Law Commons^™

Judicial Deference To Executive Precedent, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

In 1984, the Supreme Court adopted a new framework for determining when courts should defer to interpretations of statutes by administrative agencies. Previous decisions had looked to multiple contextual factors in answering this question. Chevron U.S., Inc. v. National Resources Defense Council, Inc. appeared to reject this approach and require that federal courts defer to any reasonable interpretation by an agency charged with administration of a statute, provided Congress has not clearly specified a contrary answer. The Court justified this new general rule of deference by positing that Congress has implicitly delegated interpretative authority to all agencies charged with enforcing …

A Reply: Imperfect Bargains, Imperfect Trials, And Innocent Defendants, Robert E. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

To understand what is and is not wrong with plea bargaining, one must understand the relationship of bargains to trials. Unsurprisingly, we disagree with much of what Judge Frank Easterbrook and Professor Stephen Schulhofer say about that relationship. Most of those disagreements need not be rehearsed here; readers attentive enough to wade through their essays and ours will pick up the key points readily enough. But there is one point where the dispute is at once sharp and hidden. It has to do with the fact that both trials and bargains are flawed.

That fact might seem obvious, but the …

Plea-Bargaining As A Social Contract, Robert E. Scott, William J. Stuntz

Faculty Scholarship

Most criminal prosecutions are settled without a trial. The parties to these settlements trade various risks and entitlements: the defendant relinquishes the right to go to trial (along with any chance of acquittal), while the prosecutor gives up the entitlement to seek the highest sentence or pursue the most serious charges possible. The resulting bargains differ predictably from what would have happened had the same cases been taken to trial. Defendants who bargain for a plea serve lower sentences than those who do not. On the other hand, everyone who pleads guilty is, by definition, convicted, while a substantial minority …

Paradigms Lost: The Blurring Of The Criminal And Civil Law Models – And What Can Be Done About It, John C. Coffee Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

Ken Mann's professed goal is to "shrink" the criminal law. To realize this worthy end, he advocates punitive civil sanctions that would largely parallel criminal sanctions, thereby reducing the need to use criminal law in order to achieve punitive purposes. I agree (heartily) with the end he seeks and even more with his general precept that "the criminal law should be reserved for the most damaging wrongs and the most culpable defendants." But I believe that the means he proposes would be counterproductive – and would probably expand, rather than contract, the operative scope of the criminal law as an …

Benign Restraint: The Sec's Regulation Of Execution Systems, David M. Schizer

Faculty Scholarship

To the handful of traders who founded the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in 1792 – and perhaps even to the securities traders of the 1960's – today's securities markets would be virtually unrecognizable. New communications and data processing technologies, the globalization of investment portfolios, and a surge in trading volume have created new needs and possibilities. As a result, revolutionary advances have occurred in the design and performance of execution systems: the technologies (computers, telephones, modems) and formats (auction-based stock exchanges, dealer-based "over-the-counter" markets, computerized single price auctions) that traders use to conduct trades. These advances enable trades on …

Conference On The Federal Sentencing Guidelines, Panel 3: The Allocation Of Discretion Under The Guidelines, Daniel J. Freed, Gerard E. Lynch, Steven M. Salky, Maria Rodriguez Mcbride, Vincent L. Broderick

Faculty Scholarship

The guidelines have shifted the locus of discretion from the judge to the prosecutor. This transfer has drastically changed sentencing because the prosecutor's role is very different from the judge's role.

Before the guidelines, the prosecutor's role in sentencing was minimal. The prosecutor could put a cap on the sentence by accepting a plea to a charge with a low maximum, but there was virtually no instance in which the charge would put a floor under the judge's sentence. The judge, on the other hand, could sentence however he liked. Not only was the judge's decision correct because it was …

International Human Rights Law In Soviet And American Courts, Lori Fisler Damrosch

Faculty Scholarship

To what extent should domestic courts apply international law – specifically the international law of human rights? I would like to examine this question with reference to two very different states: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the United States. For quite distinct reasons, neither of the two has yet fully embraced the idea of direct application in national tribunals of the body of international law that regulates the relationship between human beings and their own governments. As the post-Cold War era unfolds, it is time to ask whether either or both of these erstwhile adversaries might finally be …

Voice, Not Choice, James S. Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

In John Chubb and Terry Moe's book, choice is hot; voice is not. As influential as their book has become in current policy debates, however, its data and reasoning may support policies the reverse of those that the authors and their "New Paradigm" disciples propose. In this review, voice is hot; choice is not.

Rethinking The Theory Of Legal Rights, Jules S. Coleman, Jody S. Kraus

Faculty Scholarship

In the economic approach to law, legal rights are designed, in part, to overcome the conditions under which markets fail. In correcting for market failure, economic analysis endorses two rules for assigning legal rights. The first specifies the allocation of rights under conditions of rational cooperation, full information and zero transaction costs. Provided that exchange is available and that obstacles to exercising it are insignificant, rational cooperators will negotiate around inefficiencies. Under these conditions, legal rights are not assigned in order to establish optimal levels of resource deployment directly; rather, they establish well-defined entitlements or negotiation points which create a …

Takeover Defense Tactics: A Comment On Two Models, Jeffrey N. Gordon, Lewis A. Kornhauser

Faculty Scholarship

One of the most important debates of current corporate law practice and scholarship is about the appropriate role of target management confronted with a takeover bid. The controversy turns on the identification of a criterion for evaluating takeovers and target management defensive tactics. An influential body of opinion contends that maximization of shareholder wealth is the appropriate criterion because, first, traditional notions of fiduciary duty generally require managers to act in the shareholders' interest, and, second, shareholder wealth maximization is seen as the best available proxy for social wealth maximization. On this view, takeovers are desirable because they can increase …

Value Creation By Business Lawyers: Legal Skills And Asset Pricing, Ronald J. Gilson

Faculty Scholarship

What do business lawyers really do? Embarrassingly enough, at a time when lawyers are criticized with increasing frequency as nonproductive actors in the economy, there seems to be no coherent answer. That is not, of course, to say that answers have not been offered; there are a number of familiar responses that we have all heard or, what is worse, that we have all offered at one time or another without really thinking very hard about them. The problem is that, for surprisingly similar reasons, none of them is very helpful.

Antitrust Standing, Antitrust Injury, And The Per Se Standard, Daniel C. Richman

Faculty Scholarship

In 1970, a district court observed: "We must confess at the outset that we find antitrust standing cases more than a little confusing and certainly beyond our powers of reconciliation." The court could hardly have been faulted, for the confusion it noted has been endemic to these cases since the creation of the treble-damages action. Courts have never read section 4 of the Clayton Act literally to allow treble damages to every plaintiff able to attribute an economic loss to an antitrust violation. This unwillingness to recognize every such injury is fully consistent with the essential principle of antitrust law …

Free Speech And Intellectual Values, Lee C. Bollinger

Faculty Scholarship

In the preface to his book, The Negro and the First Amendment, Harry Kalven observed that the idea of free speech was marked by an unusually keen "quest for coherent general theory." Every area of the law, Kalven puzzled, was rife with inconsistency and ambiguity, yet inexplicably there was little tolerance· for anomalies in the field of free speech. As to why this was so, Kalven speculated that "free speech is so close to the heart of democratic organization that if we do not have an appropriate theory for our law here, we feel we really do not understand the …

To Praise The Estate Tax, Not To Bury It, Michael J. Graetz

Faculty Scholarship

For several decades, total revenues raised by estate and gift taxes have roughly equaled those raised by excise taxes on alcohol and tobacco. Yet no law journal has ever asked me to write on alcohol or tobacco excise taxes. The law firms of America do not routinely have divisions devoted to excise tax planning. We do not hear of the suffering of widows and orphans (or even of farmers and small businesses) because of alcohol and tobacco taxes. Philosophers and economists do not routinely debate the merits of such taxes. Perhaps most significantly, increases in such excise taxes do not …

Legality, Bureaucracy, And Class In The Welfare System, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

When lawyers confronted the welfare system in the 1960's, they charged it with oppressive moralism, personal manipulation, and invasion of privacy. They focused attention on the "man-in-the-house" rules that disqualified families on the basis of the mother's sexual conduct and the "midnight raids" in which welfare workers forced their way into recipients' homes searching for evidence of cohabitation.

When I represented welfare recipients from 1979 to 1981, the workers showed little interest in policing their morals or intruding on their private lives. The "man-in-the-house" rule and the practice of unannounced or nighttime visits had been repudiated. Yet the pathologies emphasized …

Commercial Arbitration In The Eighteenth Century: Searching For The Transformation Of American Law, Eben Moglen

Faculty Scholarship

Some recent writing on the history of American law, notably that of Morton Horwitz, has observed a "transformation" in the early years of the nineteenth century as a new legal culture replaced the pre-commercial regime and altered rules of law in favor of the commercially active founders of industrial capitalism. In the course of this transformation, Horwitz argues, merchants and lawyers identified possible grounds for an "alliance," in which the lawyers gained social status and a monopoly in adjudicative institutions, while the commercial classes gained a system of law which subsidized their interests at the expense of other classes in …

Two Modes Of Legal Thought, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

We should begin with a confession of ignorance. We have no jurisprudence of legal scholarship. Scholars expatiate at length on the work of other actors in the legal culture – legislators, judges, prosecutors, and even practicing lawyers. Yet we reflect little about what we are doing when we write about the law. We have a journal about the craft of teaching, but none about the craft of scholarship.

In view of our ignorance, we should pay particular heed to our point of departure. I start with the observation that legal scholarship expresses itself in a variety of verbal forms. Descriptive …

Manifest Criminality, Criminal Intent, And The Metamorphosis Of Lloyd Weinreb, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

My colleague has had a revelation. Professor Lloyd Weinreb's views about larceny have undergone a striking transformation in the last six months. As recently as May 1980, when he completed the preface to the third edition of his criminal law casebook, he held one set of views about The Carrier's Case and The King v. Pear. In the article published in this issue, he advances a different set of views about the two cases he regards as so important. He gives us no hint about how or why he underwent his change of heart. His transformation warrants our attention, …

Enforcing Promises: An Examination Of The Basis Of Contract, Charles J. Goetz, Robert E. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

The obligation to keep promises is a commonly acknowledged moral duty. Yet not all promises – however solemnly vowed – are enforceable at law. Why are some promises legally binding and others not? Orthodox doctrinal categories provide only modest assistance in answering this persistent question. Conventional analysis, for example, has distinguished promises made in exchange for a return promise or performance from nonreciprocal promises. Indeed, common law "bargain theory" is classically simple: bargained-for promises are presumptively enforceable; nonreciprocal promises are presumptively unenforceable. But this disarmingly simple theory has never mirrored reality. Contract law has ventured far beyond such narrow limitations, …

Constitutional Adjucation: The Who And When, Henry Paul Monaghan

Faculty Scholarship

When the newly appointed Justices of the Supreme Court assembled in the Royal Exchange Building in New York for their first session on February 2, 1790, the most farsighted individual could not have foreseen what the future held for this tribunal. Now less than a generation short of its 200th anniversary, the Court is universally acknowledged to be the final and authoritative expositor of the Constitution. Yet after almost two centuries, questions concerning this power of the Court to interpret the Constitution remain. The first set of questions centers on the substantive standards for constitutional adjudication. The second, with which …

Legal Principles And The Limits Of Law, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

Most people tend unreflectively to assume that laws belong to legal systems. "Most educated people," writes H. L. A. Hart, "have the idea that the laws in England form some sort of system, and that in France or the United States or Soviet Russia and, indeed, in almost every part of the world which is thought of as a separate 'country' there are legal systems which are broadly similar in structure in spite of important differences." This includes for most people the assumption that laws differ from non-legal rules and principles. There are, for example, moral rules and principles, social …

Bringing The Vagueness Doctrine On Campus, George A. Bermann, Ballard Jamieson Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

Although students have traditionally paid little attention to university disciplinary codes, recent campus disturbances have given these codes unprecedented significance. Those subjected to disciplinary proceedings have charged, among other things, that the provisions which regulate their behavior are too vague to inform them of what they may and may not do. Arguing that a broadly-worded code of conduct is necessary to govern, university administrators, however, have refused to make their regulations more precise.

Two Kinds Of Legal Rules: A Comparative Study Of Burden-Of-Persuasion Practices In Criminal Cases, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

Good men everywhere praise the presumption of innocence. And be they Frenchmen, Germans, or Americans, they agree on the demand of the presumption in practice. Both here and abroad, the state's invocation of criminal sanctions demands a high degree of proof that the accused has committed the offense charged. To express the requisite standard of proof, common lawyers speak of the prosecutor's duty to prove his case beyond a reasonable doubt. And Continental lawyers invoke the maxim in dubio pro reo – a precept requiring triers of fact to acquit in cases of doubt.

The French speak of the presomption …

Obscenity, 1966: The Marriage Of Obscenity Per Se And Obscenity Per Quod, Henry Paul Monaghan

Faculty Scholarship

In a widely admired article, Harry Kalven argued that the New York Times case embodies the "central meaning" of the First Amendment. On his view, in a free, open society, maximum protection must be accorded to "political" speech. He concluded that the right freely to criticize the government must lie at the center of any adequate theory of the First Amendment.

It is not so easy to make a comparable claim about the relationship between obscenity and the First Amendment. The Supreme Court's conception of obscenity is partially responsible. While the Court in Roth v. United States (1957) explicitly barred …