Law Commons^™

The Federal Election Campaign Act And The 1980 Election, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

During the 1970's Congress and the Supreme Court paid the most sustained attention in American history to the financing of federal election campaigns. Congress passed a succession of measures, known collectively as the Federal Election Campaign Act ("FECA" or the "Act"), closely regulating the activities of candidates, parties, private organizations, and individuals in raising and spending campaign money.

Prior to FECA, election finance was largely an extension of the private marketplace. Campaigns were funded through private, voluntary contributions to parties and candidates, with donors contributing to the extent of their interest and wealth, and private economic inequalities were replicated in …

Regulating The Market For Corporate Control: A Critical Assessment Of The Tender Offer's Role In Corporate Governance, John C. Coffee Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

Better answers often await better questions. In the wake of a recent series of provocative articles dealing with contested tender offers, several questions have been vigorously debated:

(1) Should management of the target company be allowed to resist a hostile tender offer in order to remain an independent company? Which, if any, of the various "shark repellent" measures by which a potential target can make itself unattractive to a bidder are justified?;

(2) If defensive tactics were generally forbidden, should the target company's management still be permitted to encourage competing bids thereby creating an auction?; and

(3) Do hostile takeovers …

Albert J. Rosenthal In Grateful Appreciation, Michael I. Sovern

Faculty Scholarship

What a joy it is to work with Al Rosenthal! And how fortunate we are that our remarkable colleague will continue to grace the faculty to which he is devoted.

It is customary upon assuming a deanship to say nice things about your predecessor, and Al Rosenthal was no exception five years ago. But I mean far more than to return a compliment when I note how splendidly my successor as Dean, with a gently guiding hand, has enhanced the intellectual life of our law school, strengthening both faculty and student body and augmenting the support for their work. He …

The Place Of Agencies In Government: Separation Of Powers And The Fourth Branch, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

For the past few years the Supreme Court has been struggling with issues of government structure so fundamental that they might have been thought textbook simple, yet with results that seem to imperil the everyday exercise of law-administration. Under what circumstances can Congress assign the adjudication of contested issues in the first instance to tribunals that are not article III courts? The past century has witnessed the profuse growth of legislation assigning to special adjudicative tribunals – administrative agencies and other article I courts – the power to hold trial-type hearings that might otherwise have been placed in the article …

Third Party Standing, Henry Paul Monaghan

Faculty Scholarship

Traditional constitutional theory posits a narrow conception of the issues that a litigant properly may assert. A litigant may invoke only his own constitutional rights or immunities; he may challenge a statute only in the terms in which it is applied to him; and, in the application process, courts have broad power to construe the relevant statutory language so as to avoid constitutional difficulties. The Yazoo case is perhaps the best known example of judicial adherence to these canons. There, a railroad claimed that a statute mandating speedy settlement of "all claims for lost or damaged freight" contravened the fourteenth …

Constitutional Law As Moral Philosophy, Gerard E. Lynch

Faculty Scholarship

The seemingly inexhaustible debate over the proper role of the Supreme Court in constitutional adjudication concerns an issue of enormous practical importance: whether the Court has or should have the power to overturn the decision of a democratically elected legislature to, say, prohibit abortions, affects not only the allocation of significant political power, but also the moral lives and indeed the very bodies of millions of citizens. For this reason, many contributions to that debate, from academics as well as from practicing politicians, have burned with the passion of political commitment, seeking to influence events directly by persuading judges (or …

The Perplexing Borders Of Justification And Excuse, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

This Article's central theme is that Anglo-American criminal law should not attempt to distinguish between justification and excuse in a fully systematic way. I explore three possible bases for drawing the distinction: (1) a distinction between warranted and wrongful conduct; (2) a division between general and individual claims; and (3) a distinction based on the rights of others. I show why none of these bases yields a clear and simple criterion for categorization. The difficulty rests largely on the conceptual fuzziness of the terms ''justification" and "excuse" in ordinary usage and on the uneasy quality of many of the moral …