Law Commons^™

Executive Pay Lessons From Private Equity, David I. Walker

Faculty Scholarship

Questions about the pay of public company executives – and, specifically, the structure of that pay – continue to dominate discussions regarding U.S. corporate governance. These concerns have been amplified by the recent financial meltdown. Some commentators suggest that the aggressive structure of executive pay packages – the heavy reliance on stock options – may have led to excessive risk taking at financial institutions that contributed to the collapse. Others have argued that incentive compensation has become a fetish in corporate America and that the heavy reliance on performance-based pay is no longer justified. More generally, Professor Frankel argues that …

Protecting Information Privacy, Charles D. Raab, Benjamin J. Goold

All Faculty Publications

This report for the Equality and Human Rights Commission (the Commission) examines the threats to information privacy that have emerged in recent years, focusing on the activities of the state. It argues that current privacy laws and regulation do not adequately uphold human rights, and that fundamental reform is required. It identifies two principal areas of concern: the state’s handling of personal data, and the use of surveillance by public bodies. The central finding of this report is that the existing approach to the protection of information privacy in the UK is fundamentally flawed, and that there is a pressing …

Smoking And The First Amendment, Kevin Outterson

Faculty Scholarship

On June 22, 2009, President Barack Obama signed the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act into law. For the first time, Congress had given the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authority to directly regulate tobacco products, with the aim of improving public health. And indeed, effective tobacco control would be a remarkable public health achievement — and might be possible if the law is allowed to stand. But on November 7, 2011, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., issued a preliminary injunction blocking some of its key provisions as unconstitutional restrictions on commercial speech, and the battle seems likely …

The Ali's Principles Of Software Contracting: Some Comments & Clarifications, Maureen A. O'Rourke

Faculty Scholarship

When I joined Boston University School of Law's faculty in 1993, there seemed to be general agreement among practitioners and academics alike that the time was ripe for some sort of uniform law to address transactions involving software. The debate was over the form that law should take rather than whether it should exist at all. More specifically, interested parties were discussing an important structural question-whether software contracts might best be dealt with in the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) under a "hub and spoke" approach or as a standalone Article. Eventually, drafters focused on a standalone Article, and the National …

Common Law And Statute Law In Administrative Law, Jack M. Beermann

Faculty Scholarship

The largely statutory appearance of U.S. administrative law be surprising in light of the existence of the federal A Procedure Act of 1946 (APA).1 The APA, including its a amendments, is a relatively comprehensive guide to much of law in the United States. It contains the procedures agencies to follow in both rulemaking and adjudication and provisions on the availability and scope of judicial review of agency action. As includes open meeting and open file requirements as well as negotiated rulemaking and legislative review of agency rules generally held view that federal courts should not make com should act only …

Untangling The Twists Of Habeas Corpus, Larry Yackle

Faculty Scholarship

Take it from me. The one job you don't want is sorting out federal habeas corpus. By all accounts, existing arrangements are an unrelieved disaster. Yet now come Nancy King and Joseph Hoffmann with a valiant effort to set things in order. Their book describes habeas corpus as the writ currently stands, offers explanations of why and how we have come to this pass, and, most important, advances a definite plan of action for habeas in criminal cases-a way to fix what so desperately needs fixing. This is a good book, a valuable book. It is informative, essentially accurate in …

The Second Amendment As Interpreted By Congress And The Court, Sean J. Kealy

Faculty Scholarship

In the last two years, the U.S. Supreme Court has finally offered a reasoned interpretation of the Second Amendment. By the slimmest of majorities in District of Columbia v. Heller and McDonald v. City of Chicago, the Supreme Court held that the Second Amendment supplies an individually-held right to bear arms; the government may place reasonable restrictions on gun ownership, but neither the federal government nor an individual state can deprive a person of their right to possess a handgun. Despite many pages of opinion, however, the majority in Heller offers an unsatisfying explanation for why the Second Amendment …

Called "Out" At Home: The One Strike Eviction Policy And Juvenile Court, Wendy J. Kaplan, David Rossman

Faculty Scholarship

One of the harshest collateral consequences of a juvenile delinquency case is the prospect of eviction from public housing. Under the federal government’s One Strike policy, public housing authorities are encouraged to evict families for any criminal act by their children, no matter how trivial. This politically popular policy creates more social ills than it cures. There is no evidence that it reduces crime in public housing, but there is abundant evidence that it makes families homeless, puts children out on the street, leads police departments to breach laws concerning confidentiality of juvenile proceedings, and creates conflicts of interest between …

Rebel Without A Clause: The Irrelevance Of Article Vi To Constitutional Supremecy, Gary S. Lawson

Faculty Scholarship

With Stare Decisis and Constitutional Text, 1 Jonathan Mitchell has produced what I think is the most interesting and creative textual defense2 (or at least partial defense) to date of the use of horizontal precedent in federal constitutional cases.3 Mitchell’s careful analysis of the Supremacy Clause is fascinating and instructive, and he does an impeccable job of drawing out the implications of his premise that the Supremacy Clause prescribes only a very limited choice-of-law rule—a rule that does not, by its own terms, specifically elevate the Constitution above federal statutes and treaties. His innovative and intriguing framework yields four distinct …

Criminal Law: Egypt, Sadiq Reza

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter presents the substantive criminal law of Egypt according to the sources of that law: the 1971 Constitution, the 1937 Penal Code, and other legislation; decisions by the Supreme Constitutional Court (SCC), the Court of Cassation, and other organs of the Egyptian judiciary; and administrative and executive regulations. The evolution of modern Egyptian criminal law is explained, and contemporary scholarly commentary is referenced; also addressed are the constitutional amendments of 2007, and controversial aspects of the law and its enforcement such as the use of emergency and military courts and the prosecution of alleged homosexuals. The chapter thus serves …

China: A New (Furtive) Approach To Taxing International Transportation Income, Wei Cui

All Faculty Publications

Donghwa Industrial Corporation v. Weihai Huancui State Tax Bureau: China's New (Furtive) Approach to Taxing International Transportation Income

Gaming The Past: The Theory And Practice Of Historic Baselines In The Administrative State, J.B. Ruhl, James Salzman

Vanderbilt Law Review

In 1988, candidate George H. W. Bush was in a tight race for the presidency, behind in the polls to the Democratic challenger, Michael Dukakis. Stung by the D+ grade given by the League of Conservation Voters, Bush was searching for a way to claw back some of the environmental vote.' He saw an opening in wetlands. Perceived as worthless swamps and wasted development opportunities for most of our nation's history, conversion of wetlands for agricultural and urban land uses has resulted in a staggering loss of resources. Beginning in the 1970s, however, views started to change, with growing recognition …

The Inauthentic Claim, Anthony J. Sebok

Vanderbilt Law Review

"It is revolting to have no better reason for a rule of law than that so it was laid down in the time of Henry IV. It is still more revolting if the grounds upon which it was laid down have vanished long since, and the rule simply persists from blind imitation of the past." -Oliver Wendell Holmes'

This Article takes a critical look at the persistence of legal doctrines that prohibit or limit property rights in litigation. The Article focuses on prohibitions on assignment and maintenance. Assignment of personal injury tort claims is prohibited throughout the United States, while …

Hope-Fulfilling Or Effectively Chilling? Reconciling The Hate Crimes Prevention Act With The First Amendment, Carter T. Coker

Vanderbilt Law Review

Living on a meager disability pension and without means of transportation, forty-nine-year-old African American James Byrd, Jr. of Jasper, Texas thought he had caught a break when three white men offered him a ride home on June 6, 1998. The following morning, police found Byrd's torso in the middle of the road, his head and arm in a ditch a mile away, and a three-mile trail of blood staining the road. That racial animus was the motivation for Byrd's torture, dragging, and death was hardly in dispute. Two of the three perpetrators were members of white supremacist organizations and bore …

The Mercer Girls Guide To Immigration, Jennifer M. Chacon

Vanderbilt Law Review

No abstract provided.

Designing Populations: Lessons In Power And Population Production From Nineteenth-Century Immigration Law, Juliet Stumph

Vanderbilt Law Review

No abstract provided.

When Men Are Harmed: Feminism, Queer Theory, And Torture At Abu Ghraib, Aziza Ahmed

Faculty Scholarship

In this Article I explore the assertions of "anti-imperialist" feminist scholars who critique "imperial feminism" for its support of the war on terror (WOT). I bring into this analysis the proposition by queer theorists that feminist reliance on male/ female subordination has the potential to not only obscure harm in times of war but also to perpetuate it. As a case study, I focus on the Abu Ghraib prison photos that depict, in part, female soldiers torturing male Iraqi prisoners. In conducting this analysis, I reveal the analytical limitations of dominance and cultural feminists, particularly with regard to male harm …

E.U. Law In U.S. Legal Academia, Daniela Caruso

Faculty Scholarship

The history of EU law in the JD curriculum is a classical tale of rise and fail. An avant garde, boutique offering in the 1970s, and a fairly popular course in the 1990s, today EU law in US law schools is slowly losing prominence. This Article begins by tracking this parabolic trajectory and argues that the discipline both rose and fell for contingent reasons that are mostly unrelated to its pedagogical and analytical significance. The Article then provides a critical appraisal of what EU law is uniquely poised to offer both in the classroom and as a subject for legal …

Follow The Leader?: Maryland's Response To The New Federal Stem Cell Guidelines, Michael Ulrich

Faculty Scholarship

Billions of dollars have been spent in search of cures for diseases such as cancer, muscular dystrophy, heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s. Medical research has consistently pushed the envelope to find new ways to tackle old problems, yet, the field of embryonic stem cell research, a field that many believe could be the key to providing new and effective treatments, remains relatively underfunded due to concerns over ethical considerations. This is largely because the biggest financial backer of scientific research is the federal government, and its desire to finance embryonic stem cell research has waxed and waned over the …

Website Design As Contract, Woodrow Hartzog

Faculty Scholarship

Few website users actually read or rely upon terms of use or privacy policies. Yet users regularly take advantage of and rely upon website design features like privacy settings. To reconcile the disparity between boilerplate legalese and website design, this article develops a theory of website design as contract. The ability to choose privacy settings, un-tag photos, and delete information is part of the negotiation between websites and users regarding their privacy. Yet courts invariably recognize only the boilerplate terms when analyzing online agreements. In this article, I propose that if significant website features are incorporated into the terms of …

Creditor Claims In Arbitration And In Court, Christopher R. Drahozal, Samantha Zyontz

Faculty Scholarship

This article is based on the Interim Report, Creditor Claims in Arbitration and in Court, issued in November 2009 by the Searle Civil Justice Institute's Consumer Arbitration Task Force. It seeks to compare the outcomes of debt collection arbitrations to the outcomes of debt collection cases in court to help in evaluating arbitration as a means of resolving consumer disputes. The arbitration cases examined are debt collection cases administered by the American Arbitration Association (AAA) as part of its consumer arbitration docket, supplemented by cases brought by a single debt buyer as part of a consumer debt collection program administered …

Biased Advice, Christopher Robertson

Faculty Scholarship

The modern capitalist society, characterized by decentralized decision making and increasingly sophisticated products and services, turns on relationships of epistemic reliance, where laypersons depend upon advisors to guide their most important decisions. Yet many of those advisors lack real expertise and may be biased by conflicting interests. In such situations, laypersons are likely to make suboptimal decisions that sometimes aggregate into systematic failures, from soaring health care costs to market crashes. Regulators can attempt to manage the symptoms and worst abuses, but the fundamental problem of biased advice will remain. There are many potential policy solutions, from outright bans on …

Pay For Regulator Performance, M. Todd Henderson, Frederick Tung

Faculty Scholarship

Few doubt that executive compensation arrangements encouraged the excessive risk taking by banks that led to the recent Financial Crisis. Accordingly, academics and lawmakers have called for the reform of banker pay practices. In this Article, we argue that regulator pay is to blame as well, and that fixing it may be easier and more effective than reforming banker pay. Regulatory failures during the Financial Crisis resulted at least in part from a lack of sufficient incentives for examiners to act aggressively to prevent excessive risk. Bank regulators are rarely paid for performance, and in atypical cases involving performance bonus …

The Puzzling Persistence Of Curtiss-Wright-Based Theories Of Executive Power, Robert D. Sloane

Faculty Scholarship

This is a brief comment on Curtiss-Wright responding to one of the Journal of the National Security Forum's "Ten Questions" for its recently released symposium issue. It describes the origins of Justice Sutherland's controversial thesis, canvasses a few of the many critiques of that thesis, and offers a few reflections on why a theory about executive power that has been vigorously criticized by scholars across the ideological spectrum continues to exert an influence out of proportion to its substantive merits.

The Willingness To Pay—Willingness To Accept Gap, The "Endowment Effect," Subject Misconceptions, And Experimental Procedures For Eliciting Valuations: Reply, Charles R. Plott, Kathryn Zeiler

Faculty Scholarship

The purpose of Plott and Zeiler (2005) — henceforth, PZ — was to investigate whether previously published experiments using consumption goods such as mugs and candy bars to measure gaps between willingness to pay (WTP) and willingness- to-accept (WTA) support endowment effect theory (EET). Our results demonstrate that the gap for commodities can be turned on and off by implementing procedures designed to control for subject misconceptions about the value elicitation procedures. Following experiments traditionally used to demonstrate the endowment effect, we used mug valuations to test EET. We used lottery rounds only to provide our subjects with paid practice …

Network Accountability For The Domestic Intelligence Apparatus, Danielle K. Citron, Frank Pasquale

Faculty Scholarship

A new domestic intelligence network has made vast amounts of data available to federal and state agencies and law enforcement officials. The network is anchored by “fusion centers,” novel sites of intergovernmental collaboration that generate and share intelligence and information. Several fusion centers have generated controversy for engaging in extraordinary measures that place citizens on watch lists, invade citizens’ privacy, and chill free expression. In addition to eroding civil liberties, fusion center overreach has resulted in wasted resources without concomitant gains in security.

While many scholars have assumed that this network represents a trade-off between security and civil liberties, our …

Researchers Without Borders?: Limiting Obligations Of Ancillary Care Through The Rescue Model, Michael Ulrich

Faculty Scholarship

With the expansion of clinical research in developing countries, there is a need to explain obligations that researchers have to their subjects beyond those required by the study protocol. This paper outlines a model founded on the duty to rescue that provides ethical clarification of the obligations of ancillary care.

Improving Antibiotic Markets For Long Term Sustainability, Aaron S. Kesselheim, Kevin Outterson

Faculty Scholarship

The world faces a worsening public health crisis: A growing number of bacteria are resistant to available antibiotics. Yet there are few new antibiotics in the development pipeline to take the place of these increasingly ineffective drugs. We review a number of proposals intended to bolster drug development, including such financial incentives for pharmaceutical manufacturers as extending the effective patent life for new antibiotics. However, such strategies directly conflict with the clear need to reduce unnecessary antibiotic prescriptions and could actually increase prescription use. As an alternative, we recommend a two-prong, “integrated” strategy based on prizes administered through the insurance …

Germ Shed Management In The United States, Kevin Outterson

Faculty Scholarship

The U.S. Medicare program reimburses only for discrete treatments of individuals with infections, but fails to pay for infection control or antibiotic stewardship more generally. By focusing solely on discrete hospitals and patients, Medicare ignores the larger epidemiological reality - that hospitals, nursing homes and other institutions operate within a germ shed. Under current Medicare rules, institutions that invest in infection control or antibiotic stewardship, may actually lose money and benefit rival firms in the market. In effect, current Medicare rules subsidize MRSA pollution. Worse yet, Medicare rules block potentially efficient Coasian contracts to promote private coordination within germ sheds.

The Four Musketeers Of Arbitral Duty (Les Devoirs De L’Arbitre: Ni Un Pour Tous, Ni Tous Pour Un), William W. Park

Faculty Scholarship

Fans of the Alexandre Dumas novel Three Musketeers will remember that the adventure includes a fourth young man, d'Artagnan, who hopes to become one of the King’s guards, along with his friends Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, living by the motto “All for one, one for all”. Likewise, an arbitrator’s generally includefour key obligation: accuracy, fairness, and efficiency, as well as vigilance in promoting an enforceable award. Prevailing litigants normally hope that the arbitral process will lead to something more than a piece of paper. To this end, they expect arbitrators to avoid giving reasons for annulment or non-recognition to any …