Law Commons^™

Foreword, Jeffrey S. Lehman

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Trial Outcomes And Demographics: Is There A Bronx Effect?, Theodore Eisenberg, Martin T. Wells

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Minorities favor injured plaintiffs and give them inflated awards. This folk wisdom in the legal community influences choice of trial locale and the screening of jurors. A Los Angeles court is said to be known by local lawyers as "the bank" because of the frequency and size of its anti-corporate awards. A newspaper article summarizing court results suggests, somewhat jokingly, that the "Bronx County Courthouse should post a warning: People who get sued here run an increased risk of suffering staggering losses." Beliefs about the influence of factors other than race, such as income and urbanization, also are common.

This …

The Paths To Legal Equality: A Reply To Dean Sullivan, Michael C. Dorf

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Secured Debt And The Likelihood Of Reorganization, Clas Bergström, Theodore Eisenberg, Stefan Sundgren

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Theory suggests that secured creditors may increasingly oppose a debtor’s reorganization as the value of their collateral approaches the amount of their claims. If reorganization occurs and the value of the firm appreciates, the secured creditor receives only part of the gain. But if the firm’s value depreciates, the secured creditor bears all of the cost. Secured claimants, thus, often have more to lose than to gain in reorganizations. This study of Finnish reorganizations filed in districts that account for most of the country’s reorganizations finds that creditor groups most likely to be well-secured are most likely to oppose reorganization. …

Ethics Of Enterprise Liability In Product Design And Marketing Litigation, James A. Henderson Jr.

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

American courts talk as though they are imposing strict enterprise liability on product manufacturers, but in truth they do so only with respect to manufacturing defects. In product design and marketing litigation, manufacturers' liability is based on fault. The reason why strict liability is inappropriate for the generic product hazards associated with design and marketing is that, in sharp contrast to manufacturing defects, the conditions necessary for insurance to function are not satisfied. Users and consumers control generic product risks to a sufficiently great extent that any insurance scheme based on strict enterprise liability would be destroyed by combinations of …

Standard-Form Contracting In The Electronic Age, Robert A. Hillman, Jeffrey J. Rachlinski

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The development of the Internet as a medium for consumer transactions creates a new question for contract law. In this Article, Professors Robert Hillman and Jeffrey Rachlinski address whether the risks imposed on consumers by Internet boilerplate requires a new lens through which courts should view these types of contracts. Their analysis of boilerplate in paper and Internet contracts examines the social, cognitive, and rational factors that affect consumers' comprehension of boilerplate and compares business strategies in presenting it. The authors conclude that the influence of these factors in Internet transactions is similar to that in proper transactions. Although the …

Legal Education In Africa In The Era Of Globalization And Structural Adjustment, Muna Ndulo

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Teaching Ethics In An Atmosphere Of Skepticism And Relativism, W. Bradley Wendel

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

I would like to do several things in this essay. First, I am interested in the sources of students' wariness about moral reasoning and claims about objectivity and truth in ethics. Sometimes I feel like a teacher of geography who must confront a deeply entrenched belief that the earth is flat. The earth is not flat, nor is ethics just a matter of opinion, but one wonders why students persist in thinking the opposite. Teaching effectively requires an understanding of where students are coming from. Accordingly, the opening section of this essay is structured around a series of hypotheses to …

Wife Murder In Chicago: 1910-1930, Cynthia Grant Bowman, Ben Altman

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

A Comparative View Of Standards Of Proof, Kevin M. Clermont, Emily Sherwin

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

In common-law systems, the standard of proof for ordinary civil cases requires the party who bears the burden of proof to establish by a preponderance of the evidence that the facts alleged are true. In contrast, the prevailing standard of proof for civil cases in civil-law systems is indistinguishable from the standard for criminal cases: the judge must be firmly convinced that the facts alleged are true. This striking difference in common-law and civil-law procedures has received very little attention from either civilian or comparative scholars.

The preponderance standard applied in common-law systems is openly probabilistic and produces, on average, …

Studying Labor Law And Human Resources In Rhode Island, Stewart J. Schwab

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Our task today is to celebrate, inaugurate, and educate. Lawyers demanded the education part of the talk because they love double counting whenever possible. The lawyers in our audience get Continuing Legal Education credits for attending. That's just one illustration of how to think like a lawyer--kill as many birds with as few stones as possible.

Lawyers are often accused of talking in an arcane language that no one else can understand. Labor-relations people are sometimes thought to be either pie-in-the-sky optimists or Marxist-inspired anarchists. Human-relations professionals are sometimes said to be hypocrites giving a fake smile to employees while …

“Certain Fundamental Truths”: A Dialectic On Negative And Positive Liberty In Hate-Speech Cases, W. Bradley Wendel

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Remembering Harry Bitner: Law Librarian, Professor, And Wonderful Colleague, Claire M. Germain

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Furthering Justice By Improving The Adversary System And Making Lawyers More Accountable, Roger C. Cramton

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Expanding State Jurisdiction To Regulate Out-Of-State Lawyers, Charles W. Wolfram

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Knowledge At Work: Disputes Over The Ownership Of Human Capital In The Changing Workplace, Katherine V.W. Stone

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

International Law And The Use Of Force: America’S Response To September 11, Muna Ndulo

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

"Speaking Rights": Evaluating Juror Discussions During Civil Trials, Paula Hannaford-Agor, Valerie P. Hans, G. Thomas Munsterman

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Permitting jurors to discuss evidence during civil trials may facilitate understanding and provide an outlet for their thoughts and questions, and does not appear to lead to prejudgment or prejudice.

Juries, Judges, And Punitive Damages: An Empirical Study, Theodore Eisenberg, Neil Lafountain, Brian Ostrom, David Rottman, Martin T. Wells

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

This Article, the first broad-based analysis of punitive damages in judge-tried cases, compares judge and jury performance in awarding punitive damages and in setting their levels. Data covering one year of judge and jury trial outcomes from forty-five of the nation's largest counties yield no substantial evidence that judges and juries differ in the rate at which they award punitive damages or in the central relation between the size of punitive awards and compensatory awards. The relation between punitive and compensatory awards in jury trials is strikingly similar to the relation in judge trials. For a given level of compensatory …

Judges As Altruistic Hierarchs, Lynn A. Stout

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Past, Present, And Future Of Empirical Legal Scholarship: Judicial Decision Making And The New Empiricism, Michael Heise

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Over the last century, empirical legal scholarship has joined the ranks of the mainstream within the legal academy. In this article, Professor Heise traces the history of legal empiricism and discusses its growing role within the legal academy. First, the article traces legal empiricism through the twentieth century from the legal empiricism movement of the early twentieth century, to post-World War II efforts to revive legal empiricism, including the Chicago Jury Project and large-scale foundational support for empirical legal research, through current support for legal empirical research from both the law schools and other research centers. The article then discusses …

Quiet Rebellion Ii: An Empirical Analysis Of Declining Federal Drug Sentences Including Data From The District Level, Frank O. Bowman, Michael Heise

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

This is the second of two articles in which we seek an explanation for the hitherto unexamined fact that the average length of prison sentences imposed in federal court for narcotics violations declined by more than 15% between 1991-92 and 2000.

Our first article, Quiet Rebellion? Explaining Nearly a Decade of Declining Federal Drug Sentences, 86 Iowa Law Review 1043 (May 2001) ( "Rebellion I" ), examined national sentencing data in an effort to determine whether the decline in federal drug sentences is real (rather than a statistical anomaly), and to identify and analyze possible causes of the decline. We …

Cognitive Psychology And Optimal Government Design, Jeffrey J. Rachlinski, Cynthia R. Farina

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

In Praise Of Procedure: An Economic And Behavioral Defense Of Smith V. Van Gorkom And The Business Judgment Rule, Lynn A. Stout

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

U.S. Jury Reform: The Active Jury And The Adversarial Ideal, Valerie P. Hans

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

In many countries, lay people participate as decision makers in legal cases. Some countries include their citizens in the justice system as lay judges or jurors, who assess cases independently. The legal systems of other nations combine lay and law-trained judges who decide cases together in mixed tribunals. The International Conference on Lay Participation in the Criminal Trial in the 21st Century provided useful contrasts among different methods of incorporating lay voices into criminal justice systems worldwide. Systems with inquisitorial methods are more likely to employ mixed courts, whereas adversarial systems more often use juries. Research presented at the Conference …

Playing With Fire, Gregory S. Alexander

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Information Technology And U.S. Legal Education: Opportunities, Challenges, And Threats, Peter W. Martin

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Disease Management And Liability In The Human Genome Era, Larry I. Palmer

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The completion of a rough draft of the Human Genome presents both tremendous potential for improvements in health care delivery and challenges to providing appropriate incentives that will bring forth new treatments while protecting individuals and groups from genetic discrimination. As "genetics" becomes an integral part of health care delivery, there are no existing coherent legal doctrines for balancing the risks and benefits of this technological and scientific achievement. Developing a coherent legal approach to these risks and benefits requires a reexamination of the purposes of the liability doctrines that govern the management of disease processes. At the moment, a …

The Investor Confidence Game, Lynn A. Stout

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Academic discussions of securities policy often assume that investors are hyperrational and distrustful actors who do not need the protections of the securities laws to avoid being defrauded. The time has come to recognize the limitations of this assumption and to consider as well the possibility and implications of investor trust. Experienced policymakers and businesspeople (and certainly experienced con artists) have long known that trust is a potent force in explaining and manipulating investor behavior. They are right. They are right to believe that investor confidence-meaning investor trust-is important to the market. They are right to think that trust has …

Employee Representation In The Boundaryless Workplace, Katherine V.W. Stone

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.