Law Commons^™

Indeterminacy And The Establishment Clause, Frederick Mark Gedicks

Faculty Scholarship

Prepared for a symposium on Kent Greenawalt, 2 Religion and the Constitution: Establishment and Fairness (Princeton, 2008), this essay responds to Professor Greenawalt's criticism of my argument in The Rhetoric of Church and State (Duke, 1995), that Establishment Clause doctrine is the incoherent residue of conflicting rhetorical discourses of religious communitarianism and secular individualism. Not only are the Supreme Court's Establishment Clause decisions inconsistent at the margins, but there is no identifiable core meaning that can account for these decisions. The essay concludes that, contra Greenawalt, the thesis of conflicting rhetorical discourses remains the most powerful explanation of the Court's …

Longing For Loving, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

Our task in this Symposium is to place Loving v. Virginia in a contemporary context: to interpret, if not reinterpret, its meaning in light of the settings in which race, sexuality, and intimacy are being negotiated and renegotiated today. So we might ask, in what way are Mildred and Richard Loving role models for us today? How, if at all, does the legal movement for marriage equality for interracial couples help us think through our arguments and strategies as we struggle today for marriage equality for same-sex couples?

One way to frame these questions is to ask whether there is …

Market Damages, Efficient Contracting, And The Economic Waste Fallacy, Alan Schwartz, Robert E. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

Market damages are the best default rule when parties trade in thick markets: They induce parties to contract efficiently and to trade if and only if trade is efficient, and they do not create ex ante inefficiencies. Courts commonly overlook these virtues, however, when promisors bundle services that are not separately priced. For example, a promisor may agree to pay royalties on a mining lease and later to restore the promisee's property. When the cost of completion is large relative to the "market delta " – the increase in market value – courts concerned with avoiding "economic waste" limit the …

Detention As Targeting: Standards Of Certainty And Detention Of Suspected Terrorists, Matthew C. Waxman

Faculty Scholarship

To the extent that a state can detain terrorists pursuant to the law of war, how certain must the state be in distinguishing suspected terrorists from nonterrorists? This Article shows that the law of war can and should be interpreted or supplemented to account for the exceptional aspects of an indefinite conflict against a transnational terrorist organization by analogizing detention to military targeting and extrapolating from targeting rules. A targeting approach to the detention standard-of-certainty question provides a methodology for balancing security and liberty interests that helps fill a gap in detention law and helps answer important substantive questions left …

Who Tolls The Bells For Firms? Tales From Transition Economies, Katharina Pistor

Faculty Scholarship

Bankruptcy law is regarded as an important mechanism for protecting creditor rights. Much of the current debate about bankruptcy law focuses exclusively on private creditors, ignoring the role of tax authorities as creditor in insolvent firms. Based on data from several transition economies, this essay documents the important, if not dominant, role tax authorities play as initiator of bankruptcy in these countries. While improved tax enforcement is crucial for tackling the problem of tax arrears and hardening the "soft budget-constraint" in former socialist countries, this essay suggests that the presence of the tax authorities as creditor may also affect the …

Letting Guidelines Be Guidelines (And Judges Be Judges), Gerard E. Lynch

Faculty Scholarship

In a prescient New York Times op-ed piece entitled "Let Guidelines be Guidelines," written in response to the Supreme Court's decision in Blakely v. Washington, before certiorari was granted in United States v. Booker, Bill Stuntz of Harvard and Kate Stith Cabranes of Yale urged that the best solution for the constitutional crisis facing the United States Sentencing Guidelines would be to treat the Guidelines as guidelines, and not as a straightjacket. The Supreme Court evidently took a similar view, deciding in Booker that the Guidelines were constitutional only to the extent that they were not mandatory. The recent follow-up …

A House Still Divided, Clare Huntington

Faculty Scholarship

In response to Adam B. Cox, Immigration Law's Organizing Principles, 157 U. PA. L. REv. 341 (2008).

Adam Cox's Immigration Law's Organizing Principles contests the traditional view that immigration law and alienage law – in his terms, "selection rules" and "regulation rules" – are distinct categories with legal and moral salience. Building upon prior scholarship that also called the distinction into question, Cox offers important insights into why this dividing line does not have the sharp conceptual edges that the jurisprudence would suggest exist. Despite the analytical persuasiveness of Cox's argument, I am not convinced that it will destabilize the …

The Constitutional Dimension Of Immigration Federalism, Clare Huntington

Faculty Scholarship

In Farmers Branch, Texas, the city council enacted a measure to fine landlords who rent their premises to unauthorized migrants, and in Arizona, the state legislature passed a law imposing stiff penalties on employers who intentionally or knowingly hire unauthorized migrants. In San Francisco, the board of supervisors passed a measure that bars law enforcement officers from inquiring into the immigration status of an individual in the course of a criminal investigation. In Alabama and Florida, state officials have entered into agreements with the federal government permitting state law enforcement officers to arrest and detain non-citizens on immigration charges. Other …