Picc; Applicability By Courts; Use Of The Picc For The Purpose Of Interpretation And Supplementation And As A Model, Ralf Michaels

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Michael's chapter provides commentary on Preamble I of the UNIDROIT Principles of International Commercial Contracts. Areas covered include purposes, legal nature and scope of the PICC; applicability by courts; use of the PICC for the purpose of interpretation and supplementation and as a model.

Intellectual Property In The Twenty-First Century: Will The Developing Countries Lead Or Follow?, Jerome H. Reichman

Faculty Scholarship

This article continues the author's contributions on the subject of intellectual property protection in developing countries, and focuses on how those developing countries with growing technological prowess should accommodate their own national systems of innovation to the worldwide intellectual property regime emerging in the post-TRIPS period, with a view to maximizing global economic welfare in the foreseeable future.

Compulsory Licensing Of Patented Pharmaceutical Inventions: Evaluating The Options, Jerome H. Reichman

Faculty Scholarship

In this Comment, the author traces the relevant legislative history pertaining to compulsory licensing of patented pharmaceuticals from the TRIPS Agreement of 1994 to the 2003 waiver to, and later proposed amendment of, article 31, which enables poor countries to obtain needed medicines from other countries that possess manufacturing capacity. The Comment then evaluates recent, controversial uses of the relevant legislative machinery as viewed from different critical perspectives. The Comment shows how developing countries seeking access to esential medicines can collaborate in ways that would avoid undermining incentives to innovation and other social costs attributed to compulsory licensing. It ends …

Theorizing And Generalizing About Risk Assessment And Regulation Through Comparative Nested Analysis Of Representative Cases, Jonathan B. Wiener, Brendon Swedlow, Denise Kall, Zheng Zhou, James K. Hammitt

Faculty Scholarship

This article provides a framework and offers strategies for theorizing and generalizing about risk assessment and regulation developed in the context of an on-going comparative study of regulatory behavior. Construction of a universe of nearly 3,000 risks and study of a random sample of 100 of these risks allowed us to estimate relative U.S. and European regulatory precaution over a thirty-five-year period. Comparative nested analysis of cases selected from this universe of ecological, health, safety, and other risks or its eighteen categories or ninety-two subcategories of risk sources or causes will allow theory-testing and -building and many further descriptive and …

Structuring U.S. Innovation Policy: Creating A White House Office Of Innovation Policy, Stuart M. Benjamin, Arti K. Rai

Faculty Scholarship

This article begins with a discussion of innovation’s importance to the future well-being of American society. The authors then discuss limitations of the current federal framework for making innovation policy. Specifically, the relative absence of innovation from the agenda of Congress and many relevant federal agencies manifests the confluence of two regulatory challenges: first, the tendency of political actors to focus on short-term goals and consequences; and second, political actors’ reluctance to threaten powerful incumbent actors. Courts, meanwhile, lack sufficient expertise and the ability to conduct the type of forward-looking policy planning that should be a hallmark of innovation policy. …

‘The Federalist’ Abroad In The World, Donald L. Horowitz

Faculty Scholarship

This paper traces the influence of The Federalist Papers on five continents. From 1787 to roughly 1850, The Federalist was widely read and highly influential, especially in Europe and Latin America. Federalist justifications for federalism as a solution to the problem of creating a continental republic or to provincial rivalries were widely accepted. So, too, was the presidency, at least in Latin America, and that region adopted judicial review later in the nineteenth century. Presidentialism and judicial review fared less well in Western Europe. Following World War II, judicial review slowly became part of the standard equipment of new and …

Mechanism Choice, Jonathan B. Wiener, Barak D. Richman

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter reviews the literature on the selection of regulatory policy instruments, from both normative and positive perspectives. It first reviews the mechanism design literature to identify normative objectives in selecting among the menu or toolbox of policy instruments. The chapter then discusses the public choice and positive political theory literatures and the variety of models developed to attempt to predict the actual selection of alternative policy instruments. It begins with simpler early models focusing on interest group politics and proceeds to more complicated models that incorporate both supply and demand for policy, the role of policy entrepreneurs, behavioral and …

Presidential Popular Constitutionalism, Jedediah Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

This Article adds a new dimension to the most important and influential strand of recent constitutional theory: popular or democratic constitutionalism, the investigation into how the U.S. Constitution is interpreted (1) as a set of defining national commitments and practices, not necessarily anchored in the text of the document, and (2) by citizens and elected politicians outside the judiciary. Wide-ranging and groundbreaking scholarship in this area has neglected the role of the President as a popular constitutional interpreter, articulating and revising normative accounts of the nation that interact dynamically with citizens’ constitutional understandings. This Article sets out a “grammar” of …

Dispute Systems Design: The United Nations Compensation Commission, Francis Mcgovern

Faculty Scholarship

The Security Council of the United Nations established the United Nations Compensation Commission (“UNCC”) with its Resolution 687 on April 3, 1991.1 It was the first compensation system established under the authority of Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter and was designed to process and pay claims arising from the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. The purpose of this paper is to examine the design of the UNCC from a variety of perspectives: its historical setting, the alternative design approaches that have been taken in other compensation contexts, the details of its design, and its role in the design …

Supreme Court Preemption Doctrine, Christopher H. Schroeder

Faculty Scholarship

In the United States, law and policy always function within layers of government authority – federal, state, and local. This book primarily examines the choices policy makers, legislatures, or agencies face in allocating and coordinating responsibility among these layers; choices that will always be constrained by any limits placed on them by the U.S. Constitution, as interpreted by the Supreme Court. This chapter explores the doctrine that the Supreme Court has elaborated to address one set of those constraints, namely the doctrine of preemption.

Preemption doctrine rests on Article VI of the Constitution, which provides that the laws and treaties …

The Restatement (Third) Of Agency And The Unauthorised Agent In Us Law, Deborah A. Demott

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Connected Coordination: Network Structure And Group Coordination, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Ramamohan Paturi, Nicholas Weller

Faculty Scholarship

Networks can affect a group’s ability to solve a coordination problem. We utilize laboratory experiments to study the conditions under which groups of subjects can solve coordination games. We investigate a variety of different network structures, and we also investigate coordination games with symmetric and asymmetric payoffs. Our results show that network connections facilitate coordination in both symmetric and asymmetric games. Most significantly, we find that increases in the number of network connections encourage coordination even when payoffs are highly asymmetric. These results shed light on the conditions that may facilitate coordination in real-world networks.

Competition In The Courtroom: When Does Expert Testimony Improve Jurors’ Decisions?, Cheryl Boudreau, Mathew D. Mccubbins

Faculty Scholarship

Many scholars lament the increasing complexity of jury trials and question whether the testimony of competing experts helps unsophisticated jurors to make informed decisions. In this article, we analyze experimentally the effects that the testimony of competing experts has on (1) sophisticated versus unsophisticated subjects' decisions and (2) subjects' deci- sions on difficult versus easy problems. Our results demonstrate that competing expert testimony, by itself, does not help unsophisticated subjects to behave as though they are sophisticated, nor does it help subjects make comparable decisions on difficult and easy problems. When we impose additional institutions (such as penalties for lying …

Global Warming And The Problem Of Policy Innovation: Lessons From The Early Environmental Movement, Christopher H. Schroeder

Faculty Scholarship

When it comes to influencing government decisions, special interests have some built-in advantages over the general public interest. When the individual members of special interest groups have a good deal to gain or lose as a result of government action, special interests can organize more effectively, and generate benefits for elected officials, such as campaign contributions and other forms of political support. They will seek to use those advantages to influence government decisions favorable to them. The public choice theory of government decision making sometimes comes close to elevating this point into a universal law, suggesting that the general public …

Implementing The New Ecosystem Services Mandate Of The Section 404 Compensatory Mitigation Program - A Catalyst For Advancing Science And Policy, James Salzman, J.B. Ruhl, Iris Goodman

Faculty Scholarship

On April 10, 2008, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) jointly published final regulations defining standards and procedures for authorizing compensatory mitigation of impacts to aquatic resources the Corps permits under Section 404 of the Clean Water Act (Section 404). Prior to the rule, the Section 404 compensatory mitigation program had been administered under a mish-mash of guidances, inter-agency memoranda, and other policy documents issued over the span of 17 years. A growing tide of policy and science scholarship criticized the program's administration as not accounting for the potential redistribution of ecosystem services that …

Private Injuries, Public Policies: Adjusting The Nlrb's Approach To Backpay Remedies Symposium: Whither The Board: The National Labor Relations Board At 75, James J. Brudney

Faculty Scholarship

From fiscal years 2004 through 2008, over 135,000 employees received backpay through NLRB proceedings, mostly based on wrongful discharges. The Labor Board's backpay determination processes are often cumbersome and time-consuming to apply: they effectively invite employers to reduce and delay monetary recoveries and, not coincidentally, they undermine the remaining employees' interest in pursuing unionization and a collective bargaining relationship. The Article first asks to what extent the Board has statutory authority to adjust its approach toward backpay and mitigation. The answer, in short, is more than has previously been understood. Invoking the remedial authority found within section 10(c) and embraced …

Supreme Court As Interstitial Actor: Justice Ginsburg's Eclectic Approach To Statutory Interpretation Symposium: The Jurisprudence Of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg: A Discussion Of Fifteen Years On The U.S. Supreme Court, James J. Brudney

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court is in the midst of an extended debate regarding the proper approach to construing federal statutes. A number of Justices have engaged in heated dialogue addressing the pros and cons of textualism or intentionalism, as well as the virtues and limitations of Chevron deference. Although Justice Ginsburg has not participated in these judicial exchanges, she has adopted her own approach to the challenge of interpreting federal statutes. This Article explores Ginsburg’s approach by focusing on four opinions that construe federal criminal laws and three that interpret labor relations and anti-discrimination laws. The Article’s central thesis is that …

Reconciling People And Place In Housing And Community Development Policy Essay, Nestor M. Davidson

Faculty Scholarship

In housing and community development theory, scholars have long debated tensions between place-based policies and those that focus on fostering mobility. In practice, this is a false dichotomy and this essay explores ways in which place-based policies change the calculus of mobility, while mobility policies deeply shape both the communities people seek and those they leave behind.

Values And Value Creation In Public-Private Transactions , Nestor M. Davidson

Faculty Scholarship

Scholars have developed a significant body of literature exploring the work of deal lawyers with the essential insight that attorneys acting as transaction-cost engineers have unique potential to add to the overall value of deals. This value-creation literature has traditionally made two foundational assumptions about the role of the state in transactional law. First, scholars have assumed that regulation is essentially irrelevant to transacting-that from the deal lawyer's perspective, the government is a factor only to the extent that the state will enforce private agreements. Second, scholars have assumed that private parties uniformly view public policy as a constraint in …

Dark Side Of Shareholder Influence: Managerial Autonomy And Stakeholder Orientation In Comparative Corporate Governance , Martin Gelter

Faculty Scholarship

This article proposes a new, functional explanation of the different roles of non-shareholder groups (particularly labor) in different corporate governance systems. The argument depends on the analysis of a factor that has so far received relatively little attention in corporate governance research: the level of shareholder influence on managerial decision making. Pro-employee laws mitigate holdup problems- opportunism from which shareholders benefit ex post, but which will deter firm-specific investment in human capital ex ante. Since holdup takes place within what is considered legitimate managerial business judgment and all shareholders (both majority and minority) are its financial beneficiaries, the degree of …

Making Sense Of Drug Regulation: A Theory Of Law For Drug Control Policy , Kimani Paul-Emile

Faculty Scholarship

This article advances a new theory of drug regulation that addresses two previously unexamined questions: how law-makers are able to regulate drugs differently irrespective of the dangers the drugs may pose and independent of their health effects, and the process followed to achieve this phenomenon. For example, although tobacco products are the leading cause of preventable death in the U.S. they can be bought and sold legally by adults, while marijuana, a substantially safer drug, is subject to the highest level of drug control. This article posits a conceptual model for making sense of this dissonance and applies this model …

Extraterritorial Electioneering And The Globalization Of American Elections, Zephyr Teachout

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay explores a fascinating new truth: because of the Internet, governments, corporations, and citizens of other countries can now meaningfully participate in United States elections. They can phone bank, editorialize, and organize in ways that impact a candidate's image, the narrative structure of a campaign, and the mobilization of base support. Foreign governments can bankroll newspapers that will be read by millions of voters. Foreign companies can enlist employees in massive cross-continental email campaigns. Foreign activists can set up offline meetings and organize door-to-door campaigns in central Ohio. They can, in short, influence who wins and who loses. Depending …

On Capturing The Possible Significance Of Institutional Design And Ethos, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

At a recent conference, a new judge from one of the federal courts of appeal – for the United States, the front line in judicial control of administrative action-made a plea to the lawyers in attendance. Please, he urged, in briefing and arguing cases reviewing agency actions, help us judges to understand their broader contexts. So often, he complained, the briefs and arguments are limited to the particular small issues of the case. We get little sense of the broad context in which it arises – the agency responsibilities in their largest sense, the institutional issues that may be at …

Contracting For Innovation: Vertical Disintegration And Interfirm Collaboration, Ronald J. Gilson, Charles F. Sabel, Robert E. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

Rapidly innovating industries are not behaving the way theory expects. Conventional industrial organization theory predicts that, when parties in a supply chain have to make transaction-specific investments, the risk of opportunism will drive them away from contracts and toward vertical integration. Despite the conventional theory, however, contemporary practice is moving in the other direction. Instead of vertical integration, we observe vertical disintegration in a significant number of industries, as producers recognize that they cannot themselves maintain cutting-edge technology in every field required for the success of their products. In doing this, the parties are developing forms of contracting beyond the …