Digital Commons Network^™

Writing The Social History Of Legal Doctrine, Cynthia Nicoletti

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

In Search Of The Absent Shareholders: A New Solution To Retail Investors' Apathy, Kobi Kastiel, Yaron Nili

Faculty Scholarship

Corporate law scholars have taken investors' rational apathy for granted for many years, considering it a necessary evil once ownership is no longer closely held. But how significant is retail investors' apathy and what is its impact? This Article is the first to provide comprehensive data on the true magnitude of retail investors' apathy and its negative impact on corporate governance. Building on behavioral economics tools, this Article then presents a novel solution that could substantially mitigate, if not fully eliminate, this long-standing problem of investors' rational apathy, with minimal regulatory burden. The solution is based on the premise that …

California Constitutional Law: The Right To An Adequate Education, Anne D. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

Plaintiffs' victory in Vergara v. State, a case about teacher evaluation and employment regulations, has thrust the issue of educational adequacy into the spotlight in California. Campaign for Quality Education v. State, a case based on the California Constitution's education clause, has been fully briefed before the California Supreme Court and is waiting to be set for argument. These cases require California courts to again look to the constitution to determine what the right to education means. Although the California Supreme Court found this right fundamental over forty years ago, no supreme court decision has yet articulated whether this right …

Overcoming The Great Forgetting: A Comment On Fishkin And Forbath, Jedediah Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Regulating Financial Change: A Functional Approach, Steven L. Schwarcz

Faculty Scholarship

How should we think about regulating our dynamically changing financial system? Existing regulatory approaches have two temporal flaws. The obvious flaw, driven by politics and human nature (and addressed in other writings), is that financial regulation is overly reactive to past crises. This article addresses a less obvious but arguably more fundamental flaw: that financial regulation is normally tethered to the financial architecture, including the distinctive design and structure of financial firms and markets, in place when the regulation is promulgated. In order to effectively address future crises, this article argues, financial regulation must transcend that time-bound architecture. This could …

Discrimination By Customers, Katharine T. Bartlett, Mitu Gulati

Faculty Scholarship

Customers discriminate by race and gender, with considerable negative consequences for female and minority workers and business owners. Yet anti-discrimination laws apply only to discrimination by firms, not by customers. We examine efficacy and privacy reasons for why this may be so, as well as changing features of the market that, by blurring the line between firms and customers, make current law increasingly irrelevant. We conclude that, while there are reasons to be cautious about regulating customer behavior, those reasons do not justify acceding to customer discrimination altogether. To open a discussion of the regulatory options that take account of …

Defining Agency And Its Scope (Ii), Deborah A. Demott

Faculty Scholarship

Fiduciary law necessarily raises issues of delineation and demarcation, which this paper demonstrates through examples involving common-law agents. Serving as an agent, and thus as a fiduciary, does not necessarily mean that agency law prescribes all duties that the agent owes the principal. The agent may have rights external to the relationship that the agent may exercise, distinct from the duty of loyalty owed the principal. When an agent acts outside the bounds of an agency relationship, the principal’s consent is not requisite to conduct that would constitute disloyalty within the bounds of the agency relationship. The paper illustrates the …

The Management Of Staff By Federal Court Of Appeals Judges, Mitu Gulati, Richard A. Posner

Faculty Scholarship

Federal court of appeals judges have staffs consisting usually of a secretary and four law clerks; some judges have externs as well (law students working part time without pay). These staffs are essential, given judicial workloads and judges’ limitations. Yet not much is known about how the judges manage their staffs. Each judge knows, of course, but judges rarely exchange information about staff management. Nor is there, to our knowledge, a literature that attempts to compare and evaluate the varieties of staff management techniques employed by federal court of appeals judges. This Essay aims to fill that gap. It is …

Backlash Against International Courts In West, East And Southern Africa: Causes And Consequences, Karen J. Alter, James T. Gathii, Laurence R. Helfer

Faculty Scholarship

This paper discusses three credible attempts by African governments to restrict the jurisdiction of three similarly-situated sub-regional courts in response to politically controversial rulings. In West Africa, when the ECOWAS Court upheld allegations of torture by opposition journalists in the Gambia, that country’s political leaders sought to restrict the Court’s power to review human rights complaints. The other member states ultimately defeated the Gambia’s proposal. In East Africa, Kenya failed in its efforts to eliminate the EACJ and to remove some of its judges after a decision challenging an election to a sub-regional legislature. However, the member states agreed to …

Race, Class, And Access To Civil Justice, Sara Sternberg Greene

Faculty Scholarship

After many years of inattention, policymakers are now focused on troubling statistics indicating that members of poor and minority groups are less likely than their higher-income counterparts to seek help when they experience a civil justice problem. Indeed, roughly three-quarters of the poor do not seek legal help when they experience a civil justice problem, and inaction is even more pronounced among poor blacks. Past work on access to civil justice largely relies on unconfirmed assumptions about the behavior patterns and needs of those experiencing civil justice problems. At a time when increased attention and resources are being devoted to …

Manufacturing Barriers To Biologics Competition And Innovation, W. Nicholson Price Ii, Arti K. Rai

Faculty Scholarship

As finding breakthrough small-molecule drugs gets harder, drug companies are increasingly turning to “large molecule” biologics. Although biologics represent many of the most promising new therapies for previously intractable diseases, they are extremely expensive. Moreover, the pathway for generic-type competition set up by Congress in 2010 is unlikely to yield significant cost savings.

In this Article, we provide a fresh diagnosis of, and prescription for, this major public policy problem. We argue that the key cause is pervasive trade secrecy in the complex area of biologics manufacturing. Under the current regime, this trade secrecy, combined with certain features of FDA …

Quieting The Sharholders' Voice: Empirical Evidence Of Pervasive Bundling In Proxy Solicitations, James D. Cox, Fabrizio Ferri, Colleen Honigsberg, Randall S. Thomas

Faculty Scholarship

The integrity of shareholder voting is critical to the legitimacy of corporate law. One threat to this process is proxy “bundling,” or the joinder of more than one separate item into a single proxy proposal. Bundling deprives shareholders of the right to convey their views on each separate matter being put to a vote and forces them to either reject the entire proposal or approve items they might not otherwise want implemented.

In this Paper, we provide the first comprehensive evaluation of the anti-bundling rules adopted by the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) in 1992. While we find that the …

Sovereign Debt Restructuring: A Model-Law Approach, Steven L. Schwarcz

Faculty Scholarship

The existing contractual framework for sovereign debt restructuring is sorely inadequate. Whether or not their fault, nations sometimes take on debt burdens that become unsustainable. Until resolved, the resulting sovereign debt problem hurts not only those nations (such as Greece) but also their citizens, their creditors, and—by posing serious systemic risks to the international financial system—the wider economic community. The existing contractual framework functions poorly to resolve the problem because it often leaves little alternative between a sovereign debt bailout, which is costly and creates moral hazard, and a default, which raises the specter of systemic financial contagion.

Most observers …

Rare As Hens' Teeth: The New Geography Of The American Death Penalty, Brandon L. Garrett

Faculty Scholarship

Today, only a few dozen scattered counties actually impose death sentences, supporting the death penalty’s arbitrariness.

Automatically Processing Tweets From Gang-Involved Youth: Towards Detecting Loss And Aggression, Terra Blevins, Robert Kwiatkowski, Jamie C. Macbeth, Kathleen Mckeown, Desmond Patton, Owen Rambow

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

Violence is a serious problems for cities like Chicago and has been exacerbated by the use of social media by gang-involved youths for taunting rival gangs. We present a corpus of tweets from a young and powerful female gang member and her communicators, which we have annotated with discourse intention, using a deep read to understand how and what triggered conversations to escalate into aggression. We use this corpus to develop a part-of-speech tagger and phrase table for the variant of English that is used, as well as a classifier for identifying tweets that express grieving and aggression.

(Mis)Recognizing Polygamy, Kerry Abrams

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Quintessential Law Library And Librarian In A Digital Era, Femi Cadmus

Faculty Scholarship

Libraries, like most institutions and industries today, are faced with disruptive technologies that challenge their relevancy in a digital era. As a result, erstwhile notions and nostalgia associated with the quintessential library and librarian are changing rapidly. This is a compelling era to reimagine the library, retaining essential traditions alongside the new technologies, which facilitate the preservation, discoverability, accessibility, and delivery of information. It is also an opportunity for libraries to respond creatively and innovatively to change. The quintessential law library and librarian cannot only survive but can also thrive in the digital era by continuing to demonstrate value through …

Obama's Aumf Legacy, Curtis A. Bradley, Jack Landman Goldsmith

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Benefit-Cost Analysis And Distributional Weights: An Overview, Matthew D. Adler

Faculty Scholarship

Standard cost-benefit analysis (CBA) is insensitive to distributional concerns. A policy that improves the lives of the rich, and makes the poor yet worse off, will be approved by CBA as long as the policy’s aggregate monetized benefits are positive. Distributional weights offer an apparent solution to this troubling feature of the CBA methodology: adjust costs and benefits with weighting factors that are inversely proportional to the well-being levels (as determined by income and also perhaps non-income attributes such as health) of the affected individuals.

Indeed, an academic literature dating from the 1950s discusses how to specify distributional weights. And …

Differential Effects Of Discrete Positive Emotions On Give-Some And Take-Some Social Dilemmas, Caitlin F. O'Neill

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Building upon the literature regarding the unique effects of distinct negative emotions on decision making, the current thesis investigates the differential effects of distinct positive emotions (i.e., pride, elevation, and amusement) on giving and taking behaviors in social dilemmas. Results of a pilot and experimental studies reveal autobiographical recalls successfully elicited distinct positive emotions, but the effects were generally inconsistent or null in predicting prosocial acts. Supplementary analyses reveal a potential methodological confound, with significant findings more likely to emerge when emotions were measured after as opposed to before the targeted dilemmas. Specifically, elevation led to significantly higher levels of …

"A Better Calm / Of Meet Companionship" : Augusta Webster's (Re)Vision Of Victorian Wifehood And Marriage, Jennifer Sabatelli

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

That nineteenth-century female poets appropriated genre conventions for their own purposes is not a new idea; how and why they did so, though, are ongoing points of conjecture for feminist scholars. The following is an exploration of how the Victorian poet Julia Augusta Webster appropriated genre—more specifically the dramatic monologue and the closet drama—to advance her own feminist agenda and provoke social change, particularly with regard to the Victorian marriage institution.

Part I consists of a paired analysis of two lesser-known dramatic monologues by Webster, “Sister Annunciata” and “The Happiest Girl in the World.” Both works offer compelling critiques of …

Perceptions Of Leadership : A Policy Capturing Approach, Kelcie Tacchi

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Drath’s (2001) meta-theory of leadership posits individuals’ developmental levels (dependent, interdependent, inter-independent) will influence their constructions of leadership (.Personal Dominance, Interpersonal Influence, Relational Dialogue) with advanced development subsuming and expanding less complex principles. While this meta-theory has been influential in practice, little research has investigated its propositions. For this thesis, a policy-capturing methodology with 23 leadership vignettes was used to examine (a) if individuals have different constructions of leadership, b) whether a crisis context will influence leadership perceptions, and (c) the effects of demographic and experiential factors on endorsement of varying leadership principles. Results suggest individuals vary in leadership constructions, …

Roots & Shoots Remembered : A Qualitative Study Of The Influence Of Childhood Place-Based Experiences On The Lives Of Young Adults, Katrina G. Macht

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This dissertation is a qualitative interview study that explored the memories of 10 former students, now young adults, long removed from their intermediate school (grades 4 – 6) experiences. The purpose of the study was to learn what impact involvement in the school’s Roots & Shoots program had on later attitudes and behaviors. Specifically, the study focused on the relationship between distant childhood experiences and current dispositions towards the environment and civic responsibility. The results from the study were based on data collected from interviews, written reflections, and email correspondence, with 10 young adults who attended the intermediate school between …

Music Therapy In Detroit's Neonatal Intensive Care Unit : A Simulated Grant Proposal, Elizabeth Barone

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Infant mortality is the number one killer of children in the city of Detroit (Bouffard, 2014) and prematurity is the largest component, representing more than fifty percent of the current infant deaths in Detroit (Bouffard, 2014; Johnson, 2015, www.henryford.com, 2015) . Over the last two decades there has been an overwhelming amount of research in support of music therapy meeting the needs of parents and infants in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (Abrams, Dassler, Lee, Loewy, Silverman & Telsey, 2007; Arnon, Shapsa, Forman, Regev, Bauer, Litmanovitz, & Dolfin, 2006; Baker & Mackinlay, 2006; Cevasco, 2008; Creighton, 2011; Edwards, 2011; Loewy, …

Stereotype Threat In The Interview : The Effects Of Structure And Priming, Joshua Carrasco

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

The most common tool in the job selection process is the in-person job interview. The job interview is used as way to determine if the individual is a match for the job functions and the culture of the organization. Interviews are generally considered to be unstructured, which allows for a free flow of topics or is structured and follows a more ridged format. From the view of the person applying for a job, the interview is the most stressful aspect of the selection. As the interview is considered to be social interaction between many people, many times stereotypes can influence …

La Dénonciation Du Patriarcat Dans La Littérature Maghrébine D’Expression Française : Le Cas De Tahar Ben Jelloun Dans L ’Enfant De Sable, Laurent K. Kadji

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Patriarchy, which literally means the rule of a patriarch, is defined as a form of social organization in which political, religious and economic powers are held by a male to the detriment of a woman. In this male-dominated system, women are oppressed and discriminated. Such practices, which are no longer acceptable nowadays, are the main characteristic of the Arabic-Muslim societies of the Maghreb. The denunciation of the patriarchal ideology, as well as calling into question of the conservative structures of the society is some of the essential themes of French language literature in the Maghreb.

The main purpose of my …

Socioeconomic And Environmental Assessment Of Woody Biofuels In Southern United States, Bernabas T. Wolde

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Although the emergence of woody bioenergy offers several energy, economic, social, and environmental benefits, forestland owners’ willingness to participate in a biomass supply market, how it affects land use choices, and forestland owners’ sustainability concerns are not well understood. In addition to these gaps, how much residual biomass forestland owners are willing to retain on site for soil fertility and other environmental benefit purposes and forestland owners’ tendency to enroll in public incentive programs are not fully documented. Because private forestland owners manage two thirds of the 214 million acres of forest cover in the southern United States, understanding their …

Strengthening Research Through Data Sharing, Elizabeth Warren

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

Data sharing has incredible potential to strengthen academic research, the practice of medicine, and the integrity of the clinical trial system. Some benefits are obvious: when researchers have access to complete data, they can answer new questions, explore different lines of analysis, and more efficiently conduct large-scale analyses across trials. Other advantages, such as providing a guardrail against conflicts of interest in a clinical trial system in which external sponsorship of research is common and necessary, are less visible yet just as critical. I appreciate that there are many policy, privacy, and practical issues that need to be addressed in …

Converting Scholarly Journals To Open Access: A Review Of Approaches And Experiences, David J. Solomon, Mikael Laakso, Bo-Christer Björk, Peter Suber Editor

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

This report identifies ways through which subscription-based scholarly journals have converted their publishing models to open access (OA). The major goal was to identify specific scenarios that have been used or proposed for transitioning subscription journals to OA so that these scenarios can provide options for others seeking to “flip” their journals to OA. The report is based on the published literature as well as “gray” literature such as blog posts and press releases. In addition, interviews were conducted with eight experts in scholarly publishing. The report identifies a variety of goals for converting a journal to OA. While there …

Recommendations For Standardized International Rights Statements, Rightsstatements.Org, International Rights Statements Working Group

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

Europeana, the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), and many other 1 2 libraries, archives and other cultural heritage institutions believe that everyone should be able to engage with their cultural heritage online. We can help achieve this by giving cultural heritage institutions simple and standardized terms to summarize the copyright status of Works in their collection and how they may be used. These simple and standardized terms we call “Rights Statements.” Providing this information is essential for those who wish to actively engage with the Works they find online. Can they use it in a school report? Print it …