Law Commons^™

Latcrit Praxis @ Xx: Toward Equal Justice In Law, Education And Society, Tayyab Mahmud, Athena D. Mutua, Francisco Valdes

Journal Articles

This article marks the twentieth anniversary of Latina and Latino Critical Legal Theory or the LatCrit organization, an association of diverse scholars committed to the production of knowledge from the perspective of Outsider or OutCrit jurisprudence. The article first reflects on the historical development of LatCrit’s substantive, methodological, and institutional commitments and practices. It argues that these traditions were shaped not only by its members’ goals and commitments but also by the politics of backlash present at its birth in the form of the “cultural wars,” and which have since morphed into perpetual “crises” grounded in neoliberal policies. With this …

Stuck: Fictions, Failures And Market Talk As Race Talk, Athena D. Mutua

Journal Articles

ClassCrits is a network of scholars and activists interested in critical analysis of law, the economy, and inequality. We aim to better integrate the rich diversity of economic methods and theories into law by exploring and engaging a variety of heterodox economic theories; including reviving, from the margins and shadowy past, discussions of class relations and their possible relevance to the contemporary context.

As a participant in the ClassCrits VI conference entitled, “Stuck in Forward: Debt, Austerity and the Possibilities of the Political”, I sat there at the end of the first day and puzzled over the fact that our …

Neofeudalism, Paraethnography And The Custodial Regulation Of Financial Institutions, David A. Westbrook

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Dinner Parties During "Lost Decades": On The Difficulties Of Rethinking Financial Markets, Fostering Elite Consensus, And Renewing Political Economy, David A. Westbrook

Journal Articles

Two groups of problems that ought to be understood in relation to one another: economic trends in the North Atlantic societies, and the capacity to collectively thinking, discussing, and even decide on what to do about our economy. Part One argues that economic policy and economic life are not only intertwined, but compromise one another. Part Two uses the World Economics Association's recent virtual conference, Rethinking Financial Markets to discuss some possibilities for fostering collective thought. Part Three briefly discusses the nature of the economy at the present time, i.e., the tasks confronting contemporary economic policy elites.

How Tax Increment Financing (Tif) Districts Correlate With Taxable Properties, Randall K. Johnson

Journal Articles

TIF literature does not answer a basic question:Does this economic development tool positively correlate with expanded tax bases? The question is important because it avoids the difficult issue of causation, while also yielding insight into the nature of the relationship between TIF and expanded tax bases. As a result, this Article answers the question for suburban Cook County, Illinois.

The “Ensuing Loss” Clause In Insurance Policies: The Forgotten And Misunderstood Antidote To Anti-Concurrent Causation Exclusions, Chris French

Journal Articles

As a result of the 1906 earthquake and fire in San Francisco which destroyed the city, a clause known as the “ensuing loss” clause was created to address concurrent causation situations in which a loss follows both a covered peril and an excluded peril. Ensuing loss clauses appear in the exclusions section of such policies and in essence they provide that coverage for a loss caused by an excluded peril is nonetheless covered if the loss “ensues” from a covered peril. Today, ensuing loss clauses are found in “all risk” property and homeowners policies, which cover all losses except for …

Taxing Family Work: Aid For Affluent Husband Care, Martha T. Mccluskey

Journal Articles

The income of the classic breadwinner married to a homemaker receives a tax advantage under federal income tax law. The conventional wisdom holds that any resulting inequities to unmarried persons or dual-earning marriages cannot be corrected without producing similarly problematic inequities. This Article challenges that dilemma by analyzing the inequity of the marital tax system from a new perspective. This Article argues that the perceived "bonus" for breadwinner-homemaker marriages is best understood as an implicit policy of "aid for affluent husband care." Recent tax reforms (up for renewal in 2010) that partly reduced the "marriagep enalty "for some dualearning couples …

A Consumer Decision-Making Theory Of Trademark Law, Mark Mckenna

Journal Articles

The consumer search costs theory has dominated discussion of trademark law for the last several decades. According to this theory, trademark law aims to increase consumer welfare by reducing the cost of shopping for goods or services, and it accomplishes this goal by preventing uses of a trademark that might confuse consumers about the source of the goods with which the mark is used. This conceptual frame is wrong, and it is complicit in most of trademark law’s extraordinary expansion. “Search costs” is not sufficiently precise; many types of search costs are irrelevant to consumer behavior, and even when search …

The Federal Reserve As Last Resort, Colleen Baker

Journal Articles

The Federal Reserve, the central bank of the United States, is one of the most important and powerful institutions in the world. Surprisingly, legal scholarship hardly pays any attention to the Federal Reserve or to the law structuring and governing its legal authority. This is especially curious given the amount of legal scholarship focused on administrative agencies that do not have anywhere near as critical a domestic and international role as that of the Federal Reserve. At the core of what the Federal Reserve does and should do is to conduct monetary policy so as to safeguard pricing, including that …

Toward Economic Analysis Of The Uniform Probate Code, Daniel B. Kelly

Journal Articles

Insights from economics and the economic analysis of law may be useful in analyzing succession law, including intestacy and wills as well as nonprobate transfers such as trusts. After surveying prior works that have examined succession from a functional perspective, I explore the possibility of utilizing tools like (i) transaction costs, (ii) the ex ante/ex post distinction, and (iii) rules versus standards, to illuminate the design of the Uniform Probate Code. Specifically, I investigate how these tools, which legal scholars have employed widely in other contexts, may be relevant in understanding events like the nonprobate revolution and issues like “dead …

The “Non-Cumulation Clause”: An “Other Insurance” Clause By Another Name, Chris French

Journal Articles

How long-tail liability claims such as asbestos bodily injury claims and environmental property damage claims are allocated among multiple triggered policy years can result in the shifting of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars from one party to another. In recent years, insurers have argued that clauses commonly titled, “Prior Insurance and Non-Cumulation of Liability” (referred to herein as “Non-Cumulation Clauses”), which are found in commercial liability policies, should be applied to reduce or eliminate their coverage responsibilities for long-tail liability claims by shifting their coverage responsibilities to insurers that issued policies in earlier policy years. The insurers’ argument …

If Not A Commercial Republic? Political Economy In The United States After Citizens United, David A. Westbrook

Journal Articles

In

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission , a majority of the Supreme Court conceived the United States to be an oligarchy and ruled accordingly. What this decision might come to mean for political economy in the United States is explored through three interrelated responses to the decision. In the first,

Citizens United is a turning point for constitutional law scholarship, and by extension, for what is expected from our legal system. After

Citizens United , legal scholars may abandon the idea that the Court takes legal argument seriously, and that law thereby constrains, as well as expresses, social privilege. …

Charting A Course In Clearing, Colleen M. Baker

Journal Articles

Memorable tales of financial collapse, such as that of Lehman Brothers (Lehman), Bear Stearns, and American Financial Group (AIG), frequently drive narratives of financial market crises and future preventative regulatory solutions. Much U.S. financial regulation, such as the monumental and historic “Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act,” (Dodd-Frank) can be understood from this perspective. Aspects of such responses, however, are sometimes puzzling. An example is the reforms surrounding certain financial market utilities in Dodd-Frank’s Title VIII, “Payment, Clearing, and Settlement Supervision Act of 2010” (Title VIII). Financial market utilities often play a vital role in a process known …

Optimal Class Size, Opt-Out Rights, And "Indivisible" Remedies, Jay Tidmarsh, David Betson

Journal Articles

Prepared for a Symposium on the ALI’s Aggregate Litigation Project, this paper examines the ALI’s proposal to permit opt-out rights when remedies and “divisible,” but not to permit them when remedies are “indivisible.” Starting from the ground up, the paper employs economic analysis to determine what the optimal size of a class action should be. We demonstrate that, in some circumstances, the optimal size of a class is a class composed of all victims, while in other cases, the optimal size is smaller. We further argue that courts should consider optimal class size in determining whether to certify a class, …

Foreword: Advances In The Behavioral Analysis Of Law: Markets, Institutions, And Contracts, Avishalom Tor

Journal Articles

Avishalom Tor, Special Editor

The collection of articles in this Special Issue is based on an international conference on Advances in the Behavioral Analysis of Law: Markets, Institutions, and Contracts that took place on December 8, 2009 at the University of Haifa Faculty of Law in Israel. The conference addressed cutting-edge legal issues at the intersection of law, economics, and psychology from a diverse set of viewpoints, bringing together scholars engaged in both theoretical and experimental behavioral analyses of law.

Foreign Citizens In Transnational Class Actions, Jay Tidmarsh, Linda Sandstrom Simard

Journal Articles

This Article addresses an increasingly important question: When, if ever, should foreign citizens be included as members of an American class action? The existing consensus holds that courts should exclude from class membership those foreign citizens whose country does not recognize an American class judgment. Our analysis begins by establishing that this consensus is flawed. Rather, to minimize the costs associated with relitigation in a foreign forum, we must distinguish between foreign claimants who are likely to commence a subsequent foreign proceeding from those who are unlikely to do so; distinguishing between those who come from recognizing and nonrecognizing countries …

Behavioral Antitrust: A New Approach To The Rule Of Reason After Leegin, William J. Rinner, Avishalom Tor

Journal Articles

The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Leegin Creative Leather Products, Inc. v. PSKS, Inc., which replaced the longstanding per-se rule against resale price maintenance (RPM) with a rule of reason approach, has resurrected the debate over RPM. Legal and economic proponents of this practice again point to its potential procompetitive benefits, while RPM detractors emphasize its possible anticompetitive consequences. Despite their disagreements regarding the overall RPM evaluation, however, scholars, the Court, and the limited empirical data appear near-unanimous in agreeing that such arrangements can either increase or decrease efficiency. Consequently, the RPM debate predominantly revolves around theoretical assertions regarding the …

Tragedy, Law, And Rethinking Our Financial Markets, David A. Westbrook

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Introducing Classcrits: Rejecting Class-Blindness, A Critical Legal Analysis Of Economic Inequity, Athena D. Mutua

Journal Articles

In 2007, two workshops at the University at Buffalo launched a project bringing together legal scholars interested in exploring the relationship between law and economic inequality. This article provides an overview of the workshops’ key understandings and discussions. The essay suggests that these understandings, informed by critical legal scholarship, constituted a set of shared assumptions among the participants and informed the groups’ rejection of class blindness, a society-wide blindness to the existence and use of economic power. Discussing some of the functional similarities of gender, race and class blindness, the article argues that feminist and critical race scholars’ critiques of …

The Methodology Of The Behavioral Analysis Of Law, Avishalom Tor

Journal Articles

This article examines the behavioral analysis of law, meaning the application of empirical behavioral evidence to legal analysis, which has become increasingly popular in legal scholarship in recent years. Following the introduction in Part I, this Article highlights four central propositions on the subject. The first, developed in Part II, asserts that the efficacy of the law often depends on its accounting for relevant patterns of human behavior, most notably those studied by behavioral decision scientists. This Part therefore reviews important behavioral findings, illustrating their application and relevance to a broad range of legal questions. Part III then argues that …

Comment: On Contractual Defaults And Experimental Law And Economics, Avishalom Tor

Journal Articles

It is possible that contract default rules, whose relevance is contingent upon parties' agreement to contract, differ from other default states. Parties therefore might not perceive contingent contractual defaults as relevant reference points. Ironically, however, Sloof, Oosterbeek and Sonnemans' (SOS) "default contract" applied inevitably whenever proposed and whenever Respondents rejected a non-default proposal, bearing greater resemblance to a legal right than to a contractual default. Thus, the contingency of typical contractual defaults cannot account for the No Bias Finding. Other aspects of the SOS experimental design, on the other hand, may explain the No Bias Finding.

Pilgrim Law: Overcoming False Consciousness Through The Witness Of London's Economic Migrants, Vincent D. Rougeau

Journal Articles

The article discusses the author's view on the works and beliefs of Robert E. Rodes Jr. He considered faith and professional life as the powerful link on Rodes works and cited three points of reflection on the matter which includes on Rodes' concept of "Pilgrim Law" that has been influential on the author's works, thinking about the relationship between the professional roles of a lawyer and a call to a lived Christian faith. He believed that the Rodes' book "Pilgrim Law" took a formidable task on extending the principles of the theology of liberation to American jurisprudence and became an …

Rankings, Standards, And Competition: Task Vs. Scale Comparisions, Avishalom Tor, Stephen M. Garcia

Journal Articles

Research showing how upward social comparison breeds competitive behavior has so far conflated local comparisons in task performance (e.g. a test score) with comparisons on a more general scale (i.e. an underlying skill). Using a ranking methodology (Garcia, Tor, & Gonzalez, 2006) to separate task and scale comparisons, Studies 1–2 reveal that an upward comparison on the scale (e.g. being surpassed in rank), rather than in the mere task (e.g., being outperformed), is necessary to generate competition among rivals proximate to a standard (e.g. ranked #3 vs. 4, near “the top”); rivals far from a standard (e.g. ranked …

"We Shall Not Be Moved": Urban Communities, Eminent Domain And The Socioeconomics Of Just Compensation, James J. Kelly

Journal Articles

If eminent domain is to serve true community development, statutory reforms must limit its propensity to abuse while still preserving its effectiveness. The first part of this article offers a normative legal theory of eminent domain as constrained by both the availability of alternative means of achieving public objectives and the inability of some condemnees to be made whole by cash compensation. The consideration of the land needs of both the condemnor and the condemnee is crucial to the respective evaluations of public use and just compensation as limitations on eminent domain. In the context of urban redevelopment, the theory …

Penalty Defaults In Family Law: The Case Of Child Custody, Margaret F. Brinig

Journal Articles

This paper considers whether an amendment to state divorce laws that strengthens its joint custody preference operates as a traditional default rule, specifying what most divorcing couples would choose or as a penalty default rule the parties will attempt to contract around.

While the Oregon statutes that frame our discussion here, like most state laws, do not state an explicit preference for joint custody, shared custody is certainly encouraged by Section 107.179, which refers cases in which the parties cannot agree on joint custody to mediation and by Section 107.105, which requires the court to consider awarding custody jointly. In …

Ranks And Rivals: A Theory Of Competition, Avishalom Tor, Stephen M. Garcia, Richard Gonzalez

Journal Articles

Social comparison theories typically assume a comparable degree of competition between commensurate rivals on a mutually important dimension. In contrast, however, the following set of studies reveals that the degree of competition between such rivals depends on their proximity to a standard. Studies 1-3 test the prediction that individuals become more competitive and less willing to maximize profitable joint gains when they and their commensurate rivals are highly ranked (e.g., #2 vs. #3) than when they are not (e.g., #202 vs. #203). Studies 4-6 then generalize these findings, showing that the degree of competition increases not only for high ranks …

The Neglected Political Economy Of Eminent Domain, Nicole Stelle Garnett

Journal Articles

This Article challenges a foundational assumption about eminent domain - namely, that owners are systematically undercompensated because they receive only fair market value for their property. The Article shows that, in fact, scholars have overstated the undercompensation problem because they have focused on the compensation required by the Constitution, rather than on the actual mechanics of eminent domain. The Article examines three ways that Takers (i.e., non-judicial actors in the eminent domain process) minimize undercompensation. First, Takers may avoid taking high-subjective-value properties. Second, Takers frequently must pay more compensation in the form of relocation assistance. Third, Takers and property owners …

Shopping For Law In A Coasean Market, G. Marcus Cole

Journal Articles

In the twentieth century, two Nobel-Prize winning economists wrote two seemingly unrelated characterizations of the processes constraining human behavior. One, Ronald Coase, wrote a short article entitled The Nature of the Firm,1 in which he reduced all managerial decision-making to a fundamental choice between making the factors of production, or buying them. This article and the idea of the "make or buy" decision for which it has come to be known, have proven to be among the most seminal in the history of financial economics and organizational behavior.

The second economist, Friedrich Hayek, wrote what he thought to be a …

Efficiency And Social Citizenship: Challenging The Neoliberal Attack On The Welfare State, Martha T. Mccluskey

Journal Articles

In the face of rising economic inequality and shrinking welfare protections, some scholars recently have revived interest in T.H. Marshall's theory of "social citizenship." That theory places economic rights alongside political and civil rights as fundamental to public well-being. But this social citizenship ideal stands against the prevailing neoliberal ("free market") ideology, which asserts that state abstention from economic protection generates societal well-being. Using the examples of AFDC and workers' compensation in the 1990s, I analyze how arguments about economic efficiency have worked to characterize social welfare programs as producers of public vice rather than public virtue. A close examination …

A Crisis Of Caring: A Catholic Critique Of American Welfare Reform, Vincent D. Rougeau

Journal Articles

The current deterioration of the American economy is bringing new attention to the problem of poverty in the United States. After falling over the last few years, the number of Americans living in poverty has begun to rise once again. Notwithstanding the achievements of recent "welfare reforms," the American poor continue to be numerous by any measure.

Unfortunately, decades of affluence have exacerbated American tendencies to view liberal concepts such as freedom, autonomy, tolerance, and choice in ways that accentuate personal autonomy over community integration. These liberal values have been increasingly unhinged from strong countervailing principles like duty and responsibility, …