Law Commons^™

Rulemaking And The American Constitution, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

A Constitution that strongly separates legislative from executive activity makes it difficult to reconcile executive adoption of regulations (that is, departmentally adopted texts resembling statutes and having the force of law, if valid) with the proposition that the President is not ‘to be a lawmaker’. Such activity is, of course, an essential of government in the era of the regulatory state. United States courts readily accept the delegation to responsible agencies of authority to engage in it, what we call ‘rulemaking’, so long as it occurs in a framework that permits them to assess the legality of any particular exercise. …

Legal Frameworks And Institutional Contexts For Public Consultation Regarding Administrative Action: The United States, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

Written for a forthcoming book on e-governance and e-democracy, this essay summarizes the current state of play in electronic rulemaking in the United States. It thus focuses on a context in which the use of electronic consultation by “executive branch” actors engaged in policy-making has been developing for over a decade, and has reached a point of considerable, although not final maturity. Initially developed haphazardly, agency-by-agency, it is now (albeit with friction in the gears) moving towards a centralized regime. The practice is rarely consultative in the full sense the book as a whole will address; while the public is …

Agency And Luck, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

Advancing an account of responsibility which is based on the functioning of our rational capacities, the paper revisits some central aspects of the moral luck puzzle. It proposes a new variant of Williams’ agent-regret, but concludes that its scope does not coincide with cases of moral luck. It then distinguishes different ways in which the factors beyond our control feature in our engagement with the world which show how the guidance principle (we are responsible for actions guided by our rational powers) recognises a narrower range of situations of moral luck than is often supposed, allowing to distinguish between responsibility …

Subsidizing Creativity Through Network Design: Zero Pricing And Net Neutrality, Robin S. Lee, Tim Wu

Faculty Scholarship

Today, through historical practice, there exists a de facto ban on termination fees – also referred to as a “zero-price” rule (Hemphill, 2008) – which forbids an Internet service provider from charging an additional fee to a content provider who wishes to reach that ISP’s customers. The question is whether this zero-pricing structure should be preserved, or whether carriers should be allowed to charge termination fees and engage in other practices that have the effect of requiring payment to reach users. This paper begins with a defense of the de facto zero-price rule currently in existence. We point out that …

Debt, Bankruptcy, And The Life Course, Allison Mann, Ronald J. Mann, Sophie Staples

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay considers the significance of credit markets and bankruptcy for life course mobility. Comparing parallel data from the 2007 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) and the 2007 Consumer Bankruptcy Project (CBP), it analyzes use of the bankruptcy process as a function of the distribution of unplanned events, the ability of households to use credit markets to limit the adverse effects of such events, and barriers in access to the bankruptcy system. Our findings suggest two things. One, although the financial characteristics of filers vary markedly by age and race, bankrupt households generally come from the bottom quartiles of the …

Enhancing Investor Protection And The Regulation Of Securities Markets, John C. Coffee Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

This is the congressional testimony of Professor John C. Coffee, Jr., before the United States Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, March 10, 2009.

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

Faculty Scholarship

Looking back on US and coalition detention operations in Afghanistan to date, three key issues 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 the longer the Afghan conflict continues. And the …

Street Stops And Broken Windows Revisited: The Demography And Logic Of Proactive Policing In A Safe And Changing City, Jeffrey Fagan, Amanda Geller, Garth Davies, Valerie West

Faculty Scholarship

The contributions of order-maintenance policing and broken windows theory to New York City’s remarkable crime decline have been the subject of contentious debate. The dominant policing tactic in New York since the 1990s has been aggressive interdiction of citizens through street encounters in the search for weapons or drugs. Research showed that minority citizens in the 1990s were disproportionately stopped, frisked and searched at rates significantly higher than would be predicted by their race-specific crime rates, and that this excess enforcement was explained by the social structure of predominantly minority neighborhoods than by either their disorder or their crime rates. …

Post-Modern Meditations On Punishment: On The Limits Of Reason And The Virtues Of Randomization, Bernard E. Harcourt, Alon Harel, Ken Levy, Michael M. O'Hear, Alice Ristroph

Faculty Scholarship

In this Criminal Law Conversation (Robinson, Ferzan & Garvey, eds., Oxford 2009), the authors debate whether there is a role for randomization in the penal sphere - in the criminal law, in policing, and in punishment theory. In his Tanner lectures back in 1987, Jon Elster had argued that there was no role for chance in the criminal law: “I do not think there are any arguments for incorporating lotteries in present-day criminal law,” Elster declared. Bernard Harcourt takes a very different position and embraces chance in the penal sphere, arguing that randomization is often the only way to avoid …

Responsibility And The Negligence Standard, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

The paper has dual aim: to analyse the structure of negligence, and to use it to offer an explanation of responsibility (for actions, omissions, consequences) in terms of the relations which must exist between the action (omission, etc.) and the agents powers of rational agency if the agent is responsible for the action. The discussion involves reflections on the relations between the law and the morality of negligence, the difference between negligence and strict liability, the role of excuses and the grounds of duties to pay damages.

Free Enterprise Fund V. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

In the wake of the Enron and WorldCom accounting scandals, Congress created the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (“PCAOB”) under the aegis of the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”), with President Bush’s support. Its purpose was to replace deficient accounting industry self-regulation with effective external regulation. The choices it made in doing so engendered passionate arguments about constitutionally necessary presidential authority and separation of powers. These divided the D.C. Circuit 2-1 and will be rehearsed before the Supreme Court in the coming weeks. President Bush’s administration defended those choices; Judge Rogers, writing for the majority, found no valid constitutional objection …

Pot As Pretext: Marijuana, Race And The New Disorder In New York City Street Policing, Amanda Geller, Jeffrey Fagan

Faculty Scholarship

Although possession of small quantities of marijuana has been decriminalized in New York State since the late 1970s, arrests for marijuana possession in New York City have increased more than tenfold since the mid-1990s, and remain high more than ten years later. This rise has been a notable component of the City’s “Order Maintenance Policing” strategy, designed to aggressively target low-level offenses, usually through street interdictions known as “Stop, Question, and Frisk” activity. We analyze data on 2.2 million stops and arrests carried out from 2004 to 2008, and identify significant racial disparities in the implementation of marijuana enforcement. These …

Neoliberal Penality: The Birth Of Natural Order, The Illusion Of Free Markets, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

What work do the categories “the free market” and “regulation” do for us? Why do we incarcerate one out of every one hundred adults? These seemingly unrelated questions, it turns out, are deeply interconnected. The categories of free and regulated markets emerged as an effort to make sense of irreducibly individual phenomena – unique forms of market organization. In the process, these categories helped shape our belief that the economic realm is characterized by natural order and equilibrium, and that the only legitimate sphere of government intervention is policing and punishment. The consequences have been devastating: first, in distorting and …

Administrative Detention Of Terrorists: Why Detain, And Detain Whom?, Matthew C. Waxman

Faculty Scholarship

This article aims to reframe the administrative detention debate, not to resolve it. In doing so, however, it aspires to advance the discussion by highlighting the critical substantive choices embedded in calls for legal procedural reform and by pointing the way toward appropriately tailored legislative options. It argues that the current debate’s focus on procedural and institutional questions of how to detain suspected terrorists has been allowed to overshadow the questions of why administratively detain, and whom to detain. Not only are the answers to these questions at least as important as the procedural rules in safeguarding and balancing liberty …

Police And National Security: American Local Law Enforcement And Counter-Terrorism After 9/11, Matthew C. Waxman

Faculty Scholarship

This article examines three national security law challenges resulting from greater involvement of state and local police agencies in protecting national security, especially in combating terrorism: organizational challenges, accountability challenges, and institutional tensions with traditional local police functions. Each threatens the balance of security and civil liberties.

Integration, Reconstructed, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

This article examines Parents Involved for the light it sheds on integration's continuing relevance to educational and social equity. Part I examines the story of school integration in Jefferson County and shows how this largely successful metropolitan integration plan challenges claims of racial integration's futility. Part II puts forward the empirical evidence that plaintiffs in Parents Involved used in seeking to establish that school boards have a compelling interest in promoting racial integration and avoiding the harm of racially isolated schools. This part argues that the empirical case for racial integration, while not without limitations, moves beyond stigmatization, psychological harm, …

Personal Sovereignty And Normative Power Skepticism, Jody S. Kraus

Faculty Scholarship

In "The Correspondence of Contract and Promise," I claim that contract scholars have mistakenly presumed that they can assess the correspondence between contract and promise without first providing a theory of self-imposed moral responsibility that explains and justifies the promise principle. To illustrate the dependence of correspondence accounts of contract law on a theory of self-imposed moral responsibility, I demonstrate how a "personal sovereignty" account of individual autonomy explains how and why, contrary to existing correspondence theories, promissory responsibility corresponds to the rights and duties recognized by contract. Personal sovereignty recognizes the fundamental right of individuals not only to choose …

Our Twenty-First Century Constitution, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

Accommodating our Eighteenth Century Constitution to the government that Congress has shaped in the intervening two and a quarter centuries, Professor Strauss argues, requires accepting the difference between the President’s role as “Commander in Chief” of the Nation’s military, and his right to seek written opinions from those Congress has empowered to administer domestic laws under his oversight. Thus, the question for today is not whether the PCAOB offends Eighteenth Century ideas about government structure, but the question asked by Professors Bruff, Lawson, and Pildes – whether the relationships between PCAOB and SEC, SEC and President meet the constitutional necessity …

Optimization And Its Discontents In Regulatory Design: Bank Regulation As An Example, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

Economists and economically-trained lawyers tend to speak about regulation from a perspective organized around the basic norm of optimization. By contrast, an important managerial literature espouses a perspective organized around the basic norm of reliability. The perspectives are not logically inconsistent, but the economist’s view sometimes leads in practice to a preoccupation with decisional simplicity and cost minimization at the expense of complex judgment and learning. Drawing on a literature often ignored by economists and lawyers, I elaborate the contrast between the optimization and reliability perspectives. I then show how it illuminates current discussions of the reform of bank regulation.

Burden Of Proof In Environmental Disputes In The Wto: Legal Aspects, Henrik Horn, Petros C. Mavroidis

Faculty Scholarship

This paper discusses allocation of burden of proof in environmental disputes in the WTO system. Besides laying down the natural principles that (i) the complainant carries the burden to (ii) make a prima facie case that its claim holds, WTO adjudicating bodies have said little of more general nature. The paper therefore examines the case law of relevance to environmental policies, to establish the rules concerning burden of proof that are likely to be applied in such disputes. Evaluating this case law, the paper makes two observations,: First, in cases submitted under the GATTWTO, adjudicating bodies have committed errors regarding …

Marriage As Monopoly: History, Tradition, Incrementalism, And The Marriage/Civil Union Distinction, Suzanne B. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

History and tradition have taken a prominent place as favored rationales for the exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage. Incrementalism likewise has been invoked to suggest that states can permissibly move “one step at a time” to redress the unequal status of same-sex couples, including by creating a civil union/marriage regime instead of providing marriage for all. Yet constitutional jurisprudence is clear that neither longevity nor tradition alone can justify the continuation of a discriminatory rule. This Article asks, then, what work these rationales perform in the marriage/civil union jurisprudence and debate, given their inadequacy from a doctrinal standpoint.

The …

On Uncertainty, Ambiguity, And Contractual Conditions, Eric L. Talley

Faculty Scholarship

This article uses the recent Delaware Chancery Court case of Hexion v. Huntsman as a template for motivating thoughts about how contract law should interpret contractual conditions in general – and "material adverse event" provisions in particular – within environments of extreme ambiguity (as opposed to risk). Although ambiguity and aversion there to bear some facial similarities to risk and risk aversion, an optimal contractual allocation of uncertainty does not always track the optimal allocation of risk. After establishing these intuitions as a conceptual proposition, I endeavor to test them empirically, using a unique data set of 528 actual material …

Guantánamo, Habeas Corpus, And Standards Of Proof: Viewing The Law Through Multiple Lenses, Matthew C. Waxman

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court held in Boumediene v. Bush that Guantánamo detainees have a constitutional right to habeas corpus review of their detention, but it left to district courts in the first instance responsibility for working through the appropriate standard of proof and related evidentiary principles imposed on the government to justify continued detention. This article argues that embedded in seemingly straightforward judicial standard-setting with respect to proof and evidence are significant policy questions about competing risks and their distribution. How one approaches these questions depends on the lens through which one views the problem: through that of a courtroom concerned …

The Use Of Force Against States That Might Have Weapons Of Mass Destruction, Matthew C. Waxman

Faculty Scholarship

The Iraq war rekindled debate – debate now further inflamed in discussions of Iran and North Korea-about the legal use of force to disarm an adversary state believed to pose a threat of catastrophic attack, including with weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Coinciding with this debate is the stark fact that intelligence about allegedly hostile states' WMD capabilities is and will remain limited.

This Article aims to develop more fully how an objective reasonableness approach to WMD capability assessments would work, and more generally how the law governing use of force should guide capability assessments. It begins in Part I …

The Devil Made Me Do It: The Corporate Purchase Of Insurance, Victor P. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

Despite the fact that public corporations ought to be risk neutral, they often carry insurance. This note first considers why insurance (or more precisely, the package of services provided by insurance companies) might create value, regardless of the risk preferences of managers, shareholders, or other corporate stakeholders. One motive is that their contractual counterparties – buyers, lessors, and lenders – require that they carry insurance. Three explanations for why the requirement might be value enhancing are proposed.

Contracts, Orphan Works, And Copyright Norms: What Role For Berne And Trips?, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

This Chapter addresses the extremes of private ordering, and the extent to which the principal multilateral copyright instruments, the Berne Convention and the TRIPs Accord, limit the range of State responses to the problems encountered at the far ends of the copyright-contract spectrum. At one end, we encounter private ordering at its most aggressive, in which private parties enter into agreements (or, more likely, the stronger party coerces the weaker parties, who may be mass market consumers) to protect subject matter or rights excluded from the ambit of copyright's exclusivity. At the other end, the difficulties arise not from overweening …

The Warren Court, Legalism And Democracy: Sketch For A Critique In A Style Learned From Morton Horwitz, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

Morton Horwitz's Transformation books developed a critical approach that elaborates the underlying premises of legal doctrine and compares them to suppressed or ignored alternative perspectives. However, Horwitz's Warren Court book is largely an appreciation of the Court's doctrine that accepts at face value its underlying premises and the judges' claim to vindicate democratic values. In this essay, I speculate on what a Transformation-style critique of the Warren Court might look like and suggest that the Court is vulnerable to criticisms analogous to those the Transformation books make of earlier doctrine. I suggest that book ignores an alternative perspective on social …

Is The Bankruptcy Code An Adequate Mechanism For Resolving The Distress Of Systemically Important Institutions?, Edward R. Morrison

Faculty Scholarship

The President and members of Congress are considering proposals that would give the government broad authority to rescue financial institutions whose failure might threaten market stability. These systemically important institutions include bank and insurance holding companies, investment banks, and other "large, highly leveraged, and interconnected" entities that are not currently subject to federal resolution authority. Interest in these proposals stems from the credit crisis, particularly the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers. That bankruptcy, according to some observers, caused massive destabilization in credit markets for two reasons. First, market participants were surprised that the government would permit a massive market player to …

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 …

To And From The Community, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

I am glad to have been asked to share with the readers of Mizan Law Review, the thoughts that occurred to me at the end of my two-week stay in Ethiopia. It is difficult to express thoughts upon impromptu invitation. On the other hand, conversations like the one I had when I was invited to express my thoughts unveil one’s inner voice which readily responds although words from the heart might lack the pattern and the roadmap of thoughts and memories polished through the mind.