Law Commons^™

Venture Capital And The Structure Of Capital Markets: Banks Versus Stock Markets, Ronald J. Gilson, Bernard S. Black

Faculty Scholarship

The United States has many banks that are small relative to large corporations and play a limited role in corporate governance, and a well developed stock market with an associated market for corporate control. In contrast, Japanese and German banks are fewer in number but larger in relative size and are said to play a central governance role. Neither country has an active market for corporate control. We extend the debate on the relative efficiency of bank- and stock market-centered capital markets by developing a further systematic difference between the two systems: the greater vitality of venture capital in stock …

Confusing Punishment With Custodial Care: The Troublesome Legacy Of Estelle V. Gamble, Philip Genty

Faculty Scholarship

For the better part of two centuries, imprisonment has been the primary means of punishment for non-capital offenses in the United States. A person, once convicted, is turned over to an institution that will regulate every minute of her or his life. Yet, despite the central role that prisons have long played in our society, the use of the Constitution to regulate conditions of confinement in prisons is a relatively recent phenomenon. Certainly, part of this has to do with the fact that constitutional litigation did not begin in earnest until the "rediscovery" of the Civil War era civil rights …

Religious Liberty And Democratic Politics, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

Some time ago, President Clinton talked to a gathering of religious journalists about abortion. He said that he did not believe that the biblical passages often cited by those who are "pro-life" indicate· clearly that abortion is wrong and should be prohibited. The reasons many people have for wanting abortion to be prohibited, or for allowing abortion, relate to their religious convictions. These people, for the most part, regard it as perfectly appropriate that religious perspectives help determine public policy on abortion in the United States. Others object. They say that the religious views of some people should not be …

Domination In The Theory Of Justification And Excuse, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

The major currents driving legal theory have largely bypassed the field of criminal law. Neither the economists nor the advocates of critical legal studies ("crits") have had much to say about the theory of criminal responsibility or the proper mode of trying suspects. The economists have fallen flat in applying their rationalist models to the problems of punishing wrongdoers. The "crits" have had little to add-beyond Mark Kelman's one original and provocative article.

Of all the schools on the march in the law schools today, the feminists have had the most to say about the failings of the criminal law. …

The Legal Environment Of International Finance: Thinking About Fundamentals, Merritt B. Fox

Faculty Scholarship

The huge increase in cross border capital flows over the last two decades has profoundly important implications for society in general and the law in particular. These flows give rise to a set of legal problems that are sufficiently distinct and coherent to constitute a legal field of their own. Confirming this observation is the development of a specialized legal practice whose members spend the bulk of their time working on such transactions. Nevertheless, a law school course in international finance is a rarity, even at the schools that train most of the students who ultimately join this practice.

The …

Barbara Jordan: Constitutional Conscience, Philip C. Bobbitt

Faculty Scholarship

Many of us learned for the first time in the press accounts following Barbara Jordan's death that she carried with her a small pocket copy of the U.S. Constitution. From some apparently early point, and then throughout her life, this small paper pamphlet was always with her. What was unreported was the fact that within this copy of the Constitution, there was folded a slip of paper on which was written a quotation from Albert Einstein. I do not believe this quotation is written in Barbara Jordan's hand; but it has clearly lain within her copy of the Constitution for …

The Legal Structure Of The Chinese Socialist Market Enterprise, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

China's phenomenal economic growth since 1978 has been accompanied by a cascade of institutional innovation and experimentation. In at least this one sense a hundred flowers are blooming in the People's Republic. The range of institutional forms and their defiance of the conventions of economic organization in both capitalist and socialist societies are impressive.

The Chinese leadership calls the new order by the unfamiliar (and to some, oxymoronic) term "socialist market" economy. Its "market" dimensions include deregulation of most prices, decentralization of decision-making to the household in agriculture and to the enterprise in industry, incentive schemes for peasants, managers, and …

John Milton's Areopagitica And The Modern First Amendment, Vincent A. Blasi

Faculty Scholarship

The traditional liberal argument for free speech is now under fire from several directions. Critics from the left, the center, and the right find simplistic the claim that unregulated expression promotes the search for truth, the protection of self-government, the autonomy of individuals, and the control of concentrated power. Even if free speech does serve these values to a considerable degree, there are costs associated with liberty, costs the critics say are not sufficiently recognized in the standard liberal accounts.

As a general matter, but especially regarding the freedom of speech, liberalism is seen as too doctrinaire, too optimistic about …

Local Government And The New York State Constitution, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

On November 4, 1997, the question "Shall there be a convention to revise the [state] constitution and amend the same?" will be submitted to the New York state electorate pursuant to the provision in the state constitution requiring that every twenty years the voters be given the opportunity to call for a constitutional convention. A longstanding constitutional concern in New York is local government and the relations between local governments and the State. With an eye to the upcoming vote on whether to hold a constitutional convention, this paper examines the place of local government and state-local relations in the …

Is There A General Trend In Constitutional Democracies Toward Parliamentary Control Over War-And-Peace Decisions?, Lori Fisler Damrosch

Faculty Scholarship

My hypothesis is that there is a general trend toward subordinating war powers to constitutional control, and that this trend includes a subtrend toward greater parliamentary control over the decision to introduce troops into situations of actual or potential hostilities. UN peace operations present one variant of a recurring problem for constitutional democracies, as do collective security and collective enforcement operations under the auspices of the United Nations or a regional body such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

Bork V. Burke, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

I would like to make the case for a conservative alternative to originalism. Much of the discussion that has taken place over the last two days has proceeded on the assumption that there are two choices. One is Robert Bork's originalism, justified by various values near and dear to conservative hearts, such as the rule of law, continuity with the past, the principle of democratic accountability, and so forth. The other is to flee into the hands of the so-called nonoriginalists, and embrace, to quote Judge Easterbrook quoting Justice Brennan, the judge's "personal confrontation with the well-springs of our society." …

Should Lawyers Obey The Law?, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

At the same time that it denies authority to nonlegal norms, the dominant view of legal ethics (the "Dominant View") insists on deference to legal ones. "Zealous advocacy" stops at the "bounds of the law."

By and large, critics of the Dominant View have not challenged this categorical duty of obedience to law. They typically want to add further public-regarding duties, but they are as insistent on this one as the Dominant View.

Now the idea that lawyers should obey the law seems so obvious that it is rarely examined within the profession. In fact, however, once you start to …

The Future Of Affirmative Action: Reclaiming The Innovative Deal, Susan Sturm, Lani Guinier

Faculty Scholarship

We are witnessing a broad-based assault on affirmative action – in the courts, the legislatures, and the media. Opponents have defined affirmative action as a program of racial preferences that threatens fundamental American values of fairness, equality, and democratic opportunity. Opponents successfully depict racial preferences as extraordinary, special, and deviant – a departure from prevailing modes of selection. They also proceed on the assumption that, except for racial or gender preferences, the process of selection for employment or educational opportunity is fair, meritocratic, and functional. Thus, they have positioned affirmative action as unnecessary, unfair, and even un- American.

Those of …

Separating From Children, Carol Sanger

Faculty Scholarship

On September 1, 1939, in anticipation of the imminent German bombing of British cities, 150,000 children were assembled at the railway stations of London and sent throughout the day to "'destinations unknown'" in the English countryside. Mothers and children under five were evacuated together but school-age children were shipped out to rural billets in school groups, accompanied only by their teachers and civil defense volunteers. Forty years later, an observer remembered the day vividly:

[T]he mothers [were] trying to hold back their tears as they marched these little boys and girls in their gas masks into the centre …. The …

From Expertise To Politics: The Transformation Of American Rulemaking, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

In this speech to be given on November 15, 1996, as the American contribution to the week-long conference on administrative law sponsored by the Fundaci6n Estudios de Derecho Administrativo in Caracas, Venezuela, Professor Peter L. Strauss addresses the history and developing political character of rulemaking in federal law over the fifty years since enactment of the Administrative Procedure Act. As a framework, Professor Strauss sets forth a hierarchy of institutional rulemaking, from constitution through informal advising. He then develops his discussion of rulemaking by tracing the federal process of rulemaking through time, beginning with the enactment of the Administrative Procedure …

Public Finance In The American Federal System: Basic Patterns And Current Issues, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

Public finance issues with significant consequences for American federalism have been at the top of the political agenda for the last several years. Indeed, much of the current debate about American federalism has been explicitly about questions of public finance: Which level of government should pay for which programs? What is to be the relationship between financial responsibility and policy-making authority? Should there be some overall limitation on government outlays and receipts?

Thus, one of the first actions of the 104th Congress was passage of a measure, swiftly signed into law by the President, to curb the ability of the …

Transfers Of Control And The Quest For Efficiency: Can Delaware Law Encourage Efficient Transactions While Chilling Inefficient Ones?, John C. Coffee Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

At first glance, few corporate law principles seem to be better established than the widely prevailing rule that a controlling shareholder may receive a control premium for its shares. From a comparative law perspective, however, this consensus may seem surprising, because the United States stands virtually alone in failing to accord minority shareholders any presumptive right to share in a control premium. Yet, from an economic perspective, the permissive U.S. rule is not surprising because economists generally agree that economic efficiency is promoted by privately negotiated control transfers at premiums not offered to minority shareholders.

The puzzling fact that this …

Religious Expression In The Public Square – The Building Blocks For An Intermediate Position, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

The problem of religious expression in the public square is not primarily legal in a narrow sense. We are not talking about whether people are allowed to voice certain kinds of opinions or to vote on certain kinds of grounds. The problem is about how citizens and officials in liberal democracies should act. My own position on this problem is an intermediate one, in a sense I shall shortly explain. Its plausibility depends on some sense of the strengths and weaknesses of positions at each end of the spectrum. I shall begin with a thumbnail sketch of these.

Walter Gellhorn, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

Walter Gellhorn had been a primary figure in administrative law and at Columbia for thirty-five years when I arrived here twenty-five years ago, hoping to establish a scholarly career. Yet it is impossible to recall any expectations I might have had about my relationship with him at the time. He was the unseen father of a camp and college friend whose warmth and wit I had cherished, more than he was a dominant member of Columbia's remarkable faculty. He quickly became my mentor and guide. I seem to have spent all the time since that day learning at his feet …

Acknowledgments, George A. Bermann

Faculty Scholarship

On April 11-12, 1996, members of the law faculties at Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität and Columbia University met in New York for the Second Frankfurt-Columbia Symposium on Comparative Law, once again dealing with issues of regulatory federalism and harmonization of laws in comparative perspective. The first symposium took place in Frankfurt a year earlier, and it was our great pleasure to host our German colleagues and return in some small measure the hospitality that they had shown us the previous year. I would particularly like to thank my good friend and colleague Prof. Dr. Ingolf Pernice (now of the law faculty …

The Theory Of Preferential Trade Agreements: Historical Evolution And Current Trends, Jagdish N. Bhagwati, Arvind Panagariya

Faculty Scholarship

The theory of preferential trade agreements (Pf A's), or what might be described in policy terms as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) Article XXIV sanctioned freetrade areas (FTA's) and Customs Unions (CU's), has undergone two phases of evolution, in two very different modes, largely reflecting the contrasting policy concerns of the time. In this paper, we trace this evolution, offering both a historical context and an intellectual coherence to diverse analytical approaches.

Preferential Trade Agreements: The Wrong Road, Jagdish N. Bhagwati

Faculty Scholarship

The nature of FTAs is to offer free trade only to members, not to non-members. Thus, FTAs are two-faced: they ensure free trade for members and (relative) protection against non-members. First-year students of international economics would be asked to shift to a different field if they could not grasp this elementary and elemental distinction, and yet today's politicians imagine themselves to be statesmen endorsing free trade when they embrace these inherently discriminatory PTAs.

As PTAs proliferate, the main problem that arises is the accompanying proliferation of discrimination in market access and a whole maze of trade duties and barriers that …

La Protection Aux Etats-Unis Des Oeuvres D'Art, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

French Abstract
Les Etats-Unis sont un marche important d'oeuvres d'art, non seulement pour la vente des tableaux, mais aussi pour !'exploitation de reproductions et d'adaptations des images. Par exemple, en dehors des reproductions traditionnelles telles que celles contenues dans des catalogues et livres d'art et des reproductions sous forme de cartes postales et affiches, une oeuvre d'art originairement corn;ue comme une expression des beaux arts peut s'exploiter telle par exemple une sortie de bain, du papier peint, voire un decor de poubelle. Dans quelle mesure un artiste peut-il etre remunere ou meme s'opposer a J'exploitation commerciale de son oeuvre aux …

Risk Assessment Perspectives, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

I have a slightly different subtitle for our session today, which I hope our panelists may consider in addressing the many challenges before them: Cost-Benefit Analysis and Risk Assessment under Diminished Resources. Allan Morrison introduced the resource problem at the end of yesterday's session. It is an important element of the problems we face.

I think another element of those problems is finding a reasoned way of addressing these issues. The contrast between reasoned decisionmaking and political football was also nicely in evidence yesterday, perhaps especially strongly for those of us who have been responsible for putting together these presentations. …

Comparative Risk Assessment In New York, Michael B. Gerrard, Deborah Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

Comparative risk assessment (CRA) is the examination of the relative risks posed by different dangers, with a view to deciding which dangers deserve the most governmental attention. CRA frequently tries to reduce different problems to a common metric, usually the statistical lives saved by a program, so that apples can be weighed against oranges. This article will discuss and assess the growing use of CRA in New York State.

There are two principal arguments for the use of CRA in the environmental context. The first is that we do not have unlimited resources; we cannot move against all problems simultaneously. …

Introduction: The Future Of Chinese Law, Stanley B. Lubman

Hong Yen Chang Center for Chinese Legal Studies

The interaction between the millennial dominant orientations of Chinese culture and the entire impact of modernization and of Marxism-Leninism is a story that is unfolding before our eyes, and we have no neat formula for predicting its outcome.

The World Trade Organization's Agreement On Government Procurement: Expanding Disciplines, Declining Membership?, Bernard Hoekman, Petros C. Mavroidis

Faculty Scholarship

The Agreement on Government Procurement (GPA) – originally negotiated during the Tokyo Round – was renegotiated for the second time during the Uruguay Round. It is one of the WTO's so-called Plurilateral Agreements, in that its disciplines apply only to those WTO Members that have signed it. In contrast to most of the other Tokyo Round codes – e.g., the agreements on technical barriers to trade (standards), import licensing, customs valuation, subsidies, and antidumping – the GPA could not be 'multilateralized'. With the reintroduction of agriculture and textiles and clothing into the GATT, procurement has therefore become the major 'hole' …

Integrating The "Underclass": Confronting America's Enduring Apartheid, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton's American Apartheid argues that housing integration has inappropriately disappeared from the national agenda and is critical to remedying the problems of the so-called "underclass." Reviewer Olati Johnson praises the authors' refusal to dichotomize race and class and the roles both play in creating and maintaining housing segregation. However, she argues, Massey and Denton fail to examine critically either the concept of the underclass or the integration ideology they espouse. Specifically, she contends, the authors fail to confront the limits of integration strategies in providing affordable housing or combating the problem of tokenism. Massey and Denton …

Competition Versus Consolidation: The Significance Of Organizational Structure In Financial And Securities Regulation, John C. Coffee Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

It's as predictable as the swallows' return to Capistrano. At the outset of each new Administration, a Presidential Task Force proposes a restructuring of the federal administrative agencies. New developments in rapidly evolving markets, it is argued, require a consolidation of agencies to generate a broader perspective, to create a "level playing field," and to end the possibility of a "race to the bottom" (to the extent that market participants can opt for one regulatory system over another). The proposal draws little overt criticism, but turf-conscious agencies quietly mobilize their constituencies to oppose the reform. The first sign of trouble …

Public Institutions Of Culture And The First Amendment: The New Frontier, Lee C. Bollinger

Faculty Scholarship

The general subject of my lecture today is the relationship between the First Amendment and public institutions of culture, which I take to be those sponsored and supported by the state with the clear purpose of preserving and promoting high culture in the United States. These include universities, museums, theaters, libraries, public broadcasting networks, programs for art in public places, and the national endowments for the arts and the humanities. All of these institutions or programs are vested with the responsibility of insuring the preservation of high human achievement in the areas to which they are devoted (knowledge, art, music, …