Digital Commons Network^™

Finessing The Siting Conundrum, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

There is a place that today's industrial society desperately wishes to find. In prior eras, people sought Nirvana or the Fountain of Youth or Shangri-La – states of mind (or nothingness) as much as places, really. The object of today's quest has no neighbors, no endangered or threatened species, no hydraulic link to precious groundwater; ideally, it has no connection to the biosphere at all.

That place is called "away," as in, "Let's dig up this contamination and haul it away," or, "We need to take this waste away." The public and private sectors in the United States have spent …

Ots Vs The Bar: Must Atorneys Advise Directors That The Directors Owe A Duty To The Depository Fund?, Susan Saab Fortney

Faculty Scholarship

This article explores the liability of attorneys representing depository institutions. Part I of this article introduces the controversy over the proper role of bank counsel following the bank and thrift crisis. Part II discusses the first Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS) actions against attorneys. Part III considers the emerging theory of liability based on counsel’s duty to advise directors on their duties to depositors and the depository fund. In Part IV, a comparison of the experience of the securities bar to that of the banking bar demonstrates how the government’s enforcement activity has already changed attorney’s perceptions of their role …

Subsidiarity And The European Community, George Bermann

Faculty Scholarship

The notion of subsidiarity in European federalism labors from all manner of burdens. It seems elusive by nature, commentators claiming that they do not know what subsidiarity means or, if they do, that they do not see in it anything new. At the same time subsidiarity has been presented at least in some quarters as a panacea for the Community's current malaise. It clearly is not that. Even if subsidiarity has not been oversold, it is almost certainly overexposed, a condition that the present Article is unlikely to cure.

My purpose in this Article is simply to help make some …

Who Was That Masked Court - An Introduction To Texas' New Special Court Of Review, Jim Paulsen, James Hambleton

Faculty Scholarship

Suppose, for some reason we can only dimly imagine, that an attorney set out to find a Texas legal definition of "chicken----." Since West's key number system was not set up with any particular items of profanity in mind, a savvy legal researcher would start with the computers. A nationwide LEXIS search quickly retrieves a surprisingly large number of cases mentioning "chicken----," including the US. Supreme Court's groundbreaking ruling that the phrase is "street vernacular" not warranting a contempt citation for its mere mention in court. Unfortunately, the reported case law contains no satisfactory definition of "chicken----."

But wait ... …

Reviewing The Law Reviews, Texas-Style, Jim Paulsen, James Hambleton

Faculty Scholarship

All is not well in the publish-or-perish world of legal academia. The number of legal periodicals is growing explosively, and is now more than 700. Established law reviews are sneaking more and more pages of text into each volume. There is a growing consensus, however, that genuine legal scholarship is not expanding at a pace sufficient to fill all these blank pages. Seminar speakers advise new law professors that somewhere there is a law review willing to print anything a professor is willing to put on paper; a little browsing will confirm that those lecturers know whereof they speak.

Lawyers At The Prison Gates: Organizational Structure And Corrections Advocacy, Susan Sturm

Faculty Scholarship

The rise of the public interest law movement ushered in an era of intense debate over the best way to provide legal representation to those unable to afford private counsel. This debate has involved two related dimensions of public interest representation. First, advocates and observers of public interest practice disagree over the proper role of lawyers acting on behalf of poor and underrepresented clients. They offer competing visions of representation spanning a continuum, from providing equal access to the courts for as many poor people as possible, to attacking the causes and effects of poverty and powerlessness.

The second dimension …

Chaos Theory And The Justice Paradox, Robert E. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

"[T]he laws have mistakes, and you can't go writing up a law for everything that you can imagine."

"When you reach an equilibrium in biology you're dead."

As we approach the Twenty-First Century, the signs of social disarray are everywhere. Social critics observe the breakdown of core structures – the nuclear family, schools, neighborhoods, and political groups. As these traditional social institutions have disintegrated, the law has expanded to fill the void. There are more laws, more lawyers, and more use of legal mechanisms to accomplish social goals than at any other time in history. The custodians and interpreters of …

Cunning Stunts: From Hegemony To Desire A Review Of Madonna's Sex, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

What is sex? Is it an accidental or contingent property that every person can be said to have? I am brunette and female, but the Pope is bald and male. Or, is sex more constitutive, that is, an essential part of who we are? In this respect, the claim is often made that women experience the world ditfierently than men. Or, is sex something we do?

If we consider sex as an adjective, can we or should we be able to manipulate it like a new hair style? Or does the notion of sexual malleability trivialize the significance …

Equality And Diversity: The Eighteenth-Century Debate About Equal Protection And Equal Civil Rights, Philip A. Hamburger

Faculty Scholarship

Living, as we do, in a world in which our discussions of equality often lead back to the desegregation decisions, to the Fourteenth Amendment, and to the antislavery debates of the 1830s, we tend to allow those momentous events to dominate our understanding of the ideas of equal protection and equal civil rights. Indeed, historians have frequently asserted that the idea of equal protection first developed in the 1830s in discussions of slavery and that it otherwise had little history prior to its adoption into the U.S. Constitution. Long before the Fourteenth Amendment, however – long before even the 1830s …

The Protective Power Of The Presidency, Henry Paul Monaghan

Faculty Scholarship

Walter Bagehot's still-admired study of the English Constitution distinguished between its "dignified" and "efficient" parts. Bagehot argued that the English Constitution's "dignified" theory of parliamentary supremacy masked the (then) dominant reality of cabinet government. Attacking what he described as the "literary" theory of the American Constitution, Woodrow Wilson posited a similar distinction. Writing in 1885, Wilson asserted that the "literary" theory of American government embodied in Federalist's "ideal checks and balances of the federal system" obscured its efficient principle: "government by the chairmen of the Standing Committees of Congress." An ardent admirer of ministerial government, Wilson especially lamented the condition …

Private Insurance, Social Insurance, And Tort Reform: Toward A New Vision Of Compensation For Illness And Injury, Kenneth S. Abraham, Lance Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

The United States does not have a system for compensating the victims of illness and injury; it has a set of different institutions that provide compensation. We rely on both tort law and giant programs of public and private insurance to compensate the victims of illness and injury. These institutions perform related functions, but the relationships among them are far from coherent. Indeed, the institutions sometimes work at cross-purposes, compensating some victims excessively and others not at all.

The absence of a coherent system of compensation is reflected even in suggested reforms of existing institutions. Proposals to reform tort law …

Natural Rights, Natural Law, And American Constitutions, Philip A. Hamburger

Faculty Scholarship

Natural rights and natural -law are ideas that frequently seem to have something in common with the elusive shapes of a Rorschach test. They are suggestive of well-defined, recognizable images, yet they are so indeterminate that they permit us to see in them what we are inclined to see. Like Rorschach's phantasm-inducing ink blots, natural rights and natural law are not only suggestive but also indeterminate – ideas to which each of us can plausibly attribute whatever qualities we happen to associate with them. For this reason, we may reasonably fear that natural rights and natural law are ideas often …

The Dynamics Of Secrecy In The Environmental Impact Statement Process, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

The environmental impact review laws – the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and its state counterparts – are premised on the idea of full and open disclosure. The notion underlying these laws is that if the government and the public are fully informed of the impacts of and alternatives to proposed actions, they will make wise decisions about whether and how to proceed. The Freedom of Information Act and its state counterparts even more explicitly seek to open up governmental deliberations to the public. Considered together, these two types of laws would lead one to believe that secrecy has little …

A Commentary On The Harmonization Of European Private Law, George A. Bermann

Faculty Scholarship

The idea behind bringing together these papers on harmonization in three such distinct fields as contract, copyright and telecommunications, and securities law must be that they may have something to tell us generally about the processes of harmonization in European private law. Each paper tells a story fascinating in its own right, but whether they in fact add up to something more, with implications for private law harmonization as a whole, is the question I naturally want to take up in this commentary.

Sectoral Strategies And Participant Commitments: The Keys To Effective Trade And Industrial Policies, Robert E. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

The declining competitiveness of the U.S. manufacturing sector of the most important causes of the decline in real wages and the stagnation in the level of the median family incomes which have plagued the United States since about 1973. Although the reports of the decline in American living standards were greeted with some skepticism when they first appeared in the work of the Economic Policy Institute ("EPI") in 1985, they have now achieved a high level of prominence on the national policy agenda. More recent studies by EPI and other research groups urge two cures for the decline. First, employment …

A Morality Fit For Humans, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

I believe that it was opposition to utilitarianism which first bred arguments claiming in one way or another that a view of morality according to which morality is very demanding is mistaken just be-cause morality cannot be so demanding. On first hearing, this type of argument is liable to seem suspect. Humans should be fit for morality, and unfortunately too often they are not – one is inclined to say. If we find morality too demanding the fault is with us and not with morality. The idea of human morality, in the sense of a morality fit for humans …

The Prospects Of Pension Fund Socialism, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

A substantial portion of corporate shareholdings in the United States is held by pension funds that secure retirement benefits for broad segments of the workforce. A number of commentators have argued that the assets secured by these pension funds should be used to promote the creation of a more democratic and egalitarian economy. Specifically, pension assets could be invested in projects that are deemed socially worthwhile, wielded in strategic "corporate campaigns" against companies resisting unionization, or directed toward allowing workers to obtain control over their own companies. This program of employing pension assets in the pursuit of a more democratic …

Further Reflections On Libertarian Criminal Defense, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

Since David Luban's is the work on legal ethics that I admire and agree with most, there is an element of perversity in my vehement critique of his arguments on criminal defense. I am therefore especially thankful for his gracious and thoughtful response. Nevertheless, I remain convinced that Luban is mistaken in excepting criminal defense from much of the responsibility to substantive justice that we both think appropriate in every other sphere of lawyering.

Investment Companies As Guardian Shareholders: The Place Of The Msic In The Corporate Governance Debate, Ronald J. Gilson, Reinier Kraakman

Faculty Scholarship

Comparative corporate governance is both necessary and hard. Recent scholarship has identified the political and historical contingency of the American pattern of corporate governance. The Berle-Means corporation, with its separation of management and risk bearing and the attendant agency conflict between managers and shareholders, is now widely recognized as being as much a creature of the American pattern of law and politics as the handiwork of neutral market forces. This recognition underscores the need to place the American experience in a comparative perspective. Other patterns of corporate governance can provide both insights into the operation of our own and a …

Understanding The Japanese Keiretsu: Overlaps Between Corporate Governance And Industrial Organization, Ronald J. Gilson, Mark J. Roe

Faculty Scholarship

We aim here for a better understanding of the Japanese keiretsu. Our essential claim is that to understand the Japanese system – banks with extensive investment in industry and industry with extensive cross-ownership – we must understand the problems of industrial organization, not just the problems of corporate governance. The Japanese system, we assert, functions not only to harmonize the relationships among the corporation, its shareholders, and its senior managers, but also to facilitate productive efficiency.

Who Rules At Home: One Person/One Vote And Local Governments, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

Twenty-five years ago, in Avery v Midland County, the United States Supreme Court extended the one person/one vote requirement to local governments. Avery and subsequent decisions applying federal constitutional standards to local elections suggested a change in the legal status of local governments and appeared to signal a shift in the balance of federalism. Traditionally, local governments have been conceptualized as instrumentalities of the states. Questions of local government organization and structure were reserved to the plenary discretion of the states with little federal constitutional oversight. In contrast, Avery assumed that local governments are locally representative bodies, not simply …

The Item Veto In State Courts, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

Contemporary debates about state constitutional law have concentrated on the role of state constitutions in the protection of individual rights and have paid less attention to the state constitutional law of government structure.This is ironic since the emergence of a state jurisprudence of individual rights has been hampered by the similarity of the texts of the state and federal constitutional provisions concerning individual rights, whereas many state constitutional provisions dealing with government structure have no federal analogues, and thus state jurisprudence in this area is free to develop outside the dominating shadow of the Federal Constitution and the federal courts. …

The Political Economy Of The Wagner Act: Power, Symbol, And Workplace Cooperation, Mark Barenberg

Faculty Scholarship

To shed light on the legal debate over new forms of workplace collaboration, this Article reexamines the origins of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. Professor Barenberg concludes that the Wagner Act scheme was profoundly cooperationist, not adversarial as is conventionally assumed. Revisionist historiography shows that, contrary to the claims of public choice theorists, Senator Wagner's network of political entrepreneurs was the decisive force in the conception and enactment of the new labor policy, amidst interest group paralysis and popular unrest. Drawing on original archival materials and oral histories, Professor Barenberg reconstructs the progressive ideology of Wagner and his …

Editing, Carol Sanger

Faculty Scholarship

In May 1993, I published a book review of Richard Posner's Sex and Reason. The review was modest in length and in purpose, part of an informal division of labor undertaken by the many critics of Sex and Reason. It challenged Judge Posner's claim that an economic analysis of sex was something new and argued that women have been making rational choices with regard to sex and reproduction for quite a long time, something that Judge Posner's book seemed to miss and misunderstand throughout.

Readers of the review (the members of my MCI Friends and Family Plan) have …

The Transformation Of Morton Horwitz, Eben Moglen

Faculty Scholarship

In 1977, Morton Horwitz published his astonishing first book, The Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860. Looking back, two things could be said of the reception of the Transformation: the book was subjected to extremely searching and ultimately quite successful criticism, while at the same time it dominated the field of American legal history for more than a decade, as no book had before, or has since. Like almost all other historians of American law trained in the years following 1977, my education in the craft of legal history was decisively affected by the Transformation. My first published work was a …

The Incompleat Burkean: Bruce Ackerman's Foundation For Constitutional History, Eben Moglen

Faculty Scholarship

With this book, the first in a projected series of at least three volumes, Bruce Ackerman confirms what attentive readers of his law review articles of the past ten years have already known-he is the most original and important writer on constitutional theory in the contemporary English-speaking world. We the People: Foundations, despite its informal, sometimes overly talky style, is not an easy book. Filled to the brim, even to overflowing, and containing many gestures in the direction of arguments to be made in future volumes rather than the substance of the arguments themselves, it presents both the casual reader …

The Role Of The Great Powers In United Nations Peace-Keeping, Lori Fisler Damrosch

Faculty Scholarship

Over the past forty-five years, international peace-keeping has developed two principal operational models: the small power model and the big power model. The small power model accounts for virtually all U.N. peace-keeping efforts over more than four decades. However, the big power model is becoming increasingly important to a world which is demanding both symbolism and substance from the United Nations.

Under the small power model, modest, lightly armed contingents from small states are deployed to symbolize international concern rather than to enforce international order. Typically, the participating states have no direct stake in the outcome of the conflict in …

Columbia University And A New European Law Chair, George A. Bermann

Faculty Scholarship

As we move toward the end of the century, we become increasingly aware of the importance of enriching the law school's opportunities for study and research in the international and comparative law fields. While we have always taken a geographically broad view of the foreign systems worthy of study and research, and have the most distinguished international and foreign curriculum in the country, we regard European law and legal institutions as of unequaled importance at this stage of the Law School's academic development. The rise of the European Community, of a still larger European economic arena, and of new legal …

Regulatory Cooperation With Counterpart Agencies Abroad: The Faa's Aircraft Certification Experience, George A. Bermann

Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines in some detail the practice and experience of one agency, the Federal Aviation Administration, and more particularly its Aircraft Certification Service, that has of recent years consciously engaged in forms of concerted activity with certain counterpart agencies abroad. This "case study" is of particular interest because the FAA's practice of intergovernmentalism includes, but also goes beyond, cooperation in rulemaking to embrace a certain amount of cooperation in more routine aspects of administration. The study may also be of interest because the intergovernmentalism engaged in largely involves cooperation with a body – the European Joint Aviation Authorities – …

Tax Policy At The Beginning Of The Clinton Administration, Michael J. Graetz

Faculty Scholarship

Ten years ago, in 1983, the Yale Journal on Regulation was started by students at the Yale Law School to foster scholarship and debate on issues of regulatory policy. Today the Journal staff consists of students from Yale University graduate and professional programs in law, management, forestry, and public health. One of the Journal's primary missions was to track the regulatory/deregulatory developments under the Reagan Administration and later the Bush Administration. Since our tenth anniversary coincided with the installment of a Democratic Administration under President Clinton, we have asked two professors at the Yale Law School to submit an essay …