Law Commons^™

Two Cheers For Specialization, Jeffrey W. Stempel

Scholarly Works

Professor Dreyfuss adopts what might be termed the more conservative and deferential view of the efficacy of Delaware corporate law in her paper and her presentation. This approach generally views the market as making a statement with which one should not lightly quarrel. Because Delaware continues to attract incorporations, this view posits that the state's attraction is the superiority of its corporate law compared to other states, which lack a semi-specialized Chancery Court. Consequently, in a race to the top of corporate standards, legal rules and adjudications, Delaware's success in the market suggests that Delaware's legal product is good.

Other …

Taking Liberties With The First Amendment: Congress, Section 5, And The Religious Freedom Restoration Act, Jay S. Bybee

Scholarly Works

In 1993 Congress enacted the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (“RFRA”), which provided that government, including the United States and the states, “shall not substantially burden a person's exercise of religion even if the burden results from a rule of general applicability” except where the government can demonstrate that the burden furthers “a compelling governmental interest” and is “the least restrictive means of furthering that interest.”

Unfortunately, whatever consistency RFRA might bring to the substance of church-state relations comes at the expense of clarity in federal-state relations. This is unfortunate because the First Amendment does not address church-state relations; it concerns …

Brown And The Doctrine Of Precedent: A Concurring Opinion, Thomas B. Mcaffee

Scholarly Works

This article is part of a symposium sponsored by Southern Illinois University regarding Brown v. Board of Education. In this article, the author addresses the question of what opinion he would have written had he been a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court when the case was decided.

The author indicates he would have concurred in those opinions finding a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment in Brown v. Board of Education. The author finds persuasive the argument that any other decision would permit states to evade the core purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment. Nevertheless, …

The Impact Of The Garcia Decision On The Market-Participant Exception To The Dormant Commerce Clause, Dan T. Coenen

Scholarly Works

In National League of Cities v. Usery, the Supreme Court recognized a strong state-sovereignty-based limit on Congress's exercise of its commerce power. In Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority, however, the Court overruled National League of Cities, relying in part on past difficulties in trying to distinguish between protected state “governmental” activities and unprotected state “proprietary” activities. In the wake of Garcia, commentators have urged that its reasoning undermines the Court's longstanding exemption of state proprietary activities from dormant Commerce Clause challenge under the so-called “market-participant” doctrine.

In this article, Professor Dan Coenen refutes this argument by showing that …

Busting The Hart & Wechsler Paradigm, Michael L. Wells

Scholarly Works

Federal Courts law was once a vibrant area of scholarship and an essential course for intellectually ambitious students. Now its prestige has diminished so much that scholars debate its future in a recent issue of the Vanderbilt Law Review, where even one of its champions calls it (albeit in the subjunctive mood) a “scholarly backwater.” What, if anything, went wrong, and what should Federal Courts scholars do about it? In his contribution to the Vanderbilt symposium, Richard Fallon defends the reigning model of Federal Courts law, an approach to jurisdictional issues that dates from the publication in 1953 of Henry …

The End Of Roman Juristic Writing, Alan Watson

Scholarly Works

The traditional date for the end of classical Roman law is 235 when the emperor Alexander Severus was murdered, or slightly later with the death of Modestinus, the last of the great known jurists. Thereafter, few original juristic books were written, and it is widely but not universally believed that a decline in legal standards began almost at once.

For many scholars there seems to exist a connection, sometimes simply implicit, between the failure of jurists to write new books, and a decline in legal standards. I should like to suggest there was a different reason for jurists ceasing to …

Economics As One Of The Humanities; An Ecumenical Response To Weisberg, West, And White, Paul J. Heald

Scholarly Works

The Law and Literature movement seems to have a deadly adversary: the Law and Economics movement. Several of the most respected literary lawyers have recently argued that economic discourse subverts the goals of humanistic scholarship. Richard Weisberg decries, for example, “the insurgency of ‘free market’ economics, a disgracefully self-serving system of ethical reductionism and human evasion [that has] attracted masses of practitioners away from the essence of their fields, away from the passions, the hopes, the reality of the world around them.” Robin West has criticized “economic man” for his “empathic impotence,” and has suggested replacing him with a more …

Refusals To Deal In "Locked-In" Health Care Markets Under Section 2 Of The Sherman Act After Eastman Kodak Co. V. Image Technical Services, James F. Ponsoldt

Scholarly Works

In the Kodak context, several common health care provider practices, previously challenged with varying results under traditional antitrust analysis, may be reexamined to focus upon the effect of refusals to deal in a secondary market with potential competitors in that secondary market. This Article focuses on three such practices: (1) the non-immunized revocation of hospital staff privileges for other than legitimate, quality-of-care motives; (2) the denial of hospital privileges to differentially credentialed, state-licensed providers; and (3) the closure of membership in comprehensive health care plans, such as preferred-provider organizations, combined with a refusal to deal with nonmembers. These practices should …

Desperately Seeking Science, Francis J. Mootz Iii

Scholarly Works

In this commentary I offer a lawyer’s view of what law and linguistics interdisciplinary studies might mean for legal practice, as well as a legal theorist’s view of what importance they may hold for jurisprudence. I do not pretend to have more than cursory knowledge about linguistics, and so my remarks about what linguistics scholars might gain from an interdisciplinary exchange necessarily will be brief general.

Substance Above All: The Utopian Vision Of Modern Natural Law Constitutionalists, Thomas B. Mcaffee

Scholarly Works

Modern natural law constitutionalists assert that the Constitution, properly understood, includes a kind of general trump card in the form of a moral reality which provides (or is, at any rate, thought to provide) a measure of all positive legal acts--whether framed in terms of the values of natural equality, natural rights, or “simple justice.”

This article explores why “trump card” natural law constitutionalism cannot by its nature adequately confront crucial issues of institutional design and democratic theory. In thus putting questions of moral substance ahead of crucial issues of authority, natural law constitutionalism appears to rest on a naive, …

The Brown Symposium – An Introduction, Thomas B. Mcaffee

Scholarly Works

This article is an introduction to a symposium sponsored by Southern Illinois University regarding Brown v. Board of Education.

Comment, The Augustan Constitution And Our Natural Rights Tradition: Is There A Conflict?, Thomas B. Mcaffee

Scholarly Works

Professor Hoffheimer has provided us with a striking picture of two important strands of our constitutional heritage. The first, which he labels “Augustan constitutionalism,” descended from classical political thought and the English constitution. Its focus is on the governmental powers that it legitimates, and its themes relate to the forms of government; in the American context, this means that its focus is on separation of powers, checks and balances, and (in general) the problem of organizing and dividing government authority. The second, which he calls the “natural rights tradition,” roots government's legitimacy--and indeed its origin and purpose--in the protection of …

The Separate Tax Status Of Loan-Out Corporations, Mary Lafrance

Scholarly Works

When professionals and other persons who offer their goods and/or services to the public conduct their businesses through corporations, the Treasury has acknowledged that for federal income tax purposes it must treat those corporations as separate and distinct from their controlling shareholder-employees, even where there is only a single shareholder-employee, provided that the corporation has a business purpose and the taxpayer consistently respects the corporate form. However, the Treasury has refused to accord equal dignity to incorporated workers who offer their services not to the public at large but to a single recipient or a small number of recipients. The …

Days Of Our Lives: The Impact Of Section 197 On The Depreciation Of Copyrights, Patents And Related Property, Mary Lafrance

Scholarly Works

For federal income tax purposes, owners of intangible property generally must capitalize the costs of creating or acquiring that property. In the past, the tax rules for recovering these capitalized costs through depreciation deductions varied greatly according to the nature of the intangible. Certain types of acquired intangibles--notably, goodwill and going concern value--were nondepreciable. In contrast, taxpayers purchasing interests in copyrights or patents could depreciate those assets under the straight-line method or, in most cases, could opt for more rapid cost recovery under the income forecast method.

In the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993, Congress greatly enlarged the class …

Critical Race Theory And Proposition 187: The Racial Politics Of Immigration Law, Ruben J. Garcia

Scholarly Works

Immigration law and politics have been historically intertwined with racial prejudice. Many of those who have called for immigration restrictions have also sought an end to the racial and cultural diversity brought by immigrants. With the end of legally sanctioned race discrimination in the 1960s, immigration rhetoric has lost some of its overt racist overtones. However, in the 1990s, many politicians and lawmakers have emphasized the difference between “legal” and “illegal” immigration. This change begs a central question: Have the racist motivations of past immigration law and policy been completely displaced by a concern for law and order? This Comment …

Democratic Responses To International Terrorism, Christopher L. Blakesley

Scholarly Works

This volume provides a multidisciplinary study of terrorism. The editor notes at the outset the difficulty of definition: "Terrorism is not a one-dimensional problem; it transcends many frontiers: political, jurisdictional, institutional, disciplinary and methodological. So approaching the problem from only one perspective may lead to only partial understanding and an incomplete strategy for developing constructive responses” (p. 3). Note the tendency of even this careful statement to assume that terrorism is always committed by others, Also, although legal definition and consideration may be implied by the terms polical, jurisdictional, institutional and disciplinary, which are indicated as various dimensions of …

The Lawyer's Dirty Hands, Leslie C. Griffin

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Organ Retrieval From Anencephalic Infants: Understanding The Ama’S Recommendations, David Orentlicher

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

First And Last Chance: Looking For Lesbians In California's Fifties Bar Cases, Joan W. Howarth

Scholarly Works

Do all of us who choose members of our own sex as objects of desire and as sexual partners share some meaningful common identity, such as “homosexual,” “gay” or perhaps “queer”? The classifications “homosexual” and “gay” claim for themselves just that kind of inclusiveness; that is, that the gay world includes people of all races, all classes and any possible gender identity. You, me, James Baldwin, Gertrude Stein, J. Edgar Hoover: we are all gay together. In this way “homosexual” or “gay” is a generic term, like, for example, “human being.” But we know that the alleged inclusiveness masks just …

Seeing The Forest And The Trees: The Proper Role Of The Bankruptcy Attorney, Nancy B. Rapoport

Scholarly Works

This article discusses the tension between the lawyer's duty to her client and her duty to the legal system as an officer of the court. It concludes that, in a situation in which those two duties conflict, the lawyer's duty to the system as a whole should trump the duty to the client.

Foreword: A New Journal Of Color In A "Colorblind" World, Frank Rudy Cooper, Jerome Mccristal Culp Jr, Lovita Tandy

Scholarly Works

In this foreword for the inaugural issue of the African-American Law & Policy Report (ALPR), Professor Frank Rudy Cooper and his colleagues present articles, which contribute to the debate that this premier issue presents: an important discussion about race that majoritarian concerns impede. The majoritarian story basically states that race is not important or race can only be examined in a "colorblind" way or that race can only be considered if we do not upset the existing power arrangements that keep African Americans and other racial groups in their place. This journal is important to ventilate those concerns because the …

Hate Speech On Campus And The First Amendment: Can They Be Reconciled?, Thomas A. Schweitzer

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

The European Bank For Reconstruction And Development And The Post-Cold War Era, John Linarelli

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Section 1983 Litigation, Martin A. Schwartz

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

The Commerce Clause Quartet, Martin A. Schwartz, Leon D. Lazer

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

A Jewish-Sponsored Law School: Its Purposes And Challenges, Howard A. Glickstein

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

“Sue Me, Sue Me, What Can You Do To Me? I Love You” A Disquisition On Law, Sex, And Talk, Dan Subotnik

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

The Progeny Of Lee V. Weisman: Can Student-Invited Prayer At Public School Graduation Still Be Constitutional?, Thomas A. Schweitzer

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Eliminating Proximate Cause As An Element Of The Prima Facie Case From Strict Products Liability, Peter Zablotsky

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Employment Discrimination: Recent Developments In The Supreme Court (The Supreme Court And Local Government Law: The 1994-1995 Term), Eileen Kaufman

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.