Digital Commons Network^™

Reviving Marriage: Could We? Should We?, Marsha Garrison

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Survey Of Seqra Cases From 2007, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

The courts issued 58 decisions under the New York State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA) in 2007.

Typically, plaintiffs have a much greater chance of success in SEQRA cases when no environmental impact statement (EIS) has been prepared: on average, in the cases from 1990 (when this column’s annual survey began) through 2006, plaintiffs won 15.9 percent of the cases where there is an EIS, and 38.6 percent of the cases without an EIS.

But in 2007 the ratio was much different. In the 22 cases with an EIS, plaintiffs won seven, or 31.8 percent. In the 27 cases without …

Financial Disclosure Of Risks Related To Global Climate Change, Michael B. Gerrard, Christopher Anderson

Faculty Scholarship

Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regulations require publicly traded companies to disclose the material impacts of environmental laws on their business. Increasing attention is being paid to the issue of securities disclosure of financial risks and opportunities posed by impending regulation relating to global climate change and by climate change itself.

The Permissible Reach Of National Environmental Policies, Henrik Horn, Petros C. Mavroidis

Faculty Scholarship

Trading nations exchange tariff concessions in the context of trade liberalizing rounds. Tariffs, nonetheless, are not the only instrument affecting the value of a concession. Domestic instruments affect it as well, but public order is not negotiable, and, consequently, is not scheduled. Public order is unilaterally defined, but must respect the default rules concerning allocation of jurisdiction which are common to all WTO Members and bind them by virtue of their appurtenance to the international community. In this paper, we focus on the interaction between trade and environment. The purpose of this study is to highlight how these rules and …

A Multilateral Solution For The Income Tax Treatment Of Interest Expenses, Michael J. Graetz

Faculty Scholarship

Recent developments – including greater taxpayer sophistication in structuring and locating international financing arrangements, increased government concerns with the role of debt in sophisticated tax avoidance techniques, and disruption by decisions of the European Court of Justice of member states' regimes limiting interest deductions – have stimulated new laws and policy controversies concerning the international tax treatment of interest expenses. National rules are in flux regarding the financing of both inbound and outbound transactions.

Heretofore, the question of the proper treatment of interest expense has generally been looked at from the perspective of either inbound or outbound investment. As a …

No Outsourcing Of Law? Wto Law As Practiced By Wto Courts, Petros C. Mavroidis

Faculty Scholarship

This article provides a critical assessment of the corpus of law that the adjudicating bodies of the World Trade Organization (WTO) – the Appellate Body (AB) and panels – have used since the organization was established on January 1, 1995. After presenting a taxonomy of WTO law, I move to discern, and to provide a critical assessment of, the philosophy of the WTO adjudicating bodies, when called to interpret it. In discussing the law that WTO adjudicating bodies have used, I distinguish between sources of WTO law and interpretative elements. This distinction will be explicated in part I below. Part …

"They Say I Am Not An American…": The Noncitizen National And The Law Of American Empire, Christina Duffy Ponsa-Kraus

Faculty Scholarship

The American papers sometimes contain tales about persons who have forgotten who they are, what are their names, and where they live. The Porto [sic] Ricans find themselves in the same predicament as those absent-minded people. To what nationality do they belong? What is the character of their citizenship? ... [l]f since they ceased to be Spanish citizens they have not been Americans [sic] citizens, what in the name ·of heaven have they been?

Decisions About Coercion: The Corporate Attorney-Client Privilege Waiver Problem, Daniel C. Richman

Faculty Scholarship

For almost a decade, law reviews and hearing rooms have resounded with cogent arguments that, for corporations at least, the attorney-client privilege has been chilled, eroded, attacked, or even killed by the federal government's misuse of its bargaining leverage. Yet it is unclear whether this rhetoric is overstated or understated. Given that most federal criminal defendants plead guilty, and that an extraordinarily large percentage of them provide information and testimony against others in order to avoid harsh sentences (or to avoid being charged at all), one could as easily say that the Fifth and Sixth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution …

Romancing The Court, Jane M. Spinak

Faculty Scholarship

Problem-solving courts, created at the end of the 20th century, make court-based solutions central to addressing significant societal problems, such as substance abuse and its impact on criminal activity and family functioning. Yet, lessons gleaned from over 100 years of family court history suggest that court-based solutions to intractable social problems have rarely been effective. This article asks three questions of the problem-solving court movement: What problem are we trying to solve? Is the court the best place to solve the problem? What are the consequences of giving authority to a court for solving the problem? Answering those questions through …

Leading Change In Legal Education - Educating Lawyers And Best Practices: Good News For Diversity, Antoinette M. Sedillo Lopez

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Old Blood, Bad Blood, And Youngblood: Due Process, Lost Evidence, And The Limits Of Bad Faith, Norman C. Bay

Faculty Scholarship

Under the law of lost evidence, absent a showing of bad faith, no due process violation occurs when the police lose potentially exculpatory evidence. This is so even though the evidence may be critical to the defense and even though post-conviction DNA testing has exonerated more than 200 individuals. Ironically, the case that developed that rule of law, Arizona v. Youngblood, is founded on the conviction of an innocent man. This Article critically examines Youngblood and provides a conceptual framework for examining the constitutional right of access to evidence. Supreme Court precedent reflects two different, sometimes competing, visions of procedural …

Taxation Without Liquidation: Rethinking "Ability To Pay", Sergio Pareja

Faculty Scholarship

This Article proposes a novel way to tax wealth transfers. Specifically, it suggests that we divide all assets transferred by gift or bequest into two classes--illiquid assets and liquid assets. The recipient should include those assets in income but be allowed two options. With respect to illiquid assets, the recipient should be able to avoid immediate income inclusion if he takes the property with an income-tax basis of zero. With respect to liquid assets, the recipient should be allowed a full income-tax deduction if he rolls the gift or bequest into a deductible IRA. The combination of these simple rules …

Restoring The Grand Jury, Kevin Washburn

Faculty Scholarship

Though it is enshrined in the Constitution, the grand jury is one of the least respected institutions in American criminal justice today. Scholars regard the grand jury just as doctors regard the appendix: an organic part of our constitutional makeup, but not of much use. While scholars have proposed reforms, most of them seem only loosely related to the fundamental purpose of the grand jury. In an era of plea bargains, the grand jury can serve a crucial role in insuring popular legitimacy in the criminal justice system. In light of the criticism, however, the grand jury seems to be …

The Legacy Of Bryan V. Itasca County: How An Erroneous $147 County Tax Notice Helped Bring Tribes $200 Billion In Indian Gaming Revenue, Kevin Washburn

Faculty Scholarship

This Article places Bryan v. Itasca County in historical context and gives credit where credit is due. From the perspective of three decades, it describes the litigation and its ramifications, and highlights the work of the legal services attorneys who brought Indian tribes this landmark victory. Part I briefly describes the litigation through the state supreme court. Part II discusses, in much greater detail, the appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. Part III analyzes the unanimous Supreme Court opinion reversing the state courts and describes the breathtaking scope of the opinion, as well as its implications. Part IV briefly describes …

Disability Advocacy And Atkins, James W. Ellis

Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines the correlation between the Court's perception and its resolution of the constitutional issues, most dramatically exhibited in Atkins. Part II of this Article briefly examines the history of discrimination against persons with mental retardation. Part III of this Article traces the history of the Court's decisions involving persons with mental retardation, giving special attention to the way in which the Justices' opinions reveal their apparent understanding of mental retardation and the relationship between individuals who have the disability and the law.5 Finally, Part IV addresses the Atkins opinion itself, with emphasis on the Court's understanding of mental …

Uniendo Comunidades By Learning Lessons And Mobilizing For Change, Margaret E. Montoya

Faculty Scholarship

Building community, that is, sustaining our connections to family and our ancestry is often hampered by going to law school. Law schools are highly adept at assimilating you into a profession and a worldview that can be at odds with who you were and how you saw the world before you began law school. Unfortunately, in order to fit in, it can seem advantageous to forget tus ralces, your roots. I began by talking about unigndo comunidades as a progressive objective and have been talking about the second part of your conference theme, learning lessons and mobilizing for change, as …

Symposium: Issues In Estate Planning For Same-Sex And Transgender Couples: Foreword, Jennifer L. Levi

Faculty Scholarship

Despite the sea of change in possibilities for creating lawful relationships for many gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender individuals, most jurisdictions do not allow them to marry or enter into any comparable legal status. The vast majority of states either by statute or state constitutional amendment actually prohibit marriage for same-sex couples. And, even when couples can marry or enter into a comparable legal status, they are faced with uncertainty regarding what effect, if any, will be accorded to that status should they travel or move. Given the legal challenges that same-sex couples face, the need for high-quality estate planning …

Who Tolls The Bells For Firms? Tales From Transition Economies, Katharina Pistor

Faculty Scholarship

Bankruptcy law is regarded as an important mechanism for protecting creditor rights. Much of the current debate about bankruptcy law focuses exclusively on private creditors, ignoring the role of tax authorities as creditor in insolvent firms. Based on data from several transition economies, this essay documents the important, if not dominant, role tax authorities play as initiator of bankruptcy in these countries. While improved tax enforcement is crucial for tackling the problem of tax arrears and hardening the "soft budget-constraint" in former socialist countries, this essay suggests that the presence of the tax authorities as creditor may also affect the …

The Other Delegate: Judicially Administered Statutes And The Nondelegation Doctrine, Margaret H. Lemos

Faculty Scholarship

The nondelegation doctrine is the subject of a vast and everexpanding body of scholarship. But nondelegation literature, like nondelegation law, focuses almost exclusively on delegations of power to administrative agencies. It ignores Congress's other delegate-the federal judiciary.

This Article brings courts into the delegation picture. It demonstrates that, just as agencies exercise a lawmaking function when they fill in the gaps left by broad statutory delegations of power, so too do courts. The nondelegation doctrine purports to limit the amount of lawmaking authority Congress can cede to another institution without violating the separation of powers. Although typically considered only with …

Dirty Dancing: The Fda Stumbles On The Chevron Two-Step, Gary S. Lawson

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Lars Noah deserves much credit for exposing some of the myriad ways in which the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has consistently sought to expand its authority through questionable, and perhaps in some cases abusive, legal practices.' As Professor Noah observes, there are signs that the federal courts' century-long honeymoon with the FDA may be ending 2 -and perhaps the FDA never deserved the solicitude that it has traditionally received from both the judiciary and Congress. 3 If Professor Noah can hasten the onset of a more realistic legal and public attitude toward the FDA, he will have performed …

Introduction To Sandra Day O'Connor, George A. Bermann

Faculty Scholarship

There are many, many reasons to honor Justice Sandra Day O'Connor-and during the course of her brief but rich stay with us here at Columbia Law School, we have touched on only some of those many reasons. There remains this afternoon one more occasion to honor Justice O'Connor-an honor that has a very special resonance at this law school. It is the conferral of the Wolfgang Friedmann Memorial Award by the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, a recognition of contributions to international law that is deeply meaningful not only at Columbia Law School, but in international law circles generally.

Silence Of The Laws? Conceptions Of International Relations And International Law In Hobbes, Kant, And Locke, Michael W. Doyle, Geoffrey S. Carlson

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay explains how the political theorists Hobbes, Kant, and Locke interpret the decision to go to war (us ad bellum) and the manner in which the war is conducted (just in bello). It also considers the implications of the three theories for compliance with international law more generally. It concludes that although all three can lay claim to certain key features of modern international law, it is Locke who provides the most complete support for both the laws of war, in particular, and with international law, in general.

Letting Guidelines Be Guidelines (And Judges Be Judges), Gerard E. Lynch

Faculty Scholarship

In a prescient New York Times op-ed piece entitled "Let Guidelines be Guidelines," written in response to the Supreme Court's decision in Blakely v. Washington, before certiorari was granted in United States v. Booker, Bill Stuntz of Harvard and Kate Stith Cabranes of Yale urged that the best solution for the constitutional crisis facing the United States Sentencing Guidelines would be to treat the Guidelines as guidelines, and not as a straightjacket. The Supreme Court evidently took a similar view, deciding in Booker that the Guidelines were constitutional only to the extent that they were not mandatory. The recent follow-up …

Who Needs Bankruptcy Law?, Edward R. Morrison

Faculty Scholarship

This essay summarizes four papers: “Bargaining Around Bankruptcy: Small Business Distress and State Law,” 38 Journal of Legal Studies 255 (2009); “Bankruptcy’s Rarity: An Essay on Small Business Bankruptcy in the United States,” 5 European Company & Financial Law Review 172 (2008); “Small Business Bankruptcy and the Bankruptcy Abuse and Consumer Protection Act of 2005,” A Report to the United States Small Business Administration (2007); and Douglas G. Baird & Edward R. Morrison, “Serial Entrepreneurs and Small Business Bankruptcies,” 105 Columbia Law Review 2310 (2005).

Global Network Finance: Organizational Hedging In Times Of Uncertainty, Katharina Pistor

Faculty Scholarship

The global financial crisis that began in 2007 revealed a fundamental weakness in the global financial system: Extensive financial interdependence of financial relations unmatched by a governance regime of similar reach. As multinational banks sought to fortify their capital base in the wake of the unfolding crisis, Sovereign wealth Funds (SWFs) and the banks’ home governments have become mutual stakeholders in some of the largest financial intermediaries with global reach. From the multitude of individual transactions has emerged a network of equity ties that spans the globe. These ties bridge institutional practices and governance regimes that previously operated largely independently …

Federal Sentencing In 2007: The Supreme Court Holds – The Center Doesn't, Daniel C. Richman

Faculty Scholarship

This essay takes stock of federal sentencing after 2007, the year of the periphery. On Capitol Hill, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales resigned in the face of widespread criticism over his role in the replacement of several U.S. Attorneys. In the Supreme Court, the trio of Rita v. United States, Gall v. United States, and Kimbrough v. United States clarified and perhaps extended the breadth of license given to district judges in an advisory guideline regime. In contrast to the Supreme Court's sentencing cases, which focus on the allocation of authority between judges and juries, and the bulk of the …

Human Rights In The United States, Sarah H. Cleveland, Catherine Powell

Faculty Scholarship

This year marks the tenth anniversary of the founding of the Human Rights Institute (HRI) at Columbia Law School. Appropriately, it also marks the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the foundational instrument of the modern international human rights regime.

When HRI was founded in 1998, it was established as a crossroads for human rights at Columbia, which would bridge theory and practice, human rights and constitutional rights, and law and other disciplines. From its inception, HRI has been a partner with the university-wide Center for the Study of Human Rights, which was established twenty years earlier …

Courts, Constitutions, And Public Finance: Some Recent Experiences From The States, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

Unlike the federal Constitution, virtually all state constitutions give detailed attention to questions of public finance. State constitutions limit spending, mandate certain types of spending, constrain taxation and debt, and require special procedures for enacting a budget. One consequence of the constitutionalization of the state fisc is its judicialization, as these measures trigger litigation. Fiscal and political conflicts turn into legal disputes, with courts joining governors and legislatures in shaping state budgets and making state fiscal policy.

This chapter provides an early-21st-century snapshot of the state constitutional law of state finance through a survey of six recent state supreme court …

A House Still Divided, Clare Huntington

Faculty Scholarship

In response to Adam B. Cox, Immigration Law's Organizing Principles, 157 U. PA. L. REv. 341 (2008).

Adam Cox's Immigration Law's Organizing Principles contests the traditional view that immigration law and alienage law – in his terms, "selection rules" and "regulation rules" – are distinct categories with legal and moral salience. Building upon prior scholarship that also called the distinction into question, Cox offers important insights into why this dividing line does not have the sharp conceptual edges that the jurisprudence would suggest exist. Despite the analytical persuasiveness of Cox's argument, I am not convinced that it will destabilize the …

Intuition, Morals, And The Legal Conversation About Gay Rights, Suzanne B. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

When lawyers and judges converse in litigation, factual and legal analysis typically takes center stage. Yet, when the legal conversation turns to the rights of lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals, the ground shifts. Intuition and morals rationales often displace evidence-based reasoning. More specifically, arguments to limit the rights of lesbians and gay men tend to depend explicitly on intuition, and sometimes morality, in ways that contemporary arguments to restrict the rights of other social groups rarely do.

In addressing this dissonance, this essay has two central aims. The first is simply to observe the disproportionate openness to arguments based on …