Law Commons^™

Governing Communities By Auction, Abraham Bell, Gideon Parchomovsky

All Faculty Scholarship

Common interest communities have become the property form of choice for many Americans. As of 2010, sixty-two million Americans lived in common interest communities. Residents benefit from sharing the cost of common amenities – pools, lawns, gazebos – and from rules that ensure compliance with community expectations. But decisionmaking in common interest communities raises serious concerns about minority abuse and manipulation, a problem well known to all property law students. Decisions about which amenities will be provided and which rules will be enacted are typically made through some combination of delegation and voting. Delegates often act for their own benefit, …

Multiple Attempts At Class Certification, Tobias Barrington Wolff

All Faculty Scholarship

The phenomenon of multiple attempts at class certification -- when class counsel file the same putative class action in multiple successive courts and attempt to secure an order of certification despite previous denials of the same request -- has always presented a vexing analytical puzzle. When the Supreme Court rejected one proposed solution to that problem in Smith v. Bayer, it left unresolved some of the broader questions of preclusion doctrine, federal common law, and the constraints of due process with which any satisfying approach will have to grapple.

This essay was solicited as a reply to a recent …

Observers As Participants: Letting The Public Monitor The Criminal Justice Bureaucracy, Stephanos Bibas

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Layers Of Law: The Case Of E-Cigarettes, Eric A. Feldman

All Faculty Scholarship

This paper, written for a symposium on "Layers of Law and Social Order," connects the current debate over the regulation of electronic cigarettes with socio-legal scholarship on law, norms, and social control. Although almost every aspect of modern life that is subject to regulation can be seen through the framework ‘layers of law,’ e-cigarettes are distinguished by the rapid emergence of an unusually dense legal and regulatory web. In part, the dense fabric of e-cigarette law and regulation, both within and beyond the US, results from the lack of robust scientific and epidemiological data on the behavioral and health consequences …

Merger Control Procedures And Institutions: A Comparison Of The Eu And Us Practice, William E. Kovacic, Petros C. Mavroidis, Damien J. Neven

Faculty Scholarship

The objective of this paper is to discuss and compare the role that different constituencies play in US and EU procedures for merger control. We describe the main constituencies (both internal and external) involved in merger control in both jurisdictions and discuss how a typical merger case would be handled under these procedures. At each stage, we consider how the procedure unfolds, which parties are involved, and how they can affect the procedure. Our discussion reveals a very different ecology. EU and US procedures differ in terms of their basic design and in terms of the procedures that are naturally …

A Tale Of Two Rights, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In part I of this article the author identifies and criticizes a cluster of constitutional rights, which she argues does tremendous and generally unreckoned harm to civil society, and does so for reasons poorly articulated in earlier critiques. At the heart of the new paradigm of constitutional rights that the author believes these rights exemplify is a “right to exit.” On this conception of individual rights, a constitutional right is a right to “opt out” of some central public or civic project. This understanding of what it means to have a constitutional right hit the scene a good two decades …