Law Commons^™

Reversible Rewards, Omri Ben-Shahar, Anu Bradford

Faculty Scholarship

This article offers a new mechanism of private enforcement, combining sanctions and rewards into a scheme of “reversible rewards.” The enforcing party sets up a precommitted fund and offers it as reward to another party to refrain from violation. If the violator turns down the reward, the enforcer can use the money in the fund for one purpose only – to pay for punishment of the violator. The article shows that this scheme doubles the effect of funds invested in enforcement and allows the enforcer to stop violations that would otherwise be too costly to deter. It argues that reversible …

Efficient Enforcement In International Law, Anu Bradford, Omri Ben-Shahar

Faculty Scholarship

Enforcement is a fundamental challenge for international law. Sanctions are costly to impose, difficult to coordinate, and often ineffective at accomplishing their goals. Rewards are likewise costly and domestically unpopular. Thus, efforts to address pressing international problems-such as reversing climate change and coordinating monetary policy-often fall short. This Article offers a novel approach to international enforcement and demonstrates the advantages of such an approach over traditional sanctions or rewards. It develops a mechanism of Reversible Rewards, which combines sticks and carrots in a unique, previously unexplored way. Reversible Rewards require that a sum of money be offered as a reward …

The Brussels Effect, Anu Bradford

Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines the unprecedented and deeply underestimated global power that the EU is exercising through its legal institutions and standards, and how it successfully exports that influence to the rest of the world. Without the need to use international institutions or seek other nations' cooperation, the EU has a strong and growing ability to promulgate regulations that become entrenched in the legal frameworks of developed and developing markets alike, leading to a notable "Europeanization" of many important aspects of global commerce. The Article identifies the precise conditions for and the specific mechanism through which this externalization of EU's standards …

Justice Stevens And The Chevron Puzzle, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

Justice Stevens's most famous decision – Chevron U.S.A. Inc. v. NRDC – has come to stand for an institutional choice approach to agency interpretation. But there is no evidence that Justice Stevens shared this understanding. Instead, he followed an equilibrium-preserving approach, which sought to nudge agencies to reconsider decisions the Justice regarded as unreasonable. Although the equilibrium-preserving approach is consistent with what a common law judge would embrace, the institutional choice perspective is probably more consistent with the needs of the modem administrative state, and it appears the Court as a whole is gradually adopting that perspective.

Why Do Criminals Obey The Law? The Influence Of Legitimacy And Social Networks On Active Gun Offenders, Andrew V. Papachristos, Tracey L. Meares, Jeffery Fagan

Faculty Scholarship

Research on procedural justice and legitimacy suggests that compliance with the law is best secured not by mere threat offorce, but by fostering beliefs in the fairness of the legal systems and in the legitimacy of legal actors. To date, however, this research has been based on general population surveys and more banal types of law-violating behavior (such as unpaid parking tickets, excessive noise, etc.). Thus, while we know why the average citizen obeys the law, we do not have similar knowledge about populations most likely to commit serious violent crimes. This study fills that void by using a unique …

The Law And Economics Of Blockholder Disclosure, Lucian A. Bebchuk, Robert J. Jackson Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

The Securities and Exchange Commission is currently considering a rulemaking petition that advocates tightening the rules under the Williams Act, which regulates the disclosure of large blocks of stock in public companies. In this Article, we explain why the Commission should not view the proposed tightening as a merely "technical" change needed to meet the objectives of the Williams Act, provide market transparency, or modernize its regulations. The drafters of the Williams Act made a conscious choice not to impose an inflexible 5% cap on pre-disclosure accumulations of shares to avoid deterring investors from accumulating large blocks of shares. We …

The Politics Of Incivility, Bernard Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

The Flemish painter, Pieter Bruegel, portrayed in his artwork men relieving themselves, cripples begging, and peasants toiling – as well as butchery and the gallows. In his masterful work, The Civilizing Process, Norbert Elias showed how the "late medieval upper class" had not yet demanded, as later generations would, that "everything vulgar should be suppressed from life and therefore from pictures."

For centuries now, defining incivility has been intimately connected with social rank, class status, political hierarchy, and relations of power. The ability to identify and sanction incivility has been associated with positions of political privilege – and simultaneously …

Significant Entanglements: A Framework For The Civil Consequences Of Criminal Convictions, Colleen F. Shanahan

Faculty Scholarship

A significant and growing portion of the U.S. population is or has recently been in prison. Nearly all of these individuals will face significant obstacles as they struggle to reintegrate into society. A key source of these obstacles is the complex, sometimes unknown, and often harmful collection of civil consequences that flow from a criminal conviction. As the number and severity of these consequences have grown, courts, policymakers, and scholars have struggled with how to identify and understand them, how to communicate them to defendants and the public, and how to treat them in the criminal and civil processes. The …

Eparpillement Aux Quatre Vents: La Fragmentation Du Droit Du Sport, Giovanni Distefano, Petros C. Mavroidis

Faculty Scholarship

Scattering to the Four Winds: The Fragmentation of Sports Law

Sports Law is characterized by a multiplicity of sources: from the outset, law-making function was mainly carried out by different and competent sports associations (both national and international). Two major events have wreaked havoc: on one side, the ever-increasing professionalization of sports business has given birth to the outcrop of private associations – active in a sort of grey and undefined area – torn between public authority ans free market; on the other side, international federations have been called upon to manage those same associations. Lack of institutional and substantive …

Arbitrating Trade Disputes (Who's The Boss?), Petros C. Mavroidis

Faculty Scholarship

World Trade Organization (“WTO”) dispute settlement has attracted a lot of interest over the years and there is a plethora of academic papers focusing on various aspects of this system. Paradoxically, there is little known about the identity of the WTO judges: since, at the end of the day, the WTO has evolved into the busiest forum litigating state-to-state disputes. There are many writings regarding the appointment process in other international tribunals. At the risk of doing injustice to many papers on this issue, we should mention the following works: Terris et al. look at various courts and especially those …

One (Firm) Is Not Enough: A Legal-Economic Analysis Of Ec-Fasteners, Chad P. Brown, Petros C. Mavroidis

Faculty Scholarship

The WTO’s Appellate Body (AB) dealt with a number of issues for the first time in the Report of EC-Fasteners. Importantly, the AB discussed the consistency of the European Union (EU) regulation with the multilateral rules on the conditions for deviating from the obligation to calculate individual dumping margins. Although China formally won the argument, the AB may have opened the door to treat China as a non-market economy (NME) even beyond 2016 when China’s NME-status was thought to expire under the terms of China’s 2001 WTO Accession Protocol. The AB further dealt with numerous other issues ranging from statistical …

Thirteenth Amendment Optimism, Jamal Greene

Faculty Scholarship

Thirteenth Amendment optimism is the view that the Thirteenth Amendment may be used to reach doctrinal outcomes neither specifically intended by the Amendment's drafters nor obvious to contemporary audiences. In prominent legal scholarship, Thirteenth Amendment optimism has supported constitutional rights to abortion and health care and constitutional powers to prohibit hate speech and domestic violence, among other things. This Essay examines the practical utility of Thirteenth Amendment optimism in the face of dim prospects for adaption by courts. The Essay argues that Thirteenth Amendment optimism is most valuable, both historically and today, as a means of motivating the political process …

Fourteenth Amendment Originalism, Jamal Greene

Faculty Scholarship

In Baze v. Rees, the Supreme Court rejected a death-row inmate's claim that a state's use of a lethal injection protocol that carried risks of severe pain from improper administration violated the Constitution. Justice Thomas wrote a remarkable concurring opinion, joined by Justice Scalia, in which he argued that the plurality opinion announcing the governing standard for claims of this sort was wrong, and should have hewed more closely to the original understanding of the Eighth Amendment. Justice Thomas wrote that "the Framers intended to prohibit torturous modes of punishment akin to those that formed the historical backdrop of …

Contextualizing Regimes: Institutionalization As A Response To The Limits Of Interpretation And Policy Engineering, Charles F. Sabel, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

When legal language and the effects of public intervention are indeterminate, generalist lawmakers (legislatures, courts, top-level administrators) often rely on the normative output of contextualizing regimes – institutions that structure deliberative engagement by stakeholders and articulate the resulting understanding. Examples include the familiar practices of delegation and deference to administrative agencies in public law and to trade associations in private law. We argue that resorting to contextualizing regimes is becoming increasingly common across a broad range of issues and that the structure of emerging regimes is evolving away from the wellstudied agency and trade association examples. The newer regimes mix …

To Tax, To Spend, To Regulate, Gillian E. Metzger

Faculty Scholarship

Two very different visions of the national government underpin the ongoing battle over the Affordable Care Act (ACA). President Obama and supporters of the ACA believe in the power of government to protect individuals through regulation and collective action. By contrast, the ACA's Republican and Tea Party opponents see expanded government as a fundamental threat to individual liberty and view the requirement that individuals purchase minimum health insurance (the so-called "individual mandate") as the conscription of the healthy to subsidize the sick. This conflict over the federal government's proper role is, of course, not new; it has played out repeatedly …

National Security Federalism In The Age Of Terror, Matthew C. Waxman

Faculty Scholarship

National security law scholarship tends to focus on the balancing of security and liberty, and the overwhelming bulk of that scholarship is about such balancing on the horizontal axis among branches at the federal level. This Article challenges that standard focus by supplementing it with an account of the vertical axis and the emergent, post-9/11 role of state and local government in American national security law and policy. It argues for a federalism frame that emphasizes vertical intergovernmental arrangements for promoting and mediating a dense array of policy values over the long term. This federalism frame helps in understanding the …

Where Is The "Quality Movement" In Law Practice?, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

The "Quality Movement" that originated in industrial production and has since influenced the professions prescribes standardized work, root cause analysis of errors, peer review, and performance measurement. While these reforms have transformed medicine and some other professions, their influence has lagged in the legal profession. This Essay reviews the limited progress of the reforms in law and assesses the cultural, institutional, and doctrinal obstacles they face.

"The Birth Of Death": Stillborn Birth Certificates And The Problem For Law, Carol Sanger

Faculty Scholarship

Stillbirth is a confounding event, a reproductive moment that at once combines birth and death. This Essay discusses the complications of this simultaneity as a social experience and as a matter of law. While traditionally, stillbirth didn't count for much on either score, this is no longer the case. Familiarity with fetal life through obstetric ultrasound has transformed stillborn children into participating members of their families long before birth, and this in turn has led to a novel demand on law.

Dissatisfied with the issuance of a stillborn death certificate, bereaved parents of stillborn babies have successfully lobbied state legislatures …

About Abortion: The Complications Of The Category, Carol Sanger

Faculty Scholarship

My subject this afternoon is abortion, a subject that for the last 40 years has embedded itself in American consciousness, American politics, and American culture with remarkable durability and reach. Looking only at the first decade of this century – from George W. Bush to Barack Obama, to use two presidential landmarks – abortion has been central to how Americans conceptualize, debate, and sometimes resolve all sorts of things: foreign aid, health care reform, high school sex education, and judicial nominations to the Supreme Court. Abortion has been at the heart of disputes over what products Walmart keeps on its …

Fragmentation Nodes: A Study In Financial Innovation, Complexity, And Systemic Risk, Kathryn Judge

Faculty Scholarship

This Article resents a case study in how complexity arising from the evolution and proliferation of a financial innovation can increase systemic risk. The subject of the case study is the securitization of home loans, an innovation which played a critical and still not fully understood role in the 2007-2009 financial crisis. The Article introduces the term "fragmentation node" for these transaction structures, and it shows how specific sources of complexity inherent in fragmentation nodes limited transparency and flexibility in ways that undermined the stability of the financial system. In addition to shedding new light on the processes through which …

Dichotomy No Longer? The Role Of The Private Business Sector In Educating The Future Russian Legal Professions, Philip Genty

Faculty Scholarship

In his 1916 work The Law: Business or Profession?, Julius Henry Cohen describes an American legal system in which uniform standards for regulating, disciplining, and educating the profession are just beginning to be developed, albeit unevenly. In discussing the differences between a business and a profession, he argues that a profession requires a uniform set of standards to guide it in matters of ethics, as well as a system of rigorous legal education that includes a firm grounding in these ethical principles.

Perhaps most surprising for a book written in the early twentieth century – long before the …

Free Lunches? Wto As Public Good, And The Wto's View Of Public Goods, Petros C. Mavroidis

Faculty Scholarship

The WTO can be viewed as a public good in that it provides a forum for negotiations which also produces the necessary legal framework to act as a support for agreed liberalization. To avoid any misunderstandings, in this article the discussion focuses on the WTO as a forum and a set of agreements, not on free trade. Since the legal agreements coming under its aegis are for good reasons incomplete, the WTO provides an additional public good by ‘completing’ the original contract through case law. The importance of this feature increases over time as tariffs are driven towards irrelevance. In …

Beyond The Private Attorney General: Equality Directives In American Law, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

American civil rights regulation is generally understood as relying on private enforcement in courts rather than imposing positive duties on state actors to further equity goals. This Article argues that this dominant conception of American civil rights regulation is incomplete. American civil rights regulation also contains a set of "equality directives," whose emergence and reach in recent years have gone unrecognized in the commentary. These federal-level equality directives use administrative tools of conditioned spending, policymaking, and oversight powerfully to promote substantive inclusion with regard to race, ethnicity, language, and disability. These directives move beyond the constraints of the standard private …

Fiscal Policy In An Era Of Austerity, David M. Schizer

Faculty Scholarship

We face a time of stagnant economic growth, severe unemployment, massive budget deficits, and an increasingly competitive global economy. These daunting challenges are the legacy of a number of unwise policy decisions in both the public and private sectors. Although the good news is that unsound policies can be changed, the bad news is that no single step will do the trick. It is a challenge to rely on monetary policy when interest rates are near zero. There also is uncertainty – and a heated debate among economists – about the effectiveness of a Keynesian stimulus. One thing we know …

Litigation Finance: What Do Judges Need To Know?, Bert Huang

Faculty Scholarship

In our classic image of an American lawsuit, including class actions, the plaintiffs lawyer pays the upfront costs and then hopes to recoup them from a share of the winnings. But today, this picture is incomplete. It is no longer only the law firm's own war chest that finances a case – so can outside investors and lenders. As Judge Hellerstein has just reminded us, the 9/11 cases he presided over involved such third-party financing. The Ecuadorian plaintiffs' environmental case against Chevron, now pending in the Southern District of New York, is another prominent example in the news.

Mexico's General Climate Change Law, Michael B. Gerrard, Anne Siders

Faculty Scholarship

Mexico’s General Climate Change Law (CCL) creates a coherent and ambitious national framework within which Mexico may fulfill its Copenhagen Pledge and establish itself as an international leader in climate change mitigation, but achieving these ends will require significant and on-going support from the Mexican government.

At Issue: Energy Efficiency, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

Relatively simple measures, such as switching to more efficient lightbulbs and insulating commercial buildings, hold great promise in efforts to combat climate change. So what's the holdup?

Quasi-Property: Like, But Not Quite Property, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

Faculty Scholarship

Quasi-property interests refer to situations in which the law seeks to simulate the idea of exclusion, normally associated with property rights, through a relational liability regime, by focusing on the nature and circumstances of the interaction in question, which is thought to merit a highly circumscribed form of exclusion. In this Article, I unpack the analytical and normative bases of quasi-property interests, examine the primary triggering events that cause courts to invoke the category, and respond to potential objections to the recognition of quasi-property as an independent category of interests in the law.

American Natures: The Shape Of Conflict In Environmental Law, Jedediah S. Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

There is a firestorm of political and cultural conflict around environmental issues, including, but running well beyond, climate change. Legal scholarship is in a bad position to make sense of this conflict because the field has concentrated on making sound policy recommendations to an idealized lawmaker, neglecting the deeply held and sharply clashing values that drive, or block, environmental lawmaking. This Article sets out a framework for understanding and engaging the clash of values in environmental law and, by extension, approaching the field more generally. Americans have held, and legislated based upon, four distinct ideas about why the natural world …

Virtue Ethics And Efficient Breach, Avery W. Katz

Faculty Scholarship

The concept of "efficient breach" – the idea that a contracting party should be encouraged to breach a contract and pay damages if doing so would be more efficient than performance – is probably the most influential concept in the economic analysis of contract law. It is certainly the most controversial. Efficient breach theory has been criticized from both within and without the economic approach, but its most prominent criticism is that it violates deontological ethics – that the beneficiary of a promise has a right to performance, so that breaching the promise wrongs the promisee.

This essay argues that …