Law Commons^™

Radical Environmental Change In The Polar Regions, William Snape

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

One need only to look at a comparison of summer Arctic ice extent from 1979 to 2007 to understand something significant is happening. In the span of a generation, the millennia-old Arctic has shrunk by roughly two-thirds and could easily be ice free in the summer within a decade. Or if that is not enough, consider that in the winter of 2008, a massive chunk of ice broke off from the Antarctic Peninsula, and another ice sheet the size of Northern Ireland (or Connecticut, if you prefer) hangs on by a thread. Over the past fifty years, the Arctic and …

Symposium On Pursuing Racial Fairness In Criminal Justice: Twenty Years After Mccleskey V. Kemp, Jeffrey Fagan, Mukul A. Bakhshi

Faculty Scholarship

Last year marked the twentieth anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in McCleskey v. Kemp, a case whose ramifications for the pursuit of racial equality within criminal justice are still felt today. McCleskey set an impossibly high bar for constitutionally-based challenges seeking fundamental racial fairness in capital punishment. The McCleskey decision strengthened a jurisprudential climate that shifted and increased the burden onto defendants seeking constitutional relief from discriminatory and biased decisions at every step of the criminal justice process, from arrest to conviction and punishment. The McCleskey court articulated a crime-control rationale for tolerance of error and refused to …

Transatlanticisms: Constitutional Asymmetry And Selective Reception Of U.S. Law And Economics In The Formation Of European Private Law, Fernanda Nicola

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

The recurrent claim made by judges, scholars, and lawyers shaping the debate on European private law is that there is a constitutional asymmetry in the European Union (EU). The asymmetry lies in the fact that European Community competences mostly encompass market and economic matters at the expense of social issues, while Member States have full jurisdiction over social matters but only limited jurisdiction over economic matters. Thus, the European constitutional structure leads to a market/technocratic orientation in its supranational institutions, as opposed to the social/political orientation of Member State governments. The pervasiveness of this claim allows jurists critiquing European adjudication …

The Importance Of Effective Investigation Of Sexual Violence And Gender-Based Crimes At The International Criminal Court, Susana Sacouto

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

INTRODUCTION: Several provisions in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC or the Court) indicate that the statute's drafters intended sexual violence and gender-based crimes to be given specific attention during the investigation of potential cases before the Court. For instance, Article 54(1)(b) requires that, in ensuring the "effective investigation and prosecution of crimes within the jurisdiction of the Court," the Prosecutor "take into account the nature of the crime, in particular where it involves sexual violence, gender violence or violence against children."' The Rome Statute also provides that States Parties, which are responsible for nominating and electing …

Going Private: Three Doctrines Gone Astray, Mary Siegel

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Introduction: "Much attention has been devoted to the seeming inconsistency in the Delaware Supreme Court's holdings that predicate the choice of monitor governing a going-private transaction based on the form of the transaction. Weinberger v. UOP, Inc.' is the beacon of going private law, requiring controlling shareholders in a conflict-of-interest long-form merger to prove the entire fairness of that transaction. Kahn v. Lynch Communication Systems, Inc. reinforced Weinbergds holding by requiring the entire fairness monitor in long-form mergers even where the controlling shareholders have provided a method to immunize their controlling influence. Against this stalwart adherence to the entire fairness …

Achieving Policymaking Consensus: The (Unfortunate) Waning Of Negotiated Rulemaking, Jeffrey Lubbers

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Introduction: As the ADR movement made its way from the courts to the agency hearing rooms in the 1980s, negotiated rulemaking (sometimes called "regulatory negotiation" or simply "reg-neg") also emerged on a parallel track as an alternative to traditional procedures for drafting proposed regulations. This exemplar of regulatory reform was based on two insights: (1) that the usual process of written notice-and-comment rulemaking has an intrinsic weakness because stakeholders engaged in it do not interact with each other or with the agency; and (2) in certain situations, it is possible to bring together representatives of the agency and the various …

Lyrical Assault: Dancehall Versus The Cultural Imperialism Of The North- West, Camille Nelson

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

I would go to Jamaica, but there is so much "gay-bashing." For the first time in my life, I was ashamed to be Jamaican. I have come to realize the power of music. We all remember the lyrics of some songs verbatim, despite the passage of time, recalling where we were, who we were with, and what we were doing when we first listened. Music crosses borders-it generates emotions and feelings which transport us to a different place and time. Moreover, music has insurgent sociopolitical power-among other things, it can rally the masses, encourage affiliations, and demarcate normative boundaries. As …

O.J., Batson And Snyder: Lessons From An Intersecting Trilogy, Camille Nelson

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

INTRODUCTION There are few cases that inform our collective understanding of the American jury system more than Batson v. Kentucky. This case serves as a touchstone in Equal Protection jurisprudence and can be viewed as "the [U.S. Supreme Court's] most ambitious attempt to impose meaningful prohibitions on the use of race-based peremptory challenges." This case and its progeny provide a framework for the protection of the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause and also implicate the Sixth Amendment's jury-trial guarantees. The Batson holding has been expanded to guard not only against the wrongful exclusion of jurors based upon race, but also …

Customary Law: The Way Things Were, Codified, Ezra Rosser

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Frequently referred to as customary law, the unique traditions and customs of different Native American tribes are cited by their tribal courts as authoritative and binding law. The recent use of customary law as a mechanism for deciding individual cases is not uniform among tribal court systems as it differs depending upon which tribe's judges are working to place custom into contemporary judicial analysis. Understanding the present role of customary law in tribal law requires first understanding the nature of customary law and then understanding how it is being used. The effect of customary law is dependent upon the place …

Short Notes On Teaching About The Micro-Politics Of Class, With Examples From Torts And Employment Law Casebooks, Susan Carle

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

INTRODUCTION: This short Essay explores several potential teaching moments in which one might raise issues concerning the micro-politics of socioeconomic class. I discuss cases found in popular casebooks for three course areas in which I teach: torts, employment, and employment discrimination law. All of these courses raise questions of distributive justice, in the sense that they all deal with issues about how economic and social resources, including legal rights or protections, get allocated between "haves" and "have nots." Tort law, as Guido Calabresi pointed out long ago, is at its center about the politics of distribution; its core questions are …

The Inter-American System Of Human Rights: Challenges For The Future, Claudio Grossman

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

The Inter-American system is a combination of human rights norms and supervisory institutions within the Americas. The applicable rules consist primarily of the American Declaration on the Rights and Duties of Man ("American Declaration") and the American Convention on Human Rights ("American Convention"). The institutions involved are the organs responsible for supervising compliance with the established rules: the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights ("the Commission") and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ("the Court"). The system performs supervisory functions basically through country reports adopted by the Commission which describe the overall human rights situation in a country and decisions in …

On The Guise Of The Good, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

I will provisionally take the Guise of the Good thesis to consist of three propositions: (1) Intentional actions are actions performed for reasons, as those are seen by the agents. (2) Specifying the intention which makes an action intentional identifies central features of the reason(s) for which the action is performed. (3) Reasons for action are such reasons by being facts which establish that the action has some value. From these it is said to follow that (4) Intentional actions are actions taken in, and because of, a belief that there is some good in them. I will examine reasons …

Learning From Difference: The New Architecture Of Experimentalist Governance In The Eu, Charles F. Sabel, Jonathan Zeitlin

Faculty Scholarship

This article argues that current widespread characterisations of EU governance as multi-level and networked overlook the emergent architecture of the EU's public rule making. In this architecture, framework goals (such as full employment, social inclusion, good water status, a unified energy grid) and measures for gauging their achievement are established by joint action of the Member States and EU institutions. Lower-level units (such as national ministries or regulatory authorities and the actors with whom they collaborate) are given the freedom to advance these ends as they see fit. But in return for this autonomy, they must report regularly on their …

Accountability And Competition In Securities Class Actions: Why "Exit" Works Better Than "Voice", John C. Coffee Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

A sizable literature on class actions has long suggested that the plaintiff’s attorney is an independent entrepreneur over whom the class members have only limited control. But the analysis cannot stop here. Why does this state of affairs exist? This essay will give two connected answers to this question as a prelude to evaluating what reforms are likely to work:

(1) The rules of "litigation governance" differ diametrically from those of corporate governance. An entrepreneur seeking capital for a business venture must convince investors to "opt in" and buy the securities of the entrepreneur's start-up corporation. In contrast, a plaintiffs …

Patterns Of Credit Card Use Among Low And Moderate Income Households, Ronald J. Mann

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter uses data from the Federal Reserve Board's Survey of Consumer Finances for 2004 (the "SCF") to examine the penetration of credit cards into LMI markets. The chapter has two purposes. First, I discuss the rise of the modern credit market, emphasizing the segmentation of product lines based on behavioral and financial characteristics of customer groups. Among other things, that trend involves the use of products aimed at LMI households that differ significantly from those aimed at middle-class households. Second, I describe the extent to which LMI households borrow on credit cards, the types of LMI households that borrow, …

Tolerated Use, Tim Wu

Faculty Scholarship

"Tolerated use" is a term that refers to the contemporary spread of technically infringing, but nonetheless tolerated, use of copyrighted works. Such patterns of mass infringement have occurred before in copyright history, though perhaps not on the same scale, and have usually been settled with the use of special laws, called compulsory licensing regimes, more familiar to non-copyright scholars as liability rules. This paper suggests that, in present times, a different and slightly unusual solution to the issue of widespread illegal use is emerging-an "opt-in" system for copyright holders, that is in property terms a rare species of ex post …

Experimental Law And Economics, Jennifer Arlen, Eric L. Talley

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter provides a framework for assessing the contributions of experiments in Law and Economics. We identify criteria for determining the validity of an experiment and find that these criteria depend upon both the purpose of the experiment and the theory of behavior implicated by the experiment. While all experiments must satisfy the standard experimental desiderata of control, falsifiability of theory, internal consistency, external consistency and replicability, the question of whether an experiment also must be contextually attentive - in the sense of matching the real world choice being studied - depends on the underlying theory of decision-making being tested …

Juvenile Crime And Criminal Justice: Resolving Border Disputes, Jeffrey Fagan

Faculty Scholarship

Rising juvenile crime rates during the 1970s and 1980s spurred state legislatures across the country to exclude or transfer a significant share of offenders under the age of eighteen to the jurisdiction of the criminal court, essentially redrawing the boundary between the juvenile and adult justice systems. Jeffrey Fagan examines the legal architecture of the new boundary-drawing regime and how effective it has been in reducing crime.

The juvenile court, Fagan emphasizes, has always had the power to transfer juveniles to the criminal court. Transfer decisions were made individually by judges who weighed the compet­ing interests of public safety and …

Recent Developments In Us Copyright Law: Part I – "Orphan" Works, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

This Comment, after a brief review of the nature of the orphan works problem and prior attempts to resolve it in the US, will analyze the current bills' provisions, both with respect to the limitation of remedies that constitutes the proposals' centerpiece, and to the conditions required to qualify for the limitation. I will also compare the US proposals with current European initiatives, and will assess the compatibility of the US proposals with international treaty norms, as well as the cross-border consequences of inconsistent US and EU orphan works regimes. I will conclude with some suggestions for amending the US …

Abolition In The U.S.A. By 2050: On Political Capital And Ordinary Acts Of Resistance, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

The United States, like the larger international community, likely will tend toward greater abolition of the death penalty during the first half of the twenty-first century. A handful of individual states – states that have historically carried out few or no executions – probably will abolish capital punishment over the next twenty years, which will create political momentum and ultimately a federal constitutional ban on capital punishment in the United States. It is entirely reasonable to expect that, by the mid-twenty-first century, capital punishment will have the same status internationally as torture: an outlier practice, prohibited by international agreements and …

Supposons Que La Discipline Et La Sécurité N'Existent Pas - Rereading Foucault's Collége De France Lectures (With Paul Veyne), Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

We have come to know well and deploy easily the Foucauldian terms discipline and sécurité (what we now call governmentality), especially as a result of Michel Foucault's 1978 and 1979 lectures at the College de France. What we know less well, I contend, is how to critique them – discipline and sécurité, that is – the way that Foucault critiqued the terms folie, délinquance, or sexualité.

In this essay, I push further my meditations on punishment and subject discipline and sécurité to the same brutal method that Foucault used in his writings on folie, délinquance, and sexualité. I begin by …

On The Value Of Distributional Equality, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

The paper returns to the question whether equality in distribution is valuable in itself, or, if you like, whether it is intrinsically valuable. Its bulk is an examination of two familiar arguments against the intrinsic value of distributional equality: the levelling down objection and the objection that equality violates some person-affecting condition, in that its realisation does not improve the lot of people.

Domestic Bonds, Credit Derivatives, And The Next Transformation Of Sovereign Debt, Anna Gelpern

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Not long ago, financial markets in most poor and middle-income countries were shallow to nonexistent, and closed to foreigners. Governments often had to rely on risky borrowing abroad; the private sector had even fewer options. But between 1995 and 2005, domestic debt in the emerging markets grew from $1 trillion to $4 trillion. In Mexico, domestic debt went from just over 20% of the total government debt stock in 1995 to nearly 80% in 2007. Foreign and local investors are buying. Over the same period, derivative contracts to transfer emerging market credit risk surpassed the market capitalization of the benchmark …

Civil Society's Involvement In Post-Conflict Peacebuilding, Corinne Parver, Rebecca Wolf

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

War is a way of life – in some parts of the world it is an on-going struggle with no end in sight. Years of perpetual conflict have adversely affected the way in which political, socioeconomic, and cultural components of society have developed. Indeed, armed conflict negatively affects all aspects of society: not only does it destroy buildings and societies, but it also leaves surviving individuals and communities with deep wounds that can last a lifetime.

Many efforts have been employed around the world to build peace following a conflict. Some interventions have proven quite successful, while others have not. …

The Espionage Act And National Security Whisteblowing After Garcetti, Stephen I. Vladeck

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Should government employees ever have a right to disseminate classified national security information to the public? As a general matter, of course, the answer is "no." It is necessarily tautological that the central purpose of classifying information is to keep that information secret. But what if the information pertains to what we might describe as "unlawful secrets," and the individual in question has exhausted all possible non-public remedies, to no avail? Are there any circumstances in which the law enables the government employee to come forward? Should there be?

As this essay suggests, because of the broad language of the …

Immigrant Remittances, Ezra Rosser

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Remittances, the sending of money from immigrants back to their home countries, are the newest anti-poverty, development activity of the poor to be applauded by international institutions and economists. Exceeding foreign aid and private investment to many developing countries, remittances are being hailed as a new, untapped resource with powerful poverty alleviation and potential development attributes. After presenting the poverty, developmental, and economic characteristics of this new transnational connection between immigrants and their loved ones, as well as the dangerous effects of excessive remittance regulation, the author argues that remittances should be understood as an anti-poverty tool, but not as …

Narrowing The Accountability Gap: Toward A New Foreign Investor Accountability Mechanism, David Hunter, Natalie L. Bridgeman

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

An ever-increasing number of standards, guidelines, principles, norms, and best practices have been adopted to address the environmental and social impacts of multinational enterprises (MNEs). This increase in standards and norms corresponds to a rise in MNE sensitivity to the environmental and social impacts that their activities have on local communities in developing countries. These standards and norms are considered voluntary by definition because they are typically not state-sponsored or the product of public regulation. They fill a normative gap located between the state-centered focus of international law and the often inadequate or unenforced standards of the developing country hosts …

Legitimacy And Cooperation: Why Do People Help The Police Fight Crime In Their Communities?, Tom R. Tyler, Jeffery Fagan

Faculty Scholarship

Past research indicates that legitimacy encourages compliance with the law. This study extends consideration of the influence of legitimacy by exploring its impact on cooperation with the police and with neighbors to combat crime in one's community. It uses a panel study design and focuses upon the residents of New York City. The study finds that legitimacy shapes cooperation with the police and has a lesser influence on cooperation with others in the community. Consistent with the findings of prior research, legitimacy itself is found to be linked to the justice of the procedures used by the police to exercise …

Overseers Or "The Deciders" – The Courts In Administrative Law, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

For the second time in a short period, Professors Miles and Sunstein have brought powerful tools of statistical analysis and diligent coding of circuit court of appeals opinions together to demonstrate what the Realists long ago taught us to suspect, that significant elements of judging can be explained in terms of the jurist's political world view – that the tension between law and politics is alive in judicial work as elsewhere and that it is only an aspiration to seek a world of laws and not of men. Elements of their work, though, appear as if in criticism of contemporary …

Land Assembly Districts, Michael A. Heller, Rick Hills

Faculty Scholarship

Eminent domain for economic development is both attractive and appalling. States need the power to condemn because so much land in America is inefficiently fragmented. But public land assembly provokes hostility because vulnerable communities get bulldozed. Courts offer no help. The academic literature is a muddle. Is it possible to assemble land without harming the poor and powerless? Yes. This Article proposes the creation of Land Assembly Districts, or "LADs." This new property form solves the age-old tensions in eminent domain and shows, more generally, how careful redesign of property rights can enhance both welfare and fairness. The economic and …