Law Commons^™

Should The Government Prosecute Monopolies?, Maurice Stucke

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In the past few years, courts and the Department of Justice have cited approvingly the Court's dicta in Verizon Communications Inc. v. Law Offices of Curtis V. Trinko, LLP. This article analyzes why the economic thinking in Trinko is wrong, and how the Court ignores its precedent involving the Sherman Act's concerns of monopolies' political, social and ethical implications. It responds to the Court's claim that cartel behavior is easier to identify and remedy than monopolistic behavior and proposes an improvement to the Court's current rule of reason standard to reduce the risk of false positives, while enabling the antitrust …

Female Investors And Securities Fraud: Is The Reasonable Investor A Woman?, Joan Macleod Heminway

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This paper extends existing scholarship that questions the existing materiality standard used under Rule 10b-5 (and elsewhere in U.S. securities regulation) and its touchstone notion of the reasonable investor. Specifically, the paper asks and answers a seemingly straightforward, yet provocative, question: Is the reasonable investor a woman? The paper then preliminarily explores the potential significance of its key findings - that women and men exhibit different investment behaviors and achieve different investment outcomes, and that the resulting female investor profile is closer to existing conceptions of the reasonable investor than the resulting male investor profile.

As women become larger players …

Martha Stewart And The Forbidden Fruit: A New Story Of Eve, Joan Macleod Heminway

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This paper narrates a biblical story - Eve’s ingestion of the forbidden fruit - and analogizes it to a recent business law story that I explore in my scholarship and use in my teaching - Martha Stewart’s sale of ImClone stock as alleged insider trading. The analogy, while imperfect, helps expose interesting questions about the descriptive and normative content of U.S. insider trading law and related legal process issues. Although many of the points made in the paper (and the related details and examples presented) can be and have been explored or used in other ways, I contend that the …

It's A Small World: Using The Classic Disney Ride To Teach Document Coherence, Michael J. Higdon

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This essay describes an analogy legal writing professors can make to the classic Disney ride, "It's a Small World" for the purpose of teaching document coherence.

Protecting A Business Entity Client From Itself Through Loyal Disclosure, Paula Schaefer

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No abstract provided.

Saving Law Reviews From Political Scientists: A Defense Of Lawyers, Law Professors, And Law Reviews, Benjamin H. Barton

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This essay reviews Robert J. Spitzer, Saving the Constitution from Lawyers: How Legal Training and Law Reviews Distort Constitutional Meaning, and argues that it fails on two fronts. First, I offer a defense of lawyers, law professors, and law reviews. Second, I show that Spitzer's own book proves that peer-reviewed political science scholarship suffers from at least as many faults and foibles as law review scholarship.

For example, in each of his three examples of wayward theorizing Spitzer insists that his reading of the Constitution and its history is so clearly correct that his opponents' scholarship is not only wrong …

Introduction To The Special Report, George Kuney

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No abstract provided.

Wanted: Female Corporate Directors (A Review Of Professor Douglas M. Branson's No Seat At The Table), Joan Macleod Heminway, Sarah A. Walters

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In his 2007 book No Seat at the Table, Professor Douglas Branson aptly describes how patterns of male dominance inherent in the legal structures of corporate governance reproduce themselves again and again to keep women out of executive suites and boardrooms, and then he offers a practical way to break this cycle of dominance-through paradigm shifting. A central value of Professor Branson's book derives from this thesis, as well as his use of nontraditional empirical data and interdisciplinary literature (in addition to more traditional decisional law and legal scholarship) to support the positions he takes. Moreover, No Seat at …

Pedagogic Techniques: Multi-Disciplinary Courses, Annotated Document Review, Collaborative Work & Large Groups, George Kuney

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No abstract provided.

Attorney-Client Fee Agreements That Offend Public Policy, Alex B. Long

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Under traditional contract law principles, an agreement may be deemed unenforceable because it so clearly offends established public policy that recovery under the contract is inappropriate. In such cases, there has traditionally been a presumption against permitting the offending party to recover, either under the contract or in quantum meruit. Yet, the legal profession (through the Restatement of the Law Governing Lawyers) and the courts (through their decisions) have effectively reversed that presumption and have announced a general rule in favor of permitting lawyers to recover fees even when their fee agreements clearly offend well-established and strong public policy. Moreover, …

Whistleblowing Attorneys And Ethical Infrastructures, Alex B. Long

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Rule 5.1 of the ABA’s Model Rules of Professional Conduct requires law firm partners to make reasonable efforts to supervise subordinate attorneys and to ensure that the firm has internal measures in place that give 'reasonable assurance' that all lawyers within the firm are complying with their ethical obligations. Despite the existence of this ethical duty, there are enough judicial decisions involving attorneys who have been fired for blowing the whistle on unethical conduct to lead one to suspect that perhaps law firm compliance measures regarding Rule 5.1 leave something to be desired. This Article discusses the role that a …

Ask Not What Your Charity Can Do For You: Robertson V. Princeton Provides Liberal-Democratic Insights Into Cy Pres Reform, Iris Goodwin

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This article centers on a long-standing problem in the law of public charity: how to ameliorate the force of restrictions imposed by donors on large gifts in the face of societal change. Seeking to advance personal beliefs or social agenda, donors of large gifts commonly limit the application of donated funds to particular programs. Under current law, such restrictions obtain in perpetuity. A restriction, if socially apposite when made, often functions as a dead hand upon the charity with the passage of time. What has long been sought by the legal community is a substantive standard by which to evaluate …

An Analysis Of The Death Penalty Jurisprudence Of The October 2007 Supreme Court Term (The Twentieth Annual Supreme Court Review), Richard Klein

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No abstract provided.

The Framers' Search Power: The Misunderstood Statutory History Of Suspicion & Probable Cause, Fabio Arcila, Jr.

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Originalist analyses of the Framers’ views about governmental search power have devoted insufficient attention to the civil search statutes they promulgated for regulatory purposes. What attention has been paid concludes that the Framers were divided about how accessible search remedies should be. This Article explains why this conventional account is mostly wrong and explores the lessons to be learned from the statutory choices the Framers made with regard to search and seizure law. In enacting civil search statutes, the Framers chose to depart from common law standards and instead largely followed the patterns of preceding British civil search statutes. The …

The Supreme Court's Hands-Off Approach To Religious Doctrine: An Introduction, Samuel J. Levine

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Although the current state of the United States Supreme Court's Religion Clause jurisprudence is an area of considerable complexity, the Court's approach is largely premised upon a number of basic underlying principles and doctrines. This Symposium issue explores an underlying principle of the Supreme Court's current Religion Clause jurisprudence, the Court's hands-off approach to questions of religious practice and belief. The Symposium is based on the program of the Law and Religion Section at the 2008 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Law Schools, in which a panel of leading scholars was asked to evaluate the Court's approach. The …

Cultural Inversion And The One-Drop Rule: An Essay On Biology, Racial Classification, And The Rhetoric Of Racial Transcendence, Deborah W. Post

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No abstract provided.

Outward Bound To Other Cultures: Seven Guidelines For U.S. Dispute Resolution Trainers, Harold Abramson

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No abstract provided.

Analytical Jurisprudence And The Concept Of Commercial Law, John Linarelli

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Commercial lawyers working across borders know that globalization has changed commercial law. To think of commercial law as only the law of states is to have an inadequate understanding of the norms governing commercial transactions. Some have argued for a transnational conception of commercial law, but their grounds of justification have been unpersuasive, often grounded on claims about the common content among national legal systems. Legal positivism is a rich literature on the concept of a legal system and the validity conditions for rules in legal systems, but it has not been used to understand legal order outside or beyond …

International Law: Practical Authority, Global Justice, John Linarelli

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No abstract provided.

Of Inkblots And Omnisignificance: Conceptualizing Secondary And Symbolic Functions Of The Ninth Amendment, In A Comparative Hermeneutic Framework, Samuel J. Levine

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In this Essay, Levine focuses on a particular hermeneutic approach common to the interpretation of the Torah and the United States Constitution: a presumption against superfluity. This presumption accords to the text a considerable degree of omnisignificance, requiring that interpreters pay careful attention to every textual phrase and nuance in an effort to find its legal meaning and implications. In light of this presumption, it might be expected that normative interpretation of both the Torah and the Constitution would preclude a methodology that allows sections of the text to remain bereft of concrete legal application. In fact, however, both the …

Shelter From The Storm: An Analysis Of U.S. Refugee Law As Applied To Tibetans Formerly Residing In India, Eileen Kaufman

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No abstract provided.

Remarks: Neuroscience, Gender, And The Law, Stacey A. Tovino

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These remarks, delivered at the Neuroscience, Law, and Government Symposium held at the University of Akron School of Law in 2009, explore how stakeholders are using advances in the neuroscience of three gender-specific and gender-prevalent conditions (the postpartum mood disorders, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, and eating disorders) to secure health care benefits under group health plans and individual health insurance policies and to push for the inclusion of these conditions in mental health parity legislation.

Faith And Politics In The Post-Secular Age: The Promise Of President Obama, Francis J. Mootz Iii

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If the modern era is properly characterized as the 'age of secularism' - a time when constitutional democracies finally have shed the last vestiges of church authority from the political realm and embrace a rationalist and humanist perspective - then the United States appears to be outside the Western mainstream. In this paper I explore how the relationship between politics and religious faith in the United States might be seen as part of the narrative of secularism that defines most other Western countries, even as the differences in the American experience might suggest an evolution of this narrative. My thesis …

Vico And Imagination: An Ingenious Approach To Educating Lawyers With Semiotic Sensibility, Francis J. Mootz Iii

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Law is a specialized semiotic realm, but lawyers generally are ignorant of this fact. Lawyers may manage meaning, but they also are managed by meaning. Seemingly trapped by the weight of pre-existing signs, their attempts to manage these meanings generally are limited to technical interventions and instrumentalist strategies. Signs have power over lawyers because they are embedded in narratives, a semiotic economy that confronts the lawyer as ‘‘given’’ even though it is dynamic and constantly under construction. Most lawyers do not make meaning through legal narratives; rather, they parrot bits of the controlling narratives in response to certain problems. Because …

The Insurance Policy As Thing, Jeffrey W. Stempel

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Insurance policies are a type of contract. But characterizing them only as contracts misses much of the richness of the insurance arrangement, policyholder-insurer relations, and the degree to which insurance policies, which are heavily standardized, are designed to perform a particular function. Because of their mass standardization and deployment to address particular risk management issues, insurance policies are in many respects like products or chattels. Insurers and the insurance trade press in fact frequently speak of a line of insurance "products" or a new "product" being introduced to address an emerging risk. Appreciating this aspect of the insurance policy can …

Chief William's Ghost: The Problematic Persistence Of The Duty To Sit Doctrine, Jeffrey W. Stempel

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The duty to sit concept or “doctrine”—or at least what I term the “pernicious” version of the concept—emphasizes a judge's obligation to hear and decide cases unless there is a compelling ground for disqualification and creates a situation in which judges are erroneously pushed to resolve close disqualification issues against recusal when the presumption should run in exactly the opposite direction. In close cases, judges should err on the side of recusal in order to enhance public confidence in the judiciary and to ensure that subtle, subconscious, or hard-to-prove bias, prejudice, or partiality does not influence decision-making. The pernicious version …

Playing Forty Questions: Responding To Justice Roberts' Concerns In Caperton And Some Tentative Answers About Operationalizing Judicial Recusal And Due Process, Jeffrey W. Stempel

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The Chief Justice of the United States would probably have excelled as a negative debater in high school forensics competitions. Good negative debaters are, as my high school English teacher put it, “great point-pickers” in that they frequently challenge affirmative proposals with a series of “what if?” or “how about?” or “what would you do if?” questions designed to leave the affirmative resolution bleeding to death of a thousand cuts. Less charitable observers might call it nit-picking. After reading Chief Justice Roberts's dissenting opinion in Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal Co., one can easily imagine him as a high school …

Dispute Resolution And The Quest For Justice, Jean R. Sternlight

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During and since the 1976 Pound conference, the rise of nonlitigation approaches has sparked an intense debate as to whether negotiation, mediation, and arbitration are consistent with justice or rule of law, and whether litigation itself is sufficiently accessible to support a quest for justice. This article offers observations on questions related to this debate, including whether procedure matters, the limits of procedural reform, whether some processes are more just than others, and how procedural reforms enhance justice.

Teaching Freedom: Exclusionary Rights Of Student Groups, Joan W. Howarth

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Progressive, anti-subordination values support robust First Amendment protection for high school and university students, including strong rights of expressive association, even when those rights clash with educational institutions' nondiscrimination policies. The leading cases addressing the conflicts between nondiscrimination policies and exclusionary student groups are polarized and distorted by their culture war context. That context tainted the leading authority, Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, and is especially salient in the student expressive association cases, many of which are being aggressively litigated by religious groups with strong anti-homosexuality goals. The strength of these First Amendment claims can be difficult to recognize …

The Case Against The Arbitration Fairness Act, Peter B. Rutledge

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The Arbitration Fairness Act is a well-intended but ultimately misguided attempt to address a system of dispute resolution that has largely worked well. The bill currently being considered by Congress rests on a series of flawed empirical premises. This article addresses three. First, though the bill posits that arbitration leaves consumers and employees worse off, data demonstrate individuals overall are often better off under a system with enforceable predispute arbitration agreements than a system without them. Second, although the bill promises improved access to justice, the proposal actually erects more impediments. Third, though the bill suggests that postdispute arbitration will …