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Full-Text Articles in Law

Coase, Herbert J. Hovenkamp Oct 2013

Coase, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

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This brief essay considers the career, contributions, and influence of Ronald Coase, who passed away in September, 2013. Comments are welcome.


Fifty Years Before Brady, Colin Starger May 2013

Fifty Years Before Brady, Colin Starger

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In marking the fiftieth anniversary of Brady v. Maryland, a fitting way to appreciate the historic significance of Justice Douglas’ opinion for the Court is to turn back the pages another fifty years. Brady’s profound contribution to our criminal justice system becomes apparent by considering the impoverished state of the Supreme Court’s due process doctrine as it stood a century ago. In the fifty years that led up to Brady, the Court confronted a series of racially and politically charged cases that forced constitutional soul searching about due process in the face of rank injustice. The story of the Court’s …


The Wires Go To War: The U.S. Experiment With Government Ownership Of The Telephone System During World War I, Michael A. Janson, Christopher S. Yoo Apr 2013

The Wires Go To War: The U.S. Experiment With Government Ownership Of The Telephone System During World War I, Michael A. Janson, Christopher S. Yoo

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One of the most distinctive characteristics of the U.S. telephone system is that it has always been privately owned, in stark contrast to the pattern of government ownership followed by virtually every other nation. What is not widely known is how close the United States came to falling in line with the rest of the world. For the one-year period following July 31, 1918, the exigencies of World War I led the federal government to take over the U.S. telephone system. A close examination of this episode sheds new light into a number of current policy issues. The history confirms …


Rabban's Law's History, Herbert J. Hovenkamp Mar 2013

Rabban's Law's History, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

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This is a brief review of David Rabban's new book: Law's History: American Legal Thought and the Transatlantic Turn to History (Cambridge, 2013).


The Classical American State And The Regulation Of Morals, Herbert J. Hovenkamp Feb 2013

The Classical American State And The Regulation Of Morals, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

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The United States has a strong tradition of state regulation that stretches back to the Commonwealth ideal of Revolutionary times and grew steadily throughout the nineteenth century. But regulation also had more than its share of critics. A core principle of Jacksonian democracy was that too much regulation was for the benefit of special interests, mainly wealthier and propertied classes. The ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment after the Civil War provided the lever that laissez faire legal writers used to make a more coherent Constitutional case against increasing regulation. How much they actually succeeded has always been subject to dispute. …


The Dialectic Of Stare Decisis Doctrine, Colin Starger Jan 2013

The Dialectic Of Stare Decisis Doctrine, Colin Starger

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In the United States Supreme Court, the concept of stare decisis operates as both metadoctrine and doctrine. On the one hand, stare decisis functions as a generally applicable presumption in favor of adherence to precedent. This presumption is metadoctrinal because it provides a generic argument against overruling that applies independently of the substantive context of any given case. On the other hand, when the Court considers overruling a particularly controversial precedent, it usually weighs the constraining force of stare decisis by invoking factors and tests announced in its own prior caselaw. In other words, the Court has precedent about when …


Section 1983 Is Born: The Interlocking Supreme Court Stories Of Tenney And Monroe, Sheldon Nahmod Jan 2013

Section 1983 Is Born: The Interlocking Supreme Court Stories Of Tenney And Monroe, Sheldon Nahmod

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No abstract provided.


Treaty Options: Towards A Behavioral Understanding Of Treaty Design, Jean Galbraith Jan 2013

Treaty Options: Towards A Behavioral Understanding Of Treaty Design, Jean Galbraith

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Rational choice theory is the dominant paradigm through which scholars of international law and international relations approach treaty design. In this Article, I suggest a different approach using a combination of empirical observations of state behavior and theoretical insights from behavioral economics. I focus on one aspect of multilateral treaty design: namely, treaty reservations and associated legal mechanisms which allow states to vary the degree of their formal commitments to treaties. I call these mechanisms “treaty options.” I argue that the framing of treaty options matters powerfully — and does so in ways inconsistent with rational choice theory, but consistent …


Shareholder Derivative Litigation’S Historical And Normative Foundations, Ann M. Scarlett Jan 2013

Shareholder Derivative Litigation’S Historical And Normative Foundations, Ann M. Scarlett

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Scholars and judges often say that the United States imported the shareholder derivative action from England, but that is not entirely accurate. What the United States imported from the English Court of Chancery was the necessary parties rule and its exceptions. During the 1800s, U.S. courts recognized an exception to the necessary parties rule that permitted representative lawsuits, but the contours of these actions differed from such actions in England. Today, these lawsuits would be classified as class actions and shareholder derivative actions in the United States. The shared history of these two forms of representative litigation has long been …


Micro-Symposium On Orin Kerr's 'A Theory Of Law', Laura Appleman, Shawn Bayern, Adam D. Chandler, Robert Cheren, Miriam A. Cherry, Ross E. Davies, Lee Anne Fennell, Paul A. Gowder, Caitlin Hartsell, Kieran Healy, Robert A. James, Jeffrey H. Kahn, Orin S. Kerr, Jacob T. Levy, Jeffrey M. Lipshaw, Orly Lobel, Geoffrey A. Manne, Chad M. Oldfather, Ronak Patel, Jeffrey A. Pojanowski, Alexandra J. Roberts, Kent Scheidegger, Arthur Stock, Anders Walker Jan 2013

Micro-Symposium On Orin Kerr's 'A Theory Of Law', Laura Appleman, Shawn Bayern, Adam D. Chandler, Robert Cheren, Miriam A. Cherry, Ross E. Davies, Lee Anne Fennell, Paul A. Gowder, Caitlin Hartsell, Kieran Healy, Robert A. James, Jeffrey H. Kahn, Orin S. Kerr, Jacob T. Levy, Jeffrey M. Lipshaw, Orly Lobel, Geoffrey A. Manne, Chad M. Oldfather, Ronak Patel, Jeffrey A. Pojanowski, Alexandra J. Roberts, Kent Scheidegger, Arthur Stock, Anders Walker

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For more than a century, careful readers of the Green Bag have known that “[t]here is nothing sacred in a theory of law...which has outlived its usefulness or which was radically wrong from the beginning...The question is What is the law and what is the true public policy?” Professor Orin Kerr bravely, creatively, and eloquently answered that question in his article, “A Theory of Law,” in the Autumn 2012 issue of the Green Bag. Uniquely among all theories of law that I know of, Kerr’s answer to the fundamental question of law and true public policy enables all scholars to …


Pluralistic Nonoriginalism And The Combinability Problem, Mitchell N. Berman Jan 2013

Pluralistic Nonoriginalism And The Combinability Problem, Mitchell N. Berman

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No abstract provided.


Pauli Murray And The Twentieth-Century Quest For Legal And Social Equality, Serena Mayeri Jan 2013

Pauli Murray And The Twentieth-Century Quest For Legal And Social Equality, Serena Mayeri

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No abstract provided.


On What Distinguishes New Originalism From Old: A Jurisprudential Take, Mitchell N. Berman Jan 2013

On What Distinguishes New Originalism From Old: A Jurisprudential Take, Mitchell N. Berman

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No abstract provided.


The Anomaly Of Executions: The Cruel And Unusual Punishments Clause In The 21st Century, John Bessler Jan 2013

The Anomaly Of Executions: The Cruel And Unusual Punishments Clause In The 21st Century, John Bessler

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This Article describes the anomaly of executions in the context of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Eighth Amendment jurisprudence. While the Supreme Court routinely reads the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause to protect prisoners from harm, the Court simultaneously interprets the Eighth Amendment to allow inmates to be executed. Corporal punishments short of death have long been abandoned in America’s penal system, yet executions — at least in a few locales, heavily concentrated in the South — persist. This Article, which seeks a principled and much more consistent interpretation of the Eighth Amendment, argues that executions should be declared unconstitutional as …