Law Commons^™

The Ecological Advantages Of Nuclear Power, Fred P. Bosselman

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Major electric utilities are deciding whether to build nuclear power plants. How will their decision affect ecological processes and systems, both in the United States and globally? The article makes three arguments: (1) if nuclear power plants are not built, the gap will be filled by more coal-fired power plants; (2) the impact of coal-fired power plants on ecological processes and systems is likely to be increasingly disastrous; and (3) nuclear power’s ecological impacts are likely to be neutral or even positive.

The Law Clerk Proxy Wars: Secrecy, Accountability, And Ideology In The Supreme Court, Carolyn Shapiro

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This piece provides an in-depth review and analysis of two recent books about Supreme Court law clerks, Courtiers of the Marble Palace: The Rise and Influence of the Supreme Court Law Clerk, by Todd C. Peppers, and Sorcerers’ Apprentices: 100 Years of Law Clerks at the United States Supreme Court, by Artemus Ward and David L. Weiden. In addition, the essay addresses a question so obvious that it is rarely asked – why is there so much curiosity about Supreme Court law clerks in the first place? In the essay, I analyze a widespread concern – and one discussed in …

The Sit-Ins And The State Action Doctrine, Christopher W. Schmidt

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By taking their seats at “whites only” lunch counters across the South in the spring of 1960, African American students not only launched a dramatic new stage in the civil rights movement, they also sparked a national reconsideration of the scope of the constitutional equal protection requirement. The critical constitutional question raised by the sit-in movement was whether the Fourteenth Amendment, which after Brown v. Board of Education (1954) prohibited racial segregation in schools and other state-operated facilities, applied to privately owned accommodations open to the general public. From the perspective of the student protesters, the lunch counter operators, and …

Private Fund Adviser Registration Act Hr-3818, Anita Krug

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This paper comments on the Obama administration's 2009 proposal for the regulation of hedge fund investment advisers.

Things Fall Apart: The Illegitimacy Of Property Rights In The Context Of Past Theft, Bernadette Atuahene

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In many states, past property theft is a volatile political issue that threatens to destabilize nascent democracies. How does a state avoid instability when past property theft causes a significant number of people to believe that the property distribution is illegitimate? To explore this question, I first define legitimacy relying on an empirical understanding of the concept. Second, I establish the relationship between inequality, illegitimate property distribution, and instability. Third, I describe the three ways a state can achieve stability when faced with an illegitimate property distribution: by using its coercive powers, by attempting to change people’s beliefs about the …

A Long And Winding Road: The Doha Round Negotiation In The World Trade Organization, Sungjoon Cho

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This article provides a concise history of the Doha Round negotiation, analyzes its deadlock and offers some suggestions for a successful deal. The article observes that the nearly decade long negotiational stalemate is symptomatic of the diametrically opposed beliefs on the nature of the Round between developed and developing countries. While developed countries appear to be increasingly oblivious of Doha’s exigency, i.e., as a “development” round, developing countries vehemently condemn the developed countries’ narrow commercial focus on the Doha Round talks. It will not be easy to untie this Gordian knot since both Worlds tend to think that no deal …

The Context Of Ideology: Law, Politics, And Empirical Legal Scholarship, Carolyn Shapiro

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In their confirmation hearings, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Sotomayor both articulated a vision of the neutral judge who decides cases without resort to personal perspectives or opinions, in short, without ideology. At the other extreme, the dominant model of judicial decisionmaking in political science has long been the attitudinal model, which posits that the Justices’ votes can be explained primarily as expressions of their personal policy preferences, with little or no role for law, legal reasoning, or legal doctrine.

Many traditional legal scholars have criticized such scholarship for its insistence on the primacy of ideology in judicial decisionmaking, even …

Global Constitutional Lawmaking, Sungjoon Cho

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Global Constitutional Lawmaking Abstract This article identifies a nascent phenomenon of “global constitutional lawmaking” in a recent WTO jurisprudence which struck down a certain calculative methodology (“zeroing”) in the antidumping area. The article interprets the Appellate Body’s uncharacteristic anti-zeroing hermeneutics, which departs from a traditional treaty interpretation under the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties and the past pro-zeroing GATT case law, as a “constitutional” turn of the WTO. The article argues that a positivist, inter-governmental mode of thinking, as is prevalent in other international organizations such as the United Nations, cannot fully expound this phenomenon. Critically, this turn …

Financial Regulatory Reform And Private Funds, Anita Krug

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This white paper comments on the Obama administration's June 2009 proposal for the regulation of hedge fund investment advisers.

All The Wild Possibilities: Technology That Attacks Barriers To Access To Justice, Ronald W. Staudt

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Predicting how technology will affect the future of the legal profession is difficult and unreliable work. I have made my share of such predictions in the past thirty years, including foretelling the death of the paper casebook in law schools and vast improvements in law practice that would be triggered by computers and document assembly software. Neither of these two prophesies has yet been fulfilled. Yet a real success story has emerged based in part on my persistent optimism that technology can improve the delivery of legal services. A2J Author, a modest software tool that allows lawyers to build guided …

Courting Specialization: An Empirical Study Of Claim Construction Comparing Patent Litigation Before Federal District Courts And The International Trade Commission, David L. Schwartz

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The United States International Trade Commission (ITC) has recently become an important adjudicator of patent infringement disputes, and the administrative law judges (ALJs) on the ITC are widely viewed as experts on patent law. This Article empirically examines the performance of the ITC in patent claim construction cases. The Article also compares the performance of the ITC on claim construction with that of federal district courts of general jurisdiction. This study does not find any evidence that the patent-experienced ALJs of the ITC are more accurate at claim construction than district court judges or that the ALJs learn from the …

Transforming Legal Aid, Ronald W. Staudt

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No abstract provided.

An Identity Crisis Of International Organizations, Sungjoon Cho

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An Identity Crisis of International Organizations Abstract International organizations (IOs) are ubiquitous. More than two hundred IOs touch our everyday lives, ranging banking to flu-shots. However, conventional political scientists seldom pay sufficient attention to IOs which they thoroughly deserve given their contemporary prominence. Because conventional international relations (IR) theories consider IOs as mere passive machineries, they hardly offer a satisfactory explanation on a distinctive mode of IOs’ institutional dynamic, in which a specific IO, as a separate and autonomous organic entity, grows, evolves and eventually makes sense of its own existence. This Essay offers a novel perspective which attempts to …

The Regulatory Response To Madoff, Anita Krug

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This white paper evaluates investor protection mechanisms in the securities regulatory regime at the time the Madoff fraud was exposed. It considers whether the post-Madoff call for additional regulation of hedge funds and/or their managers - and/or their respective activities - was warranted.

The World Trade Constitutional Court, Sungjoon Cho

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The World Trade Constitutional Court Sungjoon Cho Abstract Although a court, as a judicial organ, usually fulfils its mission by resolving specific disputes brought to it, it occasionally goes beyond this simple dispute-resolving function and more actively engages in building policies which define, and “constitute,” the very polity to which the court belongs, as was seen in Brown v. Board of Education. If this “constitutional adjudication” is an integral function of any domestic high court, could (and should) an international tribunal, in particular the World Trade Organization (WTO) tribunal, also play such a distinctive role? This paper contends that the …

Planning For A Bull Market For Wetlands, Fred P. Bosselman

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Until recently, wetlands had value in the marketplace only as targets for destruction. Today, wetlands often have market value for uses that do not require that they be dredged and filled. Such opportunities include: 1. Carbon storage offsets for greenhouse gas emissions; 2. Mitigation banks for destruction of other wetlands; 3. Conservation banks for wildlife protection; 4. Tradable water quality protection rights; 5. Sites for growing algae or other biofuel crops. These new uses have valid public benefits, but most laws and ordinances were not written with these possibilities in mind. Planners and lawyers need to think about ways to …

The Hedge Fund Transparency Act Of 2009, Anita Krug

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This white paper provides a review and critique of a bill introduced by Senators Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) and Carl Levin (D-Mich.) in the Senate in early 2009 that, if enacted, would have imposed certain registration and disclosure requirements on hedge funds and certain other private funds.

Congress Needs To Help Victims Of Foreclosures, Bernadette Atuahene

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No abstract provided.

The Aftermath Of Crawford And Davis: Deconstructing The Sound Of Silence, Kimberly D. Bailey

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No abstract provided.

One Hat Too Many? Investment Desegregation In Private Equity (Symposium) (With M. Henderson), William A. Birdthistle

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The nature of private equity investing has changed significantly as two dynamics have evolved in recent years: portfolio companies have begun to experience serious financial distress, and general partners have started to diversify and desegregate their investment strategies. Both developments have led private equity shops - once exclusively interested in acquiring equity positions through leveraged buyouts - to invest in other tranches of the investment spectrum, most particularly public debt. By investing now in both private equity and public debt of the same issuer, general partners are generating a host of new conflicts of interest between themselves and their limited …

Swamp Swaps: The "Second Nature" Of Wetlands, Fred P. Bosselman

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No abstract provided.

Happiness And Punishment (With J. Bronsteen & J. Masur), Christopher J. Buccafusco

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This article continues our project to apply groundbreaking new literature on the behavioral psychology of human happiness to some of the most deeply analyzed questions in law. Here we explain that the new psychological understandings of happiness interact in startling ways with the leading theories of criminal punishment. Punishment theorists, both retributivist and utilitarian, have failed to account for human beings' ability to adapt to changed circumstances, including fines and (surprisingly) imprisonment. At the same time, these theorists have largely ignored the severe hedonic losses brought about by the post-prison social and economic deprivations (unemployment, divorce, and disease) caused by …

Competition Law And The Institutional Embeddedness Of Economics, David J. Gerber

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Transnational debates about the role of economics in competition law have paid relatively little systematic attention to the embeddedness of economics in institutions. They typically proceed as if embeddedness were not an issue. The assumption often appears to be that economics looks, acts and functions in the same way wherever it is applied. This assumption is frequently the basis for claims supporting increased use of economics in competition law systems around the world.

This article examines that assumption and argues that the institutional embeddedness of economics needs to be taken into account when we wish to evaluate and analyze the …

Perpetual Property, Sarah K. Harding

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This paper explores the emergence of perpetual property in a number of discrete areas of property law: the longevity of servitudes in historic and environmental preservation, the ever growing time span of intellectual property rights, the disappearance of the rules against perpetual interests, and the temporally unlimited reach of cultural property claims. While the demise of temporal limitations is itself worthy of recognition and will be the focus of a significant part of this paper, my primary interest is whether these changes tell us something about shifting cultural attitudes to the institution of private property. If it is the case, …

Changing Expectations For Board Oversight Of Healthcare Quality: The Emerging Paradigm, Valerie Gutmann Koch

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Within healthcare institutions, leadership is an essential driver of expectations, performance, and culture. Yet boards of directors traditionally played a limited role in overseeing healthcare quality, providing final approval of credentialing decisions but deferring to the medical staff to set standards for the institution. Case law and standards provide little guidance for board performance in verseeing quality of care. Recent developments — the availability of comparative quality data, public reporting, and financial incentives for higher quality — have transformed expectations for board oversight. Enforcement of fraud and abuse laws based on poor quality of care, as well as federal standards …

Conflicts Of Interest In Clinical Trial Recruitment & Enrollment: A Call For Increased Oversight, Valerie Gutmann Koch

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This White Paper makes several policy recommendations to eliminate or manage the conflicts of interest that arise pursuant to the compensation arrangements between investigators and their institutions with drug and medical device manufacturers as they affect the recruitment and enrollment of human research subjects in clinical trials. The paper seeks to accomplish overall financial neutrality as between treatment and research, so that physicians' decisions regarding inclusion of patients in clinical trials is unaffected by their own financial interests.

Decoding The Dmca Safe Harbors, Edward Lee

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The DMCA is a decade old, which, in Internet time, may well be closer to a century. Although the DMCA safe harbors have helped to foster tremendous growth in web applications in our Web 2.0 world, several very basic aspects of the DMCA safe harbors remain uncertain. These uncertainties, along with the relative lack of litigation over the DMCA in the past ten years, have threatened to undermine the whole purpose of the DMCA safe harbors by failing to inform the public and technology companies of what steps they need to undertake to fall within the safe harbors. In several …

Freedom Of The Press 2.0, Edward Lee

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In today's digital age, copyright law is changing. It now attempts to regulate machines. Over the past twenty years, and particularly with the advent of the Internet, copyright holders have increasingly invoked copyright law to regulate directly - indeed, even to prohibit - the manufacture and sale of technology that facilitates the mass dissemination of expressive works. Although the concerns of copyright holders about the ease of digital copying are understandable, the expansion of copyright law to regulate - and, in some cases, to prohibit - technologies raises a troubling question. Can the government regulate under copyright law technologies that …

Guns And Speech Technologies: How The Right To Bear Arms Affects Copyright Regulations Of Speech Technologies, Edward Lee

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This Essay examines the possible effect the Supreme Court's landmark Second Amendment ruling in Heller will have on future cases brought under the Free Press Clause. Based on the text and history of the Constitution, the connection between the two Clauses is undeniable, as the Heller Court itself repeatedly suggested. Only two provisions in the entire Constitution protect individual rights to a technology: the Second Amendment's right to bear "arms" and the Free Press Clause's right to the freedom of the "press," meaning the printing press. Both rights were viewed, moreover, as preexisting, natural rights to the Framing generation and …

The Paradox Of Public Sector Labor Law, Martin H. Malin

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No abstract provided.