Law Commons^™

Creditor Control And Conflict In Chapter 11, Kenneth M. Ayotte, Edward R. Morrison

Faculty Scholarship

We analyze a sample of large privately and publicly held businesses that filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy petitions during 2001. We find pervasive creditor control. In contrast to traditional views of Chapter 11, equity holders and managers exercise little or no leverage during the reorganization process. 70 percent of CEOs are replaced in the two years before a bankruptcy filing, and few reorganization plans (at most 12 percent) deviate from the absolute priority rule to distribute value to equity holders. Senior lenders exercise significant control through stringent covenants, such as line-item budgets, in loans extended to firms in bankruptcy. Unsecured creditors …

Restating The U.S. Law Of International Commercial Arbitration, George A. Bermann

Faculty Scholarship

The American Law Institute's new Restatement of the U.S. Law of International Commercial Arbitration is only barely underway, and the reporters began with a chapter, on the recognition and enforcement of awards, that should represent for them a comfort zone of sorts within the overall project. Yet already a number of difficult, and to some extent unexpectedly difficult, questions have arisen. Some of the difficulties stem from the very nature of an ALl Restatement project. Others stem from the nature of arbitration itself and, more particularly, from the inherent tension between arbitral and judicial functions in the arbitration arena. Still …

New Frontiers In The Relationship Between National And European Courts, George A. Bermann

Faculty Scholarship

Considering that a full fifty years have passed since the Treaty Establishing the European Community came into force, it seems appropriate to take a "long" view of the subject of this panel, namely, national courts and the courts of the European Union. I mean here to sketch the evolution, as I see it, of the challenge that consists of managing the "interface" between these two series of courts.

The central question pervading this discussion is simply stated: whether and to what extent the European Court of Justice ("Court of Justice" or "Court") (and the European institutions more generally) can count …

Contract Design And The Structure Of Contractual Intent, Jody S. Kraus, Robert E. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

Modern contract law is governed by a two-stage adjudicative regime – an inheritance of the centuries-old conflict between law and equity. Under this regime, formal contract terms are treated as prima facie provisions that courts can override by invoking equitable doctrines so as to substantially "correct" the parties' contract by realigning it with their contractual intent. This ex post judicial determination of the contractual obligation serves as a fallback mechanism for vindicating the parties' contractual intent whenever the formal contract terms fall short of achieving the parties' purposes. Honoring the contractual intent of the parties is thus the central objective …

Contracting For Innovation: Vertical Disintegration And Interfirm Collaboration, Ronald J. Gilson, Charles F. Sabel, Robert E. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

Rapidly innovating industries are not behaving the way theory expects. Conventional industrial organization theory predicts that, when parties in a supply chain have to make transaction-specific investments, the risk of opportunism will drive them away from contracts and toward vertical integration. Despite the conventional theory, however, contemporary practice is moving in the other direction. Instead of vertical integration, we observe vertical disintegration in a significant number of industries, as producers recognize that they cannot themselves maintain cutting-edge technology in every field required for the success of their products. In doing this, the parties are developing forms of contracting beyond the …

Selling Originalism, Jamal Greene

Faculty Scholarship

Justice Scalia has described an originalist approach to interpretation as a prerequisite to faithful application of a written Constitution. If, says he, constitutional judicial review is implicit in the notion that the Constitution is paramount law, as has been settled in this country at least since Marbury v. Madison, then that review must be guided by the ordinary tools of legislative interpretation. In a democracy, serious legislative interpretation requires that judges keep faith with the meaning of the text as understood at the time of enactment, not as desired by those judges or by anyone else who does not, …

Ascertaining The Parties' Intentions In Arbitral Design, George A. Bermann

Faculty Scholarship

Supreme Court case law teaches us that the federal interest in arbitration does not consist of enforcing agreements to arbitrate according to some sort of abstract or ideal arbitral model, but rather according to the particular arbitral model upon which the parties had agreed. This body of law is driven by the same notions of party autonomy that underlie the law of arbitration generally. That parties may agree to forego access to national courts in favor of arbitration is an initial manifestation of that attitude. By logical extension, the parties also enjoy extraordinary latitude in determining the features that "their" …

Facial And As-Applied Challenges Under The Roberts Court, Gillian E. Metzger

Faculty Scholarship

One recurring theme of the Roberts Court's jurisprudence to date is its resistance to facial constitutional challenges and preference for as-applied litigation. On a number of occasions the Court has rejected facial constitutional challenges while reserving the possibility that narrower as-applied claims might succeed. According to the Court, such as-applied claims are "the basic building blocks of constitutional adjudication." This preference for as-applied over facial challenges has surfaced with some frequency, across terms and in contexts involving different constitutional rights, at times garnering support from all the Justices. Moreover, the Roberts Court has advocated the as-applied approach in contexts in …

The Law Of Armed Conflict And Detention Operations In Afghanistan, Matthew C. Waxman

Faculty Scholarship

In reflecting on the arc of US and coalition detention operations in Afghanistan, three key issues related to the law of armed conflict stand out: one substantive, one procedural and one policy. The substantive matter – what are the minimum baseline treatment standards required as a matter of international law? – has clarified significantly during the course of operations there, largely as a result of the US Supreme Court's holding in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. The procedural matter – what adjudicative processes does international law require for determining who may be detained? – eludes consensus and has become more controversial …

Davis V. Fec: The Roberts Court's Continuing Attack On Campaign Finance Reform, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

In Davis v. FEC, decided on the last day of the October 2007 Term, a closely divided Supreme Court invalidated the so-called Millionaires' Amendment, which was a provision added to the Federal Election Campaign Act ("FECA") as part of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act ("BCRA") of 2002 to make it easier for Senate and House candidates to raise private contributions when they run against an opponent who uses a substantial amount of personal wealth to pay for his or her campaign. From the reform perspective, the loss of the Millionaires' Amendment was not of great moment. The Amendment was …

Subsidizing Charitable Contributions: Incentives, Information, And The Private Pursuit Of Public Goals, David M. Schizer

Faculty Scholarship

The charitable deduction has enjoyed relatively little support in the legal academy. Many commentators have asked what it adds to the tax system and, as critics such as Stanley Surrey and Paul McDaniel have observed, the deduction obviously does not itself collect tax revenue. Defenders respond that the deduction helps to measure income and to keep taxpayers from inefficiently substituting leisure for work, but these points are, of course, contested. Instead of revisiting debates about what the deduction adds to the tax system, this Article focuses on the broader question of what it adds to the pursuit of public goals. …

Town Of Telluride V. San Miguel Valley Corp.: Extraterritoriality And Local Autonomy, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

At first blush, the decision of the Colorado Supreme Court in Town of Telluride v. San Miguel Valley Corp. seems like an extraordinary endorsement of home rule and a significant milestone in the evolution of local power. The Colorado Supreme Court adopted a very broad construction of the power of a home rule municipality under the state constitution and invalidated a state statute that expressly sought to limit that power. The power in question – extraterritorial eminent domain – seems to go well beyond even the most generous assumptions about local government authority. As the uproar following the United …

Rethinking The "Law And Finance" Paradigm, Katharina Pistor

Faculty Scholarship

The label "Law and Finance" stands for a body of literature that has dominated policy-making and academic debates for the past decade. The literature has its origin in a series of papers co-authored by Andrei Shleifer, Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes and a cohort of other researchers, including Robert Vishny, Simeon Djankov et al. (hereinafter referred to as LLS et al.). More than ten years after "Law and Finance" was first published, it seems appropriate to step back and consider the contribution this literature has made, but also to point out where it has gone astray and deviated attention from …

The Obama Administration's First Environmental Policy Changes, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

Under President Clinton the U.S. EPA took the position that it had the authority to regulate greenhouse gases (GHGs) from motor vehicles under the Clean Air Act as written, but the Clinton administration did not take affirmative steps to actually employ that authority. When President Bush took office, the General Counsel of EPA took the opposite position, stating that it would need special authorizing legislation in order to architect that regulation. A petition was filed with the EPA by the International Council for Technology Assessment and other organizations asking EPA to impose such regulations. EPA denied the petition. This led …

The Pto And The Market For Influence In Patent Law, Clarisa Long

Faculty Scholarship

As statutory schemes go, the patent statute has been relatively stable from 1952 to the present. In contrast to copyright law, where Congress has taken a close – indeed at times intense – interest in the details of the statutory scheme, legislative intervention into the patent statute, when it has occurred, has been more limited and narrower in scope. For many reasons, however, patent law has been disequilibrating over time, and calls for patent reform have been increasing in intensity. One of the many factors contributing to this disequilibration in recent years has been the ongoing emergence of the U.S. …

Environmental Law In 2049: A Look Back, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

December 22 marks the 40th anniversary of the National Environmental Policy Act, which started the modern era of environmental law, and the 40th anniversary of the Environmental Law Institute, which was founded to monitor the new field and to create a profession around the emerging discipline. To mark this anniversary, we asked a range of luminaries to forecast how environmental law and the profession dedicated to its successful implementation will mature over the next four decades. Will environmental protection still be the product of a social movement, or will it have become incorporated as part of the cost of doing …

Why Civil Liability For Disclosure Violations When Issuers Do Not Trade?, Merritt B. Fox

Faculty Scholarship

Civil damages liability for securities law periodic disclosure violations has come under attack, particularly fraud-on-the-market class-action lawsuits for investor losses incurred in connection with trading in the secondary market when the issuer has not sold shares. The main line of attack has been the weakness of the compensatory rationale for such suits. Without a compensatory justification, the attackers suggest, the availability of this cause of action is hard to defend given the very substantial use of social resources involved in the litigation that it generates. The critics are right concerning the weakness of the compensatory justification for civil liability. They …

Foreseeability And Copyright Incentives, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

Faculty Scholarship

Copyright law’s principal justification today is the economic theory of creator incentives. Central to this theory is the recognition that while copyright’s exclusive rights framework provides creators with an economic incentive to create, it also entails large social costs, and that creators therefore need to be given just enough incentive to create in order to balance the system’s benefits against its costs. Yet, none of copyright’s current doctrines enable courts to circumscribe a creator’s entitlement by reference to limitations inherent in the very idea of incentives. While the common law too relies on providing actors with incentives to behave in …

Intervention To Stop Genocide And Mass Atrocities: International Norms And U.S. Policy, Matthew C. Waxman

Faculty Scholarship

The collective international failure to stop genocidal violence and resulting humanitarian catastrophe in Sudan prompts the familiar question of whether the United States or, more broadly, the international community has the political will and capabilities necessary to deter or stop mass atrocities. It is well understood that mobilizing domestic and international political support as well as leveraging diplomatic, economic, and maybe even military tools are necessary to stop mass atrocities, though they may not always be enough. Other studies have focused, therefore, on what steps the United States and its international partners could take to build capabilities of the sort …

Taking Action In New York On Climate Change, Michael B. Gerrard, David Driesen, Veronica Eady Famira, J. Kevin Healy, Katrina Kuh, Edward Lloyd, Eileen Millett, David Paget, Virginia Robbins, Patricia Salkin, James Sevinsky, James Van Nostrand

Faculty Scholarship

The New York State Bar Association (NYSBA) Task Force on Global Warming (the Task Force) has been convened by NYSBA President Bernice Leber to summarize New York’s existing laws and programs regarding climate change and to make specific proposals that the State can implement in a timely and cost-effective fashion to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and to prepare for the impacts of climate change. New York has taken many steps to address climate change; however, there is much more that can be done. The Task Force has not attempted to comprehensively suggest every possible action, but rather has selected …

Reforming Family Court: Getting It Right Between Rhetoric And Reality, Jane M. Spinak

Faculty Scholarship

What do we say about the reform work we do, and to what degree is what we say accurate? How does the way in which we talk about family court reform implicate our analysis of what we are achieving? How does our place or role within the system affect our perceptions of reform? What limits our willingness and ability to apply rigorous evaluative techniques to determine whether we are reaching our goals? And if we are failing, can we acknowledge failure and learn from it? Answering these questions may lead to a better understanding of why family court reform is …

Homes With Tails: What If You Could Own Your Internet Connection?, Derek Slater, Tim Wu

Faculty Scholarship

In this paper, we propose and describe a new way to encourage broadband deployment. Most proposals have focused on deployment as a problem for firms and for government. Firms that provide broadband service question how a company can justify investments in a fiber infrastructure without a "killer app" that provides a new and proven revenue source different from what is available from existing copper wires. Governments question how they might build and operate their own networks, convince or pay existing carriers to do so, or encourage new market entrants to arrive and save the day.

We believe an innovative …

Tiered Originality And The Dualism Of Copyright Incentives, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

Faculty Scholarship

In a a well argued and thought-provoking new article, Gideon Parchomovsky and Alex Stein attempt to give copyright’s requirement of originality real meaning, by connecting it to the system’s avowed institutional goals.1 To this end, they focus on disaggregating originality into three tiers and providing creative works within each tier with a different set of rights and liabilities. Parchomovsky and Stein are indeed
correct to lament the meaninglessness of originality under current copyright doctrine. Yet their proposal does not quite fully explore the incentive effects of differentiated originality, especially as between upstream and downstream creators. Nor does it tell us …

What Has To Change For Forests To Be Saved? A Historical Example From The United States, Jedediah S. Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

This article looks at the conservation of American forests in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to cast light on the prospects for global forest conservation in the twenty-first. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Americans understood their forests as good only for cutting. By the end of the century a national scheme existed for comprehensive and permanent forest conservation. This new scheme became possible thanks to changes in scientific knowledge, the ideological self-image of the country, political institutions, and the imagination and moral commitments of citizens and social movements. A look at the changes that laid the foundations of …

A Few Questions About The Social-Obligation Norm, Jedediah S. Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

I applaud Gregory Alexander for proposing an innovative view of property, one focused on the obligations of ownership. His project locates what I think of as the liberal aim of personal freedom (meaning both formal autonomy and real opportunity) within a social context of distributive choices and conceptions of mutual obligation. That is, he is asking what counts as a free society, and he is putting property regimes at the center of the answer. I want to set out some questions about where his project goes from here.

The 60th Anniversary Of The Prc: A Retrospective On The Chinese Legal System – Introduction, Benjamin L. Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

Since its establishment in 1987, the Columbia Journal of Chinese Law and its successor, the Columbia Journal of Asian Law, have played an important role in publishing English language scholarship about the law of China and Asia. An important part of this mission has been the publication of scholarship not only by scholars in the United States and Europe, but also by scholars from China and elsewhere in Asia. I am delighted that this special edition of the Journal, marking the sixtieth anniversary of the establishment of the People's Republic of China and thirty years of legal reforms in China, …

Religious Law Schools: Tension Between Conscience And Academic Freedom, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

My comments this afternoon are responsive to John Garvey’s Presidential
Address on Institutional Pluralism at last year’s meeting. The gist of his
address, delivered gracefully, undogmatically, and persuasively, is that it may
be desirable to have law schools that are devoted substantially to particular
endeavors and points of view. Dean Garvey mentioned law schools that
concentrate on teaching particular subjects, such as law and economics, or
training for geographical areas, such as northern New York, or preparing
for forms of practice, such as clinical work, or helping a particular group of
potential lawyers, such as African‑Americans, or reflecting a special …

Short Selling And The News: A Preliminary Report On Empirical Study, Merritt B. Fox, Lawrence R. Glosten, Paul C. Tetlock

Faculty Scholarship

No subject in securities regulation has generated more heat and less light than short selling. A short sale is the sale of a share that is borrowed from a third party rather than owned by the seller. At a later time, the short seller extinguishes her obligation to this third party by “covering” – purchasing an identical share in the market and then returning it to the third party. If the share price drops, the cost of covering will be less than the proceeds received earlier from the sale and the short seller will make money. Politicians and CEOs rail …

Seven Things The New Epa Administrator Should Do, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

In view of the dramatic shift in the nation's environmental policy that is presaged by the ascension of Barack Obama, I have been asked to suggest several actions that should be undertaken by the new administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

This article was written on Jan. 26, 2009, six days after the inauguration. It is to appear in March. Thus every reader will know something that, today, I don't – what long-pent-up actions were taken by President Obama shortly after he moved into the Oval Office. But I am guessing that by the time this article appears, Lisa …

Self-Defense And The Psychotic Aggressor, George P. Fletcher, Luis E. Chiesa

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter presents an authoritative overview of self-defense against the psychotic aggressor. More specifically, it examines whether one can justifiably kill a faultless, insane assailant to save himself or another from imminent and serious harm. It considers the disagreement among scholars as to whether the defensive response should be considered justified or merely excused, or whether the specific ground of acquittal should be self-defense or necessity. The chapter includes comments by some of the nation's top legal scholars from the field of criminal law, tackling topics such as proportionality, self-defense against wrongful attack, justification of homicide against innocent aggressors without …