Digital Commons Network^™

Lying And Cheating, Or Self-Help And Civil-Disobedience?, Aditi Bagchi

Faculty Scholarship

May poor sellers lie to rich buyers? This article argues that, under limited circumstances, sellers may indeed have a license to lie about their goods. Where sellers are losers under unjust background institutions and they reasonably believe that buyers have more than they would under just institutions, lies that result in de minimum transfers can be regarded as a kind of self-help. More generally, what we owe each other in our interpersonal interactions depends on the institutional backdrop. Consumer contract law, including its enforcement regimes, should recognize the social and political contingency of sellers’ obligations to buyers. In other contexts, …

Patent Shopping, Janet Freilich

Faculty Scholarship

Over the past decade, scholars have identified many entities who use the patent system in ways that differ from the traditional model of patent use—entities such as patent assertion entities, patent aggregators, or owners of large patent portfolios. This Article presents a model that explains the behavior of some of the biggest and most controversial entities in the patent system. This Article argues that such entities are engaged in “patent shopping” where the plaintiff makes a strategic choice of patent in order to obtain the best facts and substance in a case and thereby maximize the chance of a favorable …

Deal Insurance: Representation & Warranty Insurance In Mergers & Acquisitions, Sean J. Griffith

Faculty Scholarship

Efficient contracting depends upon imposing risk on the party with superior access to information. Yet the parties in mergers and acquisitions transactions now commonly use Representation and Warranty Insurance (“RWI”) to shift this risk to a third-party insurer. Because liability and trust go together, RWI would seem to give rise to a credible commitment problem between the transacting parties, and it raises adverse selection and moral hazard problems for the insurer.

This paper examines the emergence of RWI, focusing on three interrelated questions. First, how does RWI affect transactions?Second, why do transacting parties use RWI? And third, why do insurers …

Toward A Mission Statement For Mutual Funds In Shareholder Litigation, Sean J. Griffith, Dorothy Lund

Faculty Scholarship

This paper analyzes the conduct of mutual funds in shareholder litigation. We begin by reviewing the basic forms of shareholder litigation and the benefits such claims might offer mutual fund investors. We then investigate, though an in-depth docket review, whether and how the ten largest mutual funds participate in shareholder litigation. We find that although shareholder suits offer potential benefits, the largest mutual funds have essentially forfeited their use of litigation. This finding is particularly striking given that index funds and other long-term oriented mutual funds generally cannot sell their shares when they are dissatisfied with company performance, leaving them …

Responsible A.I. Credit Scoring - A Legal Framework, Katja Langenbucher

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Some Kind Of Right, Jud Mathews

Faculty Scholarship

The Right to Be Forgotten II crystallizes one lesson from Europe’s rights revolution: persons should be able to call on some kind of right to protect their important interests whenever those interests are threatened under the law. Which rights instrument should be deployed, and by what court, become secondary concerns. The decision doubtless involves some self-aggrandizement by the German Federal Constitutional Court (GFCC), which asserts for itself a new role in protecting European fundamental rights, but it is no criticism of the Right to Be Forgotten II to say that it advances the GFCC’s role in European governance, so long …

America On Fire: Climate Change, Wildfires & Insuring Natural Catastrophes, Christopher French

Faculty Scholarship

America is on fire. The damage, destruction, and loss of life caused by wildfires have exploded over the past few decades. Nine of the ten worst fire seasons have occurred in the past fifteen years, with 2017 and 2018 being the worst years ever. Despite spending approximately $3.7 billion annually on fire suppression, more than 35,000 structures were lost to wildfires in 2017 and 2018, approximately $32 billion in property losses occurred, and more than 100 people were killed. More than forty million homes worth approximately $187 billion in the U.S. are currently at a high risk of destruction due …

Reasonable Tax Rules: Advancing Process Values With Remedial Restraint, James M. Puckett

Faculty Scholarship

The tax administration is at risk of an overcorrection with respect to its rulemaking process. Tax practitioners increasingly are mining the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) as well as chipping away at barriers to pre-enforcement review of tax rules. Tax rules include regulations, revenue rulings, revenue procedures, and more informal guidance to the public. APA-based challenges to tax rules have gained traction in the courts, typically alleging inadequate explanation or timing irregularities involving notice and comment. Such claims potentially pose major challenges for fair and efficient tax administration.

This Article integrates administrative law scholarship calling for a rule of reason with …

Dehumanization “Because Of Sex”: The Multiaxial Approach To The Title Vii Rights Of Sexual Minorities, Shirley Lin

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Autonomous Systems & International Norms, Charles J. Dunlap Jr., Richard Jordan, Elsa Kania, Michael Klare

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

International Dispute Resolution And Access To Justice: Comparative Law Perspectives, Jacqueline Nolan-Haley

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Does Revlon Matter? A Empirical And Theoretical Study, Matthew D. Cain Ph. D., Sean J. Griffith, Robert J. Jackson Jr., Steven D. Solomon

Faculty Scholarship

We empirically examine whether and how the doctrine of enhanced judicial scrutiny that emerged from Revlon and its progeny actually affects M&A transactions. Combining hand-coding and machine-learning techniques, we assemble data from the proxy statements of publicly announced mergers between 2003 and 2017 into a dataset of 1,913 unique transactions. Of these, 1,167 transactions were subject to the Revlon standard, and 553 were not. After subjecting this sample to empirical analysis, our results show that Revlon does indeed matter for companies incorporated in Delaware. We find that in Delaware, Revlon deals are more intensely negotiated, involve more bidders, and result …

Liberalism And The Distinctiveness Of Religious Belief, Abner S. Greene

Faculty Scholarship

Finding the appropriate sweet spot for religion’s role in the state and how state action may affect the lives of religious people continues to be elusive. Cécile Laborde’s ambitious book Liberalism’s Religion comes down firmly on the side of seeing religion as not distinctive, even in a liberal democracy. To the extent that nonestablishment and free exercise norms should prevail, they should prevail insofar as we can disaggregate religion into components that it shares with nonreligious belief and practice. In this review essay, I advance a position on which Laborde spends little time in her book — religion is distinctive …

Protecting Against An Unable President: Reforms For Invoking The 25th Amendment And Overseeing Presidential Nuclear Launch Authority, Louis Cholden-Brown, Daisy De Wolff, Marcello Figueroa, Kathleen Mccullough

Faculty Scholarship

The immense powers of the presidency and the vast array of global threats demand a physically and mentally capable president. To help ensure able presidential leadership, this report advocates reforms related to the 25th Amendment, including proposals for an “other body” to act with the vice president in certain circumstances to declare the president unable and a mechanism for officials to report concerns about the president’s capacity. The report also recommends new checks on the president’s authority to use nuclear weapons, such as procedures for notifying top national security officials when use is contemplated.

This report was researched and written …

The Freedom Of Speech-Conduct, John Fee

Faculty Scholarship

Part I sets up the fundamental tension between the Supreme Court's celebrated line of decisions recognizing expressive conduct as speech and its reasons for refusing to recognize all forms of communicative behavior as speech, showing that both sets of motivating concerns are valid (even if misunderstood). Part II explores the traditional method of resolving this tension by measuring the expressiveness individual behavior, concluding that none of the various tests and criteria the Court has used can sensibly reconcile the competing concerns of Part I. Parts III, IV, and V propose and develop an alternative state-action-based approach for assigning levels of …

Election Law Localism In The Time Of Covid-19, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

In just a few short months, the COVID-19 pandemic has already provoked multiple election law disputes. These have tended to track the same normative and policy conflicts that have marked election law for years, particularly the tension between strict adherence to preexisting rules and the willingness to stretch or relax those rules in order to deal with emergency conditions, and the overlapping debate over whether the primary threat to the integrity of the electoral system is fraud or the legal and administrative obstacles to voting during a pandemic. A third, but much less discussed, strand in the emerging COVID-19 election …

Complexity, Judgment, And Restraint, Gerard E. Lynch

Faculty Scholarship

I am honored to have been asked to give this year’s James Madison Lecture. I hesitate to single out any of my extraordinary predecessors at this podium – there are too many great judges to list, and too much risk of slighting any. So I will note only that the list includes both judges for whom I clerked more than forty years ago, Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., and Chief Judge Wilfred Feinberg, of the court on which I now serve. That long-ago law clerk could not have dreamed of being someday in a position once occupied by those two …

Challenges And Opportunities: Intersectional Leadership In Law Schools, Sudha Setty

Faculty Scholarship

In 2019, the Author organized with Maria Isabel Medina and participated as a panelist in the Roundtable on Intersectionality and Strengths and Challenges in Leadership at the Fourth National People of Color Legal Scholarship Conference. This Essay is one of four in the cited article. The Essay summarizes the Author’s remarks at the Roundtable on contemplating a leadership role, the value of mentorship, and the profound impact that a woman of color as dean can have, simply by occupying that role.

America's Hidden Foster Care System, Joshua Gupta-Kagan

Faculty Scholarship

In most states, child protection agencies induce parents to transfer physical custody of their children to kinship caregivers by threatening to place the children in foster care and bring them to family court. Both the frequency of these actions (this Article establishes that they occur tens or even hundreds of thousands of times annually) and their impact (they separate parents and children, sometimes permanently) resemble the formal foster care system. But they are hidden from courts, because agencies file no petition alleging abuse or neglect, and hidden from policymakers, because agencies do not generally report these cases.

While informal custody …

What Should Presidential Candidates Tell Us About Themselves? Proposals For Improving Transparency In Presidential Campaigns, Megha Dharia, Rikki Lavine, Ryan Partelow, James Auchincloss, Krysia Lenzo

Faculty Scholarship

Elections are at the foundation of our democracy, but voters sometimes cast their ballots without critical information about presidential candidates. This report calls for requirements that candidates release more personal financial information, including five years of tax returns, and undergo criminal and intelligence background checks. The report also advocates for a system allowing candidates to submit to voluntary medical exams with some results released to the public.

This report was researched and written during the 2018-2019 academic year by students in Fordham Law School’s Democracy and the Constitution Clinic, which is focused on developing non-partisan recommendations to strengthen the nation’s …

Enforcing The Intent Of The Constitution’S Foreign And Domestic Emoluments Clauses, James Auchincloss, Megha Dharia, Krysia Lenzo

Faculty Scholarship

The Constitution’s Foreign and Domestic Emoluments Clauses are meant to prevent corruption and conflicts of interest. The Foreign Emoluments Clause prohibits some federal officials, including the president, from receiving payments or other benefits from foreign governments, while the Domestic Emoluments Clause bans the president from receiving payments other than the office’s salary from the federal and state governments. To enforce the clauses, this report recommends requiring the president to divest from business interests and increasing powers to investigate and punish violations of the clauses.

This report was researched and written during the 2018-2019 academic year by students in Fordham Law …

A Relational Turn For Data Protection?, Neil Richards, Woodrow Hartzog

Faculty Scholarship

If there’s one thing everyone in the data protection debate can agree on, it’s that it’s all about the data. All over the world, data protection regimes fixate on when data can be collected, how it is being processed, when it can be accessed or should be deleted, and whether it is personal, sensitive, or deidentified. This is true even for approaches that seem quite different at first glance, such as the U.S. and EU.

Possibility And Constraint In The Lives Of Young Rural Workers In The Us: The Psychology Of Working And Post-Trauma Vocational Trajectories, Donna M. San Antonio Dr.

Faculty Scholarship

Work and wellness have long been linked in the field of psychology, but few researchers have studied this topic with rural emerging adults without a high school diploma. Overall, rural areas in the United States have higher rates of poverty and lower educational attainment than nonrural areas. This narrative inquiry illuminates how precariousness in home and school contexts influenced the work trajectories and aspirations of ten 20- to 25-year-old research participants. Findings contribute to the psychology of working theory by illuminating the individual and contextual factors that generated possibility and constraint in the lives of young workers with limited education …

Tech Dominance And The Policeman At The Elbow, Tim Wu

Faculty Scholarship

One school of thought takes much of law and the legal system as essentially irrelevant to the process of technological evolution. This view takes as axiomatic that the rate technological change is always accelerating, that any firm or institution dependent on a given technology is therefore doomed to a rapid obsolescence. Law, at best, risks interfering with a natural progression toward a better technological future, hindering “the march of civilization.”

This paper discusses the historical role of antitrust investigation in changing the course of technological development by focusing on the example of the IBM litigation (1969 - 1984). While widely …

The Indigenous Decade In Review, Christine Zuni Cruz

Faculty Scholarship

This Article considers the decade, 2010 to 2019, in respect to indigenous peoples in the United States. The degree of invisibility of indigenous peoples, in spite of the existence of 574 federally recognized tribes with political status, is a central issue in major cases and events of the decade. Land and environment, social concerns, and collective identity are the three areas through which this Article considers the decade. The Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, endorsed in 2010, sets a measure for the nation-state’s engagement with indigenous peoples possessed of self-determination. The criticality of a new place in the …

Crystal Gazing: Foretelling The Next Decade In Oil And Gas Law, Joseph A. Schremmer

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter attempts to predict the major issues oil and gas law will encounter in the 2020s. Yet even before the first draft could be completed, the industry landscape changed unexpectedly. As this chapter goes to press, the global and domestic economies are just starting to emerge from a sharp downturn brought on by the outbreak of COVID-19. Oil and natural gas prices collapsed to levels not seen in decades. Against this unforeseen backdrop, the legal changes facing oil and gas development in the United States look somewhat different. But one element of our new reality is consistent with this …

Citizens To Preserve Overton Park – Race-Inflected Below Its Surface, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

This is not a picture one would have seen during the battles over Memphis’s Overton Park. When planning for Interstate 40’s route through Memphis began in the 50’s, one could have found Blacks in parts of that park only on Tuesdays; the park was for Whites only on other days. An urban oasis near downtown, largely surrounded by White residential areas, this large park held a zoo, golf course, and attractive forests and grounds – a municipal treasure not far from the commercial area. It was bisected by a bus road that was proposed as the route for I-40 to …

Private And Public Law, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter explores the relationship between private and public law. In civil law countries, the public-private distinction serves as an organizing principle of the entire legal system. In common law jurisdictions, the distinction is at best an implicit design principle and is used primarily as an informal device for categorizing different fields of law. Even if not explicitly recognized as an organizing principle, however, it is plausible that private and public law perform distinct functions. Private law supplies the tools that make private ordering possible — the discretionary decisions that individuals make in structuring their lives. Public law is concerned …

Bankruptcy’S Role In The Covid-19 Crisis, Edward R. Morrison, Andrea C. Saavedra

Faculty Scholarship

Policymakers have minimized the role of bankruptcy law in mitigating the financial fallout from COVID-19. Scholars too are unsure about the merits of bankruptcy, especially Chapter 11, in resolving business distress. We argue that Chapter 11 complements current stimulus policies for large corporations, such as the airlines, and that Treasury should consider making it a precondition for receiving government-backed financing. Chapter 11 offers a flexible, speedy, and crisis-tested tool for preserving businesses, financing them with government funds (if necessary), and ensuring that the costs of distress are borne primarily by investors, not taxpayers. Chapter 11 saves businesses and employment, not …

Some Issues On The Law Of Direct Damages (Us And Uk), Victor P. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

When a contract is breached, both U.S. and U.K. law provide that the non-breaching party should be made whole. The Uniform Commercial Code (“UCC”) provides that “[t]he remedies provided by this Act shall be liberally administered to the end that the aggrieved party may be put in as good a position as if the other party had fully performed.” The English version, going back to Robinson v. Harman, is “that where a party sustains a loss by reason of breach of contract, he is, so far as money can do it, to be placed in the same situation, with …