Law Commons^™

Markets For Markets: Origins And Subjects Of Information Markets, Miriam A. Cherry, Robert L. Rogers

All Faculty Scholarship

This Article focuses on why information markets have covered certain subject areas, sometimes of minor importance, while neglecting other subject areas of greater significance. To put it another way, why do information markets exist to predict the outcome of the papal conclave and the Michael Jackson trial, but no information markets exist to predict government policy conclusions, Supreme Court decisions, or the rulings in Delaware corporate law cases? Arguably, from either a dollar value or a social utility perspective, these areas of law and business would be more important than the outcome of, say, the Jackson trial. Why, then, do …

A Comparative Approach To Teaching Criminal Procedure And Its Application To The Post-Investigative Stage, Stephen C. Thaman

All Faculty Scholarship

This article addresses why a comparative perspective should be brought into a basic bar course like criminal procedure. American courts and students should be aware of how other countries process their criminal cases to determine whether we can learn from them. It discusses archetypes of criminal procedure as teaching tools, applications of comparative models in the post-investigative stage of criminal procedure, the right to an oral immediate trial and the right to confront witnesses, and the division of labor between lay and professional judges in deciding facts, guilt, and sentencing. By immersing oneself in comparative law and the history of …

It's About The Relationship: Collaborative Law In The Employment Context, Marcia L. Mccormick

All Faculty Scholarship

Work is central to American life and drives us in fundamental ways. And the workplace, as a result, dominates our lives. We are spending ever greater amounts of time in the workplace and less time in civic and social engagements. As a consequence, our relationships at work have become so significant that they are nearly as important to us as our family relationships. In fact, the employment relationship is similar to the family relationship in the emotional support from coworkers it can provide and in the financial support it provides. Because the employment relationship is so common and psychologically so …

The Mysterious Survival Of The Policy Against Informed Consent Liability For Hospitals, Robert Gatter

All Faculty Scholarship

The role of hospitals in managing the informed consent process for hospital-based treatments has expanded substantially over the last several decades. Most recently, many hospitals have installed multi-media platforms designed to provide a patient with basic information about a recommended procedure, including its associated risks, and to record the patient’s consent to or rejection of the procedure. Yet, despite the substantial control that hospitals exercise over the informed consent process, state courts routinely dismiss informed consent claims brought against hospitals, holding that only physicians have the training and expertise to satisfy informed consent obligations and therefore that only physicians may …

Jury Trial And The Principles Of Transnational Civil Procedure, Geoffrey C. Hazard Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Open Access In Law Teaching: A New Approach To Legal Education, Matthew T. Bodie

All Faculty Scholarship

The "open access" movement seeks to change our approach to the distribution of scholarship in the fields of science, medicine, the social sciences, and law. This Essay argues for the application of these principles to legal education itself. Open access would mean greater flexibility, interaction, and innovation in the creation of course materials. It would lead to new teaching methods and new forms of feedback between student and professor. Open access centers on particular legal subject areas could facilitate national and international collaboration. Ultimately, the open access law school would ameliorate the growing standardization and commodification of legal education by …

The Best Puffery Article Ever, David A. Hoffman

All Faculty Scholarship

This Article provides the first extensive legal treatment of an important defense in the law of fraud and contracts: puffery. Legal authorities commonly say they make decisions about whether defendants should be able to utter exaggerated, optimistic, lies based on assumptions about buyer behavior, concluding that consumers do not rely on such speech. However, as the Article shows, such analyses are proxies for a deeper analytical question: does the speech encourage or discourage a type of consumption activity that the court deems welfare maximizing? The Article presents a novel constitutional analysis of puffery doctrine that focuses on the meaning of …

Offer-Of-Judgment Rules And Civil Litigation: An Empirical Study Of Automobile Insurance Litigation In The East, Tom Baker, Albert H. Yoon

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Final Report Of The Maldivian Penal Law & Sentencing Codification Project: Text Of Draft Code (Volume 1) And Official Commentary (Volume 2), Paul H. Robinson, Criminal Law Research Group -- University Of Pennsylvania

All Faculty Scholarship

The United Nations Development Programme and the Government of the Maldives commissioned the drafting of a penal code based upon existing Maldivian law, which meant primarily a codification of Shari'a. This is the Final Report of that codification project. A description of the process that produced this Report and the drafting principles behind it, as well as a discussion of the special challenges of codifying Islamic criminal law, are contained in an article at http://ssrn.com/abstract=941443.

Deriving Support From International Law For The Right To Counsel In Civil Cases, Sarah Paoletti

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Uselessness Of Public Use, Abraham Bell, Gideon Parchomovsky

All Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court decision of Kelo v. City of New London has been denounced by legal scholars from the entire political spectrum and given rise to numerous legislative proposals to reverse Kelo's deferential interpretation of the Public Use Clause of the Fifth Amendment, and instead, limit the use of eminent domain when taken property is transferred to private hands. In this Essay we argue that the criticisms of Kelo are ill-conceived and misguided. They are based on a narrow analysis of eminent domain that fails to take into account the full panoply of government powers with respect to property. Given …

The Essential Role Of Securities Regulation, Zohar Goshen, Gideon Parchomovsky

All Faculty Scholarship

This Article posits that the essential role of securities regulation is to create a competitive market for sophisticated professional investors and analysts (information traders). The Article advances two related theses-one descriptive and the other normative. Descriptively, the Article demonstrates that securities regulation is specifically designed to facilitate and protect the work of information traders. Securities regulation may be divided into three broad categories: (i) disclosure duties; (ii) restrictions on fraud and manipulation; and (iii) restrictions on insider trading-each of which contributes to the creation of a vibrant market for information traders. Disclosure duties reduce information traders' costs of searching and …

Popular Constitutionalism And The Rule Of Recognition: Whose Practices Ground U.S. Law?, Matthew D. Adler

All Faculty Scholarship

The law within each legal system is a function of the practices of some social group. In short, law is a kind of socially grounded norm. H.L.A Hart famously developed this view in his book, The Concept of Law, by arguing that law derives from a social rule, the so-called “rule of recognition.” But the proposition that social facts play a foundational role in producing law is a point of consensus for all modern jurisprudents in the Anglo-American tradition: not just Hart and his followers in the positivist school, most prominently Joseph Raz and Jules Coleman, but also the anti-positivist …

Brain Overclaim Syndrome And Criminal Responsibility: A Diagnostic Note, Stephen J. Morse

All Faculty Scholarship

This brief diagnostic note identifies a cognitive pathology, "Brain Overclaim Syndrome [BOS]," that often afflicts those inflamed by the fascinating new discoveries in the neurosciences. It begins by suggesting how one should think about the relation of neuroscience (or any other material explanation of human behavior) to criminal responsibility, distinguishing between internal and external critiques based on neuroscience. It then describes the signs and symptoms of BOS, the essential feature of which is to make claims about the implications of neuroscience for criminal responsibility that cannot be conceptually or empirically sustained. It then applies the diagnostic lens of BOS to …

Introduction, Anita L. Allen

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The "Bad Man" Goes To Washington: The Effect Of Political Influence On Corporate Duty, Jill E. Fisch

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Hart On Social Rules And The Foundations Of Law: Liberating The Internal Point Of View, Stephen R. Perry

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Equilibrium Content Of Corporate Federalism, William W. Bratton, Joseph A. Mccahery

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Section 83(B) Election For Restricted Stock: A Joint Tax Perspective, Michael S. Knoll

All Faculty Scholarship

In the wake of the Financial Accounting Standard Board's decision to require firms that grant employee stock options (ESOs) to treat such options as an expense, many large and sophisticated firms are switching from ESOs to restricted stock. Restricted stock - stock granted to an employee as part of her compensation and subject to the condition that if she leaves the firm within a period of time (often 3 years) she forfeits the stock - appears to be on its way to becoming the dominant form of equity-based pay in the United States. Yet, in spite of its prominence, little …

Shame And The Meanings Of Punishment, Chad Flanders

All Faculty Scholarship

Debates over shaming punishments have raged over the past few years, with people like Dan Kahan and Eric Posner for them, while James Whitman and Martha Nussbaum have entered the fray strongly against them. This Essay argues that both sides in the shaming punishment debate have it only party right. Those who favor shaming sanctions are correct that we should (all else being equal) favor those punishments which are expressive rather than those that involve some form of hard treatment. And those who reject shaming sanctions are correct that such sanctions involve forms of humiliation and denials of dignity that …

Constitutional Decision Rules For Juries, Catherine T. Struve

All Faculty Scholarship

Recent scholarship on constitutional decision rules distinguishes courts from other constitutional decision makers, but has not explored distinctions - within the judicial institution - between judges and juries. Correlatively, social science literature on jury comprehension has proposed methods for improving jury instructions, but that literature has not considered in any detail the doctrinal complexities of constitutional law. This Article, drawing upon both fields, presents an agenda for crafting constitutional decision rules specifically for juries. Implementing this agenda will enhance the adjudication of constitutional tort claims, and could also render constitutional doctrine more accessible to non-lawyers.

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.