Law Commons^™

Influence By Intimidation: Business Lobbying In The Regulatory Process, Alex Acs, Cary Coglianese

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

Interest group influence in the policy process is often assumed to occur through a mechanism of exchange, persuasion, or subsidy. Here, we explore how business groups may also exert influence by intimidating policymakers—a form of persuasion, but one based not on the provision of policy information but of political information. We develop a theory where a business firm lobbies a regulator to communicate political information about its capacity to commit to future influence-seeking activities that would sanction the regulator. The regulator assesses the credibility of this message by evaluating the firm’s commitment to lobbying. Guided by our theory, we present …

The Deregulation Deception, Cary Coglianese, Natasha Sarin, Stuart Shapiro

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

President Donald Trump and members of his Administration repeatedly asserted that they had delivered substantial deregulation that fueled positive trends in the U.S. economy prior to the COVID pandemic. Drawing on an original analysis of data on federal regulation from across the Trump Administration’s four years, we show that the Trump Administration actually accomplished much less by way of deregulation than it repeatedly claimed—and much less than many commentators and scholars have believed. In addition, and also contrary to the Administration’s claims, overall economic trends in the pre-pandemic Trump years tended simply to follow economic trends that began years earlier. …

Racial Revisionism, Shaun Ossei-Owusu

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

Review of Corey Robin, The Enigma of Clarence Thomas (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2019).

Pandemic Response As Border Politics, Michael R. Kenwick, Beth A. Simmons

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

Pandemics are imbued with the politics of bordering. For centuries, border closures and restrictions on foreign travelers have been the most persistent and pervasive means by which states have responded to global health crises. The ubiquity of these policies is not driven by any clear scientific consensus about their utility in the face of myriad pandemic threats. Instead, we show they are influenced by public opinion and preexisting commitments to invest in the symbols and structures of state efforts to control their borders, a concept we call border orientation. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, border orientation was already generally …

Crimes That Changed Our World: Tragedy, Outrage, And Reform: Chapter One: 1911 Triangle Factory Fire: Building Safety Codes, Paul H. Robinson, Sarah M. Robinson

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

This first chapter of the recently published book Crimes That Changed Our World: Tragedy, Outrage, and Reform, examines the process by which the tragic 1911 Triangle Factory Fire provoked enormous outrage that in turn created a local then national movement for workplace and building safety that ultimately became the foundation for today’s building safety codes. What is particularly interesting, however, is that the Triangle Fire was not the worst such tragedy in its day. Why should it be the one that ultimately triggers social progress?

The book has 21 chapters, each of which traces the tragedy-outrage-reform dynamic in a …

The Ecology Of Transparency Reloaded, Seth F. Kreimer

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

As Justice Stewart famously observed, "[t]he Constitution itself is neither a Freedom of Information Act nor an Official Secrets Act." What the Constitution's text omits, the last two generations have embedded in "small c" constitutional law and practice in the form of the Freedom of Information Act and a series of overlapping governance reforms including Inspectors General, disclosure of political contributions, the State Department’s “Dissent Channel,” the National Archives Information Security Oversight Office, and the publication rights guaranteed by New York Times v. United States. These institutions constitute an ecology of transparency.

The late Justice Scalia argued that the …

Tragedy, Outrage & Reform: Crimes That Changed Our World: 1983 – Thurman Beating - Domestic Violence, Paul H. Robinson, Sarah M. Robinson

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

Can a crime make our world better? Crimes are the worst of humanity’s wrongs but, oddly, they sometimes do more than anything else to improve our lives. As it turns out, it is often the outrageousness itself that does the work. Ordinary crimes are accepted as the background noise of our everyday existence but some crimes make people stop and take notice – because they are so outrageous, or so curious, or so heart-wrenching. These “trigger crimes” are the cases that this book is about.

They offer some incredible stories about how people, good and bad, change the world around …

Strict Liability's Criminogenic Effect, Paul H. Robinson

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

It is easy to understand the apparent appeal of strict liability to policymakers and legal reformers seeking to reduce crime: if the criminal law can do away with its traditional culpability requirement, it can increase the likelihood of conviction and punishment of those who engage in prohibited conduct or bring about prohibited harm or evil. And such an increase in punishment rate can enhance the crime-control effectiveness of a system built upon general deterrence or incapacitation of the dangerous. Similar arguments support the use of criminal liability for regulatory offenses. Greater punishment rates suggest greater compliance.

But this analysis fails …

Tragedy, Outrage & Reform Crimes That Changed Our World: 1911 – Triangle Factory Fire – Building Safety Codes, Paul H. Robinson, Sarah M. Robinson

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

Can a crime make our world better? Crimes are the worst of humanity’s wrongs but, oddly, they sometimes do more than anything else to improve our lives. As it turns out, it is often the outrageousness itself that does the work. Ordinary crimes are accepted as the background noise of our everyday existence but some crimes make people stop and take notice – because they are so outrageous, or so curious, or so heart-wrenching. These “trigger crimes” are the cases that this book is about.

They offer some incredible stories about how people, good and bad, change the world around …

Defending A Mixed Economy, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

This essay reviews Jacob S. Hacker's and Paul Pierson's very engaging book, American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget what Made America Prosper (2016).

Is Government Really Broken?, Cary Coglianese

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

The widespread public angst that surfaced around the 2016 presidential election in the United States revealed that many Americans believe their government has become badly broken. Given the serious problems that continue to persist in society—crime, illiteracy, unemployment, poverty, discrimination, and more—these beliefs in a government breakdown are understandable. Yet a breakdown is actually far from self-evident. In this paper, I explain how diagnoses of governmental performance depend on the perspective from which current conditions in the country are viewed. Certainly when judged against a standard of perfection, America has a long way to go. But perfection is no meaningful …

Corporate Governance And Social Welfare In The Common Law World, David A. Skeel Jr.

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

The newest addition to the spate of recent theories of comparative corporate governance is Corporate Governance in the Common-Law World: The Political Foundations of Shareholder Power, an important new book by Christopher Bruner. Focusing on the U.S., the U.K., Canada and Australia, Bruner argues that the robustness of the country’s social welfare system is the key determinant of the extent to which its corporate governance is shareholder-centered. This explains why corporate governance is so shareholder-oriented in the United Kingdom, which has universal healthcare and generous unemployment benefits, while shareholders’ powers are more attenuated in the United States, with its …

Private Enforcement Of Statutory And Administrative Law In The United States (And Other Common Law Countries), Stephen B. Burbank, Sean Farhang, Herbert M. Kritzer

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

Our aim in this paper, which was prepared for an international conference on comparative procedural law to be held in July 2011, is to advance understanding of private enforcement of statutory and administrative law in the United States, and, to the extent supported by the information that colleagues abroad have provided, of comparable phenomena in other common law countries. Seeking to raise questions that will be useful to those who are concerned with regulatory design, we briefly discuss aspects of American culture, history, and political institutions that reasonably can be thought to have contributed to the growth and subsequent development …

Symbolic Corporate Governance Politics, Marcel Kahan, Edward B. Rock

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

How are we to understand the persistent gap between rhetoric and reality that characterizes so much of corporate governance politics? In this Article, we show that the rhetoric around a variety of high profile corporate governance controversies (including shareholder proposals asking boards to redeem poison pills, proxy access, majority voting in director elections, and shareholder proposals to remove supermajority voting requirements) cannot be justified by the material interests at stake. At the same time, shareholder activists are oddly reluctant to pursue issues that may have a more material impact, such as anti-pill charter provisions or mandatory bylaw amendments. We consider …

Litigation Reform: An Institutional Approach, Stephen B. Burbank, Sean Farhang

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

The program of regulation through private litigation that Democratic Congresses purposefully created starting in the late 1960s soon met opposition emanating primarily from the Republican party. In the long campaign for retrenchment that began in the Reagan administration, consequential reform proved difficult and ultimately failed in Congress. Litigation reformers turned to the courts and, in marked contrast to their legislative failure, were well-rewarded, achieving growing rates of voting support from an increasingly conservative Supreme Court on issues curtailing private enforcement under individual statutes. We also demonstrate that the judiciary’s control of procedure has been central to the campaign to retrench …

Private Enforcement, Stephen B. Burbank, Sean Farhang, Herbert Kritzer

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

Our aim in this Article is to advance understanding of private enforcement of statutory and administrative law in the United States and to raise questions that will be useful to those who are concerned with regulatory design in other countries. To that end, we briefly discuss aspects of American culture, history, and political institutions that reasonably can be thought to have contributed to the growth and subsequent development of private enforcement. We also set forth key elements of the general legal landscape in which decisions about private enforcement are made, aspects of which should be central to the choice of …

Book Review (Paul Frymer's Black And Blue: African Americans, The Labor Movement, And The Decline Of The Democratic Party)., Sophia Z. Lee

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

No abstract provided.

Presidential Control Of Administrative Agencies: A Debate Over Law Or Politics?, Cary Coglianese

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

No abstract provided.

Citizenship, In The Immigration Context, Matthew J. Lister

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

Many international law scholars have begun to argue that the modern world is experiencing a “decline of citizenship,” and that citizenship is no longer an important normative category. On the contrary, this paper argues that citizenship remains an important category and, consequently, one that implicates considerations of justice. I articulate and defend a “civic” notion of citizenship, one based explicitly on political values rather than shared demographic features like nationality, race, or culture. I use this premise to argue that a just citizenship policy requires some form of both the jus soli (citizenship based on location of birth) and the …

The Transparency President? The Obama Administration And Open Government, Cary Coglianese

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

President Obama has trumpeted transparency as a major part of his reform agenda, promising an "unprecedented" degree of governmental openness and overseeing a variety of open government reforms, from changes in Freedom of Information Act policies to the creation of new websites like Recovery.Gov. Although transparency is politically popular, and the Obama Administration benefits in the short run by contrasting itself with the Bush Administration's reputation for secrecy, in the long run President Obama's rhetoric on openness in government may backfire politically. Too much emphasis on making government a fishbowl will only raise expectations about an unattainable or undesirable level …

Treatment Differences And Political Realities In The Gaap-Ifrs Debate, William W. Bratton, Lawrence A. Cunningham

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

No abstract provided.

Policing Politics At Sentencing, Stephanos Bibas, Max M. Schanzenbach, Emerson H. Tiller

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

No abstract provided.

A New E.R.A. Or A New Era? Amendment Advocacy And The Reconstitution Of Feminism, Serena Mayeri

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

Scholars have largely treated the reintroduction of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) after its ratification failure in 1982 as a mere postscript to a long, hard-fought, and ultimately unsuccessful campaign to enshrine women’s legal equality in the federal constitution. This Article argues that “ERA II” was instead an important turning point in the history of legal feminism and of constitutional amendment advocacy. Whereas ERA I had once attracted broad bipartisan support, ERA II was a partisan political weapon exploited by advocates at both ends of the ideological spectrum. But ERA II also became a vehicle for feminist reinvention. Congressional consideration …

The Freedom Of Information Act And The Ecology Of Transparency, Seth F. Kreimer

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

The Framers’ approbation of a unitary executive rested in important part on the belief that the unitary executive’s actions were apt to be more “narrowly watched and readily suspected” by an informed public opinion than those of a plural executive. Yet the body of the Constitution provides no right to public information. What the Constitutional text omits, the last generation has embedded as a part of modern constitutional practice in the Freedom of Information Act. Some critics have deplored FOIA as a “romantic” effort at “self help oversight”, superfluous in light of the checks and balances of divided government. Others …

The Immigration Paradox: Alien Workers And Distributive Justice, Howard F. Chang

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

The immigration of relatively unskilled workers poses a fundamental problem for liberals. While from the perspective of the economic welfare of natives, the optimal policy would be to admit these aliens as guest workers, this policy would violate liberal ideals. These ideals would treat these workers as equals, entitled to access to citizenship and to the full set of public benefits provided to citizens. If the welfare of incumbent residents determines admissions policies, however, and we anticipate the fiscal burden that the immigration of the poor would impose, then our welfare criterion would preclude the admission of relatively unskilled workers …

Temporary Accidents?, Elizabeth Magill

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

Review of Steven P. Croley, Regulation and Public Interests: The Possibility of Good Regulatory Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

Shareholder Primacy's Corporatist Origins: Adolf Berle And The Modern Corporation, William W. Bratton, Michael L. Wachter

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

No abstract provided.

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

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

No abstract provided.

How Do Corporations Play Politics? The Fedex Story, Jill E. Fisch

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

No abstract provided.

Watching The Watchers: Surveillance, Transparency, And Political Freedom In The War On Terror, Seth F. Kreimer

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

No abstract provided.