Law Commons^™

Access To Injustice: How Legal Reforms Reinforce Marginalization, Roni Amit

City University of New York Law Review

Marginalized individuals are largely excluded from making rights claims in the courts because their stories of rights violations fall outside of prescribed legal categories. Framing this exclusion as a lack of knowledge and access, proponents of the access to justice movement have sought to improve outcomes for unrepresented and marginalized litigants through measures that help them understand and navigate the system. The access to justice movement seeks to make the justice system more accessible to these litigants by focusing on procedural fairness. This Article draws on empirical data and observations from Tulsa’s eviction court to consider the limits of access …

On The Road To Nowhere: The Unique Challenges Stateless People Face In Removal Proceedings And The Untenable Legal Limbo Following Final Orders Of Removal, Rachel Marandett

City University of New York Law Review

Under a world order defined by nation-states, having one’s rights and dignity protected is inexorably tied to being a citizen of somewhere. Stateless people, who are citizens of nowhere, are thus left without the safeguards of a nation responsible for them. Today, there are over 200,000 stateless people living in the United States. Because the American immigration system is built upon the premise that everyone is a citizen of somewhere, stateless people are consistently trapped in a ceaseless legal limbo. In fact, the majority of stateless people in the United States have already gone through removal proceedings and have final …

Compensatory Preliminary Damages: Access To Justice As Corrective Justice, Sayid R. Bnefsi

City University of New York Law Review

The access to justice movement broadly concerns people’s ability to resolve legally actionable problems. To the extent that individuals seek resolution through civil litigation, they can be disadvantaged by their unmet need for legal services, particularly in high-stakes cases and complicated areas of law. In part, this is because legal services and litigation are cost-prohibitive, especially for indigent plaintiffs. As a result, these individuals are priced out of litigation and, by extension, unable to use law to seek justice

This Note proposes an innovative legal intervention to this problem called “compensatory preliminary damages.” This intervention builds from the work of …

Adjusting The Focus: Addressing Privacy Concerns Raised By Police Body-Camera Footage, Dalton Primeaux

City University of New York Law Review

Many public safety advocates have called for the use of police body cameras to document the interactions between officers and the public. In light of the documented incidents of police violence and misconduct, some advocates and policy experts have urged law enforcement to use body cameras to discourage future wrongdoing and create a record of when such incidents do happen. In some states, body camera footage is considered public record and can be obtained upon request. Most policies concerning requests for the release of body camera footage require the chief of police to grant permission for sharing the video with …

Idea Bank For New York City's Chief Public Realm Officer: Imagining A Broad, Equity-Enhancing Role For Creating Access To Public Space, Tara Eisenberg, Althea Lamel, Lindsay Matheos, Carolyn Weldy, Andrea Mcardle

City University of New York Law Review

By executive order on February 16, 2023, New York City Mayor Eric Adams created the position of the City’s Chief Public Realm Officer to promote a more centralized and coordinated approach to public realm policy, and appointed a chief strategy officer from his own staff, Ya-Ting Liu, to fill this position. This Article argues that the City should view the role of the Public Realm Office expansively and proactively to help achieve meaningful, equity-enhancing progress in stewarding public space. The authors, former students and a faculty member of CUNY School of Law’s Land Use and Community Lawyering seminar, offer a …

In Search Of Solid Ground: Constitutional Standing In Challenges To Corporate Diversity, Equity, Inclusion ("Dei") Programs, Ally Coll

City University of New York Law Review

This term, in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, the Supreme Court invalidated Harvard and the University of North Carolina’s (“UNC”) race-conscious admissions programs as unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In a significant departure from past precedent, the Court concluded that Harvard and UNC’s programs “cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause.” In anticipation of and in the wake of this decision, individuals and organizations who oppose similar workplace diversity programs brought lawsuits challenging the legality of …

Freedom Of The Press In Hungary & The United States: A Comparative Review, Zane Mcneill, Riley Clare Valentine

City University of New York Law Review

This paper compares both Hungary’s and the United States’ treatment of journalists’ freedom of expression and freedom of speech. Journalists in both Hungary and the United States face specific threats to these freedoms. Journalists face political pressure in Hungary and animosity and scrutiny in the United States under private consolidation. Additionally, coverage that is critical of the state and supports marginalized communities faces heightened scrutiny. Nonetheless, we contend that journalists within the United States have potential options in protecting their freedom of expression such as those indicated in Rodriguez-Cotto v. Pierluisi-Urrutia.

Do The Securities Laws Actually Protect Investors (And How)? Lessons From Spacs, Patrick M. Corrigan

Journal Articles

From the Article

This Article identifies transactional innovation in public offering markets as a case study of how going-public transactions would work if issuers could choose to relax some of the investor protections provided under the securities laws. In recent years, private companies that wanted to go public had a meaningful choice between a traditional initial public offering and a merger with a special purpose acquisition corporation (SPAC). Most of the direct and indirect investor protections that ordinarily apply in the initial public offering context are relaxed in the SPAC context.

The Article argues that outcomes in SPAC markets, where …

Religious Right Countermovement Tactics: Taking Down Lgbtq+ Rights One Letter At A Time, Hannah J. O'Connor

Political Science Honors Projects

The group we know today as the “Religious Right” (“R.R.”) has been in contention with the LGBTQ+ movement since the early 1970s. Using a single case study method, I analyze how, if at all, Religious Right framing and LGBTQ+ counter-framing evolved at a point in time where the R.R. recognized it was losing its fight against same-sex marriage. Using Arizona’s 2013 Senate Bill 1045 (one of the nation’s first bathroom bills) as a case study, I find that the Religious Right translates protectionist framing from its anti-gay marriage crusade into its anti-trans rights offensive, and the LGBTQ+ movement also responds …

Avoiding A "Nine-Headed Hydra": Intervention As A Matter Of Right By Legislators In Federal Lawsuits After Berger, Taylor Lawing

Vanderbilt Law Review

Heightened political polarization across the United States has resulted in the increased use of Rule 24(a) intervention as a matter of right by elected legislators in federal litigation concerning state law. Because states differ in their approaches to intervention, with only some states expressly granting intervention in state matters, lower federal courts have been tasked with evaluating motions to intervene by reconciling Rule 24(a)'s requirements with state statutes, which poses challenging questions concerning Rule 24. This Note aims to provide lower courts with a reimagined standard for evaluating motions to intervene from state legislators that considers the administrative, political, and …

Occupational Licensing And Labor Market Mobility: Evidence From The Legal Profession, Adam Chilton, Jacob Goldin, Kyle Rozema, Sarath Sanga

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

We study how state occupational licensing requirements shape labor mobility across U.S. legal markets. Drawing on newly collected data, we link variation in state bar exam waiver policies to lawyers’ license acquisitions, professional disciplinary records, and educational histories. We find that bar exam waivers increase the number of experienced lawyers obtaining a new license by 38 percent, but that the additional lawyers are subject to more professional discipline and tend to have graduated from less selective law schools. Our results suggest that state-level occupational licensing regimes can create a trade-off between the supply and quality of professionals in an industry.

Colonial Experiences And Contemporary Laws, Yun-Chien Chang, Adam Chilton, Nuno Garoupa, Mila Versteeg

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

Although research suggests that countries’ colonial experiences are associated with a range of contemporary outcomes, the link between colonial experiences and the substance of countries’ laws remains unclear. We explore this question while making four improvements over past research. First, we use more detailed data on both countries’ colonial experiences and contemporary substantive laws. Second, we directly assess whether countries’ shared legal origins—that is, whether they had a common law or civil law system—or their colonial origins—that is, which country had previously colonized them—are more associated with differences in their contemporary laws. Third, we use a research design that makes …

Lessons From Mediation In United States Chapter 11 Cases, Anthony Casey

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

No abstract provided.

The Curious Case Of Corp Group Banking And The Problem Of Private Criminal Enforcement, Anthony J. Casey

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

No abstract provided.

Ideological Concordance Between Students And Professors, Adam Bonica, Adam Chilton, Kyle Rozema, Maya Sen

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

The largely liberal composition of American university faculties is frequently lamented in academic discourse and public debate, largely out of concern that professors “brainwash” younger generations with left-leaning principles. However, these complaints often fail to acknowledge that university students are also overwhelmingly liberal. It is thus possible that university professors are more liberal than the American public but more conservative than their students. In this article, we develop a measure of student-professor ideological concordance based on the share of faculty members who are more liberal than the students at a given school. We then use data on the ideology of …

Deconstructing The Senior Creditor, Anthony Casey, Andrew Verstein

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

No abstract provided.

The Additionality Double Standard, James Salzman, David A. Weisbach

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

Carbon offsets are widely criticized for lacking additionality. The public debate, how- ever, has failed to recognize that the problem of additionality goes far beyond offsets. It arises any time the government subsidizes an activity. Programs with longer histories than offsets and far more money at stake offer valuable lessons for managing lack of additionality in offsets. The article sets out the current efforts to prove offset additionality, explains why major gov- ernment programs present comparable additionality challenges, and show why other programs’ problems of additionality are perceived as significantly different than those for offsets. We examine the toolkit used …

A Commitment Rule For Insolvency Forum: A Response To Critics, Anthony J. Casey, Aurelio Gurrea Martínez, Robert K. Rasmussen

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

No abstract provided.

Disfavored Supreme Court Precedent In The Lower Federal Courts, Curtis A. Bradley, Tara Leigh Grove

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

There has been significant debate in recent years about the stare decisis effect of Supreme Court decisions, prompted in large part by the overturning of Roe v. Wade and, more recently, by the overturning of Chevron. Almost all of this debate has concerned whether the Court should adhere to its own decisions, a matter of “horizontal” stare decisis. But potentially even more significant is the “vertical” effect of Supreme Court precedent on the lower courts, which handle almost all of the federal judicial business. If the Supreme Court expressly overturns a precedent, the lower courts will of course stop following …

Silicon Valley Bank: A Case Study In Post-Crisis Bank Failures, Anthony Casey

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

The 2023 Silicon Valley Bank collapse was the third-largest bank failure in United States (US) history and one of the two largest since the 2008 financial crisis. This event served as the first major test for the post-crisis bank-failure regime in the US. This article evaluates how effectively that regime responded to the challenge. While some critics have questioned the effectiveness of both the regime and the US government's specific actions, others argue that the measures taken successfully mitigated systemic risk. Notably, the government felt compelled to provide discretionary depositor protection beyond what the legal framework required. This suggests that …

Getting To Yes: The Role Of Coercion In Debt Renegotiations, Vincent S.J. Buccola, Marcel Kahan

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

A debt contract’s value depends on the parties’ ability to alter its terms. But although the rules of alteration are for that reason an important part of the design of debt instruments, the academic literature lacks a framework for making sense of them. Recent upheavals in restructuring practice have emphasized the practical importance of a working theory of alteration, however, and in particular of the rules governing what debtors can do to procure creditor acquiescence to proposed changes. This article develops a comprehensive account of the methods of consent solicitation broadly construed. We offer four principal contributions. First, we identify …

A New Measure Of Surviving Children That Sheds Light On Long-Term Trends In Fertility, Anup Malani, Ari Jacob

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

The consequences of fertility decline flow primarily from reduction in the number of surviving children, i.e., both births and survival, not simply from reductions in births. Therefore, neoclassical economic theories that attempt to explain fertility decline (e.g., quantity-quality models) hinge on preferences for surviving children, not births per se. This paper provides a new measure of surviving children. Effective fertility rate (EFR) is the product of the current fertility rate and the projected probability that a child survives until some age A. This age A could be between 15-49 for a measure (EFRR) that tracks reproductive potential, or 15-65 for …

Noisy Factors In Law, Adriana Z. Robertson, Pat Akey, Mikhail Simutin

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

For years, academic experts have championed the widespread adoption of the “Fama-French” factors in legal settings. Factor models are commonly used to perform valuations, performance evaluation and event studies across a wide variety of contexts, many of which rely on data provided by Professor Kenneth French. Yet these data are beset by a problem that the experts themselves did not understand: In a companion article, we document widespread retroactive changes to French’s factor data. These changes are the result of discretionary changes to the construction of the factors and materially affect a broad range of estimates.

n this Article, we …

Does Paying To Pollute Make Pollution Seem Less Bad?, Hajin Kim

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

Does Paying to Pollute Make Pollution Seem Less Bad? Hajin Kim* October 2024 Abstract A common critique of market-based instruments is that they commodify pollution and so reduce its moral stigma. If true, the increasing use of market-based instruments could reduce concern for the environment. With a preregistered and demographically representative experimental vignette study of over 2000 Americans, this project finds evidence against the anti-commodification critique. Participants randomly assigned to learn about market-based regulations of a fictitious new pollutant, malzene, did not find malzene pollution to be less morally problematic than those randomly assigned to learn about a mandate dictating …

Price Discipline For Non-Price Loan Terms, Adam Badawi, Vincent S.J. Buccola, Greg Nini

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

A standard model of capital markets contracting posits that issuers select non-price terms to optimize future flexibility relative to the price they imagine investors will charge for it. To assess such a model’s capacity to explain term selection in the syndicated loan market, we study the secondary market reaction to events—the appearance and proliferation of a new type of restructuring transaction known as an uptier—that spurred change in primary market contracting. We find only weak (and fragile) evidence of a significant price effect. The imprecision of our results reveals, as a general matter, a challenge for scholars of fixed-income contracting …

Predictability And Adaptation In Law And Other Markets, Saul Levmore

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

People and enterprises that are subject to the law find it useful to know what the law is at present, but then also to anticipate future rules. If laws are stable this is easily done. Stability is more common where the judicial branch is concerned, because precedents are often valued, and for good reason. They are more often followed by judges than by those involved in other methods of law- making. But in all of lawmaking, and even in the private sphere, there is value to consistency and certainty. And yet, surprises can be attractive if they are not confronted …

An Apa For Tax, David A. Weisbach

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

Recent Supreme Court cases threaten to upend the administrative law applicable to the tax system. Loper Bright eliminates Chevron deference. Ohio v. EPA heightens the scrutiny given to regulatory preambles. And Corner Post effectively eliminates the statute of limitations for challenging the validity regulations. A number of lower court decisions move in the same direction, aggressively using administrative law to invalidate guidance. Combined, these decisions threaten to make issuing guidance much more difficult and to slow the guidance process.

These decisions are based on the Administrative Procedure Act or related statutes rather than constitutional principles. Therefore, to the extent that …

Should Unions Play A Role In Merger Review?, Eric A. Posner

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

Agencies currently evaluate mergers by conducting a truncated cost-benefit analysis in which the impacts of a proposed merger on various markets must be estimated. Many critics question this method, which requires data that are not always available and assumptions that are not always reliable. An alternative approach would be to conduct merger review as a “structured bargain” among affected parties or their representatives, on the model of corporate bankruptcy. For example, where merging firms are unionized, the unions could be given the right to block a merger that harms their members. Appointed representatives or the agencies themselves could be given …

Lost Time: Paying For Delays Associated With Labor Strikes And Traffic Jams, Saul Levmore

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

Waiting is often costly. In many settings, one party delays to impose costs on another. In other settings, delay yields a small gain while imposing significant costs on others who cannot easily bargain. Where the parties can bargain, at least one expects the other to relent and to bring about a settlement that is mutually beneficial. Inasmuch as time offers the opportunity to gather information, compare alternatives, and reach yet better bargains, law does not and should not simply discourage all delays. On the other hand, it is often the case that when parties delay before reaching a bargain, they …

Bankruptcy By Another Name, Anthony Casey, Joshua Macey

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

Abstract

In a recent Essay, Abbe Gluck, Elizabeth Chamblee Burch, and Adam Zimmerman object to the increasing use of bankruptcy to resolve mass tort claims. They and others are concerned that bankruptcy reduces plaintiff voice, impedes the development of state law remedies, and limits discovery that can drive state and federal regulation regulatory interventions. This Online Response Essay addresses these critiques. Contrary to popular descriptions of the bankruptcy system, bankruptcy courts do not simply aim to maximize economic efficiency and financial recoveries. Bankruptcy includes numerous procedures, including robust disclosure, bellwether trials, future claims representatives, and voting, to ensure a fair …