Law Commons^™

The 'Santiago Principles' And The International Forum Of Sovereign Wealth Funds: Evolving Components Of The New Bretton Woods Ii Post-Global Financial Crisis Architecture And Another Example Of Ad Hoc Global Administrative Networking And Related 'Soft' Rulemaking?, Joseph J. Norton

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Beginning in the latter part of 2007, the proposed establishment of Chinese and Russian Sovereign Wealth Funds ("SWFs") sparked considerable governmental, intergovernmental and private financial and business sector interest in, and countervailing concerns as to, SWFs. This concern evolved into a growing realization that the cumulative asset size of SWFs was beginning to represent an increasingly significant (though not yet systemically significant) component of the international capital markets. This significance became further magnified when one considered the separate but related proliferation of other state-owned entities operating and investing globally. In addition, in the latter part of 2007, the U.S. and …

All Human Rights Are Equal, But Some Are More Equal Than Others: The Extraordinary Rendition Of A Terror Suspect In Italy, The Nato Sofa, And Human Rights, Eric Talbot Jensen, Chris Jenks

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

On November 4, 2009, an Italian court found a group of Italian military intelligence agents, operatives from the Central Intelligence Agency and a U.S. Air Force (USAF) officer guilty of the 2003 kidnapping of terror suspect Abu Omar. Thrown in a van on the streets of Milan, the abduction took Abu Omar from Italy to Egypt, where he was allegedly tortured and interrogated about his role in recruiting fighters for extremist Islamic causes, including the insurgency in Iraq.

This essay posits that lost amidst politically charged rhetoric about Bush administration impunity and the “war on terror” is that the Italian …

A Sense Of Duty: The Illusory Criminal Jurisdiction Of The U.S./Iraq Status Of Forces Agreement, Chris Jenks

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) between the U.S. and Iraq entered force on January 1, 2009 and established the legal framework by which U.S. personnel continue to operate in Iraq. The SOFA followed lengthy and contentious negotiations, which many commentators claim that Iraq “won,” extracting significant concessions from the U.S. in the process. While that may true in some areas, the opposite seems to be the case in one of the most contentious areas of this or any SOFA – criminal jurisdiction over service members. This article examines the criminal jurisdiction article of the Iraq SOFA and posits that …

Civil Rites: The Gay Marriage Controversy In Historical Perspective, Joanna L. Grossman

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This short essay, written for a volume that celebrates and reflects on Lawrence M. Friedman’s work in legal history and legal culture, explores the modern controversy about same-sex marriage through a historical lens. The legalization of same-sex marriage by five states, and the express condemnation of it by more than forty others, has reintroduced the age-old problem of non-uniform marriage laws and the complicated interactions that follow. This modern story - a challenge to traditional marriage, a divisive moral debate, and the emergence of strong oppositional forces that are stuck, at least temporarily, but perhaps indefinitely, in a kind of …

The Foreign Commerce Clause, Anthony J. Colangelo

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This Article comprehensively addresses Congress’s powers under the Constitution’s Foreign Commerce Clause. Congress has increasingly used the Clause to pass laws of unprecedented and aggressive reach over both domestic and foreign activity. Yet despite the Clause’s mounting significance for modern U.S. regulatory regimes at home and abroad, it remains an incredibly under-analyzed source of constitutional power. Moreover, faced with an increasing number of challenges under the Clause lower courts have been unable to coherently articulate the contours of Congress’s legislative authority. When courts have tried, their efforts have largely been wrong. The Article explains why they have been wrong and …

Patent Fraud, David O. Taylor

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Several recent judicial opinions suggest that patent law’s inequitable conduct doctrine is broken. These opinions indicate that - despite its admirable objective of encouraging disclosure of important information to the Patent Office - the inequitable conduct defense is being over-used by alleged infringers in patent litigation to the detriment of the public. This over-use creates problems. First, it encourages over-disclosure of information to the Patent Office. In extreme cases, over-disclosure makes it difficult for patent examiners to identify information critical to deciding whether to issue patents, potentially resulting in the issuance of invalid patents. Second, over-use of the inequitable conduct …

Green Cards For Foreign House Buyers: A Way To Help Stabilize Housing Prices, Gregory S. Crespi

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The continuing decline in US housing prices is making it difficult to effectively address our nation’s financial and economic problems. Any measures that would serve to help stabilize housing prices without requiring substantial government expenditures merit serious consideration. Richard Lefrak and Gary Shilling have recently set forth in the Wall Street Journal the broad outlines of a proposed change in immigration law that would confer conditional residency and eventually permanent residency upon foreign purchasers of US houses. In this article I present and discuss a modified version of their proposal that is more comprehensive and that seeks to avoid the …

The Texas Mis-Step: Why The Largest Child Removal In Modern U.S. History Failed, Jessica Dixon Weaver

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This Article sets forth the historical and legal reasons as to how the State of Texas botched the removal of 439 children from the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints parents residing in Eldorado, Texas. The Department of Family and Protective Services in Texas overreached its authority by treating this case like a class-action removal based on an impermissible legal argument, rather than focusing on the facts and circumstances that could have been substantiated for a select group of children at risk. This impermissible legal argument regarding the “pervasive belief system” of a polygamist sect that allowed minor …

Should Charitable Trust Enforcement Rights Be Assignable?, Joshua C. Tate

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

In recent years, scholars have given much attention to the problem of charitable trust enforcement. Departing from the common law, section 405(c) of the Uniform Trust Code provides that “[t]he settlor of a charitable trust, among others, may maintain a proceeding to enforce the trust.” This Article addresses the question of whether, and to what extent, a settlor’s right to enforce a charitable trust should be assignable to third parties. Should the law permit the settlor of a charitable trust to assign her enforcement rights after the creation of the trust, or should assignments be recognized only if they are …

Shareholder Democracy And The Curious Turn Toward Board Primacy, Grant M. Hayden, Matthew T. Bodie

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Corporate law is consumed with a debate over shareholder democracy. The conventional wisdom counsels that shareholders should have more voice in corporate governance, in order to reduce agency costs and provide democratic legitimacy. A second set of theorists, described as “board primacists,” advocates against greater shareholder democracy and in favor of increased board discretion. These theorists argue that shareholders need to delegate their authority in order to provide the board with the proper authority to manage the enterprise and avoid short-term decision making.

In the last few years, the classical economic underpinnings of corporate law have been destabilized by a …

The Cult Of Efficiency In Corporate Law, Stephen E. Ellis, Grant M. Hayden

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This paper challenges a fundamental assumption of corporate law scholarship. Corporate law is heavily influenced by economics, and by normative economics in particular. Economic efficiency, for example, is seen as the primary goal of good corporate governance. But this dependence on standard notions of economic efficiency is unfortunate, as those notions are highly problematic. In economic theory, efficiency is spelled out in terms of individual preference satisfaction, which is an inadequate foundation for any sort of normative analysis. We argue that on any account of the good, people will sometimes prefer things that aren’t good for them on that account. …

The Assault On Section 11 Of The Securities Act: A Study In Judicial Activism, Marc I. Steinberg, Brent A. Kirby

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This article focuses on the federal courts' restrictive interpretation of Section 11 of the Securities Act of 1933, the most investor-friendly express remedy that the "New Deal" Congress enacted. This judicial erosion has resulted in a cause of action that extends to fewer investors and is riddled with uncertainty at the pleading stage. The authors posit that recent federal court decisions that have added reliance as an element of Section 11 claims and rejected the use of statistical evidence to prove tracing are inconsistent with Section 11's text and legislative history. The article then explores the inconsistencies associated with pleading …

Gender, Law, And Detention Policy: Unexpected Effects On The Most Vulnerable Immigrants, Carla L. Reyes

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The United States immigration system is especially difficult for children to navigate. Advocates commonly argue that this difficulty stems largely from the poor fit resulting from the application of a system designed for adults to the reality of the child immigrant experience. Advocacy efforts, including those that resulted in changes to detention policy and substantive immigration law regarding Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC), therefore focus on modifying the system to recognize children as subjects, rather than objects, of immigration law. This article argues that the present efforts to streamline the immigration detention and relief experience for UACs by combating adult-centered bias …

Bobbitt, The Rise Of The Market State, And Race, George A. Martinez

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The importance of Philip Bobbitt’s seminal works is already being recognized as on par with such classics as Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan. In these books, Bobbitt argues that the nature of the state is changing in a fundamental way in that our country is shifting from a nation-state into a market-state. Bobbitt's theories have profound significance for many areas of law which scholars are just beginning to explore. This article is seeking to fill a gap in the literature by considering the implications of his views in the area of race and immigration law. Specifically, the article contends that Bobbitt's theories …

Race, American Law And The State Of Nature, George A. Martinez

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This article advances a new theoretical framework to help explain and understand race and American law. In particular, the article argues that we can employ a philosophical model to attempt to understand what often occurs when the dominant group deals with persons of color. The article contends that when the dominant group acts with great power or lack of constraint, it often acts as though it were in what political philosophers have called the state of nature. Thus, this article argues that there is a tendency for the dominant group to act as though it were in the state of …