Law Commons^™

Dispute Resolution In China After Deng Xiaoping: "Mao And Mediation" Revisited, Stanley B. Lubman

Hong Yen Chang Center for Chinese Legal Studies

This Article presents portions of a book tentatively entitled "Bird in a Cage: Legal Reform in China After Mao." The book explores the Western vantage point from which I have viewed institutions for dispute resolution, the imprint on them of the traditional and more recent Maoist past, the disorderly context of rapid economic and social change in which they must operate today, and the larger law reforms of which they are part. Against that background it examines the operation of extrajudicial mediation and the courts. The scope of this Article is more limited.

I have not speculated here about appropriate …

A Government For Our Time? Business Improvement Districts And Urban Governance, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

The emergence and rapid spread of business improvement districts ("BIDs") is one of the most important recent developments in American cities. BIDs have been controversial, with both supporters and proponents viewing the districts as part of a trend toward the privatization of the public sector. By examining the legal and political structures that determine BID formation, functions, finances and governance, this Article determines that BIDs are not private entities but are, instead, a distinctive hybrid of public and private elements. Moreover, although the particular fusion of public and private institutions, values and concerns embodied in the BID is unique, Professor …

Law And The Ideal Citizen, Lee C. Bollinger

Faculty Scholarship

The theme identified for this lecture series is the subject of responsibility. I assume Washington and Lee has selected that topic out of a sense that it has not received sufficient attention, as compared, for example, to the subject of "rights." I select "rights" as the counter-example because we often hear of the two in tandem – "rights and responsibilities." As such, the concept of responsibility connotes a sense of obligation as to what is due from us to others and to the community. It is, in that sense, easier to be in favor of rights than it is of …

Revaluing Restitution: From The Talmud To Postsocialism, Michael A. Heller, Christopher Serkin

Faculty Scholarship

Whatever happened to the study of restitution? Once a core private law subject along with property, torts, and contracts, restitution has receded from American legal scholarship. Few law professors teach the material, fewer still write in the area, and no one even agrees what the field comprises anymore. Hanoch threatens to reverse the tide and make restitution interesting again. The book takes commonplace words such as "value" and "gain" and shows how they embody a society's underlying normative principles. Variations across cultures in the law of unjust enrichment reflect differences in national understandings of sharing, property, and even personhood. As …

The Supreme Court, Sexual Citizenship And The Idea Of Progress, Kendall Thomas

Faculty Scholarship

Is American Progressive Constitutionalism dead ... yet? I propose to seek the beginnings of an answer to this question in the pages of a recent decision by the United States Supreme Court. I do feel obliged to say this, not because I am committed to a court-centered adjudicative conception of American constitutionalism; to the contrary. But rather, because the decision on which I want to focus seems to me to offer a rich resource for critical reflection on the idea of self-government whose connections to Progressive Constitutionalism give us our topic this afternoon.

Randolph W. Thrower Lecture: Your Tax Dollars At Work: Why U.S. Tax Law Needs To Be Changed, Michael J. Graetz

Faculty Scholarship

I focus here on prospects for tax reform. Things are quiet, politically, on the tax reform front. The Republicans in 1999 are talking about an across-theboard tax cut less extensive than Ronald Reagan's tax cut of 1981. On February 1, 1999, President Clinton, in his budget proposals, offered thirty-eight "targeted" tax reduction proposals and seventy-four tax increase proposals. It took the Treasury Department 197 closely typed, single-spaced pages to describe the proposals. We do not appear to be on the verge of major tax simplification.

Optimal Timing And Legal Decisionmaking: The Case Of The Liquidation Decision In Bankruptcy, Douglas G. Baird, Edward R. Morrison

Faculty Scholarship

Until the firm is sold or a plan of reorganization is confirmed, Chapter 11 entrusts a judge with the decision of whether to keep a firm as a going concern or to shut it down. The judge revisits this liquidation decision multiple times. The key is to make the correct decision at the optimal time. This paper models this decision as the exercise of a real option and shows that it depends critically on particular types of information about the firm and its industry. Liquidations take place too soon if we merely compare the liquidation value of the assets with …

Secured Credit And Software Financing, Ronald J. Mann

Faculty Scholarship

Software is a relatively new type of business asset, but already has taken on a central role in all sectors of the economy; when any asset brings such a crucial value to businesses, the desire for lending based on that asset cannot be far behind. Unfortunately, the existing academic literature contains no sustained examination of software-related lending.

Because the software industry is in its infancy, the existing empirical evidence is inadequate to support any understanding of it. Accordingly, I undertook a series of twenty-nine informal interviews with industry participants, including lenders in both the Massachusetts Route 128 corridor and Silicon …

Verification Institutions In Financing Transactions, Ronald J. Mann

Faculty Scholarship

One of the most common problems in commercial transactions is the resolution of information asymmetries, situations in which one party to the transaction knows more about a relevant fact than the other party. The natural response of the disadvantaged party is to attempt to investigate the transaction for itself – to investigate the matter with "due diligence" – but often such an investigation will be expensive and, however diligently undertaken, leave the truth of the matter uncertain. A law-centered approach to the problem would call for the development of warranties and covenants that the party with superior information would give …

The Future As History: The Prospects For Global Convergence In Corporate Governance And Its Implications, John C. Coffee Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

What forces explain corporate structure and shareholder behavior? For decades this question has gone unasked, as both corporate law scholars and practitioners tacitly accepted the answer given in 1932 by Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means that the separation of ownership and control stemming from ownership fragmentation explained and assured shareholder passivity. Over this decade, however, corporate law scholars have recognized that this standard answer begs an essential prior question: if ownership fragmentation explains shareholder passivity, what explains ownership fragmentation? Although the Berle and Means model assumed that large-scale enterprises could raise sufficient capital to conduct their operations only by attracting …

Copyright And Intermediate Users' Rights, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

The impending "Digital Millennium" has amplified the assertion of users' rights in U.S. copyright law. Copyright has been reimagined as a "law of users' rights" whose acolytes caution copyright owners not to stand as piggish impediments to the progress of learning and culture in the Digital Age. Proponents advance a variety of arguments in support of a user rights construct of copyright law, from the historical to the philosophical to the pragmatic. I propose to address some of these. But first it is important to specify what I mean by "users' rights" in U.S. copyright law today.

User rights in …

Copyright Legislation For The "Digital Millennium", Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

In October 1998, Congress passed two major copyright bills, the "Digital Millennium Copyright Act" [DMCA], and the "Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act." Moreover, the Senate ratified U.S. accession to the WIPO Copyright and Performances and Phonograms Treaties. The DMCA implements the obligations set forth in articles 11 and 12 of the WIPO Copyright Treaty [WCT] (and articles 18 and 19 of the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty [WPPTI) to protect technological measures against circumvention, and to protect "copyright management information" against removal or alteration that facilitates infringement. The DMCA also includes a chapter on the liability of online service …

Dispute Settlement Procedures And Mechanisms, Petros C. Mavroidis

Faculty Scholarship

The role that the World Trade Organization (WTO) plays in the settlement of United States-Japan trade disputes is, but should not be, U.S. and Japan-specific. The WTO is a multilateral forum and this aspect of its character must be maintained for the WTO to acquire credibility in the settlement of trade disputes. Trade disputes, if at all, should be exceptional not because of the parties involved, but because of their subject matter. Nothing indicates that the U.S.-Japan trade disputes are subject matter-specific. In fact, the opposite is true: there is ample evidence demonstrating that disputes over the same issues among …

Who's In Control? The Courts, The Legislature And The Public In Colorado's School Finance Debate, Christina D. Ponsa-Kraus, Drew Dunphy

Faculty Scholarship

Colorado's school finance story touches on a number of themes familiar to students of school finance litigation: a struggle between those supporting greater resources and those favoring lower taxes; a shift in focus from equity to adequacy; and the difficulty of fostering an informed, widespread dialogue on school finance given the complexity of the funding system. At the same time, certain factors particular to Colorado – a seeming conflict in the state constitution, a number of strict constitutional amendments, and an unusually strong tradition of local control – have dramatically shaped the state's reform process. With a pending lawsuit seeking …

Diverse Perspectives And The Religion Clauses: An Examination Of Justifications And Qualifying Beliefs, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

Some of the most complex questions about constitutional provisions governing religion concern the status of various kinds of convictions. Put most simply, how do undoubted religious convictions compare with convictions that appear to have little to do with religion, with convictions that derive from negative answers to religious questions, and with convictions that seem to be on some borderline of what may count as religion? In this Essay, I focus on two kinds of questions about this range of convictions.

Part I of the Essay explores justifications underlying the religion clauses of federal and state constitutions. It asks how explicitly …

Impeachment As A Technique Of Parliamentary Control Over Foreign Affairs In A Presidential System, Lori Fisler Damrosch

Faculty Scholarship

The central inquiry for this essay is the proper use of the impeachment tool in foreign relations contexts, including war powers. In Part I, the essay begins with a brief review of British impeachment practice (limited to war and foreign policy concerns) known to the Founding generation and reflected in certain fundamental texts of the Founding; this treatment does not betoken any originalist orientation on my part (au contraire) but will set the context for later developments. Part II then turns to the travails of President Andrew Johnson as seen through the eyes of Walter Bagehot, the author of …

Lessons From Fiascos In Russian Corporate Governance, Merritt B. Fox, Michael Heller

Faculty Scholarship

Bad corporate governance is often invoked to explain poor enterprise performance, but the catch phrase is never precisely defined. Neither its consequences for the real economy, nor its causes in particular countries has been adequately explained. This paper uses Russian enterprise examples to address these open questions in corporate governance theory. We define corporate governance by looking to the economic functions of the firm rather than to any particular set of national corporate laws. Firms exhibit good corporate governance when their managers maximize residuals and, in the case of investor-owned firms, make pro rata distributions to shareholders.

Using this definition, …

Rethinking The Uniformity Norm In Commercial Law: Optimal Institutional Design For Regulating Incomplete Contracts, Robert E. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

This paper begins with the claim that the state's primary role in uniformly enforcing commercial contracts is to regulate incomplete contracts efficiently. This role requires the state to perform two interdependent but conceptually distinct functions. The first is an interpretive function – the task of correctly (and uniformly) interpreting the meaning of the contract terms chosen by parties to allocate contract risk. The second is a standardizing function – the task of creating broadly suitable default rules or assigning standard meanings to widely used contract terms. Correct interpretation argues for a "textualist" or plain meaning interpretation of the express terms …

An Economic Analysis Of The Guaranty Contract, Avery W. Katz

Faculty Scholarship

Guaranty arrangements, in which one person stands as surety for a second person's obligation to a third, are ubiquitous in commercial transactions and in commercial law. In recent years, however, scholarly attention to the topic has been scant; and no one has systematically analyzed this body of law and practice from an economic policy perspective. Accordingly, this Article attempts to outline the basic economic logic underlying the guaranty relationship, and applies the results to a variety of specific issues in government policy and private planning. It poses and answers three main questions: First, why would a creditor prefer to make …

The Collapse Of The Harm Principle, Bernard Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

In November 1998, fourteen neighborhoods in Chicago voted to shut down their liquor stores, bars, and lounges, and four more neighborhoods voted to close down specific taverns. Three additional liquor establishments were voted shut in February 1999. Along with the fourteen other neighborhoods that passed dry votes in 1996 and those that went dry right after Prohibition, to date more than 15% of Chicago has voted itself dry. The closures affect alcohol-related businesses, like liquor stores and bars, but do not restrict drinking in the privacy of one's hoifie. The legal mechanism is an arcane 1933 "vote yourself dry" law, …

Virtuous Lying: A Critique Of Quasi-Categorical Moralism, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

Popular and professional moralists have a tendency to over-condemn lying. This Article is a critique of that tendency and the more general outlook it exemplifies, which I call Quasi-Categorical Moralism. I begin with an illustration from my own experience of morally appropriate lying that is condemned by the legal profession's ethics norms. I proceed to a critical examination of the arguments against lying in what is perhaps the best known contemporary work on professional ethics – Sissela Bok's Lying. I then explore the more sympathetic treatment of lying in a broad range of literary and philosophical works typically ignored …

The Past, Present And Future Of Title Vi Of The Civil Rights Act As A Tool Of Environmental Justice, Michael B. Gerrard, Nicholas Johnson, Peggy Shepard, Melva J. Hayden, Sheila Foster, Elizabeth Georges

Faculty Scholarship

Mr. Michael Gerrard: I am going to try to do something a little unconventional. After hearing some remarks from Professor Johnson, I will try to start a dialogue. I have been requested to ask very tough questions of our panelists, so I will do that in the hope of drawing all of you in the audience into the dialogue. First, we will hear some remarks from Professor Nicholas Johnson of Fordham University School of Law.

Why Start-Ups?, Joseph Bankman, Ronald J. Gilson

Faculty Scholarship

The prototypical start-up involves an employee leaving her job with an idea and selling a portion of that idea to a venture capitalist. In many respects, however, the idea should be worth more to the former employer. The former employer can be expected to have better information concerning the employee-entrepreneur and the technology, have opportunities to capture economies of scale and scope not available to a venture capital-backed start-up, and will receive more favorable tax treatment than the start-up should the innovation fail. In connection with an auction of the idea, the former employer should have both a more accurate …

The Place Of Victims In The Theory Of Retribution, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

Remarkably, the theory of criminal law has developed without paying much attention to the place of victims in the analysis of responsibility or in the rationale for punishment. You can read a first-rate book like Michael Moore's recent Placing Blame and not find a single reference to the relevance of victims in imposing liability and punishment. In the last several decades we have witnessed notable strides toward attending to the rights and interests of crime victims, but these concerns have yet to intrude upon the discussion of the central issues of wrongdoing, blame, and punishment.

Admittedly, victims and their sentiments …

Sanctions Against Perpetrators Of Terrorism, Lori Fisler Damrosch

Faculty Scholarship

Since the title for this panel is "Presidential Uses of Force and Other Sanction Strategies," I will begin with "other sanction strategies" – that is, other than use of force. I would rather not be cast in the role of the dove on the panel to comment on illegitimacy of uses of force (presidential or otherwise), because I do not want to rule out or necessarily oppose presidential uses of force for counter-terrorism purposes in all circumstances. Indeed, I find myself in considerable agreement with Professor Reisman's lecture. Although I have disagreed with some of his writings and positions on …

Crime And Work, Jeffrey Fagan, Richard B. Freeman

Faculty Scholarship

Crime and legal work are not mutually exclusive choices but represent a continuum of legal and illegal income-generating activities. The links between crime and legal work involve trade-offs among crime returns, punishment costs, legal work opportunity costs, and tastes and preferences regarding both types of work. Rising crime rates in the 1980s in the face of rising incarceration rates suggest that the threat of punishment is not the dominant cost of crime. Crime rates are inversely related to expected legal wages, particularly among young males with limited job skills or prospects. Recent ethnographic research shows that involvement in illegal work …

Japan's Experience With Deposit Insurance And Failing Banks: Implications For Financial Regulatory Design?, Curtis J. Milhaupt

Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines three decades of Japanese experience with deposit insurance andfailing banks, and analyzes the implications of that experience for bank safety net reform in other countries. To date, the literature and policy debate on deposit insurance have been heavily colored by U.S. banking history and have focused almost exclusively on explicit deposit protection schemes. Analysis of Japan's safety net experience suggests that (a) deposit insurance, for all its flaws, is superior to the real-world alternative-implicit government protection of depositors and discretionary regulatory intervention in bank distress, (b) a well-designed explicit deposit insurance system that includes a credible bank …

Siegecraft And Surrender: The Law And Strategy Of Cities And Targets, Matthew C. Waxman

Faculty Scholarship

The razing of Jericho; the sack of Magdeburg; the siege of Leningrad; the fire-bombing of Dresden. Ever since civilizations began organizing permanent economic settlements, cities and towns have occupied a central role in warfare and in our images of war." On almost every page of historical writings," remarked Grotius, "you may find accounts of the destruction of whole cities, or the leveling of walls to the ground, the devastation of fields, and conflagrations." A driving force behind the evolution and development of cities has been defense and security. As a result, how-ever, cities have become a primary target or object …

In Defense Of The Incorporation Strategy, Jody S. Kraus, Steven D. Walt

Faculty Scholarship

Contract law must provide rules for interpreting the meaning of express terms and default rules for filling contractual gaps. Article 2 of the Uniform Commercial Code provides the same response to both demands: It incorporates the norms of commercial practice. This "incorporation strategy" has recently come under attack. Although the incorporation strategy for gap-filling seems to have survived criticism, the incorporation strategy for interpretation remains heavily criticized. Critics charge that the expected rate of interpretive error under an incorporationist interpretive regime is so excessive that almost any plain meaning regime would be preferable.

The attack on the incorporation strategy for …

The Boundaries Of Private Property, Michael A. Heller

Faculty Scholarship

If your house and fields are worth more separately, divide them; if you want to leave a ring to your child now and grandchild later, split the ownership in a trust. The American law of property encourages owners to subdivide resources freely. Hidden within the law, however, is a boundary principle that limits the right to subdivide private property into wasteful fragments. While people often create wealth when they break up and recombine property in novel ways, owners may make mistakes, or their self-interest may clash with social welfare. Property law responds with diverse doctrines that prevent and abolish excessive …