Law Commons^™

Ownership Without Citizenship: The Creation Of Noncitizen Property Rights, Allison Tirres

College of Law Faculty

No abstract provided.

"All Areas Of Suspected Disability", Mark Weber

College of Law Faculty

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) requires school districts to assess children “in all areas of suspected disability.” It further provides that each child’s individualized education program (IEP) must contain measurable annual goals designed to “meet each of the child’s . . . educational needs that result from the child’s disability,” and a statement of special education and related services that will be provided for the child “to advance appropriately toward attaining annual goals.” Courts have strictly enforced these requirements in the last several years, remedying violations of IDEA when school districts fail to assess in all areas of …

"All Areas Of Suspected Disability", Mark Weber

College of Law Faculty

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) requires school districts to assess children “in all areas of suspected disability.” It further provides that each child’s individualized education program (IEP) must contain measurable annual goals designed to “meet each of the child’s . . . educational needs that result from the child’s disability,” and a statement of special education and related services that will be provided for the child “to advance appropriately toward attaining annual goals.” Courts have strictly enforced these requirements in the last several years, remedying violations of IDEA when school districts fail to assess in all areas of …

Government Choices In Innovation Funding (With Reference To Climate Change), Joshua Sarnoff

College of Law Faculty

Huge amounts of money will soon be spent by governments and private entities to develop technology to reduce the costs of climate change mitigation and adaptation, and to deploy new energy and transportation infrastructures. Incredibly, we still lack any good idea of the best means of providing massive amounts of government or private money so as to promote the most innovation and technology diffusion at the lowest cost. This Article seeks to support better analyses of, and decision making regarding, the choices of government innovation-funding mechanisms by discussing the limits of current analyses and providing a taxonomy of such measures. …

Where Does One Stand On A Slippery Slope?, Craig Mousin

Mission and Ministry Publications

No abstract provided.

Merchant Law In A Modern Economy, Lisa Bernstein

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

No abstract provided.

A Solution To The Collective Action Problem In Corporate Reorganization, Eric A. Posner, E. Glen Weyl

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

The voting rules in Chapter 11 are supposed to ensure that debtor firms are appropriately liquidated or reorganized. However, these convoluted and internally inconsistent rules are poorly designed to produce such outcomes, and there is no evidence that they do. However, the major proposals for reform, including auctions and options-trading, neglect the fundamentally collective nature of choices in reorganizations. We argue that a more appealing reform is the improvement of voting rules through the use of an economically efficient procedure known as quadratic voting, according to which stakeholders may cast a number of votes equal to the square root of …

An Empirical Study Of The Effect Of Shady Grove V. Allstate On Forum Shopping In The New York Courts, William Hubbard

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

Given the considerable prominence of forum-shopping concerns in the jurisprudence and academic literature on the so-called Erie Doctrine, courts and commentators may benefit from data on whether, and to what extent, forum shopping in fact responds to choice-of-law decisions under the Erie Doctrine. Prior to this paper, however, no empirical study quantified the changes in forum shopping behavior caused by a court decision applying the Erie Doctrine. I study changes in filing patterns of cases likely to be affected by the Supreme Court's recent decision in Shady Grove v. Allstate and find evidence of large shifts in the patterns of …

Beccaria's 'On Crimes And Punishments': A Mirror On The History Of The Foundations Of Modern Criminal Law, Bernard E. Harcourt

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

No abstract provided.

Is There A Lingua Franca For The American Legal Academy?, Mary Anne Case

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

No abstract provided.

Boards-R-Us: Reconceptualizing Corporate Boards, M. Todd Henderson, Stephen Bainbridge

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

State corporate law requires director services be provided by "natural persons." This Article puts this obligation to scrutiny, and concludes that there are significant gains that could be realized by permitting firms (be they partnerships, corporations, or other business entities) to provide board services. We call these firms "board service providers" (BSPs). We argue that hiring a BSP to provide board services instead of a loose group of sole proprietorships will increase board accountability, both from markets and judicial supervision. The potential economies of scale and scope in the board services industry (including vertical integration of consultants and other board …

The South African Constitutional Court And Socio-Economic Rights As 'Insurance Swaps', Tom Ginsburg, Rosalind Dixon

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

No abstract provided.

A Theory Of Pleading, William Hubbard

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly and Ashcroft v. Iqbal are the most important cases on pleading in fifty years. A large literature argues that these cases have raised pleading standards, empowered federal judges as the gatekeepers to federal court, and undermined the "liberal ethos" of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. This understanding of pleading doctrine has in turn led to predictions of dramatic effects on dismissal rates, particularly for claims, such as employment discrimination claims, where plaintiffs often lack knowledge of the defendant's intent at the outset of the case. The accumulating empirical evidence, however, confounds these predictions. Why …

Libertarian Paternalism, Path Dependence, And Temporary Law, Tom Ginsburg, Jonathan Masur, Richard H. Mcadams

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

No abstract provided.

The Impact Of The U.S. Debit Card Interchange Fee Caps On Consumer Welfare: An Event Study Analysis, David S. Evans, Howard H. Chang, Steven Joyce

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

The cost to merchants of taking payment on debit cards declined by more than $7 billion annually as a result of the Durbin Amendment to the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010, while the effective cost to issuers of providing debit card services to consumers increased by a corresponding amount. This paper reports an event-study analysis of stock prices to determine the impact on consumers of the Durbin Amendment. Did consumers gain more from cost savings passed on by merchants, in the form of lower prices and better services, than they lost from cost increases passed …

'Becker And Foucault On Crime And Punishment': A Conversation With Gary Becker, François Ewald, And Bernard Harcourt: The Second Session, Gary S. Becker, François Ewald, Bernard E. Harcourt

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

No abstract provided.

A Winner's Curse?: Promotions From The Lower Federal Courts, Eric A. Posner, Mitu Gulati, Stephen J. Choi

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

The standard model of judicial behavior suggests that judges primarily care about deciding cases in ways that further their political ideologies. But judicial behavior seems much more complex. Politicians who nominate people for judgeships do not typically tout their ideology (except sometimes using vague code words), but they always claim that the nominees will be competent judges. Moreover, it stands to reason that voters would support politicians who appoint competent as well as ideologically compatible judges. We test this hypothesis using a dataset consisting of promotions to the federal circuit courts. We find, using a set of objective measures of …

Copyright In Teams, Anthony Casey, Andres Sawicki

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

Dozens of people worked together to produce Casablanca. But a single person working alone wrote Ulysses. While almost all films are produced by large collaborations, no great novel ever resulted from the work of a team. Why does the frequency and success of collaborative creative production vary across art forms? The answer lies at the intersection of intellectual property law and the theory of the firm. Existing analyses in this area often focus on patent law and look almost exclusively to property-rights theories of the firm. The implications of organizational theory for collaborative creativity and its intersection with copyright law …

Quadratic Voting As Efficient Corporate Governance, Eric A. Posner, E. Glen Weyl

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

Shareholder voting is a weak and much-criticized mechanism for controlling managerial opportunism. Among other problems, shareholders are often too uninformed to vote wisely, and majority and supermajority rule permits large shareholders to exploit small shareholders. We propose a new voting system called Quadratic Voting(QV), according to which shareholders are not given voting rights but may purchase votes, with the price of votes being a quadratic function of the number of votes purchased. QV ensures that voting outcomes are efficient under reasonable conditions. We argue that corporations should implement QV, or a simple approximation called square-root voting, and that the law …

Benefit-Cost Paradigms In Financial Regulation, Eric A. Posner, E. Glen Weyl

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

This paper builds on contributions to a Conference on Benefit-Cost Analysis of Financial Regulation, held at the University of Chicago, to show how benefit-cost analysis (BCA) of financial regulations should be conducted. Our major themes are that (1) on theoretical grounds, BCA should be easier for financial regulation than for other areas of regulation where it is already used, such as health and safety regulation; (2) while many needed valuations for BCA of financial regulation do not yet exist, those valuations are theoretically measurable; (3) once regulators commit to using BCA, economists will have incentives to work on supplying those …

Patent Invalidity Versus Noninfringement, Roger Ford

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

Most patent scholars agree that the Patent and Trademark Office grants too many invalid patents and that these patents impose a significant tax upon industry and technological innovation. Although policymakers and scholars have proposed various ways to address this problem, including better ex ante review by patent examiners and various forms of ex post administrative review, the use of district courts to invalidate patents remains a core defense against bad patents. This Article analyzes a previously unidentified impediment to the use of district courts to invalidate patents. Nearly every patent lawsuit rises or falls on one of two defenses: invalidity …

Just Enough, Lee Anne Fennell

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

No abstract provided.

Mandatory Arbitration And Distributive Equity: An Essay On Access To Justice, Omri Ben-Shahar

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

Mandatory arbitration clauses in consumer contracts are widely regarded as problematic becasue they limit consumer's access to judicial forums, to fair procedures, and potentially to any kind of remedy. But rather than looking at consumers as a group, I examine which sub groups of consumers are affected by this limitation more than others. I argue that in most circumstances, access to courts benefits the elite, not the weak. It is a species of open-access policy that has an unintended regressive effect. Paradoxically, rules rather than protect, weaker consumers, as they mandate a regressive reallocation. I also consider the role of …

Attention To Rivalry Among Online Platforms And Its Implications For Antitrust Analysis, David S. Evans

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

Many online businesses, including most of the largest platforms, seek and provide attention. These online attention rivals provide products and features to obtain the attention of consumers and sell some of that attention, through other products and services, to merchants, developers and others who value it. The multi-sided business of seeking and providing attention is fluid with rivalries crossing boundaries defined by the features of the products and services. It is also dynamic. Rivals introduce new products and services, some involving drastic innovation, frequently. Online attention rivals impose competitive constraints on each other. Product differentiation tempers the significance of these …

Can Lawyers Stay In The Driver's Seat?, Daniel G. Currell, M. Todd Henderson

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

No abstract provided.

Municipalities In Distress: A Preventive View, Tamar Frankel

Faculty Scholarship

The recent rising failure of municipalities has not produced the avalanche that some expected.¹ Yet concerns have been raised that the future will spawn more failures.² New York City and other municipalities face soaring pension, Medicaid, and retiree health care costs.³ New York City’s neighboring counties face similar challenges; Yonkers, Suffolk, and Nassau Counties each face their own set of fiscal problems.⁴

Municipalities that have failed, or are likely to fail, have raised a number of legal issues implicated by their inability to pay their debts. Some questions seem new. For example, are employees’ pension benefits …

Big Data In Small Hands, Woodrow Hartzog, Evan Selinger

Faculty Scholarship

"Big data" can be defined as a problem-solving philosophy that leverages massive data-sets and algorithmic analysis to extract "hidden information and surprising correlations." Not only does big data pose a threat to traditional notions of privacy, but it also compromises socially shared information. This point remains under appreciated because our so-called public disclosures are not nearly as public as courts and policymakers have argued — at least, not yet. That is subject to change once big data becomes user friendly.

Most social disclosures and details of our everyday lives are meant to be known only to a select group of …

“Rugged Vaginas” And “Vulnerable Rectums”: The Sexual Identity, Epidemiology, And Law Of The Global Hiv Epidemic, Aziza Ahmed

Faculty Scholarship

AIDS remains amongst the leading causes of death globally. Identity is the primary mode of understanding HIV and organizing in response to the HIV epidemic. In this Article, I examine how epidemiology and human rights activism co-produce ideas of identity and risk. I call this the "identity/risk narrative ": the commonsense understanding about an identity group's HIV risk. For example, epidemiology offers the biological narrative of risk: anal sex and the weak rectal lining make men who have sex with men more vulnerable to HIV; while the fragility of a woman's vaginal wall provides a biological foundation for women's vulnerability. …

Ten Reasons For Adopting A Universal Concept Of Participation In Atrocity, James G. Stewart

All Faculty Publications

The legal doctrine that assign blame for international crimes are numerous, unclear, ever-changing and often conceptually problematic. In this Essay, I question the prudence of retaining the radical doctrinal heterogeneity that, in large part, produces this state of disarray. Instead of tolerating different standards of participation across customary international law, the ICC statute and national systems of criminal law, I argue for a universal concept of participation that would apply whenever an international crime is charged, regardless of the jurisdiction hearing the case. Although I have argued elsewhere that a unitary theory of perpetration should serve this role, I here …

Hunting Stag With Fly Paper: A Hybrid Financial Instrument For Social Enterprise, Dana Brakman Reiser, Steven A. Dean

Faculty Scholarship

Social entrepreneurs and socially motivated investors share a belief in the power of social enterprise: ventures that pursue a "double bottom line" of profit and social good. Unfortunately, they also share a deep mutual suspicion. Recognizing that social ventures-just like traditional for-profit and nonprofit enterprises-need capital to flourish, this Article offers a financing tool to transform that skepticism into commitment. Unlike the array of new entities that have emerged in recent years-including L3Cs, benefit corporations, and flexible purpose corporations-the hybrid financial instrument this Article describes provides a robust and transparent solution to the puzzle that lies at the heart of …