Law Commons^™

What Can Be Done About Stock Market Volatility, Tamar Frankel

Faculty Scholarship

Volatility is as old as the financial markets. The bull market of 1986 and the crash that followed in 1987 were but the latest of periodic market gyrations that started with the South Sea Bubble and the Lombard Street run on commercial paper and have continued ever since.' Volatility in the financial markets would not be very important if market activity simply mirrored economic activity. Volatility would be much less important if the markets moved independently of the economy. But if we believe, as I do, that the markets and the economy are interdependent, and that their volatility is generally …

Shutting Down The Government, Alan L. Feld

Faculty Scholarship

Actions of the federal government cost money. Legislative processes that specify the amounts and purposes of governmental expenditures control the scope and content of government actions.¹ To paraphrase Chief Justice Marshall, the power to withhold spending involves the power to destroy.²

Those involved in the legislative process ordinarily do not engage in wholesale or sudden dismantling of government activities through unheralded failures to provide funds. While disputes over funding constitute a regular part of the nation's political activity, these controversies usually concern adjustments in the level of spending and of agency operations. A decision to terminate an agency …

A Critical Approach To Section 1983 With Special Attention To Sources Of Law, Jack M. Beermann

Faculty Scholarship

The Civil Rights Act of 1871¹ ("§ 1983") establishes a tort-like remedy for persons deprived of federally protected rights "under color of law."'² While the statute's broad language provides a remedy for violations of federal constitutional and statutory rights, the statute itself provides little or no guidance regarding important subjects such as the measure of damages, the availability of punitive damages, the requirements for equitable relief, the statute of limitations, survival of claims, proper parties, and immunities from suit.³...

...The first part of this article examines the narrowly "legal" analysis of § 1983 in the cases …

The Supreme Court Of Israel: Formative Years, 1948-1955, Pnina Lahav

Faculty Scholarship

This article looks at the institutional and jurisprudential development of the Israeli Supreme Court in its early stages.

Doctors And Lawyers And Wolves, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

Relations between lawyers and physicians, and therefore between law and medicine, are getting more and more destructive and counterproductive. It used to be a joke, but it's not funny anymore. We can't afford the continuing and escalating acrimony between our professions and it's time that we take constructive steps in the public interest to deal with it.

Baseline Questions In Legal Reasoning: The Example Of Property In Jobs, Jack M. Beermann, Joseph William Singer

Faculty Scholarship

In what follows, we critique at-will employment by focusing on the baselines that underlie the analysis. Our ultimate goal is to develop persuasive arguments to move courts and businesses to provide greater job security for workers. One possible reason the courts have been so reluctant to change employment law is that judges analyze job security issues from the standpoint of a series of baselines which have the effect of creating a presumption against job security that is almost impossible to overcome. These baseline assumptions effectively place the burden of proof on advocates of job security.

Judges fail to recognize that …

Caveat Auditor: The Rise Of Accountants' Liability, Gary S. Lawson

Faculty Scholarship

The revolution in liability law started with personal-injury claims, and many observers have imagined, or hoped, that it would remain confined to that uniquely emotional class of cases. Not so. According to a survey by the publication Inside Litigation, quoted in the May 18 Wall Street Journal, the biggest judgments are now coming in the type of contract and business cases where the complained-of injuries are financial. Among the professions sore beset by lawsuits at the moment is one that puts out a wholly intangible "product": accounting.

Predicting The Future Of Privacy In Pregnancy: How Medical Technology Affects The Legal Rights Of Pregnant Women, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

The bodies of pregnant women are the battleground on which the campaign to define the right of privacy is fought. The ultimate outcome will likely be shaped at least as much by new medical technologies as by politics or moral persuasion. This is because medical technologies do much more than change what we can do: they can radically alter the way we think about ourselves. Technologies have the power to change "not only the relation of man to nature but of man to man."1 More than that, they can alter our very concept of what it means to be human, …

Health Law At The Turn Of The Century: From White Dwarf To Red Giant, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

The evolution of stars is inexorable. From the form in which we currently view our own Sun, it and similar stars eventually expand as their exteriors cool to become red giants. When a red giant runs out of fuel, its exposed core will collapse to form a degenerate white dwarf and, eventually, a dead black dwarf.¹ Health law, as a discipline worthy of our attention, seems to have an opposite trajectory: from black dwarf to white dwarf, it is now on its way to becoming a red giant. The relevance of health law and the reasons for its exponentially …

Equitable Access To Biomedical Advances: Getting Beyond The Rights Impasse, Wendy K. Mariner

Faculty Scholarship

In 1988, gay rights activists and supporters demonstrated outside a Food and Drug Administration building demanding unrestricted access to experimental drugs being tested for the treatment of human immunodeficiency virus ("HIV") infection and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome ("AIDS").² Across the ocean in France, in October of the same year, came an equally insistent demand from women's groups, scientists, and family planning agencies that the pharmaceutical company Groupe Roussel Uclaf put its abortifacient RU 486 back on the market.' Early in 1989, people were outraged when newspapers reported that New Hampshire's Medicaid program would not pay for a life-saving bone marrow …

Corporate Risk Management And Risk Communication In The European Community And The United States, Michael S. Baram

Faculty Scholarship

The responsibility of private firms to communicate hazard and risk information to government officials and persons at risk has emerged as one of the central features of corporate risk management in the European Community ("E.C.") and the United States ("U.S."). This function is commonly described as "risk communication."' In both the E.C. and the U.S., new legal requirements and public attitudes now promote corporate disclosure of hazard and risk information on an unprecedented scale.

Corporate risk management is a vast, complex field of activity that is largely unaddressed by commentators and unknown to the general public in both industrial societies. …

Rational Decisions And Regulation Of Union Entry, Keith N. Hylton, Maria O'Brien

Faculty Scholarship

More than a decade after the publication of Law and Reality, the debate continues over the proper scope of election campaign regulation under the National Labor Relations Act (the "Act"). The issue has been whether employer efforts to dissuade employees from electing a union to represent them in collective bargaining actually influence the outcomes of elections. Several academic lawyers and social scientists have criticized one aspect or another of the Getman, Goldberg and Herman results (hereinafter the "Getman Study"), suggesting that many employer tactics have no effect on election outcomes, and that such tactics should not be regulated by …

Choosing Judges The Democratic Way, Larry Yackle

Faculty Scholarship

A generation ago, the pressing question in constitutional law was the countermajoritarian difficulty.' Americans insisted their government was a democratic republic and took that to mean rule by a majority of elected representatives in various offices and bodies, federal and local. Yet courts whose members had not won election presumed to override the actions of executive and legislative officers who had. The conventional answer to this apparent paradox was the Constitution, which arguably owed its existence to the people directly. Judicial review was justified, accordingly, when court decisions were rooted firmly in the particular text, structure, or historical backdrop of …

An Inquiry Into The Merits Of Copyright: The Challenges Of Consistency, Consent And Encouragement Theory, Wendy J. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

Hostility to copyright has a long and honorable history. In the nineteenth century, for example, Lord Macaulay argued that while copyright might be necessary to ensure a "supply of good books," the monopoly that it imposed was at best a necessary evil.

"For the sake of the good we must submit to the evil; but the evil ought
not to last a day longer than is necessary for the purpose of securing the good."

A number of studies critical of intellectual property followed in our century. The most well known is probably the economically oriented 1970 study by Stephen Breyer …

Foreword: The Economics Of Contract Law, Michael J. Meurer

Faculty Scholarship

The articles in this issue are samples from the burgeoning economics of contract law. They demonstrate that lawyers a can bring economic models to bear on quite specific issues of co offer normative guidance regarding the structure of efficient The success of the symposium and the quality of the articles of this field will continue to flourish. The articles cover a fairly narrow range of contract law issues. The second through sixth articles all address topics involving remedies. Two of these loo at the optimal remedies to be provided by contract law, and the other three are concerned with remedies …

Efficient Remedies For Breach Of Warranty, Kenneth Chapman, Michael J. Meurer

Faculty Scholarship

This article attempts to suggest valuable refinements and extensions of the economic theory of warranty by explicitly considering the choice of remedies for breach of warranty in conjunction with the choice of warranty protection itself. In particular, it offers explanations for the prevalence of replacement terms rather than refund terms in warranties. Economists studying the general issue of breach of contract have noted that the choice of remedy has important implications for risk sharing, renegotiation, transaction-specific investment, and the incentive to breach.5 This article derives much of its insight from the recognition that work on the economics of contract breach …

Aids, Astrology, And Arline: Towards A Casual Interpretation Of Section 504, Gary S. Lawson

Faculty Scholarship

Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 provides that "[n]o otherwise qualified individual with handicaps shall, solely by reason of his handicap, be excluded from the participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under [any federal or federally funded program]."' In School Board v. Arline, the Supreme Court held that a school teacher with a history of infectious tuberculosis was an "individual with handicaps" protected by section 504, and that the determination of whether she was "otherwise qualified" to teach elementary school required a sound medical assessment of the risks of contagion posed by …

Bad Judicial Activism And Liberal Federal-Courts Doctrine: A Comment On Professor Doernberg And Professor Redish, Jack M. Beermann

Faculty Scholarship

JUDUCIAL ACTIVISM IS often portrayed as a liberal vice. This perception is wrong both historically and, as Professor Redish argues, ³ currently as well. The federal judiciary has been and still is an activist institution, working with both substantive law and jurisdictional rules to achieve its own policy goals. It has done this in statutory, constitutional, and common-law matters. Specifically, the Supreme Court of the United States has actively-shaped the jurisdiction of the federal courts in a restrictive and generally conservative manner.

Professors Doernberg⁴ and Redish attack this last form of activism by the federal courts, activism in shaping …

Aids, Astrology, And Arline: Towards A Causal Interpretation Of Section 504, Gary S. Lawson

Faculty Scholarship

Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 provides that ‘[n]o otherwise qualified individual with handicaps shall, solely by reason of his handicap, be excluded from the participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under [any federal or federally funded program].’1 In School Board v. Arline,2 the Supreme Court held that a school teacher with a history of infectious tuberculosis was an ‘individual with handicaps' protected by section 504,3 and that the determination of whether she was ‘otherwise qualified’ to teach elementary school required a sound medical assessment of the risks …

National Law And Commercial Justice: Safeguarding Procedural Integrity In International Arbitration, William W. Park

Faculty Scholarship

The law chosen to govern the merits of an international contract dispute does not always lead to results hat satisfy an arbitrator's personal sense of what is right. The arbitrator therefore may be tempted to resolve the dispute according to his own notion of justice. Seduced away from the rules of the otherwise applicable law, the arbitrator may take on unauthorized powers of amiable composition. While most international arbitrators are conscientious in respecting the bounds of their mission, some have been known to boast of their skill in finding ways to bypass the established rules of the party-chosen law. …

The Supreme Court, Privacy, And Abortion, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

Although states can regulate abortions after the point of fetal viability (or, more accurately, can restrict the induction of premature birth), since Roe only 13 states have enacted laws to restrict such abortions.8 Decisions after Roe In more than a dozen major cases over the succeeding 15 years, the Supreme Court applied Roe to specific attempts by some states to limit abortion rights during the first and second trimesters. [...]1989, the Court consistently struck down almost all such limitations. The Court did find it constitutional, however, for the state and federal governments to refuse to fund abortions through the Medicaid …

The Politics Of Transplantation Of Human Fetal Tissue, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

Research involving human fetal tissue has been the subject of intense political debate in this country for almost two decades, and the use of fetal tissues in transplantation continues this controversy in another forum. Since Roe v. Wade ,1 the landmark decision on abortion by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1973, the federal government has focused public attention on fetal research by creating panels of experts. "3 This conclusion was accepted on a vote of 15 to 2, and included recommendations that the decision to abort be kept independent of the decision to retrieve and use fetal tissue, that recipients …

Dispute Over The United States’ Denial Of A Visa To Yasir Arafat, Sadiq Reza

Faculty Scholarship

On November 26, 1988, the United States denied a visa to Yasir Arafat, Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), when he sought to enter the United States to attend the forty-third session of the United Nations (UN) in New York. The denial rekindled a forty-year-old dispute between the United States and the UN over the extent to which the United States may, under the terms of the Agreement Between the United Nations and the United States of America Regarding the Headquarters of the United Nations (Headquarters Agreement), restrict entry to persons seeking to enter the …

Amici For Appellees: Brief For Bioethicists For Privacy As Amicus Curiae Supporting Appelles Brief For Bioethicists For Privacy As Amicus Curiae Supporting Appellees, George J. Annas, Leonard H. Glantz, Wendy K. Mariner

Faculty Scholarship

Amicus is an ad hoc group of 57 philosophers, theologians, attorneys and physicians .. .who teach medical ethics to medical students and physicians. The members believe that permitting competent adults to make important, personal medical decisions in consultation with their physician is a fundamental principle of medical ethics, and that the doctor-patient relationship deserves the constitutional protection the Court has afforded it under the right of privacy.

Review Of Red, White, And Blue: A Critical Analysis Of Constitutional Law By Mark Tushnet, David B. Lyons

Faculty Scholarship

Mark Tushnet's new book offers no such counsel. Mainly a critique of interpretative theories, its conclusions are profoundly skeptical. Tushnet's central claim is that judicial review and constitutional theory cannot possibly perform their assigned functions, and that liberalism is to blame. This review will focus on those facets of the book.

Bracton, The Year Books, And The 'Transformation Of Elementary Legal Ideas' In The Early Common Law, David J. Seipp

Faculty Scholarship

The language of the common law has a life and a logic of its own, resilient through eight centuries of unceasing talk. Basic terms of the lawyer's specialized vocabulary, elementary conceptual distinctions, and modes of argument, which all go to make “thinking like a lawyer” possible, have proved remarkably durable in the literature of the common law. Two fundamental distinctions—between “real” and “personal” actions and between “possessory” and “proprietary” remedies—can be traced back to their early use in treatises of the first generations of professional common law judges and in reports of courtroom dialogue from the first generations of professional …

Legal Policy Conflicts In International Banking, William W. Park

Faculty Scholarship

The world debt crisis might never have occupied the front pages of our newspapers during much of the past decade if more attention had been paid to the advice old Polonius gave to young Laertes. More than one Secretary of the Treasury has tried to control a multibillion dollar problem of money addiction, whose resolution sometimes seems to lie in the realm of financial eschatology.