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Full-Text Articles in Law
The Political Dynamics Of Legislative Reform: Potential Drivers Of The Next Communications Statute, Christopher S. Yoo, Tiffany Keung
The Political Dynamics Of Legislative Reform: Potential Drivers Of The Next Communications Statute, Christopher S. Yoo, Tiffany Keung
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Although most studies of major communications reform legislation focus on the merits of their substantive provisions, analyzing the political dynamics that led to the enactment of such legislation can yield important insights. An examination of the tradeoffs that led the major industry segments to support the Telecommunications Act of 1996 provides a useful illustration of the political bargain that it embodies. Application of a similar analysis to the current context identifies seven components that could form the basis for the next communications statute: universal service, pole attachments, privacy, intermediary immunity, net neutrality, spectrum policy, and antitrust reform. Determining how these …
Regulation Of Algorithmic Tools In The United States, Christopher S. Yoo, Alicia Lai
Regulation Of Algorithmic Tools In The United States, Christopher S. Yoo, Alicia Lai
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Policymakers in the United States have just begun to address regulation of artificial intelligence technologies in recent years, gaining momentum through calls for additional research funding, piece-meal guidance, proposals, and legislation at all levels of government. This Article provides an overview of high-level federal initiatives for general artificial intelligence (AI) applications set forth by the U.S. president and responding agencies, early indications from the incoming Biden Administration, targeted federal initiatives for sector-specific AI applications, pending federal legislative proposals, and state and local initiatives. The regulation of the algorithmic ecosystem will continue to evolve as the United States continues to search …
1911 Triangle Factory Fire — Building Safety Codes, Paul H. Robinson, Sarah M. Robinson
1911 Triangle Factory Fire — Building Safety Codes, Paul H. Robinson, Sarah M. Robinson
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Can a crime make our world better? Crimes are the worst of humanity’s wrongs but, oddly, they sometimes do more than anything else to improve our lives. As it turns out, it is often the outrageousness itself that does the work. Ordinary crimes are accepted as the background noise of our everyday existence but some crimes make people stop and take notice – because they are so outrageous, or so curious, or so heart-wrenching. These “trigger crimes” are the cases that this book is about.
They offer some incredible stories about how people, good and bad, change the world around …
Statutory Rape, Paul H. Robinson, Tyler Scot Williams
Statutory Rape, Paul H. Robinson, Tyler Scot Williams
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It is common for criminal law scholars from outside the United States to discuss the “American rule” and compare it to the rule of other countries. As this volume makes clear, however, there is no such thing as an “American rule.” Because each of the states, plus the District of Columbia and the federal system, have their own criminal law, there are fifty-two American criminal codes.
American criminal law scholars know this, of course, but they too commonly speak of the “general rule” as if it reflects some consensus or near consensus position among the states. But the truth is …
The Ecology Of Transparency Reloaded, Seth F. Kreimer
The Ecology Of Transparency Reloaded, Seth F. Kreimer
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As Justice Stewart famously observed, "[t]he Constitution itself is neither a Freedom of Information Act nor an Official Secrets Act." What the Constitution's text omits, the last two generations have embedded in "small c" constitutional law and practice in the form of the Freedom of Information Act and a series of overlapping governance reforms including Inspectors General, disclosure of political contributions, the State Department’s “Dissent Channel,” the National Archives Information Security Oversight Office, and the publication rights guaranteed by New York Times v. United States. These institutions constitute an ecology of transparency.
The late Justice Scalia argued that the …
Distributive Principles Of Criminal Law, Paul H. Robinson, Tyler Scot Williams
Distributive Principles Of Criminal Law, Paul H. Robinson, Tyler Scot Williams
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This first chapter from the recently published book Mapping American Criminal Law: Variations across the 50 States documents the alternative distributive principles for criminal liability and punishment — desert, deterrence, incapacitation of the dangerous — that are officially recognized by law in each of the American states. The chapter contains two maps visually coded to display important differences: the first map shows which states have adopted desert, deterrence, or incapacitation as a distributive principle, while the second map shows which form of desert is adopted in those jurisdictions that recognize desert. Like all 38 chapters in the book, which covers …
Crimes That Changed Our World: Tragedy, Outrage, And Reform: Chapter One: 1911 Triangle Factory Fire: Building Safety Codes, Paul H. Robinson, Sarah M. Robinson
Crimes That Changed Our World: Tragedy, Outrage, And Reform: Chapter One: 1911 Triangle Factory Fire: Building Safety Codes, Paul H. Robinson, Sarah M. Robinson
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This first chapter of the recently published book Crimes That Changed Our World: Tragedy, Outrage, and Reform, examines the process by which the tragic 1911 Triangle Factory Fire provoked enormous outrage that in turn created a local then national movement for workplace and building safety that ultimately became the foundation for today’s building safety codes. What is particularly interesting, however, is that the Triangle Fire was not the worst such tragedy in its day. Why should it be the one that ultimately triggers social progress?
The book has 21 chapters, each of which traces the tragedy-outrage-reform dynamic in a …
Felony Murder, Paul H. Robinson, Tyler Scot Williams
Felony Murder, Paul H. Robinson, Tyler Scot Williams
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It is common for criminal law scholars from outside the United States to discuss the “American rule” and compare it to the rule of other countries. As this volume makes clear, however, there is no such thing as an “American rule.” Because each of the states, plus the District of Columbia and the federal system, have their own criminal law, there are fifty-two American criminal codes.
American criminal law scholars know this, of course, but they too commonly speak of the “general rule” as if it reflects some consensus or near consensus position among the states. But the truth is …
Insanity Defense, Paul H. Robinson, Tyler Scot Williams
Insanity Defense, Paul H. Robinson, Tyler Scot Williams
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It is common for criminal law scholars from outside the United States to discuss the “American rule” and compare it to the rule of other countries. As this volume makes clear, however, there is no such thing as an “American rule.” Because each of the states, plus the District of Columbia and the federal system, have their own criminal law, there are fifty-two American criminal codes.
American criminal law scholars know this, of course, but they too commonly speak of the “general rule” as if it reflects some consensus or near consensus position among the states. But the truth is …
What Congress's Repeal Efforts Can Teach Us About Regulatory Reform, Cary Coglianese, Gabriel Scheffler
What Congress's Repeal Efforts Can Teach Us About Regulatory Reform, Cary Coglianese, Gabriel Scheffler
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Major legislative actions during the early part of the 115th Congress have undermined the central argument for regulatory reform measures such as the REINS Act, a bill that would require congressional approval of all new major regulations. Proponents of the REINS Act argue that it would make the federal regulatory system more democratic by shifting responsibility for regulatory decisions away from unelected bureaucrats and toward the people’s representatives in Congress. But separate legislative actions in the opening of the 115th Congress only call this argument into question. Congress’s most significant initiatives during this period — its derailed attempts to repeal …
Conclusion: Trigger Crimes & Social Progress, Paul H. Robinson, Sarah M. Robinson
Conclusion: Trigger Crimes & Social Progress, Paul H. Robinson, Sarah M. Robinson
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Can a crime make our world better? Crimes are the worst of humanity’s wrongs but, oddly, they sometimes do more than anything else to improve our lives. It is often the outrageousness itself that does the work. Ordinary crimes are accepted as the background noise of everyday existence but some crimes make people stop and take notice – because they are so outrageous or so heart-wrenching.
This brief essay explores the dynamic of tragedy, outrage, and reform, illustrating how certain kinds of crimes can trigger real social progress. Several dozen such “trigger crimes” are identified but four in particular are …
Report Of The Delaware Criminal Law Recodification Project, Paul H. Robinson, Matthew Kussmaul, Ilya Rudyak, Criminal Law Research Group
Report Of The Delaware Criminal Law Recodification Project, Paul H. Robinson, Matthew Kussmaul, Ilya Rudyak, Criminal Law Research Group
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In 1973, during the “first wave” of American criminal law recodification efforts following the publication of the Model Penal Code, Delaware adopted a new criminal code. While it represented a dramatic improvement over the law it replaced, its initial clarity and utility were greatly diminished by subsequent piecemeal legislation. Delaware’s current criminal code is lengthy, inconsistent, and replete with duplicative and outdated offenses that impose disproportional punishments. This process of criminal code deterioration is not unique to Delaware and plagues other U.S. jurisdictions. In 2015, however, stakeholders in Delaware’s criminal justice system initiated a code revision process, commissioning the authors …
The Bylaw Puzzle In Delaware Corporate Law, David A. Skeel Jr.
The Bylaw Puzzle In Delaware Corporate Law, David A. Skeel Jr.
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In less than a decade, Delaware’s legislature has overruled its courts and reshaped Delaware corporate law on two different occasions, with proxy access bylaws in 2009 and with shareholder litigation bylaws in 2015. Having two dramatic interventions in quick succession would be puzzling under any circumstances. The interventions are doubly puzzling because with proxy access, Delaware’s legislature authorized the use of bylaws or charter provisions that Delaware’s courts had banned; while with shareholder litigation, it banned bylaws or charter provisions that the courts had authorized. This Article attempts to unravel the puzzle.
I start with corporate law doctrine, and find …
Class Actions And The Counterrevolution Against Federal Litigation, Stephen B. Burbank, Sean Farhang
Class Actions And The Counterrevolution Against Federal Litigation, Stephen B. Burbank, Sean Farhang
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In this article we situate consideration of class actions in a framework, and fortify it with data, that we have developed as part of a larger project, the goal of which is to assess the counterrevolution against private enforcement of federal law from an institutional perspective. In a series of articles emerging from the project, we have documented how the Executive, Congress and the Supreme Court (wielding both judicial power under Article III of the Constitution and delegated legislative power under the Rules Enabling Act) fared in efforts to reverse or dull the effects of statutory and other incentives for …
Lobbying And The Petition Clause, Maggie Blackhawk
Lobbying And The Petition Clause, Maggie Blackhawk
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Contrary to popular opinion, the Supreme Court has not yet resolved whether lobbying is constitutionally protected. Belying this fact, courts, Congress, and scholars mistakenly assume that lobbying is protected under the Petition Clause. Because scholars have shared the mistaken assumption that the Petition Clause protects the practice of “lobbying”, no research to date has looked closely at the Petition Clause doctrine and the history of petitioning in relation to lobbying. In a recent opinion addressing petitioning in another context, the Supreme Court unearthed the long history behind the right to petition and argued for the importance of this history for …
Federal Securities Fraud Litigation As A Lawmaking Partnership, Jill E. Fisch
Federal Securities Fraud Litigation As A Lawmaking Partnership, Jill E. Fisch
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In its most recent Halliburton II decision, the Supreme Court rejected an effort to overrule its prior decision in Basic Inc. v. Levinson. The Court reasoned that adherence to Basic was warranted by principles of stare decisis that operate with “special force” in the context of statutory interpretation. This Article offers an alternative justification for adhering to Basic—the collaboration between the Court and Congress that has led to the development of the private class action for federal securities fraud. The Article characterizes this collaboration as a lawmaking partnership and argues that such a partnership offers distinctive lawmaking advantages. …
Federal Court Rulemaking And Litigation Reform: An Institutional Approach, Stephen B. Burbank, Sean Farhang
Federal Court Rulemaking And Litigation Reform: An Institutional Approach, Stephen B. Burbank, Sean Farhang
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The purpose of this article is to advance understanding of the role that federal court rulemaking has played in litigation reform. For that purpose, we created original data sets that include (1) information about every member of the Advisory Committee on Civil Rules who served from 1960 to 2013, and (2) every proposal for amending the Federal Rules that the Advisory Committee approved for consideration by the Standing Committee during the same period and that had implications for private enforcement. We show that, beginning in 1971, when a succession of Chief Justices appointed by Republican Presidents have chosen committee members, …
The Rise And Fall And Resurrection Of American Criminal Codes, Paul H. Robinson
The Rise And Fall And Resurrection Of American Criminal Codes, Paul H. Robinson
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This brief essay summarizes the virtues of the modern American codification movement of the 1960s and 70s, putting it in a larger global context, then describes how these once-enviable codes have been systematically degraded with thoughtless amendments, a process of degradation that is accelerating each year. After exploring the political dynamics that promote such degradation, the essay suggests the principles and procedures for fixing the current codes and, more importantly, structural changes to the process that could avoid the restart of degradation in the future.
Catalogs, Gideon Parchomovsky, Alex Stein
Catalogs, Gideon Parchomovsky, Alex Stein
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It is a virtual axiom in the world of law that legal norms come in two prototypes: rules and standards. The accepted lore suggests that rules should be formulated to regulate recurrent and frequent behaviors, whose contours can be defined with sufficient precision. Standards, by contrast, should be employed to address complex, variegated, behaviors that require the weighing of multiple variables. Rules rely on an ex ante perspective and are therefore considered the domain of the legislator; standards embody a preference for ex post, ad-hoc, analysis and are therefore considered the domain of courts. The rules/standards dichotomy has become a …
Copyright’S Private Ordering And The 'Next Great Copyright Act', Jennifer E. Rothman
Copyright’S Private Ordering And The 'Next Great Copyright Act', Jennifer E. Rothman
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Private ordering plays a significant role in the application of intellectual property laws, especially in the context of copyright law. In this Article, I highlight some of the dominant modes of private ordering and consider what formal copyright law should do, if anything, to engage with private ordering in the copyright space. I conclude that there is not one single approach that copyright law should take with regard to private ordering, but instead several different approaches. In some instances, the best option is for the law to get out of the way and simply continue to provide room for various …
States Of Bankruptcy, David A. Skeel Jr.
States Of Bankruptcy, David A. Skeel Jr.
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In the past several years, many states’ financial condition has been so precarious that some observers have predicted that one or more might default. As the crisis persisted, a very unlikely word crept into these conversations: bankruptcy. Should Congress provide a bankruptcy option for states, or would bankruptcy be a mistake? The goal of this Article is to carefully vet this question, using all of the theoretical, empirical and historical tools currently available. The discussion is structured as a “case” for bankruptcy, rather than an “on the one hand, on the other hand” assessment. But it seeks to be scrupulously …
State Bankruptcy From The Ground Up, David A. Skeel Jr.
State Bankruptcy From The Ground Up, David A. Skeel Jr.
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After a brief, high profile debate, proposals to create a new bankruptcy framework for states dropped from sight in Washington in early 2011. With the debate’s initial passions having cooled, at least for a time, we can now consider state bankruptcy, as well as other responses to states’ fiscal crisis, a bit more quietly and carefully. In this Article, I begin by briefly outlining a theoretical and practical case for state bankruptcy. Because I have developed these arguments in much more detail in companion work, I will keep the discussion comparatively brief. My particular concern here is, as the title …
Report On Offense Grading In New Jersey, Paul H. Robinson, Rebecca Levenson, Nicholas Feltham, Andrew Sperl, Kristen-Elise Brooks, Agatha Koprowski, Jessica Peake, Benjamin Probber, Brian Trainor
Report On Offense Grading In New Jersey, Paul H. Robinson, Rebecca Levenson, Nicholas Feltham, Andrew Sperl, Kristen-Elise Brooks, Agatha Koprowski, Jessica Peake, Benjamin Probber, Brian Trainor
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The University of Pennsylvania Criminal Law Research Group was commissioned to do a study of offense grading in New Jersey. After an examination of New Jersey criminal law and a survey of New Jersey residents, the CLRG issued this Final Report. (For the report of a similar project for Pennsylvania, see Report on Offense Grading in Pennsylvania, http://ssrn.com/abstract=1527149, and for an article about the grading project, see The Modern Irrationalities of American Criminal Codes: An Empirical Study of Offense Grading, http://ssrn.com/abstract=1539083, Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology (forthcoming 2011).) The New Jersey study found serious conflicts between the relative grading …
Subsidizing Addiction: Do State Health Insurance Mandates Increase Alcohol Consumption?, Jonathan Klick, Thomas Stratmann
Subsidizing Addiction: Do State Health Insurance Mandates Increase Alcohol Consumption?, Jonathan Klick, Thomas Stratmann
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A model of addiction in which individuals are forward looking implies that as the availability of addiction treatment options grows, individuals will consume more of an addictive good. We test this implication using cross-state variation in the adoption of mental health parity mandates that include substance abuse treatments. We examine the effects of these mandates on the consumption of alcohol and find that parity legislation leads to an increase in alcohol consumption. To account for the possible endogeneity of the adoption of mental health parity mandates, we perform an instrumental variables analysis and find that the ordinary least squares estimation …
Aggregation, Auctions, And Other Developments In The Selection Of Lead Counsel Under The Pslra, Jill E. Fisch
Aggregation, Auctions, And Other Developments In The Selection Of Lead Counsel Under The Pslra, Jill E. Fisch
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No abstract provided.
An Economic Analysis Of Trade Measures To Protect The Global Environment, Howard F. Chang
An Economic Analysis Of Trade Measures To Protect The Global Environment, Howard F. Chang
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In this article, Professor Howard Chang addresses the role of trade restrictions in supporting policies to protect the global environment and proposes a more liberal treatment of these environmental trade measures than that adopted by dispute-settlement panels of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The GATT Secretariat has recommended that countries like the United States rely on "carrots" rather than "sticks" in order to induce the participation of other countries in multilateral environmental agreements. Professor Chang defends the use of sticks on the ground that they encourage more restrained exploitation of the environment pending a multilateral agreement. First, …
Duties To Offset Competitive Advantages, Richard B. Dagen, Michael S. Knoll
Duties To Offset Competitive Advantages, Richard B. Dagen, Michael S. Knoll
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No abstract provided.
State-Court Injunctions And The Federal Common Law Of Labor Contracts: Beyond Norris-Laguardia, Howard Lesnick
State-Court Injunctions And The Federal Common Law Of Labor Contracts: Beyond Norris-Laguardia, Howard Lesnick
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No abstract provided.