Law Commons^™

Procedure, Substance, And Erie, Jay Tidmarsh

Journal Articles

This Article examines the relationship between procedure and substance, and the way in which that relationship affects Erie questions. It first suggests that "procedure" should be understood in terms of process-in other words, in terms of the way that it changes the substance of the law and the value of legal claims. It then argues that the traditional view that the definitions of "procedure" and "substance" change with the context-a pillar on which present Erie analysis is based-is wrong. Finally, it suggests a single process based principle that reconciles all of the Supreme Court's "procedural Erie" cases: that federal courts …

Ngo Standing And Influence In Regional Human Rights Courts And Commissions, Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer

Journal Articles

This article explores the extent to which nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have standing to bring claims in the European, Inter-American, and African human rights enforcement systems, examines the degree to which NGOs in fact bring such cases, and analyzes the ramifications of NGO involvement in these systems. Part I of this article considers how NGOs can be involved in the European Court of Human Rights, the Inter-American Human Rights Commission and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights and the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights. As detailed in this part, while …

Restoring Lost Connections: Land Use, Policing, And Urban Vitality, Nicole Stelle Garnett

Journal Articles

Justice William Brennan rightfully reminded all of us that state constitutional law is too often neglected in our courtrooms and our classrooms. State constitutions, to borrow from the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist, ought not to be "relegated to the status of a poor relation" in our constitutional legal structure. They differ in important ways from the federal law Constitution-and those differences provide the space within which our democratic experiment flourishes. And I am sure if Justice Brennan were here with us today, he would agree that we also should not neglect the study of the state and local policies …

Charities And Lobbying: Institutional Rights In The Wake Of Citizens United, Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer

Journal Articles

One of the many aftershocks of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Citizens United v. FEC is that the decision may raise constitutional questions for the long-standing limits on speech by charities. There has been much scholarly attention both before and after that decision on the limit for election-related speech by charities, but much less attention has been paid to the relating lobbying speech limit. This article seeks to close that gap by exploring that latter limit and its continued viability in the wake of Citizens United. I conclude that while Citizens United by itself does not undermine the limit …

Memory And Punishment, O. Carter Snead

Journal Articles

This article is the first scholarly exploration of the implications of neurobiological memory modification for criminal law. Its point of entry is the fertile context of criminal punishment, in which memory plays a crucial role. Specifically, this article will argue that there is a deep relationship between memory and the foundational principles justifying how punishment should be distributed, including retributive justice, deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation, moral education, and restorative justice. For all such theoretical justifications, the questions of who and how much to punish are inextricably intertwined with how a crime is remembered - by the offender, by the sentencing authority, …

Apportioning Responsibility Among Joint Tortfeasors For International Law Violations, Roger P. Alford

Journal Articles

With the new wave of claims against corporations for human rights violations – particularly in the context of aiding and abetting government abuse – there are unusually difficult problems of joint tortfeasor liability. In many circumstances, one tortfeasor – the corporation – is a deep-pocketed defendant, easily subject to suit, but only marginally involved in the unlawful conduct. Another tortfeasor – the sovereign – is a central player in the unlawful conduct, but, with limited exceptions, is immune from suit under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. A third tortfeasor – the low-level security personnel – accused of actually committing the …

Strategic Spillovers, Daniel B. Kelly

Journal Articles

The conventional problem with externalities is well known: Parties often generate harm as an unintended byproduct of using their property. This Article examines situations in which parties may generate harm purposely, in order to extract payments in exchange for desisting. Such “strategic spillovers” have received relatively little attention, but the problem is a perennial one. From the “livery stable scam” in Chicago to “pollution entrepreneurs” in China, parties may engage in externality-generating activities they otherwise would not have undertaken, or increase the level of harm given that they are engaging in such activities, to profit through bargaining or subsidies. This …

Congressional Authority To Interpret The Thirteenth Amendment: A Response To Professor Tsesis, Jennifer Mason Mcaward

Journal Articles

This essay explores the proper scope of Congress’s power to enforce the Thirteenth Amendment’s prohibition on slavery and involuntary servitude. It reviews the historical context surrounding the drafting of the Thirteenth Amendment enforcement power, and it points to structural constitutional considerations relevant to the understanding of that power. It concludes by suggesting some related topics that deserve further exploration.

Justice For Hedgehogs, Robert E. Rodes

Journal Articles

Professor Dworkin begins this complex and ambitious book with a chapter called "Baedeker" after the nineteenth century guidebooks. In it, he gives an overview of his project, which is to show "the unity of value." The "title refers to a line by an ancient Greek poet, Archilochus, that Isaiah Berlin made famous for us. The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. Value is one big thing" (1).

He articulates his overarching value in terms of human dignity: "[W]e each have a sovereign ethical responsibility to make something of value of our own lives, as a …

International Cooperation And The Patent-Antitrust Intersection, Stephen Yelderman

Journal Articles

Commentators have long recognized the need to coordinate questions at the patent-antitrust intersection with other policy levers available under patent law. In the international context, however, control over patent policy has been fractured and entrusted to diverse decisionmakers. Many details of patent law are tightly coordinated by international agreement, while others related to antitrust are left to national discretion. This Article evaluates the consequences of this fracture, and notes ways in which the prevailing treaty regimes (the Paris Convention and the TRIPS Agreement) distort incentives for national policymaking. National discretion at the patent-antitrust intersection can be expected to result in …

Do Joint Parenting Laws Make Any Difference?, Margaret Brinig, Douglas W. Allen

Journal Articles

Using a unique data set on divorcing couples, we analyze the effects of a change in legal entitlement on the outcomes for divorcing couples. In particular, we analyze the 1997 change to custody provisions in the State of Oregon. Prior to 1997, Oregon assigned custody, based on the discretion of the court, in the best interests of the child. This was changed to a presumption- of joint parenting, which manifests in the courts encouraging and imposing joint (or shared) custody in cases that otherwise would have had sole custody arrangements. We find that the law had several implications for divorce …

Headline Kidnappings And The Origins Of The Lindbergh Law, Barry Cushman

Journal Articles

The federal kidnapping statute of 1932 -- which prohibits the transportation of a kidnapped person across state lines -- is commonly known as the Lindbergh Law due to its enactment in the immediate wake of the abduction of Charles and Anne Lindbergh’s child in March of that year. Indeed, but for the commission of that crime the statute probably would not have been enacted. But the Lindbergh affair alone cannot explain the form that the congressional reaction took. For the Lindbergh baby was found murdered fewer than four miles from his home, and there was no evidence that he had …

Probabilistic Knowledge Of Third-Party Trademark Infringement, Mark Mckenna

Journal Articles

This essay views secondary trademark liability in light of tort law’s treatment of parties whose actions expose a plaintiff to third party-wrongdoing. Broadly speaking, tort law imposes liability on a party for contributing to the tortious activity of another in two different ways. In vicarious and accomplice liability cases, courts impose the same liability on the defendant as they would have on the direct tortfeasors, had they been defendants: if the third-party wrongdoer is a batterer, the defendant is liable for battery. Another line of cases imposes liability for unreasonably putting a defendant at risk of third-party wrongdoing, and these …

Child Support Guidelines: The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly, Margaret F. Brinig, Douglas W. Allen

Journal Articles

Child support guideline systems do more than simply determine the amount of income to be transferred from the noncustodial to the custodial household. They create incentives, one way or another, for spouses to divorce and seek custody and support payments. We examine three cases found in North America, and find that the common method of income shares provides a decent guideline that does not create any perverse incentives for divorce. Percentage-of-obligor-income methods do worse than other systems, and can cause increases in divorce rates for families in which one spouse earns a high income. Finally, the Canadian system, which is …

Pornography As Pollution, John C. Nagle

Journal Articles

Pornography is often compared to pollution. But little effort has been made to consider what it means to describe pornography as a pollution problem, even as many legal scholars have concluded that the law has failed to control internet pornography. Opponents of pornography maintain passionate convictions about how sexually-explicit materials harm both those who are exposed to them and the broader cultural environment. Viewers of pornography may generally hold less fervent beliefs, but champions of free speech and of a free internet object to anti-pornography regulations with strong convictions of their own. The challenge is how to address the widespread …

Equality And Differences, John M. Finnis

Journal Articles

This revised and annotated version of the H.L.A. Hart Memorial lecture in the University of Oxford in June 2011 has some significant differences in coverage from the essay of the same title published in the American Journal of Jurisprudence 56 (2011) 17-44, including a brief discussion of Waldron’s treatment of basic equality and Cohen’s “luck-egalitarianism”. The object of the lecture is to establish the grounds of basic human equality, and to indicate how neglect of non-basic inequalities and of preconditions for sustainable common good tends to ensure that legal measures promoting equality rights and condemning ‘discrimination’ yield serious injustices (violations …

The Alien Tort Statute And The Law Of Nations, Bradford R. Clark, Anthony J. Bellia

Journal Articles

Courts and scholars have struggled to identify the original meaning of the Alien Tort Statute (ATS). As enacted in 1789, the ATS provided "[t]hat the district courts...shall...have cognizance...of all causes where an alien sues for tort only in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States." The statute was rarely invoked for almost two centuries. In the 1980s, lower federal courts began reading the statute expansively to allow foreign citizens to sue other foreign citizens for all violations of modern customary international law that occurred outside the United States. In 2004, the Supreme Court took …

Transition Policy In Environmental Law, Bruce R. Huber

Journal Articles

Embedded within the structure of much American environmental regulation is a distinction between the new and the existing. This distinction reflects a recurrent political challenge for environmental policymakers: whether and how to mitigate regulatory burdens when policy change upsets settled expectations and investment commitments. Environmental law often grandfathers existing products and pollution sources or provides them with other kinds of transition relief. This paper presents a survey of transition policies in environmental regulation, which is followed by a pair of short case studies drawn from the trucking and pesticide industries. These examples demonstrate that the form and extent of transition …

Parents: Trusted But Not Trustees Or (Foster) Parents As Fiduciaries, Margaret F. Brinig

Journal Articles

Some fifteen years ago, Elizabeth and Robert Scott wrote an important article making the case that parents could be usefully described using a fiduciary model. This paper explains why their model fits foster parents better than biological or adoptive parents, at least in the sense that Tamar Frankel explains in her new book on fiduciary law.

The Political (And Other) Safeguards Of Religious Freedom, Richard W. Garnett

Journal Articles

This essay is a contribution to a symposium marking the 20th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s still-controversial decision in Employment Division v. Smith. That decision, it is suggested, should not be read as reflecting or requiring hostility or indifference towards claims for legislatively enacted accommodations of religion. Smith is not an endorsement of religion-blind neutrality in constitutional law; instead, it assigns to politically accountable actors the difficult, but crucially important, task of accommodating those whose religious exercise would otherwise be burdened by generally applicable laws. The essay goes on to suggest several things that must be true of our law …

Shedding Light On Shady Grove: Further Reflections On The Erie Doctrine From A Conflicts Perspective, Joseph P. Bauer

Journal Articles

This Article, a contribution to the Notre Dame Law Review symposium issue on the Supreme Court’s recent Shady Grove decision, is a follow-up to an article published in the same journal eleven years ago, in which I suggested that the Erie doctrine could be usefully informed by drawing on caselaw and jurisprudence from the horizontal choice of law setting. Shady Grove addressed the question of whether a New York state law, barring the assertion of claims for statutory damages, was binding in an action brought in the federal courts, or whether Federal Rule 23, which does not contain a similar …

Foreign Citizens In Transnational Class Actions, Jay Tidmarsh, Linda Sandstrom Simard

Journal Articles

This Article addresses an increasingly important question: When, if ever, should foreign citizens be included as members of an American class action? The existing consensus holds that courts should exclude from class membership those foreign citizens whose country does not recognize an American class judgment. Our analysis begins by establishing that this consensus is flawed. Rather, to minimize the costs associated with relitigation in a foreign forum, we must distinguish between foreign claimants who are likely to commence a subsequent foreign proceeding from those who are unlikely to do so; distinguishing between those who come from recognizing and nonrecognizing countries …

See The Mojave!, John C. Nagle

Journal Articles

This article examines how the law is being asked to adjudicate disputed sights in the context of the Mojave Desert. The Mojave is the best known and most explored desert in the United States. For many people, though, the Mojave is missing from any list of America’s scenic wonders. The evolution in thinking about the Mojave’s aesthetics takes places in two acts. In the first act, covering the period from the nineteenth century to 1994, what began as a curious voice praising the desert’s scenery developed into a powerful movement that prompted Congress to enact the CDPA. The second act …

A Winn For Educational Pluralism, Nicole Stelle Garnett

Journal Articles

This short essay takes as its starting point on the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Winn v. Arizona Christian Tuition Organization, which involved an Establishment Clause challenge to Arizona’s scholarship tax program — a school-choice device that provides tax credits from state income taxes for donations to organizations granting scholarship to private K-12 schools. In Winn, a divided court ruled that taxpayers lack standing to challenge this and other tax credit programs — thereby dramatically limiting the Flast v. Cohen exception to the no-taxpayer-standing rule. The essay makes the case that the Winn will promote authentic educational pluralism by clearing …

Somebody's Watching Me: Fcpa Monitorships And How They Can Work Better, F. Joseph Warin, Michael S. Diamant, Veronica S. Root

Journal Articles

This article explores the rise of the corporate compliance monitor as a condition for settling violations of the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (“FCPA”) — a setting in which federal prosecutors routinely impose monitors. If U.S. enforcement authorities maintain their current approach, the reality is that companies facing liability for violating the FCPA are likely to have a monitor imposed on them as part of a settlement agreement. From the U.S. government’s perspective, monitorships make sense for companies that violate anti-bribery laws, making it important for offending corporations to learn how to deal with monitors. Pulling from the authors’ extensive …

Designing Surveillance Law, Patricia L. Bellia

Journal Articles

As communications surveillance techniques become increasingly important in government efforts to detect and thwart criminal and terrorist activities, questions of how to reconcile privacy and law enforcement interests take on paramount importance. These questions have institutional as well as substantive dimensions. That is, the issue is not simply what the limits on communications surveillance should be, but who should set them — courts through application of the Fourth Amendment or legislatures through statutes and the oversight process? The scholarly literature offers divergent positive and normative perspectives on these questions.

For most scholars, the question of who should regulate communications surveillance …

Administrative Change, Randy J. Kozel, Jeffrey Pojanowski

Journal Articles

Determining the standard of review for administrative actions has commanded judicial and scholarly interest like few other topics. Notwithstanding the extensive debates, far less consideration has been given to the unique features of agencies’ deviations from their own precedents. In this article we examine this puzzle of administrative change. By change, we mean a reversal of the agency’s former views about the best way to implement and interpret its regulatory mandate. We trace the lineage of administrative change at the Supreme Court and analyze features that distinguish agency reversals from other administrative actions. In particular, we contend that because administrative …

Foreword: Advances In The Behavioral Analysis Of Law: Markets, Institutions, And Contracts, Avishalom Tor

Journal Articles

Avishalom Tor, Special Editor

The collection of articles in this Special Issue is based on an international conference on Advances in the Behavioral Analysis of Law: Markets, Institutions, and Contracts that took place on December 8, 2009 at the University of Haifa Faculty of Law in Israel. The conference addressed cutting-edge legal issues at the intersection of law, economics, and psychology from a diverse set of viewpoints, bringing together scholars engaged in both theoretical and experimental behavioral analyses of law.

Belonging And Trust: Divorce And Social Capital, Margaret F. Brinig

Journal Articles

To whom do spouses belong? Do they belong to their communities as well as each other and their immediate families? These questions are explored in an empirical paper demonstrating ways in which social capital in communities may affect even the marriages of people living in them.

Optimal Class Size, Opt-Out Rights, And "Indivisible" Remedies, Jay Tidmarsh, David Betson

Journal Articles

Prepared for a Symposium on the ALI’s Aggregate Litigation Project, this paper examines the ALI’s proposal to permit opt-out rights when remedies and “divisible,” but not to permit them when remedies are “indivisible.” Starting from the ground up, the paper employs economic analysis to determine what the optimal size of a class action should be. We demonstrate that, in some circumstances, the optimal size of a class is a class composed of all victims, while in other cases, the optimal size is smaller. We further argue that courts should consider optimal class size in determining whether to certify a class, …