Law Commons^™

Offensive Non-Mutual Issue Preclusion Revisited, Edward D. Cavanagh

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Some forty years ago, in Parklane Hosiery Co. v. Shore, the United States Supreme Court held that the rule of mutuality of estoppel was no longer an absolute bar to the invocation of issue preclusion for the benefit of a plaintiff who had been a stranger to the prior (F-1) litigation against a defendant who had been party to both the F-I and present (F-2) cases. In so ruling, the Supreme Court gave its imprimatur to Judge Traynor's dramatic takedown of the mutuality rule in Bernhard v. Bank of America National Trust and Savings Association nearly four decades …

Hey, Big Spender: Ethical Guidelines For Dispute Resolution Professionals When Parties Are Backed By Third-Party Funders, Elayne E. Greenberg

Faculty Publications

This first-of-its-kind paper introduces ethical guidelines and suggested practices for dispute resolution providers and neutrals when third-party funders provide financial backing for parties in U.S. domestic arbitrations and mediations. Sophisticated third-party funders have realized that litigation and dispute resolution are fast-growing, unregulated investment opportunities. Seizing these opportunities, third-party funders are now making billions of dollars in profits through their strategic investments in domestic and global litigation and dispute resolution with few ethical rules or regulations to curtail their investment behavior.3 Preferring to be secretive about the terms of their funding contracts and invisible in their work, third- party funders are …

The Legal Imagination: Studies In The Nature Of Legal Thought And Expression, Rachel H. Smith

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

This book, now available in a 45th-anniversary edition, is a marvel for its breadth and creativity. It remains a must-read for lawyers, law students, and law professors, even those who are not familiar with the Law as Literature movement for which the book was a founding contribution. Those who read it decades ago would be well served by a revisit because the book’s care and attention to legal language remain uniquely powerful.

Scope And Justification Of The Right Of Publicity, Jeremy N. Sheff

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Thank you to Professor June Besek, and thanks to everyone here at Columbia for the invitation. June, to correct one of your introductions here—Mark McKenna is too humble to say so, but in addition to being a widely recognized scholar, he was elected yesterday to the American Law Institute, which is well deserved given his immense contributions to Intellectual Property Law scholarship.

Mark and I have talked about this topic, in part in preparation for today, and so a lot of what I say is going to reflect some of what he has said, and I think that is …

Legal Sets, Jeremy N. Sheff

Faculty Publications

In this Article, I propose that the practices of legal reasoning and analysis are helpfully understood as being primarily concerned not with rules or propositions, but with sets. This Article develops a formal model of the role of sets in the practices of legal actors in a common-law system defined by a recursive relationship between cases and rules. In doing so, it demonstrates how conceiving of legal doctrines as a universe of discourse comprising (sometimes nested or overlapping) sets of cases can clarify the logical structure that governs marginal cases and help organize the available options for resolving such cases …

Business Development Companies – The Basics, Christine Lazaro

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Business Development Companies (“BDCs”) are a type of closed end fund. They were created by Congress in 1980, through amendments to the Investment Company Act of 1940 (the “1940 Act”).

BDCs were first created when a venture capital pool manager lobbied Congress to make it easier to invest in venture capital pools and private equity investments. While there was early interest in BDCs, their popularity waned through the 1990s. Since 2000, they have once again regained their popularity.

BDCs provide funding to small and mid-sized businesses. Following the financial crisis, BDCs were able to provide loans to businesses that …

Facebook V. Sullivan: Public Figures And Newsworthiness In Online Speech, Thomas E. Kadri, Kate Klonick

Faculty Publications

In the United States, there are now two systems to adjudicate disputes about harmful speech. The first is older and more established: the legal system in which judges apply constitutional law to limit tort claims alleging injuries caused by speech. The second is newer and less familiar: the content-moderation system in which platforms like Facebook implement the rules that govern online speech. These platforms are not bound by the First Amendment. But, as it turns out, they rely on many of the tools used by courts to resolve tensions between regulating harmful speech and preserving free expression—particularly the entangled concepts …

Passive Avoidance, Anita S. Krishnakumar

Faculty Publications

In its nascent years, the Roberts Court quickly developed a reputation—and drew sharp criticism—for using the canon of constitutional avoidance to rewrite statutes in controversial, high-profile cases. In recent years, however, the Court seems to have taken a new turn, quietly creating exceptions or reading in statutory conditions in order to evade potentially serious constitutional problems without expressly discussing the constitutional issue or invoking the avoidance canon. In fact, the avoidance canon seems largely, and conspicuously, missing from many cases decided during the Court’s most recent Terms, playing a significant role in justifying the Court’s construction in only one majority …

An Overview Of The Regulation Best Interest Rule Package, Christine Lazaro

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

On June 5, 2019, the SEC adopted the Regulation Best Interest Rule Package. The package consists of Regulation Best Interest: The Broker-Dealer Standard of Conduct; Form CRS Relationship Summary and Amendments to Form ADV; Commission Interpretation Regarding Standard of Conduct for Investment Advisers; and Commission Interpretation Regarding the Solely Incidental Prong of the Broker-Dealer Exclusion from the Definition of Investment Adviser. This article will summarize each of the releases.

The Lost History Of Insider Trading, Michael A. Perino

Faculty Publications

Common conceptions about the history of insider trading norms in the United States are inaccurate and incomplete. In his landmark 1966 book Insider Trading and the Stock Market, Dean Henry Manne depicted a world in which insider trading was both widespread and universally accepted. It was SEC enforcement efforts in the early 1960s, he contended, that swayed public opinion to condemn what had previously been considered a natural and unobjectionable market feature. For five decades, the legal academy has largely accepted Manne’s historical description, and the vigorous debates over whether the federal government should prosecute insider trading have assumed, …

Fintech Lending: A Study Of Expectations Versus Market Outcomes, Vincent Dilorenzo

Faculty Publications

This article explores expectations and outcomes. It documents the expectations for the fintech lending industry, which has emerged in this decade, and compares such expectations to market outcomes. It presents an evidence-based analysis for policy making decisions. Part one of the article documents expectations—possible benefits and risks of fintech lending—through large-scale surveys and interviews of industry, consumer and government stakeholders. Part two of the article examines market outcomes—benefits and risks that have been realized or failed to materialize as documented by studies of substantial data sets of various types of fintech loans. The benefits and risks explored include increased access …

Finding Balance: Using Employment Law Problems To Achieve Multiple Learning Goals In Persuasive Legal Writing, Rosa Castello

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Legal Writing professors, like myself, face the same challenge each new semester: how can I effectively and efficiently help students learn one of the most important skills for a practicing lawyer? And one large hurdle in this quest to make our students good legal writers is creating a trial motion or appellate brief problem that helps them develop the particular skills required for persuasive legal writing. The act of creating the problem is sometimes like tightrope walking̶ finding just the right balance of facts and law to challenge students and help develop and enhance vital research, analytical, organizational, writing, …

Vaccination Law 101: A Guide For Children’S Lawyers, Christal Cammock, Jennifer Baum

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Today, U.S. children are typically vaccinated against 11 deadly, and formerly common, diseases: diphtheria, Hib disease, hepatitis B, measles, mumps, pertussis (whooping cough), polio, rubella, pneumococcal disease, tetanus, and varicella (chicken pox). But it wasn’t always so. Vaccines are a relatively recent development in medical history. The world’s first vaccine, for smallpox, was discovered in the late 1700s. A hundred years later, Louis Pasteur discovered the second vaccine, for rabies. By the mid-1900s, technological and medical advances drove more rapid vaccine development, and in 1963, the first measles vaccine was approved.

Before the measles vaccine became available, up to …

Board Diversity By Term Limits?, Darren Rosenblum, Yaron Nili

Faculty Publications

Four-fifths of the corporate board seats in the United States are held by men and a shocking number of companies lack any female representation on their boards. While institutional investors have pushed these companies for change, California took a more aggressive step and followed several European countries by mandating a quota for board representation. Heated argument has ensued over what diversity we should prioritize and what mechanisms should be used to promote diversity. Yet could these challenges be avoided altogether through the use of term limits?

This Article is the first academic inquiry exploring the connection between term limits and …

California Dreaming?, Darren Rosenblum

Faculty Publications

Over the past few years, California became the setting for shocking tales of sex inequality and abuse in Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Decades after women achieved educational parity, men still run the corporate world. In response to these stories exposed by the #MeToo movement, California joined the transnational corporate board quota movement by converting its voluntary quota into a hard one. Will California’s first mover status overcome constitutional objections and inspire other jurisdictions to act. Or is just utopian dreaming, California-style? This Essay argues that despite its many flaws, the quota may succeed in curbing male over-representation on corporate boards. …

Uniform Climate Control, Anthony Moffa

Faculty Publications

In Washington, D.C., the “Green New Deal” may be nothing more than a symbolic, Twitter-friendly legislative campaign with no real hope of adoption. But in New York, it is the new legal reality. The efforts of sub-national governments - like New York’s - to tackle widespread environmental harms, in particular climate change, have drawn increased media and scholarly attention since the United States declared its intention to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. In truth, the trend towards so-called “environmental federalism” predates the election of President Donald J. Trump. We are ushering in the next generation of environmental laws, and those …

Ad Hoc Diplomats, Ryan M. Scoville

Faculty Publications

Article II of the Constitution grants the president power to appoint “Ambassadors” and “other public Ministers” with the advice and consent of the Senate. By all accounts, this language requires Senate confirmation for the appointment of resident ambassadors and other diplomats of similar rank and tenure. Yet these are hardly the only agents of U.S. foreign relations. Ad hoc diplomats—individuals chosen exclusively by the president to complete limited and temporary assignments—play a comparably significant role in addressing international crises, negotiating treaties, and otherwise executing foreign policy.

This Article critically examines the appointments process for such irregular agents. An orthodox view …

The Role Of Pressure Groups And Problem Definition In Crafting Legislative Solutions To The Opioid Crisis, Taleed El-Sabawi

Faculty Publications

Organized interest groups and federal administrative agencies have historically been influential in defining problem drug use during nationwide crisis. As such, the manner in which these pressure groups defined the problem may have influenced or, at least, provided support for legislators’ decisions to shy away from a criminal justice approach and towards acceptance of a more “health-oriented” — one that did not comprehensively address demand factors or demonstrate a commitment to reforming U.S. drug policy to meet international standards of best practice. In an effort to provide a snapshot of what such involvement may look like, this article explores the …

Half-Baked: The Science And Politics Of Legal Pot, Joelle A. Moreno

Faculty Publications

Weed, herb, grass, bud, ganja, Mary Jane, hash oil, sinsemilla, budder, and shatter. Marijuana – whether viewed as a medicine or intoxicant – is fast becoming a part of everyday life, with the CDC reporting 7,000 new users every day and the American market projected to grow to $20 billion by 2020. Based on early campaign rhetoric, by that same year the U.S. could have a pro-marijuana president.

Despite its growing acceptance and popularity, marijuana remains illegal under federal law. Like heroin, LSD, and ecstasy, marijuana is a DEA Schedule I drug reflecting a Congressional determination that marijuana is both …

Using Science To Build Better Learners: One School's Successful Efforts To Raise Its Bar Passage Rates In An Era Of Decline, Louis N. Schulze Jr.

Faculty Publications

What measures can law schools take to improve student performance and bar passage? The answer is not what you think.

Recent developments in the science of learning show that most law students learn wrong. In fact, ineffective methods of learning pervade all levels of education. We now know that widely accepted learning and study strategies that were once considered gospel are actually deeply flawed. Yet we still embrace and propagate those myths.

Meanwhile, bar passage rates and law student performance are plummeting. Everyone in legal education is asking “what can we do?” But, “what can we do?” is the wrong …

Securities & Exchange Commission Vs. Elon Musk & The First Amendment, Jerry W. Markham

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Carrots, Sticks And Problem Drug Use: The Law Enforcement Lobby's Contribution To The Policy Discourse On Drug Use & The Opioid Crisis, Taleed El-Sabawi

Faculty Publications

Despite the growing support for the idea that problem drug use should be treated like a chronic medical disease, some law enforcement interest groups, including trial court judges associations, prosecuting attorneys associations, and police associations (“law enforcement groups” or “criminal justice actors”), continue to argue for the use of the criminal justice system to address the nation’s drug crises. The justification for the use of the criminal justice system to oversee the psychological and medical treatment of persons with substance use disorders (SUDs) is based on the belief that persons with SUDs are deviants, who cannot refrain from engaging in …

Private Ordering And Improving Information Flow To The Board Of Directors: The Duty To Inform Bylaw, Jennifer O'Hare

Faculty Publications

It seems that almost every day there is another report of a corporate scandal at a public company. Whether the scandal involves sexual harassment by senior management or widespread illegal conduct by employees, the first question asked by investors and the media is usually, “Where was the board?” And the board’s response is almost always, “We didn’t know.” Directors of public companies rely on officers to provide the information the board needs to manage the corporation, but, strangely enough, officers may not even be legally required to provide information to the board. The Delaware General Corporation Law is silent on …

The Free-Market Family And Children’S Caretaking, Maxine Eichner

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Investment Imperative, Kate Sablosky Elengold

Faculty Publications

This Article names and identifies the “investment imperative” as the widely-held belief that higher education is necessary to increase one’s financial prosperity and social standing in America. Increasingly, higher education policy has supported the investment imperative by shifting the benefit, burden, and risk of higher education from the public to the private consumer. This has resulted in a patchwork of laws that encourage education at any cost, primarily driven by personal debt, and without concomitant regulations that control for instructional quality.

Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship, empirical studies, and original interviews with student loan borrowers across the country, this Article argues …

Citation Stickiness, Kevin Bennardo, Alexa Z. Chew

Faculty Publications

This Article is an empirical study of what we call citation stickiness. A citation is sticky if it appears in one of the parties’ briefs and then again in the court’s opinion. Imagine that the parties use their briefs to toss citations in the court’s direction. Some of those citations stick and appear in the opinion—these are the sticky citations. Some of those citations don’t stick and go unmentioned by the court—these are the unsticky ones. Finally, some sources were never mentioned by the parties yet appear in the court’s opinion. These authorities are endogenous—they spring from the court itself. …

Constituencies And Control In Statutory Drafting: Interviews With Government Tax Counsels, Shuyi Oei, Leigh Z. Osofsky

Faculty Publications

Tax statutes have long been derided as convoluted and unreadable. But there is little existing research about drafting practices that helps us contextualize such critiques. In this Article, we conduct the first indepth empirical examination of how tax law drafting and formulation decisions are made. We report findings from interviews with government counsels who participated in the tax legislative process over the past four decades. Our interviews revealed that tax legislation drafting decisions are both targeted to and controlled by experts. Most counsels did not consider statutory formulation or readability important, as long as substantive meaning was accurate. Many held …

The Modern Case For Withholding, Kathleen Delaney Thomas

Faculty Publications

Who is responsible for paying taxes to the government? Currently, the answer depends on one’s employment status. Employees enjoy the luxury of not having to think about tax remittance during the year because their employers withhold taxes from their paychecks. Non-employees, on the other hand, face a much more onerous system. They must keep track of and budget for taxes during the year, make quarterly remittances to the IRS, and may face penalties for failing to do so. Although this regime has been in place for many decades, there are several reasons why reform may be in order.

First, the …

Abandoning Predictions, Kevin Bennardo

Faculty Publications

Analytical documents are a hallmark of the law school legal writing curriculum and of the practice of law. In these documents, the author applies a body of law to a set of facts and reaches a conclusion. Oftentimes, that conclusion is phrased as a prediction (“The court is likely to find . . .”), and many academics even refer to analytical documents as “predictive” document types. If that describes you, my goal is to convince you to change your ways. Instead of conceptualizing legal analysis as “predictive,” we should simply conceptualize it as analytical. Rather than writing predictive conclusions to …

Consumer Protection After A Global Financial Crisis, Melissa B. Jacoby

Faculty Publications

Like other major events, the Global Financial Crisis generated a large and diffuse body of academic analysis. As part of a broader call for operationalizing the study of crises as policy shocks and resulting responses, which inevitably derail from elegant theories, we examine how regulatory protagonists approached consumer protection after the GFC, guided by six elements that should be considered in any policy shock context. After reviewing the introduction and philosophy of the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection, created as part of the Dodd–Frank Act of 2010, we consider four examples of how consumer protection unfolded in the crises’ aftermath …