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The Joint Venture Exception In The International Silver Platter Doctrine: Variability And Devaluation Of Cooperation, Jacqueline Pecaro

University of Chicago Law Review

This Comment examines the joint venture exception in the international silver platter doctrine in the context of the use of wiretaps in federal narcotics cases. Under the international silver platter doctrine, evidence obtained through searches (like wiretaps) by foreign law enforcement on foreign soil and under foreign law is admissible in U.S. courts. The joint venture exception qualifies the international silver platter doctrine: if participation by U.S. law enforcement in a wiretap by foreign law enforcement on foreign soil constitutes a joint venture, then evidence obtained from the search is admissible only if the wiretap was reasonable under the Fourth …

The Improvised Implementation Of Executive Agreements, Kathleen Claussen

University of Chicago Law Review

Implementation is at the core of lawmaking in our divided government. A rich literature covers the waterfront with respect to agencies’ implementation of legislative mandates, and another equally robust line of scholarship considers Congress’s implementation of treaties. Missing from those discussions, however, is another area of implementation central to U.S. foreign relations: the implementation of transnational regulatory agreements.

This Article examines how federal agencies have harnessed far-reaching discretion from Congress on whether and how to implement thousands of international agreements. Agencies regularly implement agreements by relying on a self-developed menu of options, much like they do in the domestic regulatory …

Jurisdiction As Power, Ryan C. Williams

University of Chicago Law Review

For centuries, courts and legal commentators defined “jurisdiction” by reference to a court’s “power.” A court that lacked jurisdiction, under this conception, simply lacked the ability to bind the parties, and its resulting rulings could therefore be regarded by both litigants and later courts as void and of no legal effect. But in the middle decades of the twentieth century, the Supreme Court and other U.S. courts strongly embraced the so-called bootstrap doctrine—a distinctive branch of preclusion law that severely limits the ability to collaterally attack a judgment based on a claimed lack of jurisdiction. Because the bootstrap doctrine effectively …

Toward A Centralized Hatch-Waxman Venue, Matthew Makowski

University of Chicago Law Review

Pharmaceutical litigation often begins when a generic drug company files an application to have its generic drug approved by the FDA. That application is received by the FDA in the District of Maryland. To “submit” it is a statutory act of patent infringement under the Hatch-Waxman Act. Establishing venue in subsequent Hatch-Waxman litigation can be complex because HatchWaxman litigation often involves simultaneous and independent lawsuits against many generic applicants. A Hatch-Waxman plaintiff might reasonably attempt to consolidate litigation in a single district court; Hatch-Waxman defendants might reasonably resist consolidation in the plaintiff’s preferred venue. Recent Supreme Court and Federal Circuit …

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Academic Freedom And Misgendered Honorifics In The Classroom, Gabrielle Dohmen

University of Chicago Law Review

In recent years, public universities have promulgated pronoun policies designed to encourage professors and students to respect the pronouns that others use to identify themselves. A professor who does not follow the pronoun policy and instead misgenders a student—or uses gendered words or pronouns that do not match that student’s gender identity—may be disciplined by their university for violating the pronoun policy.

This Comment argues that professorial speech misgendering students in the classroom should not be protected by a professor’s First Amendment right to academic freedom, which traditionally covers teaching and scholarship. The First Amendment protects some exercises of academic …

Reducing Prejudice Through Law: Evidence From Experimental Psychology, Sara Emily Burke, Roseanna Sommers

University of Chicago Law Review

Can antidiscrimination law effect changes in public attitudes toward minority groups? Could learning, for instance, that employment discrimination against people with clinical depression is legally prohibited cause members of the public to be more accepting toward people with mental health conditions? In this Article, we report the results of a series of experiments that test the effect of inducing the belief that discrimination against a given group is legal (versus illegal) on interpersonal attitudes toward members of that group. We find that learning that discrimination is unlawful does not simply lead people to believe that an employer is more likely …

The Class Appeal, Adam S. Zimmerman

University of Chicago Law Review

For a wide variety of claims against the government, the federal courthouse doors are closed to all but those brought by powerful, organized interests. This is because hundreds of laws—colloquially known as “channeling statutes”—require disaffected groups to contest government bodies directly in appellate courts that hear cases individually. In theory, these laws promise quick, consistent, and authoritative legal decisions in appellate courts. In fact, without class actions, government bodies avoid judicial review by selectively avoiding claims brought by some of the most vulnerable people in the administrative state—from veterans and immigrants to coal miners, laborers, and the disabled.

This Article …

The Visibility Trap, Kate Redburn

University of Chicago Law Review

In August 2021, the Indiana Court of Appeals prohibited a transgender teenage boy (H.S.) from changing the gender marker on his birth certificate. Because he was fifteen at the time, his parents had filed the petition on his behalf.¹ As his parents testified, changing the gender marker on a young trans person’s birth certificate is more than a formality. It makes it possible for them to obtain a passport and driver’s license that match their identity, helping to avoid incongruities in gender regulation that can run the gambit from confusing to dangerous.²

The appellate panel was split. Legally …

Pretrial Detention By A Preponderance: The Constitutional And Interpretive Shortcomings Of The Flight-Risk Standard, Jaden M. Lessnick

University of Chicago Law Review

Pretrial detention seriously restricts the physical liberty of presumptively innocent people who have yet to be tried and convicted. The Bail Reform Act (BRA) imposes several procedural requirements that must be satisfied before a judge can order the pretrial detention of a federal defendant. At a detention hearing, the BRA allows a judge to order the pretrial detention of an arrestee who poses either a danger to the community or a flight risk. The BRA states unequivocally that a finding of dangerousness must be supported by clear and convincing evidence, but the statute is silent as to the evidentiary standard …

What’S The Use?: Interpreting The Term “Uses” In The Aggravated Identity Theft Provision, Shang-Chi Andrew Liu

University of Chicago Law Review

The Identity Theft Penalty Enhancement Act (ITPEA) increases penalties for crimes that involve the unlawful use of another person’s identifying information. A subsection of the ITPEA—the aggravated identity theft provision—imposes a mandatory two-year sentencing enhancement on a defendant who “uses” a means of identification of another person during and in relation to a predicate felony. Currently, federal circuit courts disagree about whether the term “uses” in the statute is ambiguous and whether the rule of lenity should consequently apply to narrow its reach. On the one hand, courts that have held the statute to be ambiguous apply the rule of …

Untangling The Prison Mailbox Rules, Mario Ramirez

University of Chicago Law Review

Unlike typical litigants, pro se prisoners are unable to deliver filings to court or to have an attorney do so on their behalf. Such prisoners are forced to rely on their prisons’ mailing systems to file documents, which often results in those documents reaching the court after the applicable deadlines. Accordingly, the Supreme Court created a “prison mailbox rule” in Houston v. Lack, under which some filings by prisoners are considered filed when they are given to prison officials for mailing, rather than when they reach the court.

Defining the exact reach of that prison mailbox rule has created considerable …

The Public Right To Education, Matthew Patrick Shaw

University of Chicago Law Review

Public education is “the most important function of state and local government” and yet not a “fundamental right or liberty.” This Article engages one of constitutional law’s most intractable problems by introducing “the public right to education” as a doctrinal pathway to a constitutional right to education process in three steps. First, it identifies that the otherwise right-to-education foreclosing case, San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, only contemplated education as a fundamental right or liberty interest. Second, by identifying public education as a due process–protected property interest, this Article presents a viable pathway for circumventing Rodriguez. Third, mindful of …

An Information-Production Theory Of Liability Rules, Jacob Assaf, Roy Shapira

University of Chicago Law Review

The negligence-versus–strict liability debate is over in tort law, and negligence has clearly won. Yet the fact that our accident-compensation system is fault based continues to attract much opposition in popular sentiment and academic circles. Standard economic analysis views strict liability as preferable to negligence because it is easier to administer and leads to better risk reduction: strict liability induces injurers not only to optimally invest in precaution but also to optimally adjust their activity levels. Standard analysis thus views the prevalence of negligence as unjustifiable on efficiency grounds. This Article challenges the conventional wisdom and clarifies an efficiency rationale …

Retooling Sanctions: China’S Challenge To The Liberal International Order, Timothy Webster

Chicago Journal of International Law

Professor Tom Ginsburg has produced yet another classic of transnational law, political science, and international relations. Democracies and International Law yields important insights into the democratic nature of international law but cautions that authoritarian states can apply these very legal technologies for repressive or antidemocratic purposes. Building on Ginsburg’s theories of mimicry and repurposing, this contribution highlights the role of both techniques in the creation of China’s economic sanctions program. On the one hand, China has developed a basic set of tools to impose economic sanctions—a key instrument in the liberal international toolkit—on foreign entities and persons. In so doing, …

Democratization’S Discontents: Rediscovering The Virtues Of The Non-Intervention Norm, Brad R. Roth

Chicago Journal of International Law

Post-Cold War triumphalism prompted efforts to transform international law into a tool of democratization, forsaking the international legal order’s former neutrality with respect to the foundations of political legitimacy within states. Yet after three decades, the sources of political legitimacy remain “incorrigibly plural,” and efforts to ascertain “the will of the people” remain beset by indeterminacy. It is time to rediscover international law’s role as a framework of accommodation among bearers of conflicting interests and values, with consequent limits on pro-democratic intervention in the internal affairs of states.

A Mimicry Of International Law Compliance: How The Abusive Interpretation Of International Norms Serves Poland’S Illiberal Regime, Aleksandra Dzięgielewska

Chicago Journal of International Law

In recent years, the instrumental use of international norms to entrench abusive rule has been a strategy increasingly utilized by democratically regressing European states. This pattern is evident in Poland in particular, where captured democratic institutions have attempted to legitimize unconstitutional reforms of the justice system by asserting their consistency with international law. To provide an insight into this illiberal strategy, this Essay uses the concept of mimicry as a framework to study recent judgments by the Polish Constitutional Tribunal. This Essay argues that the Polish Constitutional Tribunal feigns legal compliance by abusively interpreting well-established concepts of international law. The …

The New Corporate Governance, Oliver Hart, Luigi Zingales

The University of Chicago Business Law Review

In the last few years, there has been a dramatic increase in shareholder engagement on environmental and social issues. In some cases shareholders are pushing companies to take actions that may reduce market value. It is hard to understand this behavior using the dominant corporate governance paradigm based on shareholder value maximization. We explain how jurisprudence has sustained this criterion in spite of its economic weaknesses. To overcome these weaknesses we propose the criterion of shareholder welfare maximization and argue that it can better explain observed behavior. Finally, we outline how shareholder welfare maximization can be implemented in practice.

The Win-Win That Wasn’T: Managing To The Stock Market’S Negative Effects On American Workers And Other Corporate Stakeholders, Aneil Kovvali, Leo E. Strine Jr.

The University of Chicago Business Law Review

Easterbrook and Fischel’s work suggests that society as a whole would achieve the best results if corporate leaders focused only on raising stock prices, leaving other institutions to tend to all other interests. But the idea that making societally important corporations govern to the whims of the stock market would be a win-win for investors, other corporate stakeholders, and our society as a whole has proven incorrect. At bottom, Easterbrook and Fischel failed to contend with the real- world realities that allow investors to profit by shifting distributions and political power to themselves, while shifting costs and risks to workers, …

Violating International Law Is Contagious, Shai Dothan

Chicago Journal of International Law

Democracies have a stronger incentive to comply with international law than autocracies, but they will not comply when faced with violations by other states. International law is a mechanism of cooperation between states: it can make states vulnerable to betrayal, but also increase their chances for successful collaboration. In other words, complying with international law is like playing cooperate in a stag hunt game. Cooperating is an efficient strategy but not a strategy that is evolutionarily stable. If an autocracy emerges and starts to violate international law, democracies will violate international law in response. This makes violating international law contagious. …

Democracies And International Law: An Update, Tom Ginsburg

Chicago Journal of International Law

Democracies have traditionally played a very important role in the construction and operation of international law, but this role has come under some pressure with the wave of democratic erosion that began around 2006. In a book published last year, the author laid out an argument that in some cases, international law could help to bolster democracy around the world, but that role was under threat from rising authoritarianism. This Essay considers relevant developments, finding cause for optimism in Latin America, some cause for pessimism in Africa, and real risks in Europe. Cyber governance is going to be a critical …

Contractual Evolution, Matthew Jennejohn, Julian Nyarko, Eric L. Talley

University of Chicago Law Review

Conventional wisdom portrays contracts as static distillations of parties’ shared intent at some discrete point in time. In reality, however, contract terms evolve in response to their environments, including new laws, legal interpretations, and economic shocks. While several legal scholars have offered stylized accounts of this evolutionary process, we still lack a coherent, general theory that broadly captures the dynamics of real-world contracting practice. This paper advances such a theory, in which the evolution of contract terms is a byproduct of several key features, including efficiency concerns, information, and sequential learning by attorneys who negotiate several deals over time. Each …

Competing Views On The Economic Structure Of Corporate Law, Lucian Arye Bebchuk

The University of Chicago Business Law Review

Written for a symposium issue celebrating the thirty-year anniversary of the publication of The Economic Structure of Corporate Law by Frank Easterbrook and Daniel Fischel (“E&F”), this Essay discusses the interaction of my research over the years with their writings. During the period in which the book and articles were written, and in the many years since then, I have paid close attention to E&F’s writings in my research in the economics of corporate governance. Indeed, a significant part of my research in this field engaged closely with E&F’s writing and reached conclusions that substantially differed from theirs. Below I …

Just Say No? Shareholder Voting On Securities Class Actions, Albert H. Choi, Stephen J. Choi, A. C. Pritchard

The University of Chicago Business Law Review

The U.S. securities laws allow security-holders to bring a class action suit against a public company and its officers who make materially misleading statements to the market. The class action mechanism allows individual claimants to aggregate their claims. This procedure mitigates the collective action problem among claimants, and also creates potential economies of scale. Despite these efficiencies, the class action mechanism has been criticized for being driven by attorneys and also encouraging nuisance suits. Although various statutory and doctrinal “solutions” have been proposed and implemented over the years, the concerns over the agency problem and nuisance suits persist. This paper …

Hidden History Of Securities Damages, Allen Ferrell

The University of Chicago Business Law Review

Approaches to calculating fraud on the market 10b-5 damages have evolved substantially from the 1970s to the present. In this Essay I discuss the various approaches used over this span of time, including the rise of the event study approach.

Purpose Proposals, Jill E. Fisch

The University of Chicago Business Law Review

Repurposing the corporation is the hot issue in corporate governance. Commentators, investors, and increasingly issuers, maintain that corporations should shift their focus from maximizing profits for shareholders to generating value for a more expansive group of stakeholders. Corporations are also being called upon to address societal concerns—from climate change and voting rights to racial justice and wealth inequality.

The shareholder proposal rule, Rule 14a–8, offers one potential tool for repurposing the corporation. This Article describes the introduction of innovative proposals seeking to formalize corporate commitments to stakeholder governance. These “purpose proposals” reflect a new dynamic in the debate over stakeholder …

Rereading The “One Share, One Vote” Principle: Is It Also A Matter Of Competition?, Federico Ghezzi, Chiara Mosca, Maria ‎‏‏‎ Lucia‎ Passador ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎

The University of Chicago Business Law Review

Despite being a cumbersome principle of corporate governance, the “one share, one vote” principle à la Easterbrook and Fischel is constantly challenged by several attempts to circumvent the original structure of capitalism democracy, based on the provision (often a default provision) that no more and no less than one vote is attributed to each share.

The possibility of adopting categories of shares with multiple voting rights and that of resorting to mechanisms that multiply voting rights upon the occurrence of specific conditions (oftentimes linked to a loyalty bonus for long-term shareholders), depends on the articles of association’s autonomy granted to …

Endogenous Choice Of Stakes Under Common Ownership, C. Scott Hemphill, Marcel Kahan

The University of Chicago Business Law Review

We present a simple model of common ownership in which an investor chooses its stake in competing firms in light of the effects on firm behavior and firm profits. Two firms compete in Cournot duopoly, and ownership affects a firm’s objective function in the manner posited by Bresnahan & Salop (1986) and Salop & O’Brien (2000). We show that an investor with equal stakes in both firms—a so-called common concentrated owner (CCO)—places a greater value on an additional share of a firm, compared to atomistic owners. The same is true of a noncommon concentrated owner (NCO) with a stake in …

Should There Be Corporate Governance Police?, M. Todd Henderson

The University of Chicago Business Law Review

If a company misbehaves, lawsuits are one way of providing a remedy and encouraging that company and others to behave in the future. If the misbehavior is securities fraud, there are two potential plaintiffs—traders allegedly injured by the fraud may bring a private suit, and the government (through the SEC or DOJ) may sue to enforce the public interest in truthful disclosures of corporate information. If the misbehavior is violations of corporate governance rules, however, only private suits are available. Despite the parallel rationales for marrying private and public attorneys general, the toolkit for protecting the public interest in corporate …

Shadow Contracts, Jessica S. Jeffers, Anne M. Tucker

The University of Chicago Business Law Review

This project explores side letters in private market funds. Side letters, separate agreements between a fund and an investor, act as an invisible amendment to the main contract. This article introduces a new use case for side letters: impact investments, where funds target social, as well as financial, returns. Using a hand-collected data set, we examine the scope and role of side letters in this growing space. Side letters as “shadow contracts” demonstrate the Easterbrook/Fischel theories in action, namely that parties “write their own tickets,” tailoring agreement terms to their specific needs within the framework of corporate governance rules. Expressing …