Law Commons^™

Gone Broke: Sovereign Debt, Personal Bankruptcy, And A Comprehensive Contractual Solution, Adam Brenneman

University of Pennsylvania Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Chief Justice's Special Authority And The Norms Of Judicial Power, Theodore W. Ruger

University of Pennsylvania Law Review

No abstract provided.

Censorship By Proxy: The First Amendment, Internet Intermediaries, And The Problem Of The Weakest Link, Seth F. Kreimer

University of Pennsylvania Law Review

No abstract provided.

Responsibilities Of Judges And Advocates In Civil And Common Law: Some Lingering Misconceptions Concerning Civil Lawsuits, Geoffrey C. Hazard Jr., Angelo Dondi

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Preemption In The Rehnquist Court: A Preliminary Empirical Assessment, Michael S. Greve, Jonathan Klick

All Faculty Scholarship

The federal preemption of state law has emerged as a prominent field of study for legal scholars and political scientists. This rise to prominence of a technical and often dull field of jurisprudence is due to a number of developments-increasingly frequent federal statutory preemptions; the states' unprecedented aggressiveness in regulating business transactions, the expansion of corporate liability under state common law and the increased resort of corporate defendants to federal preemption defenses; and, not least, the Rehnquist Court's discovery of federalism and states' rights.

Unfortunately, the preemption debate has been marred by misperceptions and a lack of reliable data. Extravagant …

An Efficiency-Based Explanation For Current Corporate Reorganization Practice, Kenneth M. Ayotte, David A. Skeel Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Beyond Kelo: Thinking About Urban Development In The 21st Century, Wendell E. Pritchett

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Regulatory Responses To Investor Irrationality: The Case Of The Research Analyst, Jill E. Fisch

All Faculty Scholarship

An extensive body of behavioral economics literature suggests that investors do not behave with perfect rationality. Instead, investors are subject to a variety of biases that may cause them to react inappropriately to information. The policy challenge posed by this observation is to identify the appropriate response to investor irrationality. In particular, should regulators attempt to protect investors from bad investment decisions that may be the result of irrational behavior?

This Article considers the appropriate regulatory response to investor irrationality within the concrete context of the research analyst. Many commentators have argued that analyst conflicts of interest led to biased …

Rhetoric Of Disputes In The Courts, The Media, And The Legislature, Geoffrey C. Hazard Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Subsidizing Addiction: Do State Health Insurance Mandates Increase Alcohol Consumption?, Jonathan Klick, Thomas Stratmann

All Faculty Scholarship

A model of addiction in which individuals are forward looking implies that as the availability of addiction treatment options grows, individuals will consume more of an addictive good. We test this implication using cross-state variation in the adoption of mental health parity mandates that include substance abuse treatments. We examine the effects of these mandates on the consumption of alcohol and find that parity legislation leads to an increase in alcohol consumption. To account for the possible endogeneity of the adoption of mental health parity mandates, we perform an instrumental variables analysis and find that the ordinary least squares estimation …

Government Regulation Of Irrationality: Moral And Cognitive Hazards, Jonathan Klick, Gregory Mitchell

All Faculty Scholarship

Behavioral law and economics scholars who advance paternalistic policy proposals typically employ static models of decision-making behavior, despite the dynamic effects of paternalistic policies. This Article considers how paternalistic policies fare under a dynamic account of decision making that incorporates learning and motivation effects. This approach brings out two important limitations on the efficiency effects of paternalistic regulations. First, if preferences and biases are endogenous to institutional forces, paternalistic government regulations may perpetuate and even magnify a given bias and cause other adverse psychological effects. Second, for some biases, it will be more efficient to invest resources in debiasing than …

"A Teaching, Suggestion, Or Motivation To Combine": Bringing Structure And Clarity To The Obviousness Analysis, R. Polk Wagner

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Network Neutrality And The Economics Of Congestion, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Supersize Pay, Incentive Compatibility, And The Volatile Shareholder Interest, William W. Bratton

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Making Visible The Invisible: Strategies For Responding To Globalization's Impact On Immigrant Workers In The United States, Sarah Paoletti

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Moralizing In Public, Anita L. Allen

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Race And Gender In The Law Review, Cynthia Grant Bowman, Dorothy E. Roberts, Leonard S. Rubinowitz

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Restorative Processes & Doing Justice, Paul H. Robinson

All Faculty Scholarship

This essay argues that, while many restorative processes are quite valuable, there is the potential for their use to produce results that conflict with the community's shared intuitions of justice and to thereby undermine the criminal law's moral credibility. Because such moral credibility can have practical crime-control value, it ought not be undermined unless the crime-control benefits of doing so clearly outweigh the costs. In practice, it is entirely possible to rely upon restorative processes in ways that avoid injustice and that assure justice is done.

Alternative Career Resolution Ii: Changing The Tenure Of Supreme Court Justices, Stephen B. Burbank

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Tuna Court: Law And Norms In The World's Premier Fish Market, Eric Feldman

All Faculty Scholarship

Legal scholars have long emphasized the corrosive impact of conflict on long-term commercial and interpersonal relationships. To minimize the negative consequences of such conflict, members of close-knit groups who anticipate future interactions create ways of resolving their disputes with reference to internal group norms rather than relying on state-mandated legal rules. From farmers in California’s Shasta County to jewelers in midtown Manhattan and neighbors in Sanders County, the literature describes people who create norms of conflict management that are faster and less expensive than relying on formal law, and lessen the harm that conflict causes to their relationships. This article …

Constitutional Fidelity, The Rule Of Recognition, And The Communitarian Turn In Contemporary Positivism, Matthew D. Adler

All Faculty Scholarship

Contemporary positivism has taken a communitarian turn. Hart, in the Postscript to the Concept of Law, clarifies that the rule of recognition is a special sort of social practice: a convention. It is not clear whether Hart, here, means “convention” in the strict sense elaborated by David Lewis, or in some weaker sense. A number of contemporary positivists, including Jules Coleman (at one point), Andrei Marmor, and Gerald Postema, have argued that the rule of recognition is something like a Lewis-convention. Others have suggested that the rule of recognition is conventional in a weaker sense -- specifically, by figuring in …

Management-Based Strategies For Improving Private Sector Environmental Performance, Cary Coglianese, Jennifer Nash

All Faculty Scholarship

Improvements in environmental quality depend in large measure on changes in private sector management. In recognition of this fact, government and industry have begun in recent years to focus directly on shaping the internal management practices of private firms. New management-based strategies can take many forms, but unlike conventional regulatory approaches they are linked by their distinctive focus on management practices, rather than on environmental technologies or emissions targets. This article offers the first sustained analysis of both public and private sector initiatives designed specifically to improve firms' environmental management. Synthesizing the results of a conference of leading scholars and …

Aspiration And Underenforcement, Kermit Roosevelt Iii

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Preempting The People: The Judicial Role In Regulatory Concurrency And Its Implications For Popular Lawmaking, Theodore Ruger

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Strange Career Of Jane Crow: Sex Segregation And The Transformation Of Anti-Discrimination Discourse, Serena Mayeri

All Faculty Scholarship

This article examines the causes and consequences of a transformation in anti-discrimination discourse between 1970 and 1977 that shapes our constitutional landscape to this day. Fears of cross-racial intimacy leading to interracial marriage galvanized many white Southerners to oppose school desegregation in the 1950s and 1960s. In the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, some commentators, politicians, and ordinary citizens proposed a solution: segregate the newly integrated schools by sex. When court-ordered desegregation became a reality in the late 1960s, a smattering of southern school districts implemented sex separation plans. As late as 1969, no one saw sex-segregated schools …

Mandatory Waiting Periods For Abortions And Female Mental Health, Jonathan Klick

All Faculty Scholarship

Proponents of laws requiring a waiting period before a woman can receive an abortion argue that these cooling off periods protect against rash decisions on the part of women in the event of unplanned pregnancies. Opponents claim, at best, waiting periods have no effect on decision-making and, at worst, they subject women to additional mental anguish and stress. In this article, I examine these competing claims using adult female suicide rates at the state level as a proxy for mental health. Panel data analyses suggest that the adoption of mandatory waiting periods reduce suicide rates by about 10 percent, and …

Aspirational Rights And The Two-Output Thesis, Mitchell N. Berman

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The "Duty" To Be A Rational Shareholder, David A. Hoffman

All Faculty Scholarship

How and when do courts determine that corporate disclosures are actionable under the federal securities laws? The applicable standard is materiality: would a (mythical) reasonable investor have considered a given disclosure important. As I establish through empirical and statistical testing of approximately 500 cases analyzing the materiality standard, judicial findings of immateriality are remarkably common, and have been stable over time. Materiality's scope results in the dismissal of a large number of claims, and creates a set of cases in which courts attempt to explain and defend their vision of who is, and is not, a reasonable investor. Thus, materiality …

A Reckless Response To Rape: A Reply To Ayres And Baker, Kimberly Kessler Ferzan

All Faculty Scholarship

In a recent article in the University of Chicago Law Review, Professors Ian Ayres and Katharine Baker propose the crime of "reckless sexual conduct," criminalizing unprotected first-encounter sexual intercourse. The goals of this proposal are to combat the epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases by requiring condom use and to reduce acquaintance rape by "forcing" communication. While the goals are admirable, the proposal is deeply flawed. As public health legislation, it is overinclusive, thereby punishing the morally innocent, and its conception of consent as an affirmative defense fundamentally misunderstands criminal responsibility. As rape reform, which is arguably the true aim of …

Addiction, Genetics, And Criminal Responsibility, Stephen J. Morse

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.