Digital Commons Network^™

An Efficiency Analysis Of Defensive Tactics, Ronald J. Gilson, Alan Schwartz

Faculty Scholarship

For thirty five years, courts and scholars have divided over the effects of defensive tactics in the market for corporate control. Strong defensive tactics locate authority to accept a hostile bid in the target’s board. The board can bargain for a higher takeover price than uncoordinated shareholders could realize but high takeover prices may reduce shareholder returns by reducing the likelihood of receiving a bid. The Delaware Courts themselves disagree. The Delaware Chancery Court would locate ultimate decision authority in the target’s shareholders, while the Supreme Court, by permitting strong defensive tactics, allocates extensive power to the target’s board. Though …

Towards A Law Of Inclusive Planning: A Response To “Fair Housing For A Non-Sexist City”, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

Noah Kazis’s important article, Fair Housing for a Non-sexist City, shows how law shapes the contours of neighborhoods and embeds forms of inequality, and how fair housing law can provide a remedy. Kazis surfaces two dimensions of housing that generate inequality and that are sometimes invisible. Kazis highlights the role of planning and design rules – the seemingly identity-neutral zoning, code enforcement, and land-use decisions that act as a form of law. Kazis also reveals how gendered norms underlie those rules and policies. These aspects of Kazis’s project link to commentary on the often invisible, gendered norms that shape …

Legal Internalism In Modern Histories Of Copyright, Shyamkrishna Balganesh, Taisu Zhang

Faculty Scholarship

Legal internalism refers to the internal point of view that professional participants in a legal practice develop toward it. It represents a behavioral phenomenon wherein such participants treat the domain of law (or a subset of it) as normative, epistemologically self-contained, and logically coherent on its own terms regardless of whether the law actually embodies those characteristics. Thus understood, legal internalism remains an important characteristic of all modern legal systems. In this Review, we examine three recent interdisciplinary histories of copyright law to showcase the working of legal internalism. We argue that while their interdisciplinary emphasis adds to the conversation …

The Right To Mental Health In Yemen, Waleed Alhariri, Amanda Mcnally, Sarah Knuckey

Faculty Scholarship

Mental health issues are all too common consequences of conflict and atrocity crimes, often causing upwards of one-quarter of the post-conflict, post-atrocity population to suffer from physical and mental sequelae that linger long after weapons have been silenced. After more than six years of ongoing conflict, Yemen’s already weak health care system is on the brink of collapse, and population resilience has been severely stressed by indiscriminate attacks, airstrikes, torture, food insecurity, unemployment, cholera, and now the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper examines Yemen’s responsibilities regarding the right to mental health and details the few actions the government has taken to …

"Everybody Knows I'M Not Lazy": Medicaid Work Requirements And The Expressive Content Of Law, Kristen Underhill

Faculty Scholarship

In a first for the Medicaid program, the Department of Health and Human Services under President Trump allowed states to establish work requirements for program participants who are considered "able-bodied adults." These mandates were halted by litigation, and President Biden's administration is now in the process of withdrawing the waivers. But early experiences with Medicaid work requirements suggested that they can produce widespread losses of benefits. In addition to affecting access, work requirements and other conditions on public benefits can serve an expressive purpose: they provide a source of information about a state's values, goals, and beliefs about beneficiaries. Beneficiaries …

Should The U.S. Government Actively Assert Its Own Patents?, Christopher J. Morten, Barry Datlof, Amy Kapczynski, Donna Meuth, Zain Rizvi

Faculty Scholarship

On March 10, 2021, our journal partnered with the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy to host a symposium addressing the role and impact of U.S. innovation policy on access to medicine. Our 2021 Symposium Issue — Volume 11, Issue 1 — captures that event.

The following article represents the second of four panels. This panel asked, “Should the U.S. government actively assert its own patents?” The panel was moderated by Christopher Morten, Deputy Director of NYU Law’s Technology Law & Policy Clinic. The panelists included Barry Datlof, Chief of Business Development and Commercialization in the Office of Medical …

Professor Justice Ginsburg: Justice Ginsburg's Love Of Procedure And Jurisdiction, Zachary D. Tripp, Gillian E. Metzger

Faculty Scholarship

As two of Justice Ginsburg’s former clerks, we are keenly aware of the popular image of the Justice as the “Notorious RBG”: the champion of women’s rights and the forceful dissenter, strongly disputing the Roberts Court’s conservative turn and articulating the case for the liberal New Deal constitutional vision, with its commitment to protecting individual rights and broad view of national power.

This she did, powerfully and eloquently. But to understand Justice Ginsburg – the person, the Justice, and her jurisprudence – it is also critical to account for her role as the Supreme Court’s leading civil procedure and federal …

After First Options: Delegation Run Amok, George A. Bermann

Faculty Scholarship

The proper allocation of authority between courts and arbitral tribunals over the enforceability of agreements to arbitrate has long occupied a central place in U.S. arbitration law, domestic and international alike. From U.S. Supreme Court case law over the years, there has emerged a reasonably well-understood distinction between those issues of enforceability that a court will address if asked by a party to do so and those that it will not. Fundamental to the Court’s jurisprudence is a recognition that some enforceability issues – “gateway issues” – so seriously implicate the consent of parties to arbitrate their disputes that a …

Corporate Crime And Punishment: An Empirical Study, Dorothy S. Lund, Natasha Sarin

Faculty Scholarship

For many years, law and economics scholars, as well as politicians and regulators, have debated whether corporate punishment chills beneficial corporate activity or, in the alternative, lets corporate criminals off too easily. A crucial and yet understudied aspect of this debate is empirical evidence. Unlike most other types of crime, the government does not measure corporate crime rates; therefore, the government and researchers alike cannot easily determine whether disputed policies are effectively deterring future incidents of corporate misconduct. In this Article, we take important first steps in addressing these questions. Specifically, we use three novel sources as proxies for corporate …

Preemption: The Continuing Challenge, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

The decade of the 2010s witnessed the emergence and rapid spread of aggressive state preemption of local government actions. This “new preemption” consists of intentional, extensive, and sometimes punitive state efforts to block local action across a wide range of domains—from firearms regulation to the treatment of immigrants, workplace equity to environmental protection, the scope of anti-discrimination laws to the regulation of the sharing economy. This new preemption has roots going back to the turn of this century, and began to build decades ago, but it took off most dramatically after the Republican takeover of many state governments in 2010, …

Authoring The Law, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

Faculty Scholarship

Copyright law denies protection to legal texts through a rule known as the “government edicts doctrine”. Entirely a creation of nineteenth century courts, the government edicts doctrine treats expression produced by lawmakers in the exercise of their lawmaking function as altogether uncopyrightable. Despite having been in existence for over a century, the doctrine remains shrouded in significant mystery and complexity. Lacking statutory recognition, the doctrine has come to be seen as driven by open-ended considerations of “public policy” that draw on the overarching importance of public access to laws. In its decision in Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org., Inc., the Supreme …

Leading Through Learning: Using Evolutionary Learning To Develop, Implement, And Improve Strategic Initiatives, Kimberly Austin, Amanda Cahn, Elizabeth Chu, Andrea Clay, James S. Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

Equitably educating students requires effective differentiation of services based on students’ strengths and needs. Doing so reliably at scale is difficult given the diversity of students and contexts in our public school systems and the diversity of needs created by historical and institutionalized discrimination against people of color, immigrants, and other populations.

Still, a number of systems and organizations have succeeded in advancing equity at scale. They have done so by finding new ways to design, lead, and manage their operations and engage internal and external stakeholders – in our language, new ways to govern2 their work. Cutting across these …

In Remembrance Of Anani Dzidzienyo (1941-2020), Tanya K. Hernandez

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Federal Corporate Law And The Business Of Banking, Lev Menand, Morgan Ricks

Faculty Scholarship

The only profit-seeking business enterprises chartered by a federal government agency are banks. Yet there is barely any scholarship justifying this exception to state primacy in U.S. corporate law.

This Article addresses that gap. It reinterprets the National Bank Act (NBA) – the organic statute governing national banks, the heavyweights of the financial sector – as a corporation law and recovers the reasons why Congress wrote this law: not to catalyze private wealth creation or to regulate an existing industry, but to solve an economic governance problem. National banks are federal instrumentalities charged with augmenting the money supply – a …

William P. Alford: Kindness, Integrity, And Insight, Benjamin L. Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

In the summer of 1988, travelling from Dengshikou, in the center of Beijing, to the Xiyuan Hotel, just across from the Beijing Zoo, seemed like travelling to the outer edge of Beijing. I was back in Beijing visiting my host family at the end of the summer, and they were worried about me travelling so far on my own. But I had an invitation to dinner with an American professor, and my host family reluctantly let me travel across Beijing on the electric trolley bus to attend the dinner.

Spoofing And Its Regulation, Merritt B. Fox, Lawrence R. Glosten, Sue S. Guan

Faculty Scholarship

Nearly a century after the United States enacted its first securities laws, urgent questions remain as to the scope of manipulation law: whether manipulation is possible in principle, and if so, how the law should respond in practice. Sharp disagreement among courts, economists, and legal scholars as to whether trading or quoting activity constitutes illegal manipulation has led to a legal framework that lacks precision and cogency. Moreover, the poorly articulated normative basis for court rulings has resulted in enforcement that is both under-inclusive and over-inclusive in ways that do a poor job of discouraging socially harmful transactions and enabling …

Next Mayor Will Inherit Job Of Implementing 2019 Law Setting Building Emissions Caps, Michael B. Gerrard, Edward Mctiernan

Faculty Scholarship

Whoever becomes New York City’s next Mayor will need to pivot quickly to implementing a collection of laws adopted in 2019 and bundled together as the Climate Mobilization Act. These laws are designed to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions in New York City by 40% below 2005 levels by 2030 and 80% by 2050. Because 70% of the greenhouse gases emitted in New York City are generated by how New Yorkers heat, light and power buildings, the Climate Mobilization Act includes Local Laws 92 and 94, which require that new buildings or buildings undergoing major roof renovations include solar panels …

Potential Tensions Between New York’S Climate Change Laws And Historic Preservation Laws, Michael B. Gerrard, Edward Mctiernan

Faculty Scholarship

For many years, designated historic buildings have been exempt from most energy conservation codes. However, with increased attention to the perils of climate change, some cities – including New York – are adopting strong laws on building energy use that do not have this exemption. Historic preservation laws that have not caught up, and some fire codes, may pose obstacles to the installation of rooftop solar and some other methods to reduce building energy consumption.

Tainted Precedent, Darrell A. H. Miller

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Future Of Disclosure: Esg, Common Ownership, And Systematic Risk, John C. Coffee Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

The U.S. securities markets have recently undergone (or are undergoing) three fundamental transitions: (1) institutionalization (with the result that institutional investors now dominate both trading and stock ownership); (2) extraordinary ownership concentration (with the consequence that the three largest U.S. institutional investors now hold 20% and vote 25% of the shares in S&P 500 companies); and (3) the introduction of ESG disclosures (which process has been driven in the U.S. by pressure from large institutional investors). In light of these transitions, how should disclosure policy change? Do institutions and retail investors have the same or different disclosure needs? Why are …

Informing Wto Reform: Dispute Settlement Performance, 1995-2020, Bernard M. Hoekman, Petros C. Mavroidis, Maarja Saluste

Faculty Scholarship

This article presents salient facts on the performance of WTO dispute settlement, using an updated dataset on cases adjudicated between 1992 and mid 2020. The dataset provides a comprehensive compilation of information on WTO disputes, including complainants, respondents and third parties; the substantive matters tabled; the WTO provisions invoked; the claims that are accepted or rejected by adjudicating bodies; the time involved to complete the consultation, panel and appeal (Appellate Body) stages; and the identity of panelists and how they were appointed. We highlight elements of the operation of the system that are salient to WTO reform discussions, while drawing …

Unexpected Effects Of Expected Sanctions, Giuseppe Dari‐Mattiacci, Alex Raskolnikov

Faculty Scholarship

The economic analysis of law enforcement holds that greater expected sanctions lead to greater compliance. The literature on positive and negative incentives holds that rewards and sanctions – or carrots and sticks – have identical first-order incentive effects. We extend the basic model of law enforcement in three ways. We allow agents to opt out of the regulatory regime, we allow for enforcement errors, and we model agents who vary in at least one trait in addition to their cost of compliance. We show that following these three realistic modifications of the basic model, the two fundamental conclusions just described …

Removing Carbon Dioxide Through Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement And Seaweed Cultivation: Legal Challenges And Opportunities, Romany M. Webb, Korey Silverman-Roati, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

This paper explores two ocean-based carbon dioxide removal strategies – ocean alkalinity enhancement and seaweed cultivation. Ocean alkalinity enhancement involves adding alkalinity to ocean waters, either by discharging alkaline rocks or through an electrochemical process, which increases ocean pH levels and thereby enables greater uptake of carbon dioxide, as well as reducing the adverse impacts of ocean acidification. Seaweed cultivation involves the growing of kelp and other macroalgae to store carbon in biomass, which can then either be used to replace more greenhouse gas-intensive products or sequestered.

This paper also examines the international and U.S. legal frameworks that apply to …

Investigating The Contract Production Process, Stephen J. Choi, Robert E. Scott, G. Mitu Gulati

Faculty Scholarship

Contract law and theory have traditionally paid little attention to the processes by which contracts are made. Instead, contracts among sophisticated parties are assumed to be full articulations of the desires of the parties; whatever the process, the outcome is the same. This article compares sovereign debt contracts from US and UK firms, with different production processes, that are trying to do the same thing under very similar legal regimes. We find that that the production process likely matters quite a bit to the final form that contracts take.

The Past, Present, And Future Of The Restatement Of Copyright, Shyamkrishna Balganesh, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

It is now six years since the American Law Institute (ALI) began work on its first ever Restatement of an area dominated by a federal statute: copyright law. To say that the Restatement of the Law, Copyright (hereinafter “Restatement”) has been controversial would be a gross understatement. Even in its inception, the ALI identified the project as an outlier, noting that it was likely to be seen as an “odd project” since copyright “is governed by a detailed federal statute.”1 Neither the oddity nor the novelty of the project, however, caused the ALI to slow its efforts to push the …

The Use Of Technical Experts In Software Copyright Cases: Rectifying The Ninth Circuit’S “Nutty” Rule, Shyamkrishna Balganesh, Peter S. Menell

Faculty Scholarship

Courts have long been skeptical about the use of expert witnesses in copyright cases. More than four decades ago, and before Congress extended copyright law to protect computer software, the Ninth Circuit in Krofft Television Productions, Inc. v. McDonald’s Corp. ruled that expert testimony was inadmissible to determine whether Mayor McCheese and the merry band of McDonald’s characters infringed copyright protection for Wilhelmina W. Witchiepoo and the other imaginative H.R. Pufnstuf costumed characters. Since the emergence of software copyright infringement cases in the 1980s, substantially all software copyright cases have permitted expert witnesses to aid juries in understanding software code. …

Looking Back With A Legend: Ira Millstein Reflects On The Impact Of Milton Friedman's Views On Corporate Governance, Eric L. Talley, Ira M. Millstein, Leo E. Strine Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

In this discussion, corporate governance legend and frequent The Business Lawyer contributor Ira M. Millstein reflects on the impact of Milton Friedman and his adherents on our corporate governance system and economy generally, as well as the path forward to an economy that functions better for the many. Millstein takes an historical perspective in conversation with former Chief Justice and Chancellor of Delaware, Leo E. Strine, Jr., moderated by Professor Eric Talley of Columbia Law School. Millstein situates the evolution of our corporate governance system, including the effect of Friedman and the Chicago school on it, within the political dynamics …

Tribute To Dave Markell, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

I first met Dave Markell around 1988, when he moved to New York to direct the Division of Environmental Enforcement of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC). This was an era when the federal Superfund and its state equivalents were rapidly growing in importance; the laws passed in the wake of the Love Canal disaster of the late 1970s were finally growing teeth. Dave led New York's efforts to drive the cleanup of contaminated sites by using both civil and criminal remedies. He established DEC's criminal enforcement unit and doubled the number of criminal cases developed and …

The Equity E.O.: Building A Regulatory Infrastructure Of Inclusion, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

Among his first acts, President Biden signed Executive Order 13,985 to advance “Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government.” Alongside an order directing regulatory review to include “social welfare, racial justice, environmental stewardship, human dignity, equity, and the interests of future generations” and an ambitious infrastructure plan, this Equity E.O. signals a new engagement of the administrative state in proactively promoting racial equity and other dimensions of inclusion. The outlines of the infrastructure initiative are still emerging, but what appears key is its conceptualization of infrastructure as extending beyond roads and buildings to the social and …

Presidential Commission On The Supreme Court Of The United States Final Report, Michelle Adams, Kate Andrias, Jack Balkin, William Baude, Bob Bauer, Elise Boddie, Guy-Uriel E. Charles, Andrew Manuel Crespo, Walter Dellinger, Justin Driver, Richard Fallon Jr., Caroline Fredrickson, Heather Gerken, Nancy Gertner, Thomas B. Griffith, Tara Leigh Grove, Bert I. Huang, Sherrilyn Ifill, Olatunde C.A. Johnson, Michael S. Kang, Alison L. Lacroix, Margaret H. Lemos, David F. Levi, Trevor W. Morrison, Richard H. Pildes, Michael D. Ramsey, Cristina M. Rodríguez, Kermit Roosevelt, Bertrall Ross, David A. Strauss, Laurence H. Tribe, Michael Waldman, Adam White, Keith E. Whittington

Faculty Scholarship

On April 9, 2021, President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. issued Executive Order 14023 establishing this Commission, to consist of “individuals having experience with and knowledge of the Federal judiciary and the Supreme Court of the United States.” The Order charged the Commission with producing a report for the President that addresses three sets of questions. First, the Report should include “[a]n account of the contemporary commentary and debate about the role and operation of the Supreme Court in our constitutional system and about the functioning of the constitutional process by which the President nominates and, by and with the advice …