Law Commons^™

The Roles Of Litigation, Stephen B. Burbank

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Venture Capital On The Downside: Preferred Stock And Corporate Control, William W. Bratton

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Excuses And Dispositions In Criminal Law, Claire Oakes Finkelstein

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Black Internationalism: Embracing An Economic Paradigm, Jeffery M. Brown

Journal Publications

The seemingly inexorable march toward a more unified political and economic world order poses strategic and leadership challenges to States, international organizations, and local activists unimaginable a generation ago. Supporters of this process argue that easing international economic regulatory restrictions, creating a more predictable legal order, and liberalizing investment standards will benefit the global economy by rendering financial transactions more efficient, thereby increasing trade and investment opportunities. Globalization poses important conceptual challenges to international law and international trade scholars committed to defending local interests and historically marginalized people against the perceived adverse effects of accelerated global economic expansion. Critics argue …

Creating An Online Tutorial And Pathfinder, Peter A. Hook

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Mr Hook explores the educational potential of Web-based tutorials and pathfinders. He discusses how the multimedia environment can effectively reach a broad range of learner types, explaining how the disciplines of infor- mation architecture and information visualization can contribute to designing a successful tutorial and pathfinder.

Book Review. Teaching Legal Research And Providing Access To Electronic Resources (Gary L. Hill, Et. Al., Eds.), Peter A. Hook

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

The Complex Uses Of Sexual Orientation In Criminal Court, Abbe Smith

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Times may or may not be changing for gay people in the criminal justice system--and for the import of sexual orientation in criminal law. It depends on the nature of the case and, more importantly, exactly whose sexual orientation we are talking about.

Signs of positive change include the recent high profile Matthew Shepard and Diane Whipple cases, in which gay and lesbian homicide victims were mourned not only by the gay community, but also by the entire country. It was no doubt helpful that both Shepard and Whipple presented very appealing images of gay people: each was young, attractive, …

Democracy And Legitimation: A Response To Professor Guinier, Louis Michael Seidman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay is a response to Supreme Democracy: Bush v. Gore Redux, an essay by Lani Guinier (2002).

The author critiques Professor Lani Guinier’s essay through a discussion of the maldistribution of wealth in American society, which he argues is accepted by American people thanks to the existence complex structures that allow them to distance themselves from it. He discusses four legitimation structures as he critiques this essay.

Professor Guinier focuses on the belief in meritocracy. For our purposes, we might define a believer in meritocracy as someone who thinks that, in a given society, people get more or less …

Vertical Integration And Media Regulation In The New Economy, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

Recent mergers and academic commentary have placed renewed focus on what has long been one of the central issues in media policy: whether media conglomerates can use vertical 'integration to harm competition. This Article seeks to move past previous studies, which have explored limited aspects of this issue, and apply the full sweep of modern economic theory to evaluate the regulation of vertical integration in media-related industries. It does so initially by applying the basic static efficiency analyses of vertical integration developed under the Chicago and post-Chicago Schools of antitrust law and economics to three industries: broadcasting, cable television, and …

How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Pill: Adaptive Responses To Takeover Law, Marcel Kahan, Edward B. Rock

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Alternatives To Economic Sanctions, Christine M. Chinkin

Book Chapters

Considering the merits of non-coercive alternatives to economic sanctions inevitably risks the charges of idealism and naIvete. However a number of speakers in this conference have raised considerable doubts about the efficacy of sanctions: even on their own terms sanctions rarely work and the material costs to non-targeted states and the implications for human rights make their justification problematic, even when they can in some sense be said to have worked. It therefore makes sense at least to give consideration to some non- coercive alternatives, either in conjunction with sanctioning policies or separate from them. The other alternative is the …

Building A Foreign Law Collection At The University Of Michigan Law Library, 1910-1960, Margaret A. Leary

Articles

Ms. Leary describes the vision, energy, imagination, and techniques of the dedicated people who built an eminent foreign law collection at the University of Michigan Law Library. She also uses Michigan as an example to illustrate the development of libraries and librarianship nationally.

Meeting By Signals, Playing By Norms: Complementary Accounts Of Non-Legal Cooperation In Institutions, Edward B. Rock, Michael L. Wachter

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The New Basel Capital Accord: Making It Effective With Stronger Market Discipline, Harald Benink, Clas Wihlborg

Business Faculty Articles and Research

In January 2001 the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision proposed a new capital adequacy framework to respond to deficiencies in the 1988 Capital Accord on credit risk. The main elements or ‘pillars’ of the proposal are capital requirements based on the internal risk-ratings of individual banks, expanded and active supervision, and information disclosure requirements to enhance market discipline. We discuss the incentive effects of the proposed regulation. In particular, we argue that it provides incentives for banks to develop new ways to evade the intended consequences of the proposed regulation. Supervision alone cannot prevent banks from ‘gaming and manipulation’ of …

Rates Of Reversible Error And The Risk Of Wrongful Execution, James S. Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

Innocent fatalities are a concern of all social activity with a capacity to kill. This is especially true when the social activity is the death penalty since an innocent person's execution is not simply a tragic collateral consequence of activity with a non-fatal objective. Instead, the taking of life is the goal of the enterprise, and the killing is the intended act of the state.

There is another difference between accidental fatalities in other social activities and those that occur when the capital system miscarries. Typically, the former fatalities are easy to spot and quantify; the latter are not. Precisely …

What Do We Do When We Do Law And Popular Culture, Jessica Silbey

Faculty Scholarship

"What We Do When We Do Law and Popular Culture" establishes a theoretical framework for analyzing legal popular culture, taking as its point of departure Richard Sherwin's book "When Law Goes Pop." The article stresses what Professor Silbey considers to be three major stumbling blocks in the growing interdiscipline of law and popular culture. She argues that if we are to advance our understanding of the relationship between law and popular culture, we must follow at least three simple charges: (1) demarcate our beginning concepts, such as law or culture, so that amidst the vast phenomena that may be called …

Comments On The Symposium: Expanding Research Opportunities On The Federal Criminal Justice System, Daniel C. Richman

Faculty Scholarship

A full understanding of how the federal enforcement bureaucracy will elude us without a rich understanding of what makes prosecutors (or agents) tick. However, I suspect that the best way to reach that goal is not to start with this ultimate question. After all, to look closer to home, what do professors “maximize” when they grade papers? Progress is much more likely to be made if we follow Jim Eisenstein and focus on, first, identifying the most salient features of the bureaucratic environment, and, second, getting a handle on their relative influences.

Natural Law And Public Reasons, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

In this Lecture I shall discuss the reasons that officials and citizens should rely upon in American politics. In recent years, various theorists have claimed that people in liberal democracies should rely in politics on "public reasons," reasons that are accessible to all citizens. Others have objected that such a counsel is unreasonable, if not incomprehensible. I shall concentrate on two facets of this issue. First, does the law exemplify a structure of public reasons – that is, do judges deciding cases draw on a stock of public reasons that is narrower than all the reasons one might give for …

Trust And Betrayal In The Medical Marketplace, Maxwell Gregg Bloche

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The author argues in this Comment that disingenuity as first resort is an unwise approach to the conflict between our ex ante and our later, illness-endangered selves. Not only does rationing by tacit deceit raise a host of moral problems, it will not work, over the long haul, because markets reward deceit's unmasking. The honesty about clinical limit-setting that some bioethicists urge may not be fully within our reach. But more candor is possible than we now achieve, and the more conscious we are about decisions to impose limits, the more inclined we will be to accept them without experiencing …

Market Power In Chinese Taipei: Laws, Policies And Treatments, Kung-Chung Liu, Yun-Peng Chu

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The experience of Chinese Taipei shows that opening up a previously protected market to new entrants can be a more effective and reliable way to enhance competition than regulating the behavior of dominant or monopolistic firms. Moreover, when opening up the market, the liberalizing measures adopted by government should be market-structure-neutral. That is, it should not try to dictate the direction and results of market competition. A more pressure-resistant mechanism should be designed to deal with market power, taking the form of a regime that is cross-sector, independent and collective in its decision-making, such as has been the case with …

Policing Guns And Youth Violence, Jeffrey A. Fagan

Faculty Scholarship

To combat the epidemic of youth gun violence in the 1980s and 1990s, law enforcement agencies across the United States adopted a variety of innovative strategies. This article presents case studies of eight cities' efforts to police gun crime. Some cities emphasized police-citizen partnerships to address youth violence, whereas others focused on aggressive enforcement against youth suspected of even minor criminal activity. Still others attempted to change youth behavior through "soft" strategies built on alternatives to arrest. Finally, some cities used a combination of approaches. Key findings discussed in this article include:

• Law enforcement agencies that emphasized police-citizen cooperation benefited …

How Many Copies Are Enough? Using Citation Studies To Limit Journal Holdings, Kincaid C. Brown

Law Librarian Scholarship

Mr. Brown introduces the University of Michigan Law Library’s use of citation study literature to develop a new policy regarding the number of duplicate copies of law review titles to be held in the library’s collection. The specifics of the new policy are described

A Broken System, Part Ii: Why There Is So Much Error In Capital Cases And What Can Be Done About It, James S. Liebman, Jeffrey A. Fagan, Andrew Gelman, Valerie West, Garth Davies, Alexander Kiss

Faculty Scholarship

There is growing awareness that serious, reversible error permeates America’s death penalty system, putting innocent lives at risk, heightening the suffering of victims, leaving killers at large, wasting tax dollars, and failing citizens, the courts and the justice system.

Our June 2000 Report shows how often mistakes occur and how serious it is: 68% of all death verdicts imposed and fully reviewed during the 1973-1995 study period were reversed by courts due to serious errors.

Analyses presented for the first time here reveal that 76% of the reversals at the two appeal stages where data are available for study were …

The War On Terrorism And The End Of Human Rights, David Luban

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In the immediate aftermath of September 11, President Bush stated that the perpetrators of the deed would be brought to justice. Soon afterwards, the President announced that the United States would engage in a war on terrorism. The first of these statements adopts the familiar language of criminal law and criminal justice. It treats the September 11 attacks as horrific crimes—mass murders—and the government’s mission as apprehending and punishing the surviving planners and conspirators for their roles in the crimes. The War on Terrorism is a different proposition, however, and a different model of governmental action—not law but war. Most …

Trade And Poverty In The Poor Countries, Jagdish N. Bhagwati, T.N. Srinivasan

Faculty Scholarship

While freer trade, or “openness” in trade, is now widely regarded as economically benign, in the sense that it increases the size of the pie, the recent anti-globalization critics have suggested that it is socially malign on several dimensions, among them the question of poverty.

Their contention is that trade accentuates, not ameliorates, and that it deepens, not diminishes, poverty in both the rich and the poor countries. The theoretical and empirical analysis of the impact of freer trade on poverty in the rich and in the poor countries is not symmetric, of course. We focus here only on the …

Punishment Theory: Moral Or Political?, Guyora Binder

Journal Articles

This article argues that the justification of punishment is best conceived as a problem of political theory rather than moral philosophy. Noting the familiar charge that utilitarianism permits framing the innocent, it argues that retributivism is equally vulnerable to the charge that it permits lynching the guilty. It argues that both critiques unfairly attribute lawlessness and dishonesty to the respective punishment theories. As a result, they mischaracterize both as theories about what individuals should do, rather than what acts legitimate government should authorize. In so doing, they disregard how committed the founders of the respective theories were to the rule …