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2013

Fordham Law School

Faculty Scholarship

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Articles 1 - 30 of 66

Full-Text Articles in Law

U.S. Global Aids Funding And Its Discontents: Why The Supreme Court Must Strike Down The Anti-Prostitution Pledge, Chi Adanna Mgbako Jan 2013

U.S. Global Aids Funding And Its Discontents: Why The Supreme Court Must Strike Down The Anti-Prostitution Pledge, Chi Adanna Mgbako

Faculty Scholarship

This op-ed recommends that the U.S. Supreme Court strike down the "anti-prostitution pledge," a Congressional requirement forcing organizations receiving U.S. global AIDS funding to adopt policies "opposing prostitution and sex trafficking."


Financial Retrenchment And Institutional Entrenchment: Will Legal Education Respond, Explode, Or Just Wait It Out?, Ian Weinstein Jan 2013

Financial Retrenchment And Institutional Entrenchment: Will Legal Education Respond, Explode, Or Just Wait It Out?, Ian Weinstein

Faculty Scholarship

Both markets and ideas have turned against the American legal profession. Legal hiring has contracted, and law school enrollments are decreasing. The business models of big law and legal education are under pressure, current levels of student indebtedness seem unsustainable, and a hero has yet to emerge from our fragmented regulatory structures. In the realm of ideas, the information revolution has sparked deep critiques of structured knowledge and expertise, opening the roles of the law and the university in society to reexamination. We are less enamored of the scholar-lawyer and gaze with longing at technocrats. I hope that clinical law …


Faithful Agency Versus Ordinary Meaning Advocacy, James J. Brudney Jan 2013

Faithful Agency Versus Ordinary Meaning Advocacy, James J. Brudney

Faculty Scholarship

This Article contends that ordinary meaning analysis based on dictionaries and language canons cannot be reconciled with the faithful agent model. Fidelity to Congress as a principal entails fidelity to its lawmaking enterprise, not to words or sentences divorced from that enterprise. Congress has indicated that it does not value dictionaries as part of its lawmaking process, and it ascribes at most limited weight to language canons in that process. Further, Justices advocating ordinary meaning analysis too often use dictionary definitions, and language canons such as the rule against surplusage, the whole act rule, and ejusdem generis, in ways that …


The Political Morality Of Voting In Direct Democracy, Michael Serota, Ethan J. Leib Jan 2013

The Political Morality Of Voting In Direct Democracy, Michael Serota, Ethan J. Leib

Faculty Scholarship

The voting levers in candidate elections and in direct democracy elections are identical. The political obligations that bind the citizens that pull them are not. This Essay argues that voters in direct democracy elections, unlike their counterparts in candidate elections, serve as representatives of the people and are, accordingly, bound by the ethics of political representation. Upending the traditional dichotomy between representative and direct democracy, this Essay explains why citizens voting in direct democracy are representative legislators who must vote in the public interest and must not vote in their private interests.


New Formalism In The Aftermath Of The Housing Crisis, Nestor M. Davidson Jan 2013

New Formalism In The Aftermath Of The Housing Crisis, Nestor M. Davidson

Faculty Scholarship

The housing crisis has left in its wake an ongoing legal crisis. After housing markets began to collapse across the country in 2007, foreclosures and housing-related bankruptcies surged significantly and have barely begun to abate more than six years later. As the legal system has confronted this aftermath, courts have increasingly accepted claims by borrowers that lenders and other entities involved in securitizing mortgages failed to follow requirements related to perfecting and transferring their security interests. These cases – which focus variously on issues such as standing, real party in interest, chains of assignment, the negotiability of mortgage notes, and …


The Great And Mighty Tax Law: How The Roberts Court Has Reduced Constitutional Scrutiny Of Taxes And Tax Expenditures, Linda Sugin Jan 2013

The Great And Mighty Tax Law: How The Roberts Court Has Reduced Constitutional Scrutiny Of Taxes And Tax Expenditures, Linda Sugin

Faculty Scholarship

This article compares National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius – the Supreme Court’s decision upholding the individual mandate in Obamacare as a tax, with Arizona Christian Schools v. Winn – the Supreme Court’s decision denying standing to taxpayers with an Establishment Clause challenge to a state tax credit. It argues that these cases aggravate a growing tension between the economic and legal analyses of taxation by reducing the legal significance of economic analysis in constitutional cases. It suggests that Arizona Christian Schools was a truly radical decision because it conceptualized tax expenditures as private action immune from constitutional attack, …


Lawyers’ Professional Independence: Overrated Or Undervalued?, Bruce A. Green Jan 2013

Lawyers’ Professional Independence: Overrated Or Undervalued?, Bruce A. Green

Faculty Scholarship

This article explores the concept of lawyers’ "professional independence" in the literature of the U.S. legal profession. It begins with some reflections on the conventional meanings of professional independence, which encompasses both the bar’s collective independence to regulate its members and individual lawyers’ independence in the context of professional representations, including independence from clients, on one hand, and independence from third parties, on the other. The article suggests that the professional conduct rules are overly preoccupied with protecting lawyers’ professional independence from the corrupting influences of other professionals. The article then turns to an aspect of professional independence that has …


The Omnipresent Specter Of Omnicare, Sean J. Griffith Jan 2013

The Omnipresent Specter Of Omnicare, Sean J. Griffith

Faculty Scholarship

In this Article, written for a symposium commemorating the tenth anniversary of the Delaware Supreme Court’s opinion in Omnicare, Inc. v. NCS Healthcare, Inc., I argue, notwithstanding reports to the contrary, that Omnicare is still very much with us. Although there is a line of cases that qualifies the narrow holding of the opinion, the strong reading of Omnicare, which requires a fiduciary out in every merger agreement and elevates the “unremitting” duty to remain “fully informed” to an absolute jurisprudential principle, lives on in Delaware law, animating the Court of Chancery’s controversial rulings in the recent standstill cases. Shifting …


Unregulated Corporate Internal Investigations: Achieving Fairness For Corporate Constituents, Bruce A. Green, Ellen S. Progdor Jan 2013

Unregulated Corporate Internal Investigations: Achieving Fairness For Corporate Constituents, Bruce A. Green, Ellen S. Progdor

Faculty Scholarship

This article focuses on the relationship between corporations and their employee constituents in the context of corporate internal investigations, an unregulated multi-million dollar business. The classic approach provided in the 1981 Supreme Court opinion, Upjohn v. United States, is contrasted with the reality of modern-day internal investigations that may exploit individuals to achieve a corporate benefit with the government. Attorney-client privilege becomes an issue as corporate constituents perceive that corporate counsel is representing their interests, when in fact these internal investigators are obtaining information for the corporation to barter with the government. Legal precedent and ethics rules provide little relief …


Review Of "Confucian Constitutional Order: How China’S Ancient Past Can Shape Its Political Future" By Jiang Qing, Carl F. Minzner Jan 2013

Review Of "Confucian Constitutional Order: How China’S Ancient Past Can Shape Its Political Future" By Jiang Qing, Carl F. Minzner

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.


The Inner Morality Of Private Law, Benjamin C. Zipursky Jan 2013

The Inner Morality Of Private Law, Benjamin C. Zipursky

Faculty Scholarship

Lon Fuller's classic The Morality of Law is an exploration of the basic principles of a legal system: the law should be publicly promulgated, prospective, clear, and general. So deep are these principles, he argued, that too great a deviation from them would not simply create a bad legal system and bad law, but would render the products of such a system undeserving of the name "law" at all. In this essay, I argue that Fuller's basic principles are not in fact desiderata for all of law, observing that much of private law plainly flouts them; it is unwritten, retroactive, …


Who Governs? Delegations In Global Trade Lawmaking, Terence C. Halliday, Josh Pacewicz, Susan Block-Lieb Jan 2013

Who Governs? Delegations In Global Trade Lawmaking, Terence C. Halliday, Josh Pacewicz, Susan Block-Lieb

Faculty Scholarship

Who governs international trade law regimes? Although this question has attracted much research for global regulatory regimes, very little is known about international trade law organizations which function as global legislatures. This paper focuses on hitherto invisible attributes of the inner core of global legislators - the state and non-state delegations and delegations that create global norms for private international trade law through the most prominent global trade legislature, the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL). Based on ten years of fieldwork, extensive interviews, and unique data on delegation attendance and participation in UNCITRAL’s Working Group on Insolvency, …


Localist Statutory Interpretation, Ethan J. Leib Jan 2013

Localist Statutory Interpretation, Ethan J. Leib

Faculty Scholarship

This paper argues for more attention to citizens’ point of contact with our legal system within local courts – and makes an effort to conceptualize local judges as parts of local governments. Once the paper highlights the role of local courts within the constellation of local government, it offers an argument for why certain forms of "localist judging" are appropriate postures for local judges to take when confronted with hard cases of statutory interpretation. The paper explores the virtues of a type of "intrastate judicial federalism."


The Chevron-Ecuador Dispute, Forum Non Conveniens, And The Problem Of Ex Ante Inadequacy, Howard M. Erichson Jan 2013

The Chevron-Ecuador Dispute, Forum Non Conveniens, And The Problem Of Ex Ante Inadequacy, Howard M. Erichson

Faculty Scholarship

These opening lines from Chevron's website of "facts about Chevron and Texaco in Ecuador" refer to the latest salvo in a long-running environmental dispute concerning a Texaco subsidiary's Ecuadorian oil-drilling activities. Chevron resisted enforcement in the United States of an Ecuadorian court's $18 billion judgment, and the plaintiffs are seeking to enforce the judgment against Chevron in various courts around the world. Chevron's account suggests that the plaintiffs' lawyers are engaged in improper forum-shopping. The plaintiffs'lawyers, according to Chevron, ought to pursue enforcement of the judgment in the United States.


Commentary, Critical Legal Theory In Intellectual Property And Information Law Scholarship, Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal Spring Symposium, Sonia K. Katyal, Peter Goodrich Jan 2013

Commentary, Critical Legal Theory In Intellectual Property And Information Law Scholarship, Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal Spring Symposium, Sonia K. Katyal, Peter Goodrich

Faculty Scholarship

The very definition and scope of CLS (critical legal studies) is itself subject to debate. Some scholars characterize CLS as scholarship that employs a particular methodology—more of a “means” than an “end.” On the other hand, some scholars contend that CLS scholarship demonstrates a collective commitment to a political end goal—an emancipation of sorts —through the identification of, and resistance to, exploitative power structures that are reinforced through law and legal institutions. After a brief golden age, CLS scholarship was infamously marginalized in legal academia and its sub-disciplines. But CLS themes now appear to be making a resurgence—at least in …


Oil And Water: Mixing Taxable And Tax-Exempt Shareholders In Mutual Funds, Jeffrey M. Colon Jan 2013

Oil And Water: Mixing Taxable And Tax-Exempt Shareholders In Mutual Funds, Jeffrey M. Colon

Faculty Scholarship

As of 2012, roughly 23% of U.S. households’ assets and 50% of retirement assets are invested in mutual funds, thus making mutual funds one of the most important investment vehicles for U.S. households. The federal taxation of mutual funds and mutual fund shareholders has played a vital role in the development of mutual funds and their appeal to U.S. investors. Despite the significant amount of mutual fund assets held in retirement accounts, there has been very little analysis of the issues that arise when taxable and tax-exempt shareholders invest together in the same mutual fund. A substantial body of research …


The Mobility Case For Regionalism, Nestor M. Davidson, Sheila R. Foster Jan 2013

The Mobility Case For Regionalism, Nestor M. Davidson, Sheila R. Foster

Faculty Scholarship

In the discourse of local government law, the idea that a mobile populace can “vote with its feet” has long served as a justification for devolution and decentralization. Tracing to Charles Tiebout’s seminal work in public finance, the legal-structural prescription that follows is that a diversity of independent and empowered local governments can best satisfy the varied preferences of residents metaphorically shopping for bundles of public services, regulatory environment, and tax burden. This localist paradigm generally presumes that fragmented governments are competing for residents within a given metropolitan area. Contemporary patterns of mobility, however, call into question this foundational assumption. …


Trademark Cosmopolitanism, Sonia K. Katyal Jan 2013

Trademark Cosmopolitanism, Sonia K. Katyal

Faculty Scholarship

The world of global trademarks can be characterized in terms of three major shifts: first, a shift from national to global branding strategies; second, a shift from national and regional systems to harmonized international regimes governing trademark law; and third, a concurrent shift from local to transnational social movements that challenge branding and other corporate practices. The rise of transnational brands brings with it an attendant series of legal shifts in trademark law. Long considered the stepchild of intellectual property law, today, trademark law has morphed into a powerful global legal phenomenon, revealing a foundational shift from national and regional …


Federalism And The Eighth Amendment, Youngjae Lee Jan 2013

Federalism And The Eighth Amendment, Youngjae Lee

Faculty Scholarship

How many “cruel and unusual punishments” clauses are there? Michael Mannheimer, in his article, Cruel and Unusual Federal Punishments, argues that there are two—one for the federal government and one for state governments.1 Mannheimer contends that courts have been unduly neglecting the former and mistakenly applying the latter to the federal government without adequate reflection.2 Mannheimer further argues that the Eighth Amendment is primarily a device to promote state sovereignty and that we should accordingly read it as requiring that federal punishments be no more severe than state punishments for equivalent crimes.3 I cannot do justice in this brief Response …


Critical Legal Studies In Intellectual Property And Information Law Scholarship, (Symposium), Sonia K. Katyal, Peter Goodrich, Rebecca L. Tushnet Jan 2013

Critical Legal Studies In Intellectual Property And Information Law Scholarship, (Symposium), Sonia K. Katyal, Peter Goodrich, Rebecca L. Tushnet

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.


Federal Criminal Discovery Reform: A Legislative Approach, Bruce A. Green Jan 2013

Federal Criminal Discovery Reform: A Legislative Approach, Bruce A. Green

Faculty Scholarship

In general, discovery is far narrower in federal criminal cases than in federal civil litigation. Under current federal law, prosecutors do not have to disclose evidence and information that is favorable to the defense for its use in investigating, advising the defendant, plea negotiations or trial, unless the favorable evidence falls within one of several narrow categories or might be probative enough to produce an acquittal. Proponents of broader federal criminal discovery law express concern both that disclosure is too limited to ensure fair outcomes and provide a fair process in criminal cases and that prosecutors do not universally comply …


Risk-Shifting Through Issuer Liability And Corporate Monitoring, Martin Gelter Jan 2013

Risk-Shifting Through Issuer Liability And Corporate Monitoring, Martin Gelter

Faculty Scholarship

This article explores how issuer liability re-allocates fraud risk and how risk allocation may reduce the incidence of fraud. In the US, the apparent absence of individual liability of officeholders and insufficient monitoring by insurers under-mine the potential deterrent effect of securities litigation. The underlying reasons why both mechanisms remain ineffective are collective action problems under the prevailing dispersed ownership structure, which eliminates the incentives to moni-tor set by issuer liability. This article suggests that issuer liability could potentially have a stronger deterrent effect when it shifts risk to individuals or entities holding a larger financial stake. Thus, it would …


Judicial Review For Enemy Fighters: The Court’S Fateful Turn In Ex Parte Quirin, The Nazi Saboteur Case, Andrew Kent Jan 2013

Judicial Review For Enemy Fighters: The Court’S Fateful Turn In Ex Parte Quirin, The Nazi Saboteur Case, Andrew Kent

Faculty Scholarship

The emerging conventional wisdom in the legal academy is that individual rights under the U.S. Constitution should be extended to noncitizens outside the United States. This claim - called globalism in my article - has been advanced with increasing vigor in recent years, most notably in response to legal positions taken by the Bush administration during the war on terror. Against a Global Constitution challenges the textual and historical grounds advanced to support the globalist conventional wisdom and demonstrates that they have remarkably little support. At the same time, the article adduces textual and historical evidence that noncitizens were among …


The Regulation Of Race In Science, Kimani Paul-Emile Jan 2013

The Regulation Of Race In Science, Kimani Paul-Emile

Faculty Scholarship

The overwhelming majority of biological scientists agree that there is no such thing as race among modern humans. Yet, scientists regularly deploy race in their studies, and federal laws and regulations currently mandate the use of racial categories in biomedical research. Legal commentators have tried to make sense of this paradox primarily by looking to equal protection strict scrutiny analysis. However, the colorblind approach that attends this doctrine — which many regard as synonymous with invalidation — does not offer a particularly useful way to think about the use of race in research. It offers no way to address how …


What Real-World Criminal Cases Tell Us About Genetics Evidence, Deborah W. Denno Jan 2013

What Real-World Criminal Cases Tell Us About Genetics Evidence, Deborah W. Denno

Faculty Scholarship

This Article, which is part of a symposium on "Law and Ethics at the Frontier of Genetic Technology," examines an unprecedented experimental study published in Science. The Science study indicated that psychopathic criminal offenders were more likely to receive lighter sentences if a judge was aware of genetic and neurobiological explanations for the offender’s psychopathy. This Article contends that the study’s conclusions derive from substantial flaws in the study’s design and methodology. The hypothetical case upon which the study is based captures just one narrow and unrepresentative component of how genetic and neurobiological information operates, and the study suffers from …


Shields, Swords, And Fulfilling The Exclusionary Rule's Deterrent Function, James L. Kainen Jan 2013

Shields, Swords, And Fulfilling The Exclusionary Rule's Deterrent Function, James L. Kainen

Faculty Scholarship

When the exclusionary rule prevents the prosecution from using evidence necessary to bring a case to trial, the rule deters illegality while raising no issue about how it might interfere with usual factfinding processes. However, when a case proceeds to trial although a court has suppressed some prosecution evidence, courts need to decide the extent to which the defendant may benefit from the absence of the proof without opening the door to its admission. The exclusion of any relevant evidence raises similar questions, and courts often say the exclusionary rule is a shield from suppressed evidence, but not a sword …


State Speech And Political Liberalism, Abner S. Greene Jan 2013

State Speech And Political Liberalism, Abner S. Greene

Faculty Scholarship

Jim Fleming and Linda McClain have written an impressive book on the responsible exercise of rights, which flows from prior writing by each.Their title, "Ordered Liberty," is a bit of a misnomer, however. When one thinks of that phrase, one thinks of the ways in which we balance liberty against order, i.e., against security, police power, controlling the excesses of liberty. Responsibility in the exercise of rights is an aspect of how rights are orderly, but the major hard cases involving rights are hard because significant claims of harm are in play. Think of much of constitutional criminal procedure, free …


Google And Search-Engine Market Power, Mark R. Patterson Jan 2013

Google And Search-Engine Market Power, Mark R. Patterson

Faculty Scholarship

A significant and growing body of commentary considers whether possible manipulation of search results by Google could give rise to antitrust liability. Surprisingly, though, little serious attention has been paid to whether Google has market power. Those who favor antitrust scrutiny of Google generally cite its large market share, from which they infer or assume its dominance. Those who are skeptical of competition law’s role in regulating search, on the other hand, usually cite Google’s 'competition is only a click away' mantra to suggest that Google’s market position is precarious. In fact, the issue of Google’s power is more complicated …


The Relational Infrastructure Of Law Firm Culture And Regulation: The Exaggerated Death Of Big Law, Russell G. Pearce, Eli Wald Jan 2013

The Relational Infrastructure Of Law Firm Culture And Regulation: The Exaggerated Death Of Big Law, Russell G. Pearce, Eli Wald

Faculty Scholarship

In recent years, the ethical infrastructure and culture of law firms has come under attack from commentators, such as Larry Ribstein, Bill Henderson, and Marc Galanter, who, in related ways, predict "the death of Big Law." They assert that the individualistic ethical infrastructure and culture of large firms undermine their commitment to professional values and will result in their failure to prepare for, and to survive, long term economic and technological trends. We identify a contradiction at the heart of this analysis. While these critiques correctly identify the individualistic flaws of law firm culture, they share the same individualistic assumptions. …


Review Of Out In Africa: Lgbt Organizing In Namibia And South Africa, Chi Adanna Mgbako Jan 2013

Review Of Out In Africa: Lgbt Organizing In Namibia And South Africa, Chi Adanna Mgbako

Faculty Scholarship

This is a review of the book Out in Africa: LGBT Organizing in Namibia and South Africa by Ashley Currier.