Law Commons^™

The "Contemporaneous" Traders Who Can Sue An Inside Trader, William K.S. Wang

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Philadelphia Newspapers V. Hepps: Unanswered Defamation Questions, John L. Diamond

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Constitutional Right To Jury Trial: A Historical Exception For Small Monetary Claims, Margreth Barrett

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Dual Sovereignty Exception To Double Jeopardy: In The Wake Of Garcia V. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority, Evan Tsen Lee

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Choice Of Law Outline For Texas Courts, James P. George

Faculty Scholarship

Several recent Texas choice of law cases have misapplied the most-significant-relationship test, the basic Texas choice of law test adopted from the Restatement (Second) of Conflict of Laws. The misapplications (none from the Texas Supreme Court) predominantly turn on the courts' improperly focusing on a single element of the seven-factor most-significant-relationship test, thereby thwarting its function as a balancing test for competing interests. Texas courts are not alone in this misunderstanding of choice of law tests. In recent years most states have moved away from the old rigid choice of law rules--easily applied, but often unfair--to the newer rules based …

Blue-Sky Merit Regulation: Benefit To Investors Or Burden On Commerce?, Roberta S. Karmel

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Bounds And Beyond: A Need To Reevaluate The Right Of Prison Access To The Courts, Steven D. Hinckley

Faculty Scholarship

The author argues that the 1977 United States Supreme Court decision in Bounds v. Smith insufficiently protects the right of prisoners to represent themselves before the courts by failing to require state and federal correctional facilities to establish and maintain adequately stocked prison law libraries and to provide prisoners with the option to use those libraries as their means of gaining meaningful access to the courts.

Use Of Comparative Risk Methods In Regulatory And Common Law, Michael S. Baram

Faculty Scholarship

Several persistent problems afflict risk decisionmaking. In the regulatory context, agencies confront the problems of how to prioritize risks for best use of their limited resources and how to determine "how safe is safe enough," or a risk limit, when action is to be taken on a particular risk.

In the trial courts hearing toxic tort actions, the jury must often determine whether an activity is "unreasonably dangerous" or a product is "defective" because of its risk attributes.

To resolve these problems, many have proposed the use of risk comparisons. Now that we can quantify risks, why not compare them …

Protecting The Liberty Of Pregnant Patients, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

We are seeing the beginning of an alliance between physicians and the state to force pregnant women to follow medical advice for the sake of their fetuses. No irreversible commitments to such an alliance have yet been made, but only a principled discussion of the issues is likely to prevent forced treatment from becoming standard medical practice.

In her futuristic novel The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood envisions a world in which physicians and the state combine to strip fertile women of all human rights. These women come to view themselves as "two-legged wombs, that's all; sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices." …

Basics Of Business Reorganization In Bankruptcy, Steven L. Schwarcz

Faculty Scholarship

In this article, Steven Schwarcz offers an overview of Chapter 11 bankruptcy. In addition to beginning a Chapter 11 case, he also discusses administration of these cases and the plan of reorganization that a debtor must consider.

Troubled Marriage Of Retirement Security And Tax Policies, Michael J. Graetz

Faculty Scholarship

This Article concentrates on equitable and distributional aspects of the retirement security problem, although the unified view taken here seems essential to an adequate assessment of the fairness or efficacy either of the three components taken together or of any one of the three. Moreover, because tax legislation serves as the dominant public mechanism for implementing national retirement policy, whether through funding Social Security via the payroll tax or providing tax incentives for both private pensions and individual savings, a unified view of retirement security policy highlights interrelationships, confluences, and potential conflicts between retirement security and tax policy concerns.

This …

Conflict And Cooperation In Long-Term Contracts, Robert E. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

This Article uses the techniques of modern decision analysis and game theory to analyze the decisionmaking strategies of parties to long-term commercial contracts. Most parties to long-term contracts initially allocate the risks of future contingencies and agree – either explicitly or implicitly – to adjust this initial risk-allocation scheme if unanticipated events occur. Once contract risks are initially distributed, however, each party's self-interest may compel them to evade their responsibility rather than adjust cooperatively as originally agreed. Visualizing the interactions between contracting parties as an iterated prisoner's dilemma, the Author attempts to clarify the dynamics of this adjustment process. Professor …

Democracy, Autonomy, And Values: Some Thoughts On Religion And Law In Modern America, Frederick Mark Gedicks, Roger Hendrix

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Pyrrhic Victory: Daniel Goldman's Defeat Of Zoning In The Maryland Court Of Appeals, Garrett Power

Faculty Scholarship

Nowadays government regulation of the use of urban land is taken for granted. Such was not always the case. Some sixty years ago, the Maryland Court of Appeals held it unconstitutional for Zoning Commissioner J. Frank Crowther to deny a request for a permit to operate a tailor shop in the basement of a Eutaw Place home. This paper examines the case of Goldman v. Crowther. Goldman's story reads like a comic melodrama with a tragic ending. But the saga also illuminates the social condition - it sheds light and casts shadows on the practice of xenophobia, the nature …

Rico: The Crime Of Being A Criminal Parts I And Ii, Gerard E. Lynch

Faculty Scholarship

One of the most controversial statutes in the federal criminal code is that entitled "Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations," known familiarly by its acronym, RICO. Passed in 1970 as title IX of the Organized Crime Control Act of 1970, RICO has attracted much attention because of its draconian penalties, including innovative forfeiture provisions; its broad draftsmanship, which has left it open to a wide range of applications, not all of which were foreseen or intended by the Congress that enacted it; and the sometimes dramatic prosecutions that have been brought in its name.

RICO's complexity has attracted several efforts to unscramble …

Bargaining In The Shadow Of Eminent Domain: Valuing And Apportioning Condemnation Awards Between Landlord And Tenant, Victor P. Goldberg, Thomas W. Merrill, Daniel Unumb

Faculty Scholarship

Who has a constitutionally protected "property" interest when the government condemns land subject to a lease? Is it the landlord? The tenant? Or do both parties have property rights that entitle them to compensation? Further, how should the size of the total condemnation award be determined? Should we value the property rights of the landlord and the tenant separately and sum? Or should we value the entire parcel as if it were an undivided fee simple and apportion the award between the landlord and the tenant? If the condemnation award is based on the value of a fee simple and …

Social Theory And Political Practice: Unger's Brazilian Journalism, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

Roberto Mangabeira Unger is a citizen of Brazil. While working on Politics, his large-scale treatise on social theory, he has been active in his country's politics. Among the fruits of these activities is a series of political and programmatic commentaries on Brazil published in the Brazilian press. The commentaries apply the style of political analysis and the general political program elaborated in Politics to the recent circumstances of Brazil. Thus, they give an extended illustration of Unger's general social theory. At the same time, they exemplify a form of political writing that attempts to combine ambitious critical social theory …

Formal And Functional Approaches To Separation-Of-Powers Questions – A Foolish Inconsistency?, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

Is it possible to give contemporary shape to the principles of constitutional structure we know as "separation of powers"? That question was sharply presented once again on the final day of the Supreme Court's most recent Term, when it decided two cases raising separation-of-powers issues. In Bowsher v. Synar, the subject of this symposium, the Court found constitutional fault in Congress's asserted expansion of its own powers at the expense of the President's article II authority. Commodity Future Trading Commission v. Schor, far less widely noted, upheld against constitutional challenge Congress's assignment to an administrative adjudicator of the …

Contributions Of Victimization To Delinquency In Inner Cities, Jeffery Fagan, Elizabeth S. Piper, Yu-Teh Cheng

Faculty Scholarship

The relationship between victimization and criminality has been widely cited in recent years. Early thinking and public perceptions about crime intuitively presumed that criminals were distinct from their victims. Crime control policies resulted which promoted the physical separation of victims from predatory offenders through "target hardening" and "defensible space." Such distinctions, however, ignored the empirical evidence on the considerable overlap between offender and victim profiles and distorted the reality of events in which persons are labelled as victims or victimizers based only on the consequences of the event. Given the homogeneous relation between victim and offender, theories of crime that …

The Regulation Of Entrepreneurial Litigation: Balancing Fairness And Efficiency In The Large Class Action, John C. Coffee Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

Just as war is too important to be left to generals, civil procedure – with apologies to Clemenceau – is too important to be left to proceduralists. Although it would be a serious overstatement to claim that all civil procedure scholars are confined by a tunnel vision focused only on the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, they have as a group been reluctant to engage explicitly in incentive-based reasoning and seem particularly hesitant to reexamine what they must know to be a noble myth: namely, that the client can and should control all litigation decisions. Within an important and expanding …

The Teaching Function Of The First Amendment, Vincent A. Blasi

Faculty Scholarship

In this important book, Professor Bollinger seeks to understand and remedy the inadequacy he perceives in the way our legal culture deals with extremist speech. He argues that the high level of protection the first amendment has been construed to require serves a social function that has not been fully recognized or carefully evaluated. His thesis is that the contemporary social function of the idea of freedom of speech is to help the society develop a general capacity for tolerance, a capacity that determines how we respond to many forms of conduct as well as speech. Once this function is …

Law And Morality: A Kantian Perspective, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

The relationship between law and morality has emerged as the central question in the jurisprudential reflection of our time. Those who call themselves positivists hold with H.L.A. Hart that calling a statute or a judicial decision "law" need not carry any implications about the morality of that statute or decision. Valid laws might be immoral or unjust. Those who resist this reduction of law to valid enactments sometimes argue, with Lon Fuller, that moral acceptability is a necessary condition for holding that a statute is law; or, with Ronald Dworkin, that moral principles supplement valid enactments as components of the …

Introduction To Rico, Joseph Sweeney

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Evaluating Dual Class Common Stock: The Relevance Of Substitutes, Ronald J. Gilson

Faculty Scholarship

The proposal of the New York Stock Exchange to end its prohibition on listing the securities of companies with dual classes of common stock has focused public policy debate over this evolution in capital structure both too broadly and too narrowly.

The debate has been too broad because it has encompassed one situation – an initial public offering by a company with a capital structure containing dual class common stock – that should not be controversial at all. Whatever may have originally prompted the New York Stock Exchange's longstanding prohibition against listing non-voting common stock or common stock with voting …

The Universal And The Particular In Legal Discourses, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

My target in this article is a set of views that I shall call the functionalist perspective of comparative law. Of course, the word "functionalist" stands for a number of different theories. In order to be precise about the view that I oppose, I shall set my sights on the arguments developed in Otto Kahn-Freund's inaugural lecture Comparative Law as an Academic Subject, published two decades ago.

Note, Internationalizing The Copyright Code: An Analysis Of Legislative Proposals Seeking Adherence To The Berne Convention, Doriane Lambelet Coleman

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

From The Editor: Books About Statutes, Richard A. Danner

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

From The Editor: Public Access To The Law, Richard A. Danner

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

From The Editor: Reading Legal Research, Richard A. Danner

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Simplifying Subpoena Law: Taking The Fifth Amendment Seriously, Robert P. Mosteller

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.