Law Commons^™

Confronting The Certainty Imperative In Corporate Finance Jurisprudence, Diane Lourdes Dick

Faculty Articles

This Article argues that the methodological constraints of the Imperative have abandoned its underlying goals of certainty and stability in financial markets. Therefore, a new paradigm is needed that will enable courts to allocate rights and remedies in accordance with the economic substance of arrangements, and thus better enhance market stability.

This Article proceeds as follows: Part II articulates the jurisprudential underpinnings of the Imperative. Part III examines the economic theory and assumptions reflected in Imperative-driven decisions, as well as the interpretive methodology that has evolved across a range of judicial decisions and legislative enactments. Part IV introduces a recent …

From Both Sides Now: The Job Talk’S Role In Matching Candidates With Law Schools, Anne Enquist, Paula Lustbader, John B. Mitchell

Faculty Articles

In the heavily competitive law school teaching job market, the so-called “job talk” has assumed increasing importance in the ultimate hiring decision. Nevertheless, there is little published information to assist a law school faculty in structuring or evaluating the job talk and a similar paucity of information for candidates to guide them in creating and preparing for the presentation of their talk. This article is intended to fill that void. The article guides the preparation of faculty and candidates for both the job talk itself and for the crucial Q&A period that follows the talk. The article represents the authors’ …

Labor Values Are First Amendment Values: Why Union Comprehensive Campaigns Are Protected Speech, Charlotte Garden

Faculty Articles

Corporate targets of union “comprehensive campaigns” increasingly have responded by filing civil Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) lawsuits alleging that unions’ speech and petitioning activities are extortionate. These lawsuits are the descendants of the Supreme Court’s unexplained treatment of much labor speech as less worthy of protection than other types of speech. Starting from the position that speech that promotes democratic discourse deserves top-tier First Amendment protection, this article argues that labor speech--which plays a unique role in civil society--should be on an equal footing with civil rights speech. Thus, even if union advocacy qualifies as legal extortion, …

Climate Change, Food Security, And Agrobiodiversity: Toward A Just, Resilient, And Sustainable Food System, Carmen G. Gonzalez

Faculty Articles

The global food system is in a state of profound crisis. Decades of misguided aid, trade and production policies have resulted in an unprecedented erosion of agrobiodiversity that renders the world’s food supply vulnerable to catastrophic crop failure in the event of drought, heavy rains, and outbreaks of pests and disease. Climate change threatens to wreak additional havoc on food production by increasing the frequency and severity of extreme weather events, depressing agricultural yields, reducing the productivity of the world’s fisheries, and placing pressure on scarce water resources. Furthermore, the climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis are occurring at a …

The Global Politics Of Food: Introduction To The Theoretical Perspectives Cluster, Carmen G. Gonzalez

Faculty Articles

In May 2010, the Universidad Interamericana in Mexico City hosted an international conference on The Global Politics of Food: Sustainability and Subordination. Sponsored by Latina and Latino Critical Legal Theory, Inc. and by Seattle University School of Law, the conference took place under the auspices of the South-North Exchange on Theory, Culture and Law (SNX), a yearly gathering of scholars in the Americas that seeks to foster transnational, cross-disciplinary and inter-cultural dialogue on current issues in law, theory and culture. Published in the University of Miami Inter-American Law Review, the conference papers examine the complex ways in which the …

Investment Income Withholding In The United States And Germany, Lily Kahng

Faculty Articles

In a reversal from its historical roots, the United States income tax system now taxes income from labor significantly more heavily than income from capital. It does so not only facially, through explicit preferences for income from capital, but also more subtly, through more hidden features of the tax system – specifically, enforcement strategies. This article focuses on a prominent disparity in enforcement between the two forms of income: Wage income is subject to withholding while investment income is not.

In its critical examination of this disparity, the article first offers a brief history of withholding in the United States, …

Managing Forced Displacement By Law In Africa: The Role Of The New African Union Idps Convention, Won Kidane

Faculty Articles

This article provides a critical appraisal of the newly adopted African IDPs Convention. In particular, it offers a detailed analysis of the Convention's transformation of the UN Guiding Principles into legally binding rules for the management of the phenomenon of internal displacement in Africa. By definition, internally displaced persons (IDPs) are persons who have not crossed international frontiers and are citizens of the state within which they find themselves. Although their conditions may be similar to refugees, who are necessarily aliens to the host community, their legal status is not analogous. At the most basic level, there is no doctrinal …

The Predictive Power Of Merger Analysis, John B. Kirkwood

Faculty Articles

This article looks first at the process courts use to resolve merger challenges and finds that in the area of product market definition, merger analysis is reasonably strong. Market definition remains complex and subjective, however, and could be improved, or avoided altogether, through econometric techniques such as merger simulation. Judicial analysis of entry is much weaker. Courts ask whether the market is protected by entry barriers but rarely ask whether the barriers are high enough to make entry unprofitable.

The article also examines the results of "marginal" mergers, mergers that would have been blocked had the government and courts been …

“Surplus Humanity" And The Margins Of Legality: Slums, Slumdogs, And Accumulation By Dispossession, Tayyab Mahmud

Faculty Articles

Marooned on the outskirts of the law, more than one billion people worldwide live in urban slums and squatter settlements, mostly in the global South. Law, extra-legality, and illegality commingle in urban slums to produce spaces and subjects at the margins of legal orders and formal economies. Three enduring and inter-related features of capitalism-accumulation by dispossession, a reserve army of labor, and an informal sector of the economy-produce and sustain urban slums. The genesis and persistence of slums and slum-dwellers testify to the iron fist of the state working in concert with the hidden hand of the market in the …

Colonial Cartographies, Postcolonial Borders, And Enduring Failures Of International Law: The Unending Wars Along The Afghanistan-Pakistan Frontier, Tayyab Mahmud

Faculty Articles

Many of today's pervasive and intractable security and nation-building dilemmas issue from the dissonance between the prescribed model of territorially bounded nation-states and the imprisonment of postcolonial polities in territorial straitjackets bequeathed by colonial cartographies. With a focus on the Durand Line, the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan and the epicenter of the prolonged war in the region, this article explores the enduring ramifications of the mutually constitutive role of colonialism and modern law. The global reach of colonial rule reordered subjects and reconfigured space. Fixed territorial demarcations of colonial possessions played a pivotal role in this process. Nineteenth century …

Is It Greek Or Déjà Vu All Over Again?: Neoliberalism And Winners And Losers Of International Debt Crises, Tayyab Mahmud

Faculty Articles

The global financial meltdown and the Great Recession of 2007-2009 have brought into sharp relief the uneven distribution of gain and pain during economic crises. The 2009-2010 debt crisis in Greece resulted in a windfall for financial institutions at the expense of taxpayers, a rollback of welfare systems, and the impoverishment of the working classes. This outcome is consistent with the pattern that has emerged in the international debt crises of the last three decades, including the Latin American crisis during the 1980s and the Asian crisis during the 1990s.

The recurrent international debt crises of the last three decades …

Punctuated Equilibrium: A Model For Administrative Evolution, Mark C. Niles

Faculty Articles

The “public choice” model of the administrative state posits a federal regulatory structure that is dominated by the private entities subject to its policy proscriptions. The formidable advantages in resources and focus enjoyed by the these private entities leave governmental units, like agencies and legislatures, with little realistic chance to resist agency capture and avoid implementing the policy objectives of the parties whom they are charged with regulating.

As theoretically powerful and practically descriptive as this model is, there is one significant question for which it fails to provide a satisfying answer—why, if regulated entities enjoy a strangle-hold on the …

A Prudent Approach To Climate Change, John B. Kirkwood

Faculty Articles

Climate change poses large and difficult issues. The potential stakes are enormous, but there is vexing uncertainty about the likelihood of a catastrophe, our ability to mitigate it, the economic costs of taking action, and the desirability of doing so without the participation of the world’s rapidly developing economies. This article outlines a prudent response to these uncertainties. Given the state of the economy, it does not endorse high taxes or other severe curbs on carbon emissions. But unlike John Kunich’s article in the same volume, it does not suggest it would be appropriate to do nothing. Instead, the article …

Slavery, The Rule Of Law, And The Civil War, George Van Cleve

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

Neither A Model Of Clarity Nor A Model Statute: An Analysis Of The History, Challenges, And Suggested Changes To The “New” Article 120, Hon. Jack Nevin, Joshua R. Lorenz

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

Laws As Tactics, Dean Spade

Faculty Articles

This article will look at how trans scholarship and activism have taken up disciplinary critiques of gender, often influenced by Butler, and suggest that further development of critical trans perspectives focused on sites of regularization is needed, for which Butler's work on governmentality can be useful. To start, it describes some of the key concepts from Butler's work that have been taken up in trans politics and briefly reviews the distinctions Foucault offers between sovereignty, discipline and biopolitics. The article then examines some of the ways that trans politics has critiqued disciplinary norms, looking at resistance to the medicalization of …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

No abstract provided.