Law Commons^™

Epic Fail: Harkenrider V. Hochul And New York's 2022 Misadventure In "Independent" Redistricting, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

In 2014, following passage in two successive legislatures, New York voters ratified amendments to the state constitution to change both the process and substantive rules governing the decennial redistricting of the state’s legislature and congressional delegation. The constitution now includes multiple new substantive requirements for districting plans, including a prohibition on the “draw[ing of] [districts] to discourage competition or for the purpose of favoring or disfavoring incumbents or other particular candidates or political parties.” It also directs the creation of an “Independent Redistricting Commission” (“IRC”) to draw up, for submission to the legislature, maps that, following an extensive process of …

Killing Precedent: The Slaughter-House Constitution, Maeve Glass

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay offers a revisionist account of the Slaughter-House Cases. It argues that the opinion’s primary significance lies not in its gutting of the Privileges or Immunities Clause but in its omission of a people’s archive of slavery.

Decades before the decision, Black abolitionists began compiling the testimonies of refugees who had fled slavery. By 1872, this archival practice had produced a published record of Black struggle and become a platform for the celebration of Black resistance and a new era of Black leadership. Although the lead compiler of this record sent a copy to the Chief Justice, the …

Comparing Agency Costs In Contract Production: Private Equity M&A Versus Corporate And Sovereign Bonds, Stephen J. Choi, Mitu Gulati, Robert E. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

Different areas of transactional practice, such as M&A or high-yield bonds and sovereign bonds, vary in terms of the degree to which they are afflicted by agency problems. In some areas, clients are actively involved in deal making, and in others they are not present until well after the deal is done. If vulnerability to agency problems differs, and these agency problems impact the quality of contract production, one would expect those differences to appear when comparing contract production across practice areas. This Article compares one feature of contract production — the problems of encrusted and sticky boiler-plate — across …

Debt Textualism And Creditor-On-Creditor Violence: A Modest Plea To Keep The Faith, Eric L. Talley, Sneha Pandya

Faculty Scholarship

In this article, we argue that debt textualism played a key role in laying the groundwork for our present malaise by encouraging contracts to become increasingly bloated, complex, and rigid up to the point of buckling completely. The dense contractual landscape wrought by debt textualism, when freshly populated with a calculating coterie of financial mercenaries, has transformed corporate lending markets into an elaborate and costly contest of Hunger Games-worthy contractual “gotcha” where (a) lenders scour loan agreements for unappreciated loopholes to undercut borrowers; (b) borrowers do the same in an attempt to counteract lenders; and (c) permutated coalitions from …

What Is At Stake If Antitrust Regulation Fails?, Anu Bradford

Faculty Scholarship

Momentum for regulating Big Tech is growing across the world. The European Union has been leading this fight for the past decade, frequently leveraging its antitrust laws, data protection laws, and other regulatory instruments to reclaim control over the industry. But the EU is no longer the lone crusader prepared to take on the tech giants. The Chinese government has initiated an unprecedented crackdown on its tech sector in the name of advancing "common prosperity" and ensuring that its tech giants do not overpower the state. The tide may now finally be turning even in the United States, where Congress …

The Possibility Of Modern India, Madhav Khosla

Faculty Scholarship

The history of modern constitutionalism has immortalized several events of much moment. It has, however, cast scant attention upon a great deal other episodes that merit greater engagement. Among this latter category is the making of modern India – the crafting of the constitutional text that would create the world’s largest democracy. The Indian case invites attention not merely because of its size but rather because of its conditions. This postcolonial experiment involved the coming together of democratization and constitution-making in a setting that was poor, uneducated, and divided, and one that was stepped in centuries of tradition. Unlike in …

Concluding Thoughts, Morgan Ricks, Ganesh Sitaraman, Shelley Welton, Lev Menand

Faculty Scholarship

Writing a book review, especially when that book weighs in at 1,200 pages, is an act of generosity. We are so very grateful to all the contributors for their deep engagement with Networks, Platforms, and Utilities: Law and Policy.

Appropriations, The Budget, And Public Debt Transparency: The Fiscal Panorama, Gillian E. Metzger, Anna Gelpern, Alissa Ardito Ashcroft, Erika Lunder, Karla Vasquez-Suarez

Faculty Scholarship

Appropriations, budget, and public debt law lurk in the recesses of public law. Every now and again, in a blaze of glory and spilled ink, they emerge under the guise of a constitutional issue. Should a constitutional question arise, usually separation of powers, amid a political stalemate, then an extended shutdown or debt ceiling drama steal the spotlight. After a last-minute compromise or, rarely, a judicial ruling, the green eyeshades return. Money, finance, public spending – whether mandatory or discretionary – exert little charm over lawyers, who went to law school to avoid arithmetic. But the federal government pays for …

Ignorance Of The Rules Of Omission: An Essay On Privilege Law, Rebecca Wexler

Faculty Scholarship

Evidentiary privileges--that is, rules that empower people to withhold evidence from legal proceedings-are one thread in a mesh of secrecy powers that control the flow of information in society. They are part and parcel of the laws, rules, norms, and practicalities that determine who can conceal and who can compel, that allocate power based on access to knowledge and its opposite. Despite the significance of privileges and of the harms that they produce, our understanding of this body of law has profound gaps.5 The questions posed above turn out to be more challenging than they might at first appear. Notwithstanding …

Energy Insecurity Mitigation: The Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program And Other Low-Income Relief Programs In The Us, Andrea Nishi, Diana Hernández, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

Energy insecurity, defined as the “inability to meet basic household energy needs,” can be both a chronic and an acute problem. Chronic energy insecurity manifests as an inability to access or afford adequate supplies of energy, while acute energy insecurity arises when infrastructural, maintenance, environmental, or other external sources disrupt or impede access to energy. A substantial number of individuals and families across the United States experience energy insecurity, which can lead to a variety of adverse consequences including residential instability and poor health outcomes.

The Major Questions Doctrine: Right Diagnosis, Wrong Remedy, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court’s “major questions” doctrine has been attacked as an attempt to revive the nondelegation doctrine. The better view is that this statutory interpretation responds to perceived failings of the Chevron doctrine, which has governed court-agency relations since 1984. This article criticizes the major question doctrine and proposes modifications to the Chevron doctrine that would partially correct its failings while preserving the traditional interpretive role of courts.

Beyond The Labor Exemption: Labor's Antimonopoly Vision And The Fight For Greater Democracy, Kate Andrias

Faculty Scholarship

Although the labor movement and the antimonopoly movement both oppose concentrated economic power and bemoan rising inequality, their projects are frequently viewed as divergent, if not incompatible. According to the conventional account, the labor movement has historically lacked an affirmative antimonopoly agenda, instead focusing its demands on achieving a labor exemption to the antitrust laws. This chapter shows, however, that left-leaning industrial unions from the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century repeatedly and insistently used the language of antimonopoly to argue that private concentrations of economic power posed a grave threat to workers and to democracy. But labor’s vision …

Liability Beyond Law: Conceptions Of Fairness In Chinese Tort Cases, Rachel E. Stern, Benjamin L. Liebman, Wenwa Gao, Xiaohan Wu

Faculty Scholarship

Empirical work consistently finds that Chinese courts resolve civil cases by finding a compromise solution. But beyond this split-it-down-the-middle tendency, when and how do Chinese courts arrive at decisions that feel “fair and just” in cases in which they invoke those ideas? Drawing on a data set of 9,485 tort cases, we find that Chinese courts impose liability on two types of parties with ethical, but not legal, obligation to victims: (1) participants in a shared activity and (2) those who control a physical space. In these cases, Chinese courts stretch the law to spread losses through communities and to …

Yes, Tax The Rich — And Also The Merely Affluent, Alex Raskolnikov

Faculty Scholarship

Most Americans believe that economic inequality is too high, and many think that higher taxes are the answer. There is some disagreement about who should pay higher taxes, but there is broad agreement about who should not. At least since the heyday of the Occupy Wall Street movement, 'We Are the 99 Percent'' has been the dividing line.

“Those in the 1 percent are walking off with the riches, but in doing so they have provided nothing but anxiety and insecurity to the 99 percent,” explained Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz in his 2012 book The Price of Inequality. The …

Our Avatars, Ourselves, Mala Chatterjee

Faculty Scholarship

On 2013 an episode of the British TV show Black Minvrimagined a harrowing possibility: that technology might allow us to recreate the dead. A young woman named Martha loses her partner in a sudden accident and copes with the loss-or perhaps refuses to cope with itwith the assistance of an unnerving artificial intelligence, trained on her partner's data footprint, that can speak, act, and appear exactly as he did. It's not long before Martha becomes obsessed with the emulation, gathering every remnant of her partner's life to incorporate into the model and spending hours on the phone conversing with his …

Law As Persuasion, Bert I. Huang

Faculty Scholarship

When does the law persuade us about what is right or wrong – and when does it not? On topics ranging from racial equality to abortion to same-sex marriage, historians have debated and puzzled over the law’s persuasive force on our collective moral intuitions. Meanwhile, other scholars have sought out individual-level insights into the psychology of law’s persuasion, under the microscope of controlled experiments.

This chapter presents evidence of the law’s influence on our moral intuitions in a survey experiment based on a classic dilemma known as the “trolley problem,” in which someone must make a choice about whether to …

The End Of Asylum Redux And The Role Of Law School Clinics, Elora Mukherjee

Faculty Scholarship

The Biden Administration has perpetuated many of the prior administration’s hostile policies undermining access to asylum at the southern border. This Essay first examines these policies and then identifies emerging opportunities for law school clinics to address these new challenges, including by serving asylum seekers south of the U.S.-Mexico border.

Navigating Between "Politics As Usual" And Sacks Of Cash, Daniel C. Richman

Faculty Scholarship

Like other recent corruption reversals, Percoco was less about statutory text than what the Court deems “normal” politics. As prosecutors take the Court’s suggestions of alternative theories and use a statute it has largely ignored, the Court will have to reconcile its fears of partisan targeting and its textualist commitments

Exemplary Legal Writing 2020: Four Recommendations, Jed S. Rakoff, Lev Menand

Faculty Scholarship

For some years, John Coffee of the Columbia Law School, one of the country’s leading experts on corporate and securities law, has been critical of the government’s failure to effectively prosecute corporate crime. In this book, Coffee both propounds a general theory of why such criminality is rarely prosecuted in a meaningful way, and also offers some creative solutions to such underenforcement.

Anticipatory Deference: What Will Courts Decide And Not Decide Before Enforcing An Agreement To Arbitrate?, George A. Bermann

Faculty Scholarship

The question of deference in international arbitration usually arises when the issue before a decision-maker, be it a tribunal or a court, is one that has already been addressed and ruled upon by another decision-maker over an arbitration’s life-cycle. The salience of this question stems from the fact that international arbitration is a highly iterative and staged process over the course of which different actors are successively confronted with the same issue. This is particularly the case in regard to jurisdictional issues because the authority of a tribunal to entertain a dispute is potentially an issue at all stages.

But …

Child Development And The Family Regulation System, Clare Huntington

Faculty Scholarship

Child abuse and neglect clearly harm children, but the risks that accompany involvement with the family regulation system (also known as the child welfare system), especially placement in foster care, also present considerable risks to child development. This chapter describes these competing risks to child development, the legal framework governing the family regulation system, and scholarly debates in the field. It then analyzes the system in the broader context of the legal regulation of children, showing that the family regulation system is out of step with other areas and in need of significant reform. A core problem with the system …

The Gravity Of Legal Diffusion, Anu Bradford, Adam S. Chilton, Katerina Linos

Faculty Scholarship

A persistent empirical finding is that bilateral trade between two countries is proportional to the size of their economies and inversely proportional to their geographic distance. We hypothesize that a similar pattern is likely to hold for the diffusion of laws. We specifically argue that countries’ propensity to update their laws to converge with the leading regulator in a given policy area is likely to be proportional to the size of their economies and inversely proportional to their geographic distance. We then empirically test this theory in the area of antitrust and assess countries’ convergence to the world’s leading antitrust …

Specific Performance: On Freedom And Commitment In Contract Law, Hanoch Dagan, Michael A. Heller

Faculty Scholarship

When should specific performance be available for breach of contract? This question — at the core of contract — divides common-law and civil-law jurisdictions and it has bedeviled generations of comparativists, along with legal economists, historians, and philosophers. Yet none of these disciplines has provided a persuasive answer. This Article provides a normatively attractive and conceptually coherent account, one grounded in respect for the autonomy of the promisor’s future self. Properly understood, autonomy explains why expectation damages should be the ordinary remedy for contract breach. This same normative commitment justifies the “uniqueness exception,” where specific performance is typically awarded, and …

Price Gouging In A Pandemic, Christopher Buccafusco, Daniel Hemel, Eric L. Talley

Faculty Scholarship

The COVID-19 pandemic led to acute supply shortages across the country as well as concerns over price increases amid surging demand. In the process, it reawakened a debate about whether and how to regulate “price gouging” — a controversy that continues as inflation has accelerated even as the pandemic abates. Animating this debate is a longstanding conflict between laissez-faire economics, which champions price fluctuations as a means to allocate scarce goods, and perceived norms of consumer fairness, which are thought to cut strongly against sharp price hikes amid shortages.

This Article provides a new, empirically grounded perspective on the price …

Can Contract Emancipate? Contract Theory And The Law Of Work, Hanoch Dagan, Michael A. Heller

Faculty Scholarship

Contract and employment law have grown apart. Long ago, each side gave up on the other. In this Article, we re-unite them to the betterment of both. In brief, we demonstrate the emancipatory potential of contract for the law of work.

Today, the dominant contract theories assume a widget transaction between substantively equal parties. If this were an accurate description of what contract is, then contract law would be right to expel workers. Worker protections would indeed be better regulated by – and relegated to – employment and labor law. But contract law is not what contract theorists claim. Neither …

Disabling Travel: Quantifying The Harm Of Inaccessible Hotels To Disabled People, Kristen L. Popham, Elizabeth F. Emens, Jasmine E. Harris

Faculty Scholarship

During its 2023–2024 term, the U.S. Supreme Court will decide a case with significant implications for the future of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). In Acheson Hotels v. Laufer, the Court will determine whether a civil rights “tester” plaintiff has Article III standing to sue a hotel for failing to provide information about the hotel’s accessibility online — in violation of Department of Justice (DOJ) regulations applying the ADA’s requirement of “reasonable modifications in policies, practices, or procedures” — when the plaintiff did not intend to book a hotel reservation. Plaintiff-Respondent Deborah Laufer has not only challenged the …

Election Obstruction, Jason Marisam

Faculty Scholarship

In 2020 and 2022, multiple Republican county canvassers refused to perform their ministerial duty to approve election returns, obstructing the official certification of the results. The canvassers latched onto false claims of fraud and other conspiracies advanced by election deniers. They eventually relented because of court orders and public pressure. The elections produced official winners, and crisis was averted. But, as long as election denialism rots our political discourse, election obstruction by canvassers will be a persistent risk with significant dangers for our democracy. This Essay provides a brief history of election obstruction by canvassers, examines the modern link between …

The Road To Autonomy, Nicole Mcconlogue

Faculty Scholarship

Scholars, activists, and advocates have long identified the “transportation gap” as a significant factor contributing to race- and class-based economic and other disparities. Carlessness correlates closely with race and poverty; meanwhile, widespread disinvestment in public transit results in low-income Black and Brown people suffering a disproportionate lack of access to opportunity and choice in almost every conceivable area of life.

State and local governments most often propose one of three solutions to correct the transportation gap: 1) renewing their investment in public transit; 2) increasing access to shared transit; and 3) making adaptations to the built environment. This Article demonstrates …

Crossing The Cultural Chasm And The Power Of Listening: How We Wrote A New Tenure Code, David Larson, Linda Hanson

Faculty Scholarship

Revising the Tenure Code of an institution of higher learning may be among the most challenging of the processes it undertakes, especially when there is a commitment to shared governance by its Board of Trustees and Faculty. At Mitchell Hamline School of Law, we recently experienced this process - both difficult and ultimately satisfying - following the combination of two law schools. In 2016, Mitchell Hamline School of Law became an independent institution formed through the combination of independent William Mitchell College of Law and Hamline School of Law, a school of Hamline University, both based in St. Paul, Minnesota. …

Chatgpt, Professor Of Law, Tammy Oltz

Faculty Scholarship

In this Paper, I test the ability of ChatGPT to assist with common tasks performed by law professors. To conduct the experiment, I ran four service-related prompts and three teaching-related prompts through the free version of ChatGPT and then analyzed the results. ChatGPT performed very well on the service-related prompts and moderately well on the teaching-related prompts. I conclude that ChatGPT can provide law professors with near-finished products for routine tasks and a solid jumping-off point for those that are more complex.