Law Commons^™

Justice And Reasonable Care In Negligence Law, Richard W. Wright

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The academic literature generally assumes that an aggregate-risk-utility test is employed to determine whether conduct was reasonable or negligent. This aggregate-risk-utility test is a transparent implementation of the basic impartiality and aggregation principles of utilitarianism and the most popular (Kaldor-Hicks) interpretation of economic efficiency. Thus, the test's assumed prevalence as the criterion of reasonableness in negligence law has been highlighted by legal economists as confirmation of the utilitarian efficiency foundations of tort law, while those, including Ronald Dworkin, who think that the law, including tort law, is or should be grounded on principles of justice have sought to demonstrate that, …

Teaching Real Torts: Using Barry Werth's Damages In The Law School Classroom, Tom Baker

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No abstract provided.

Empirical Analysis And Administrative Law, Cary Coglianese

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Empirical research has been used to study many areas of law, including administrative law. In this article Professor Coglianese discusses the current and future role of empirical research in understanding and improving administrative rulemaking. Criticism of government regulation and calls for regulatory reform have grown in the last few decades. Empirical research is a valuable tool for designing reforms that will truly improve the effectiveness, efficiency, and legitimacy of regulatory governance. Specifically, Professor Coglianese discusses three areas of administrative law that have benefited from empirical research—economic review of new regulations, judicial review of agency rulemaking, and negotiated rulemaking.

Agencies are …

Put-Call Parity And The Law, Michael S. Knoll

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A common literary theme is the conflict between appearance and reality. That conflict also frequently arises in the law, where it is usually cast as one between substance and form. Another discipline in which the conflict arises is finance, where it appears in the put-call parity theorem. That theorem states that given any three of the four following financial instruments--a riskless zero-coupon bond, a share of stock, a call option on the stock, and a put option on the stock--the fourth instrument can be replicated. Thus, the theorem implies that any financial position containing these assets can be constructed in …

Semtek, Forum Shopping, And Federal Common Law, Stephen B. Burbank

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No abstract provided.

Reconsidering Estoppel: Patent Administration And The Failure Of Festo, R. Polk Wagner

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Last Term, in Festo Corporation v. Shoketsu Kinzoku Kogyo Kabashuki Co., the United States Supreme Court missed perhaps the most important opportunity for patent law reform in two decades. At the core of the failure to grasp the implications of "prosecution history estoppel" - a judicially-crafted principle limiting the enforceable scope of patents based on acts occurring during their application process - is the heretofore universal (but ultimately unsupportable) view of the doctrine as an arbitrary ex post limitation on patent scope. This Article demonstrates the serious flaws in this traditionalist approach, and develops a new theory of prosecution history …

Dangerous Liaisons: Corporate Law, Trust Law, And Interdoctrinal Legal Transplants, Edward B. Rock, Michael L. Wachter

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No abstract provided.

Securities Regulation As Lobster Trap: A Credible Commitment Theory Of Mandatory Disclosure, Edward B. Rock

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No abstract provided.

Corporate Ownership Structure And The Evolution Of Bankruptcy Law: Lessons From The United Kingdom, John Armour, Brian R. Cheffins, David A. Skeel Jr.

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No abstract provided.

Can Law And Economics Be Both Practical And Principled?, David A. Hoffman, Michael P. O'Shea

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This article describes important recent developments in normative law and economics, and the difficulties they create for the project of efficiency-based legal reform. After long proceeding without a well articulated moral justification for using economic decision procedures to choose legal rules, scholars have lately begun to devote serious attention to developing a philosophically attractive definition of well-being. At the same time, the empirical side of law and economics is also being enriched with an improved understanding of the complexities of individuals' decision-making behavior. That is where the problems begin. Scholars may have better, more plausible conceptions of well-being in hand, …

Enron And The Dark Side Of Shareholder Value, William W. Bratton

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No abstract provided.

Human Rights, Civil Wrongs And Foreign Relations: A "Sinical" Look At The Use Of U.S. Litigation To Address Human Rights Abuses Abroad, Jacques Delisle

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No abstract provided.

Pliability Rules, Abraham Bell, Gideon Parchomovsky

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In 1543, the Polish astronomer, Nicolas Copernicus, determined the heliocentric design of the solar system. Copernicus was motivated in large part by the conviction that Claudius Ptolemy's geocentric astronomical model, which dominated scientific thought at that time, was too incoherent, complex, and convoluted to be true. Hence, Copernicus made a point of making his model coherent, simple, and elegant. Nearly three and a half centuries later, at the height of the impressionist movement, the French painter Claude Monet set out to depict the Ruen Cathedral in a series of twenty paintings, each presenting the cathedral in a different light. Monet's …

Method And Principle In Legal Theory, Stephen R. Perry

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No abstract provided.

Lawyers On The Auction Block: Evaluation And Selection Of Class Counsel By Auction, Jill E. Fisch

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The lead counsel auction has attracted increasing attention. Auction advocates argue that auctions introduce competitive market forces that improve the selection and compensation of class counsel. The benefits of the auction, the;' claim, include lower legal fees and better representation. Careful scrutiny reveals that auction advocates have overlooked substantial methodological problems with the design and implementation of the lead counsel auction. Even if these problems were overcome, the auction procedure is flawed: Auctions are poor tools for selecting firms based on multiple criteria, compromise the judicial role, and are unlikely to produce reasonable fee awards. Although the existing record is …

Double Helix, Double Bind: Factual Innocence And Postconviction Dna Testing, Seth F. Kreimer, David Rudovsky

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No abstract provided.

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

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No abstract provided.

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

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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

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No abstract provided.