Law and Society Commons^™

Mr Gandhi’S Terror Sermon, Shubhankar Dam

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

No abstract provided.

Looking Backward From The Year 2099: Ecozoic Reflections On The Future, Samuel Alexander

Environmental and Earth Law Journal (EELJ)

Looking Backward from the Year 2099: Ecozoic Reflections on the Future

Abstract by Samuel Alexander

Story, myth, and narrative played a central role in Thomas Berry’s writings. He told new stories about the Universe and our place in it, stories not only about where we have been and where we seem to be going, but also stories about where we could go, if only we exercised our freedom in different ways. Inspired by Berry, in this paper I have dared to experiment with story, by attempting to look back on the 21st century from the vantage point of the year …

Uprooted Justice: Transformations Of Law And Everyday Life In Northern Thailand, David M. Engel

Journal Articles

Studies of law in everyday life tend to view law either as instrumental in shaping specific decisions and practices or as constitutive of the cultural categories through which humans apprehend their world and perceive law as relevant to a greater or lesser extent. This article, however, suggests that circumstances may arise in which law’s role in relation to everyday life is neither instrumental nor constitutive but instead becomes one of radical dissociation. Based on an analysis of injuries in northern Thailand, it examines two transformational episodes in Thai legal and political history. The first occurred at the turn of the …

Indecency, A La Carte, And The Fcc's Approval Of The Sirius Xm Satellite Radio Merger: How The Fcc Indirectly Regulated Indecent Content On Satellite Radio At The Expense Of The "Public Interest", Elizabeth A. Pike

University of Miami Business Law Review

No abstract provided.

Governing In The Information Age: Technology As A Tool Of Democratic Engagement, Sally Katzen

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Regulation, Deregulation, And Happiness, Jeffrey L. Harrison

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

The High Price Of Misguided Legislation: Nevada's Need For Practical Sex Offender Laws, Stephanie Buntin

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Much Needed Reform In The Realm Of Public Morals: A Proposed Addition To The Gatt Article Xx(A) "Public Morals" Framework, Resulting From China-Audiovisual, Tyler M. Smith

Cardozo Journal of International and Comparative Law

The note examines the tension between free trade and moral considerations under the GATT and GATS frameworks, focusing on the public morals exceptions in Article XXa of the GATT and Article XIVa of the GATS. It critiques the WTO's current two-tiered jurisprudential framework, particularly the provisional justification standard, for insufficiently addressing the balance between trade restrictions and moral protections. The author proposes a more robust analytical framework requiring states invoking public morals exceptions to demonstrate substantial domestic legislative and executive efforts to protect those morals, ensuring such measures are not mere pretexts for protectionism. This approach aims to foster predictability, …

Virtues Of Common Ownership, Anna Di Robilant

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Michael Sandel's theory of justice is attractive and inspirational for lawyers interested in social change. Sandel's call to go beyond egalitarian liberalism has real and important implications for legal and institutional engineering. However, Sandel's theory of justice is parsimonious of recommendations for medium level institutional design. It offers little detailed guidance to private lawyers called upon to design background rules for the allocation of scarce resources and necessary burdens. This essay will discuss how Sandel's theory of justice may help orient the work of lawyers and policymakers interested in a question that is central to recent property debates: the …

Self-Conscious Dicta: The Origins Of Roe V. Wade’S Trimester Framework, Randy Beck

Scholarly Works

One of the controversies arising from Roe v. Wade (1973), has concerned whether the conclusions undergirding the opinion's “trimester framework” should be considered part of the holding of the case, or instead classified as dicta. Different Supreme Court opinions have spoken to this question in different ways. This article reviews materials from the files of Justices who participated in Roe, seeking insight as to what the Court thought about the issue at the time. The article concludes that Justices in the Roe majority understood the opinion’s trimester framework to consist largely of dicta, unnecessary to a ruling on the constitutionality …

Outsourcing Enforcement: Principles To Guide Self-Policing Regimes, Sarah L. Stafford

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Paul Verkuil And Pragmatic Adjustment In Government, Sidney A. Shapiro

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Attention All Internet Users: How Proposed Amendments To The Communications Decency Act Could Save Your Reputation, Niki Blumentritt

Legislation and Policy Brief

Imagine a beautiful fall day on a Southern college campus. The leaves are changing, and the sound of the band practicing for this weekend’s big game echoes throughout campus.  Jane, a college freshman, is walking through campus on the way back to her dorm from her Biology 101 class.  Usually, Jane’s walk is uneventful, aside from the occasional run-in with a friend or sorority sister; however, today is much different.  Jane notices that many people are staring, pointing, and snickering at her.  Is there something on her face?  She quickly pulls out her compact and realizes that all makeup is …

Mind Control: Firms And The Production Of Ideas, Anthony J. Casey

Seattle University Law Review

The central questions for economic theories of the firm concern how the production of a good is organized (in the market or within a firm) and why that organization prevails. Derivative to these questions, legal scholars ask how the law affects and is affected by any particular organizational structure. Emerging literature looks at these questions in connection with the law of intellectual property. The prevailing theories in that literature focus primarily, though not exclusively, on patent law and generally adopt a property-rights theory of the firm. Those theories, focusing on residual control and hold-up problems, have shown that as patent …

Theories Of The Firm And Judicial Uncertainty, Andrew S. Gold

Seattle University Law Review

There is no necessary connection between academics’ theories of the firm and judicial theories of the firm. Economists and legal scholars may adopt one theory of the firm, and courts may adopt another. We might even predict this result. Judges are not economists, and as increasingly sophisticated theories of the firm emerge in the academic literature, judges are not well-positioned to keep pace with the evolving accounts. Indeed, judges may reasonably choose to adopt no theory at all. Given these premises, this Essay explores the relationship between academically developed theories of the firm and corporate legal doctrine. Legal scholars who …

Coase, Knight, And The Nexus-Of-Contracts Theory Of The Firm: A Reflection On Reification, Reality, And The Corporation As Entrepreneur Surrogate, Charles R.T. O'Kelley

Seattle University Law Review

Working within the nexus-of-contracts model, scholars have struggled to develop a rhetorical paradigm that accurately predicts or describes corporation law. This difficulty flows from twin flaws in the currently dominant model—the equation of the corporation and the firm and the exclusion of the entrepreneur. Coase and his progenitor, Frank Knight, saw the firm as having an “inside” and an “outside” and a distinct central actor—the entrepreneur. Contrary to the allocation of resources by the unconscious processes of the market fundamental to the perfect competition model favored by free-market, nexus-of-contracts theorists, Knight and Coase looked inside the firm and identified the …

Salomon Redux: The Moralities Of Business, Allan C. Hutchinson, Ian Langlois

Seattle University Law Review

In this Essay, we revisit the Salomon case and its related litigation not only from a legal standpoint but also from a broader moral perspective. 4 In the second Part, we offer a detailed context for and account of the Salomon litigation. The third Part focuses on the historical roots of the corporation and the judicial arguments in Salomon. In the fourth Part, we explore the moral and legal consequences of the Salomon decision. Throughout the Essay, our ambition will be not only to give the Salomon case a more contextual and richer spin but also to tackle the relationship …

Law And Legal Theory In The History Of Corporate Responsibility: Corporate Personhood, Lyman Johnson

Seattle University Law Review

This Article, the first of a multipart project, addresses the nature of corporate personhood, one area where law has played a central role in the history of corporate responsibility in the United States.1 The treatment will be illustrative, not exhaustive. Consistent with the theme of the larger project, the Article serves to make the simple but important point that a full historical understanding of corporate responsibility requires an appreciation of the law’s significant, if ultimately limited, contribution to the longstanding American quest for more responsible corporate conduct. On one hand, the spheres of law and corporate responsibility, although clearly complementary, …

Nevada And The Market For Corporate Law, Bruce H. Kobayashi, Larry E. Ribstein

Seattle University Law Review

Berle and Means’s view that managers rather than shareholders control our largest corporations finds important expression in William Cary’s famous article arguing that managers have led shareholders on a “race to the bottom” whose finish line is Delaware. These views, in turn, support supplanting state corporation law with federal regulation of corporate governance. Concerns about a race to the bottom lately focus on Nevada, which seeks to be Delaware’s first real competitor for out-of-state firms in the national incorporation market. Evidence suggests that Nevada’s strategy is to raise tax revenues by offering a significantly laxer corporate law than Delaware. We …

Hired To Invent Vs. Work Made For Hire: Resolving The Inconsistency Among Rights Of Corporate Personhood, Authorship, And Inventorship, Sean M. O'Connor

Seattle University Law Review

Corporations have long held core aspects of legal personhood, such as rights to own and divest property and to sue and be sued. U.S. copyright law allows corporations to be authors while U.S. patent law does not allow them to be inventors. To be sure, both copyright law and patent law allow corporations to own copyrights and patents as assignees. But only copyright law, through its work-made-for-hire doctrine, provides for the nonnatural person of the corporation to “be” the author in an almost metaphysical sense. Under patent law, the natural-person inventors must always be listed in the patent documents, even …

A Shallow Harbor And A Cold Horizon: The Deceptive Promise Of Modern Agency Law For The Theory Of The Firm, David A. Westbrook

Seattle University Law Review

Modern agency law—the consensual agreement of one person to work for and under the control of another—has been widely used to provide a general framework for understanding a great deal of business law. Agency law concepts can be used to frame pedagogical, scholarly, institutional, and even political discourses. In so doing, modern agency law addresses concerns about the institution of the corporation, generally by reference to contract: institutions are created out of essentially consensual, and hence justifiable, relationships among autonomous individuals. So modern agency law is more than a “theory” of the firm in the narrow sense of theory; modern …

The Future Of Socialism, Robert Paul Wolff

Seattle University Law Review

An unpromising title, this, in the seventh year of the third millennium of the Common Era; rather like “Recent Developments in Ptolemaic Astronomy” or “Betamax—a Technology Whose Time Has Come.” My grandfather’s dream, the faith of my younger days, has turned to ashes. And yet, I remain persuaded that Karl Marx has something important to teach us about the world in which we live today. In what follows, I propose to take as my text a famous statement from Marx’s A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy1—a sort of preliminary sketch of Das Kapital2—and see what it can tell …

Order For The Courts: Reforming The Nollan/Dolan Threshold Inquiry For Exactions, Winfield B. Martin

Seattle University Law Review

For decades prior to 2005, Fifth Amendment regulatory takings jurisprudence languished in a state of confused neglect. Rather than articulating a clearly discernable standard for determining whether a violation of the Takings Clause had occurred, Justices rebuffed government action that seemed to amount to “an out-and-out plan of extortion” and nodded in approval when they deemed the government to have “acted diligently and in good faith” or in furtherance of a “compelling interest.” In trying to parse this imprecise thicket, scholars have characterized the Court’s approach to regulatory takings as a “muddle,” in “disarray,” and “incoherent.” Professor Kent even noted …

Consumer Lock-In And The Theory Of The Firm, David G. Yosifon

Seattle University Law Review

The advent of the modern corporation separated not only ownership from control but also production from consumption. The agency problem that arose between owners and managers of firms also emerged between producers and consumers. Just as corporations needed to lock-in capital to sustain large-scale operations, so too did they need to lock-in consumers to justify and reduce the risks of asset-specific investment. Large corporate operations succeeded because they solved both the capital and consumer lock-in challenges. This Article explores ways in which modern consumers, like shareholders, can find themselves in a very real sense locked into the corporations with which …

The Citizen Shareholder: Modernizing The Agency Paradigm To Reflect How And Why A Majority Of Americans Invest In The Market, Anne Tucker

Seattle University Law Review

This Article examines corporate law from the perspective of personal investment and discusses the economic realities of modern investments in order to understand the role of shareholders within the agency paradigm. Corporate law, its scholars, and suggested reforms traditionally focus on the internal organization of the corporation. For example, agency principles inform corporate law by acknowledging a potential conflict of interest between the managers and shareholders of a corporation. Reforms such as increased shareholder voting rights and proxy access, which seek to give shareholders a more direct means to make their interests known to managers, illustrate corporate law’s focus on …

We Don’T Need You Anymore: Corporate Social Responsibilities, Executive Class Interests, And Solving Mizruchi And Hirschman’S Paradox, Richard Marens

Seattle University Law Review

Previously, Northern Italian, Dutch, and then English entrepreneurs had dominated global trade in turn, and when after a century or so their respective hegemonies began to show cracks, each group refocused its efforts in the service of tapping already-accumulated wealth through financial speculation and, in the process, also financed the rise of their successors.20 If Dahrendorf was correct, and American capital was managed during the era of American industrial dominance by “a class of career bureaucrats, whose primary loyalty lay with their employer rather than with a class of property owners,”21 there are good reasons to believe that that has …

Rethinking The Nature Of The Firm: The Corporation As A Governance Object, Peer Zumbansen

Seattle University Law Review

This Article attempts to bridge two discourses—corporate governance and contract governance. Regarding the latter, a group of scholars has recently set out to develop a more comprehensive research agenda to explore the governance dimensions of contractual relations, highlighting the potential of contract theory to develop a more encompassing theory of social and economic transactions. While a renewed interest in the contribution of economic theory for a concept of contract governance drives one dimension of this research, another part of this undertaking has been to move contract theory closer to theories of social organization. Here, these scholars emphasize the “social” or …

Strengthening Investment In Public Corporations Through The Uncorporation, Kelli A. Alces

Seattle University Law Review

We cannot completely overcome the difficulties caused by the separation of ownership and control. In The Modern Corporation and Private Property, Adolf A. Berle and Gardiner Means focused our attention on what was then a relatively new phenomenon: widely dispersed public shareholding.1 They marveled at how, for the first time in the history of the American economy, the owners of assets had so little to do with the management of those assets, and managers had so much power over so much health that did not belong to them.2 Berle and Means described what we now call the Berle−Means corporation, the …

The Post-Revolutionary Period In Corporate Law: Returning To The Theory Of The Firm, Matthew T. Bodie

Seattle University Law Review

The consensus on corporate law theory has narrowed the field’s doctrinal and methodological foci. Although the vibrancy of shareholder primacy has at times been called into question as a matter of law, both boardrooms and courts have taken the normative call for shareholder wealth maximization increasingly to heart. There is little doubt that the revolution has not only substantially affected legal theory but also legislation, court decisions, and corporate behavior. It achieved a level of success unusual for an academic discipline; it not only transformed the field but also the world. We now find ourselves in the post-revolutionary period. For …

The Evolution Of The American Corporation And Global Organizational Biodiversity, Ugo Pagano

Seattle University Law Review

The Evolution of the Modern Corporate Structure has been one of the most influential chapters of The Modern Corporation & Private Property. But Berle and Means’s superb analysis is framed in the American context and cannot be easily generalized to other experiences. Their corporate model arose in a democratic country where “production engineers” commanded more respect than financiers and capitalist dynasties. Other countries followed different organizational paths, characterized by different institutional complementarities between labor and financial markets that generated “concentrated equilibria” different from the American “dispersed equilibrium.” This Article argues that the divide can be traced to the different aristocratic …