Law Commons^™

First Principles For An Effective Federal Housing Policy, David J. Reiss

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Federal housing policy is heavily funded and made up of a morass of programs. This article provides a taxonomy of goals for housing policy. The article first asks what the aim of housing policy is. In other words, what can a well-designed and executed housing policy achieve? The answer to this question is not at all clear-cut. Some argue that the aim of housing policy is to allow all Americans to live in safe, well-maintained and affordable housing. Others argue for a more modest aim – achieving an income transfer to low- and moderate-income families that mandates that the income …

The Argument For Same-Sex Marriage, Nelson Tebbe, Deborah A. Widiss, Shannon Gilreath

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Professors Tebbe and Widiss revisit the arguments they made in "Equal Access and the Right to Marry" and emphasize their belief that distinguishing between different-sex marriage and same-sex marriage is inappropriate. They lament the sustained emphasis on the equal-protection and substantive-due-process challenges in the Perry litigation and suggest that an equal-access approach is more likely to be successful on appeal.

Professor Shannon Gilreath questions some of the fundamental premises for same-sex marriage. He challenges proponents to truly reflect on "what there is to commend marriage to Gay people," and points to his own reversal on the question as evidence. Though …

The New Family: Challenges To American Family Law, Cynthia Grant Bowman

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The vast demographic and social changes of the twentieth century have produced a variety of new family forms – cohabiting couples, same-sex couples, an increased number of single-parent families, and extended families resulting from divorce, for example. The legal system in the United States has yet adequately to address the legal problems that these new family forms create. This article discusses a number of major issues that arise from this failure, including: (1) the sometimes negative impact of gender-neutral rules in divorce upon women and children; (2) the ambiguity and inadequacy of property and support obligations between cohabitants; (3) the …

D Is For Digitize: An Introduction, James Grimmelmann

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

This symposium issue of the New York Law School Law Review collects seven articles springing from the D Is for Digitize conference on the Google Books lawsuit and settlement, held at New York Law School October 8-10, 2009. In the spirit of Chaucer's "good feyth," thirty panelists and over one hundred attendees (plus dozens more watching online) gathered to discuss the legal and social issues raised by the proposed settlement. For three days, lawyers, academics, librarians, programmers, and public-interest advocates met for a rich, respectful, and wide-ranging conversation on this once-in-a-lifetime settlement. These articles continue that conversation.

Federal Governmental Power: The Voting Rights Act, Michael C. Dorf

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Affirmative Action In Higher Education Over The Next Twenty-Five Years: A Need For Study And Action, Sandra Day O'Connor, Stewart Schwab

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Leveraging A Library Collection Through Collaborative Digitization Ventures, Femi Cadmus, Fred Shapiro

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Privacy As Product Safety, James Grimmelmann

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Online social media confound many of our familiar expectations about privacy. Contrary to popular myth, users of social software like Facebook do care about privacy, deserve it, and have trouble securing it for themselves. Moreover, traditional database-focused privacy regulations on the Fair Information Practices model, while often worthwhile, fail to engage with the distinctively social aspects of these online services.

Instead, online privacy law should take inspiration from a perhaps surprising quarter: product-safety law. A web site that directs users' personal information in ways they don't expect is a defectively designed product, and many concepts from products liability law could …

Fannie Mae And Freddie Mac: Creatures Of Regulatory Privilege, David J. Reiss

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

This book chapter addresses the appropriate role of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-chartered, privately owned mortgage finance companies, in the United States housing finance sector. The federal government recently placed Fannie and Freddie in conservatorship. These two massive companies are profit-driven, but as government-sponsored enterprises they also have a government-mandated mission to provide liquidity and stability to the United States mortgage market and to achieve certain affordable housing goals. How the two companies should exit their conservatorship has implications that reach throughout the global financial markets and are of key importance to the future of American housing finance …

Rethinking The Future Of Self-Regulation In The Financial Industry, Saule T. Omarova

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

In today's post-crisis world, arguing in favor of self-regulation in the financial services industry is sure to raise many eyebrows and invite significant disagreement. Much of the skepticism in this respect may be fully justified: the lack of truly effective incentives or political obstacles may ultimately foreclose the possibility of creating a new regime of embedded self-regulation aimed at detection and prevention of systemic financial risks. Nevertheless, as this Article sought to demonstrate, the realities of today's financial marketplace make it critically important that we give the idea of industry self-regulation a full consideration.

The main goal of this Article …

The Torture Lawyers, Jens David Ohlin

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

One of the longest shadows cast by the Bush Administration’s War on Terror involves the fate of the torture lawyers who authored or signed memoranda regarding torture or enhanced interrogation techniques against detainees. Should they face professional sanction or even prosecution for their involvement? The following Article suggests that their fate implicates some of the deepest questions of criminal law theory and that resolution of the debate requires a fundamental reorientation of the most important areas of justifications and excuses. First, the debate about torture has been overly focused on justifications for torture. This can be explained in part by …

Transatlantic Merger Control: The Courts And The Agencies, Mark Leddy, Christopher Cook, James Abell

Cornell International Law Journal

No abstract provided.

U.S. Chamber Of Commerce Liability Survey: Inaccurate, Unfair, And Bad For Business, Theodore Eisenberg

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce uses its Survey of State Liability to criticize judiciaries and seek legal change but no detailed evaluation of the survey’s quality exists. This article presents evidence that the survey is substantively inaccurate and methodologically flawed. It incorrectly characterizes state law; respondents provide less than 10 percent correct answers for objectively verifiable responses. It is internally inconsistent; a state threatened with judicial hellhole status ranked first in the survey while venues not on the list ranked lower. The absence of correlation between survey rankings and observable activity suggests that other factors drive the rankings. Two factors …

Untold Truths: The Exclusion Of Enforced Sterilizations From The Peruvian Truth Commission's Final Report, Jocelyn E. Getgen

Cornell Law School Berger International Speaker Papers

This presentation argues that the exclusion of enforced sterilization cases from the Peruvian Truth Commission's investigation and Final Report effectively erases State responsibility and decreases the likelihood for justice and reparations for women victims-survivors of State-sponsored violence in Peru. In a context of deep cultural and economic divides and violent conflict, this presentation recounts how the State's Family Planning Program violated Peruvian women's reproductive rights by sterilizing low-income, indigenous Quechua-speaking women without informed consent. This presentation argues that these systematic reproductive injustices constitute an act of genocide, proposes an independent inquiry, and advocates for a more inclusive investigation and final …

Condemning Religion: Rluipa And The Politics Of Eminent Domain, Christopher Serkin, Nelson Tebbe

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Should religious landowners enjoy special protection from eminent domain? A recent federal statute, the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA), compels courts to apply a compelling interest test to zoning and landmarking regulations that substantially burden religiously owned property. That provision has been controversial in itself, but today a new cutting-edge issue is emerging: whether the Act’s extraordinary protection should extend to condemnation as well. The matter has taken on added significance in the wake of Kelo, where the Supreme Court reaffirmed its expansive view of the eminent domain power. In this Article, we argue that RLUIPA should …

Attorneys’ Fees And Expenses In Class Action Settlements: 1993-2008, Theodore Eisenberg, Geoffrey P. Miller

Cornell Law Faculty Working Papers

We report on a comprehensive data base of eighteen years of published opinions (1993-2008, inclusive) on settlements in class action and shareholder derivative cases in both state and federal courts. An earlier study, covering1993-2002 , revealed a remarkable relationship between attorneys’ fees and the size of class recovery: regardless of the methodology for calculating fees ostensibly employed by the courts, the overwhelmingly important determinant of the fee was simply the size of the recovery obtained by the class. The present study, which nearly doubles the number of cases in the data base, powerfully confirms that relationship. Fees display the same …

Placeholders: Engaging The Hayekian Critique Of Financial Regulation, Annelise Riles

Cornell Law Faculty Working Papers

Since Friedrich Hayek, debates about the proper relationship between the state and the market, and about the optimal design of regulatory institutions, often turn on assumptions about the workings of legal expertise — and in particular about the difference between public expertise (bureaucratic knowledge) and private expertise (private law). Hayek’s central argument, adopted uncritically by a wide array of policy-makers and academics across the political spectrum, is a temporal one: bureaucratic reasoning is inherently one step behind the market, and hence effective market planning is impossible. In contrast, Hayek argues, private ordering is superior because it is of the moment, …

Waste No Land: Property, Dignity And Growth In Urbanizing China, Eva M. Pils

Cornell Law Faculty Working Papers

The Chinese state does not allow rural collectives to sell land, but takes land from them and makes it available on the urban property market. While rural land rights are thus easily obliterated, the newly created urban rights in what used to be rural land enjoy legal protection. The state justifies these land takings by the need for urbanization and economic growth. The takings have resulted in an impressive contribution of the construction and property sector to state revenue and GDP growth, but also in unfairness toward peasants evicted from their land and homes. The example discussed here shows that …

Lessening Cumulative Burdens On The Right To Vote: A Legislative Response To Crawford V. Marion County Election Board, Neil P. Kelly

Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy

No abstract provided.

Policing The Good Guys: Regulation Of The Charitable Sector Through A Federal Charity Oversight Board, Terri Lynn Helge

Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy

No abstract provided.

Beyond The Employee Free Choice Act: Unleashing The States In Labor-Management Relations Policy, Henry H. Drummonds

Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy

No abstract provided.

Trawling Dna Databases For Partial Matches: What Is The Fbi Afraid Of, David H. Kaye

Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy

No abstract provided.

Propensity Or Stereotype: A Misguided Evidence Experiment In Indian Country, Aviva Orenstein

Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy

No abstract provided.

The Military And The Law Elite, Dennis Jacobs

Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy

No abstract provided.

Kendra’S Law And The Rights Of The Mentally Ill: An Empirical Peek Behind The Courts’ Legal Analysis And A Suggested Template For The New York State Legislature’S Reconsideration For Renewal In 2010, Kathryn A. Worthington

Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy

No abstract provided.

A Simple Theory Of Takeover Regulation In The United States And Europe, Guido Ferrarini, Geoffrey P. Miller

Cornell International Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Death Is Different And A Refugee’S Right To Counsel, John R. Mills, Kristen M. Echemendia, Stephen Yale-Loehr

Cornell International Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Accountability And The Commission On The Limits Of The Continental Shelf: Deciding Who Owns The Ocean Floor, Anna Cavnar

Cornell International Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Hope In The Law, Annelise Riles

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Regulate Otc Derivatives By Deregulating Them: Response To Comments, Lynn A. Stout

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Response to comments by Jean Helwege, Peter Wallison, and Craig Pirrong on the author's article, "Regulate OTC Derivatives By Deregulating Them." Article predates the author's affiliation with Cornell Law School.