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Articles 1 - 9 of 9

Full-Text Articles in Law

The Structural Exceptionalism Of Bankruptcy Administration, Rafael I. Pardo, Kathryn A. Watts Jan 2012

The Structural Exceptionalism Of Bankruptcy Administration, Rafael I. Pardo, Kathryn A. Watts

Scholarship@WashULaw

The current system of administration of the Bankruptcy Code is highly anomalous. It stands as one of the few major federal civil statutory regimes administered almost exclusively through adjudication in the courts, not through a federal regulatory agency. This means that rather than fitting bankruptcy into a regulatory model, Congress has chosen to give the courts primary interpretive authority in the field of bankruptcy, delegating to courts the power to engage in residual policymaking. Although scholars have noted some narrow aspects of the structural exceptionalism of bankruptcy administration, Congress’s decision to locate responsibility for bankruptcy policymaking almost exclusively with the …


Made In The U.S.A.: Corporate Responsibility And Collective Identity In The American Automotive Industry, Benjamin Levin Jan 2012

Made In The U.S.A.: Corporate Responsibility And Collective Identity In The American Automotive Industry, Benjamin Levin

Scholarship@WashULaw

This Article seeks to challenge the corporate-constructed image of American business and American industry. By focusing on the automotive industry and particularly on the tenuous relationship between the rhetoric of automotive industry advertising and the realities of doctrinal corporate law, I hope to examine the ways that we as social actors, legal actors, and (perhaps above all) consumers understand what it means for a corporation or a corporation’s product to be American. In a global economy where labor, profits, and environmental effects are spread across national borders, what does it mean for a corporation to present the impression of national …


Speaking Truth To Firepower: How The First Amendment Destabilizes The Second, Gregory P. Magarian Jan 2012

Speaking Truth To Firepower: How The First Amendment Destabilizes The Second, Gregory P. Magarian

Scholarship@WashULaw

When the Supreme Court in District of Columbia v. Heller declared that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms, it set atop the federal judicial agenda the critical task of elaborating the new right’s scope, limits, and content. Following Heller, commentators routinely draw upon the First Amendment’s protections for expressive freedom to support their proposals for Second Amendment doctrine. In this article, Professor Magarian advocates a very different role for the First Amendment in explicating the Second, and he contends that our best understanding of First Amendment theory and doctrine severely diminishes the Second Amendment’s …


Does Ideology Matter In Bankruptcy? Voting Behavior On The Courts Of Appeals, Rafael I. Pardo, Jonathan Remy Nash Jan 2012

Does Ideology Matter In Bankruptcy? Voting Behavior On The Courts Of Appeals, Rafael I. Pardo, Jonathan Remy Nash

Scholarship@WashULaw

This Article empirically examines the question of whether courts of appeals judges cast ideological votes in the context of bankruptcy. The empirical study is unique insofar as it is the first to specifically examine the voting behavior of circuit court judges in bankruptcy cases. More importantly, it focuses on a particular type of dispute that arises in bankruptcy - debt-dischargeability determinations. The study implements this focused approach in order to reduce heterogeneity in result. We find, contrary to our hypotheses, no evidence that circuit court judges engage in ideological voting in bankruptcy cases. We do find, however, non-ideological factors - …


Electronic Privacy And Employee Speech, Pauline Kim Jan 2012

Electronic Privacy And Employee Speech, Pauline Kim

Scholarship@WashULaw

The boundary between work and private life is blurring as a result of changes in the organization of work and advances in technology. Current privacy law is ill-equipped to address these changes and as a result, employees’ privacy in their electronic communications is only weakly protected from employer scrutiny. At the same time, the law increasingly protects certain socially valued forms of employee speech. In particular, collective speech, speech that enforces workplace regulations and speech that deters or reports employer wrong-doing are explicitly protected by law from employer reprisals. These two developments — weak protection of employee privacy and increased …


Entering Liberty's Refuge (Some Assembly Required) Panel Discussion On Engaging Liberty's Refuge: Introduction, Gregory P. Magarian Jan 2012

Entering Liberty's Refuge (Some Assembly Required) Panel Discussion On Engaging Liberty's Refuge: Introduction, Gregory P. Magarian

Scholarship@WashULaw

This brief discussion of a book I greatly admire, by an author I am fortunate to know as a colleague and a friend, cannot hope to capture all of the book’s important and interesting contributions. I will simply describe three of the book’s primary facets. Liberty’s Refuge is, first, a work of intellectual history: Inazu seeks to recover from history’s tall grass a legally respected Anglo-American tradition of assembly. The book is also a work of constitutional interpretation and legal analysis: Inazu aims to revitalize the right of assembly for our time, critiquing the legal decisions that he sees as …


Conflicted Gatekeepers: The Volcker Rule And Goldman Sachs, Andrew F. Tuch Jan 2012

Conflicted Gatekeepers: The Volcker Rule And Goldman Sachs, Andrew F. Tuch

Scholarship@WashULaw

In many areas of regulation, rules require one person to act with loyalty to another person, or at least constrain one person’s pursuit of self-interest by restricting the extent to which that person may act in conflict with the interests of another person. These rules are typically justified on the basis of reducing (economic) agency costs. However, recently-adopted provisions in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which include the so-called Volcker Rule, impose such conflict of interest rules on underwriters selling securities to investors, including sophisticated investors - a context in which agency costs do not arise. …


Modifying Rand Commitments To Better Price Patents In The Standards Setting Context, Kyle Rozema Jan 2012

Modifying Rand Commitments To Better Price Patents In The Standards Setting Context, Kyle Rozema

Scholarship@WashULaw

This Article addresses a single problem: how can we allow engineers and scientists from different institutions to collaborate to set the best technical standards possible, not considering intellectual property (“IP”) rights, and then establish the royalty rates for each patent owner after the standard is set? The current system attempting to solve this problem requires patent owner participants to sign a Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory (“RAND”) commitment. These RAND commitments require the participants to agree an ante, i.e., before the standard is actually set, to license whatever patent rights they may ultimately have in the standard on terms that are reasonable …


Blue-Collar Crime: Conspiracy, Organized Labor, And The Anti-Union Civil Rico Claim, Benjamin Levin Jan 2012

Blue-Collar Crime: Conspiracy, Organized Labor, And The Anti-Union Civil Rico Claim, Benjamin Levin

Scholarship@WashULaw

This Article provides an historically-rooted analysis of a recent spate of civil RICO complaints arising from labor union organizing campaigns. The Article historicizes contemporary civil RICO suits against labor unions by analogizing to nineteenth century conspiracy prosecutions of unions. In tracing this history of organized labor’s social standing, the Article addresses the cultural framing of the union and its place in political and cultural discourse over the past century. The civil RICO complaints have received limited scholarly attention mainly focusing on issues of federal preemption; this Article argues for a broad reading of the cases as a way to understand …