The Misuse Of Tax Incentives To Align Management-Shareholder Interests,
2011
Boston College Law School
The Misuse Of Tax Incentives To Align Management-Shareholder Interests, James R. Repetti
James R. Repetti
The U.S. tax system contains many provisions which are intended to align management of large publicly traded companies more closely to stockholders. This article shows that many of the tax provisions that have been adopted are of questionable effectiveness because they fail to address the complexities of stockholder-management relations in attempting to motivate management to act in the best interests of stockholders. The article proposes that rather than Congress attempting to identify the best way that it can use the tax system to motivate management, Congress should eliminate tax provisions which subsidize management's inefficiencies in order to encourage stockholders, themselves, …
The Standard Of Causation In The Mixed-Motive Title Vii Action—A Social Policy Perspective,
2011
Boston College Law School
The Standard Of Causation In The Mixed-Motive Title Vii Action—A Social Policy Perspective, Mark S. Brodin
Mark S. Brodin
In this Article, Professor Brodin explores the causal-relation problem in individual employment discrimination suits alleging disparate treatment brought under title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The effort in this Article is to define a theory of causation for the individual disparate treatment case that is consistent with the goals of title VII as well as with the realities and limitations of our adversary system of adjudication. Professor Brodin surveys the problem, traces the development of relevant case law and concludes with a proposal of causal analysis that separates issues of liability from those of remedy.
The Standard Of Causation In The Mixed-Motive Title Vii Action -- A Social Policy Perspective,
2011
Boston College Law School
The Standard Of Causation In The Mixed-Motive Title Vii Action -- A Social Policy Perspective, Mark S. Brodin
Mark S. Brodin
No abstract provided.
Bush V. Gore: The Worst (Or At Least Second-To-The-Worst) Supreme Court Decision Ever,
2011
Boston College Law School
Bush V. Gore: The Worst (Or At Least Second-To-The-Worst) Supreme Court Decision Ever, Mark S. Brodin
Mark S. Brodin
In the stiff competition for worst Supreme Court decision ever, two candidates stand heads above the others for the simple reason that they precipitated actual fighting wars in their times. By holding that slaves, as mere chattels, could not sue in court and could never be American citizens, and further invalidating the Missouri Compromise, which had prohibited slavery in new territories, Dred Scott v. Sanford charted the course to secession and Civil War four years later. By disenfranchising Florida voters and thereby appointing popular-vote loser George W. Bush as President, Bush v. Gore set in motion events which would lead …
What One Lawyer Can Do For Society: Lessons From The Remarkable Career Of William P. Homans, Jr.,
2011
Boston College Law School
What One Lawyer Can Do For Society: Lessons From The Remarkable Career Of William P. Homans, Jr., Mark S. Brodin
Mark S. Brodin
William P. Homans Jr. was an iconic civil liberties and criminal defense lawyer who mentored generations of younger lawyers that followed in his path. He appeared in cases that defined his times, from representing targets of the McCarthy-era inquisitions of the 1950s, to defending publishers of books like Tropic of Cancer when the authorities sought to suppress them, to serving on the defense team in the conspiracy trial of internationally-renowned pediatrician Benjamin Spock and four other leaders of the anti-Vietnam-War movement, to defending a doctor charged with manslaughter arising from an abortion he performed soon after Roe v. Wade legalized …
Environmental Law And Three Economies: Navigating A Sprawling Field Of Study, Practice, And Societal Governance In Which Everything Is Connected To Everything Else,
2011
Boston College Law School
Environmental Law And Three Economies: Navigating A Sprawling Field Of Study, Practice, And Societal Governance In Which Everything Is Connected To Everything Else, Zygmunt J.B. Plater
Zygmunt J.B. Plater
The vast sprawl of the environmental law field makes it a bemusing and confounding puzzle even to those who pursue it as their primary academic vocation. The amorphous breadth and intricate depths of environmental law present special challenges to anyone who tries to navigate the field. This Article addresses several of these challenges, briefly analyzing how environmental curricula are designed, and then suggests a potentially useful new way to conceptualize the realm of environmental law.
The Embattled Social Utilities Of The Endangered Species Act - A Noah Presumption And Caution Against Putting Gasmasks On The Canaries In The Coalmine,
2011
Boston College Law School
The Embattled Social Utilities Of The Endangered Species Act - A Noah Presumption And Caution Against Putting Gasmasks On The Canaries In The Coalmine, Zygmunt J.B. Plater
Zygmunt J.B. Plater
The Endangered Species Act (ESA) is once again poised at the brink of what could become an illuminating national debate. The Act’s congressional reauthorization process is likely to provide the first major indicator of what the 105th Congress will or won’t do to environmental law generally. From the turbulent past and present of the ESA, this essay offers some reminders for the impending battles over the Act.
Keynote Essay: A Modern Political Tribalism In Natural Resources Management,
2011
Boston College Law School
Keynote Essay: A Modern Political Tribalism In Natural Resources Management, Zygmunt J.B. Plater
Zygmunt J.B. Plater
The first law of ecology holds that everything is connected to everything else. This conference addresses the challenges and dilemmas of resource management policy on America’s public lands, but it seems useful both for the purposes of the conference and in broader terms to note how resource management is connected to larger questions of global integrity and human governance. This essay explores a troubling fact of modern political life: As the problems of managing the economy and ecology of this nation become ever more complex, subtly-interrelated, pressured and demanding, our processes of legal and political governance might be expected to …
The Right To Counsel Fees In Public Interest Environmental Litigation,
2011
Boston College Law School
The Right To Counsel Fees In Public Interest Environmental Litigation, Zygmunt J.B. Plater, Joseph H. King Jr
Zygmunt J.B. Plater
No abstract provided.
Dealing With Dumb And Dumber: The Continuing Mission Of Citizen Environmentalism,
2011
Boston College Law School
Dealing With Dumb And Dumber: The Continuing Mission Of Citizen Environmentalism, Zygmunt J.B. Plater
Zygmunt J.B. Plater
Surveying the history of citizen environmentalism in the context of environmental law and politics over the past fifty years, this essay hypothesizes five different categories of corporate, governmental, political, and individual actions that deserve to be called “dumb,” and the societal lessons that have been or could be learned from each. If there is truth to the wistful aphorism that “we learn from our mistakes,” then our society is in position to learn a great deal about our world and how it works, which perhaps provides some ground for hope for the years to come. Environmentalism embodies fundamentally rational and …
Coal Law From The Old World: A Perspective On Land Use And Environmental Regulation In The Coal Industries Of The United States, Great Britain, And West Germany,
2011
Boston College Law School
Coal Law From The Old World: A Perspective On Land Use And Environmental Regulation In The Coal Industries Of The United States, Great Britain, And West Germany, Zygmunt J.B. Plater
Zygmunt J.B. Plater
America’s reentry into the Coal Age has been one of the major consequences of the Mideast oil-producing nations’ discovery of their collective marketing power, and in this new emphasis on coal the United States is not alone. Like the United States, many industrialized nations with domestic coal reserves had allowed their coal industries to languish under the influence of low-priced, petroleum based energy economy and are now hastening to strengthen their coal production. Different nations approach the regulation of their resurgent coal industries in varying ways, however, and these differences can be instructive to American observers, particularly as they relate …
The Exxon Valdez Resurfaces In The Gulf Of Mexico ... And The Hazards Of “Megasystem Centripetal Di-Polarity”,
2011
Boston College Law School
The Exxon Valdez Resurfaces In The Gulf Of Mexico ... And The Hazards Of “Megasystem Centripetal Di-Polarity”, Zygmunt J.B. Plater
Zygmunt J.B. Plater
The 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon blowout spill in the Gulf of Mexico shocked the nation with the amount of oil and harm it unleashed upon the Gulf and its natural and human ecosystems. As details of the calamity became available, they revealed frustrating parallels to the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in the Gulf of Alaska in terms of causation and impaired response capability. Similar systemic deficits characterized the actions of corporate managers and state and federal regulators in the oil industry of both Gulfs. In a “di-polar” system where industry and government regulators are supposed to counterbalance one another, …
Endangered Species Act Lessons Over 30 Years, And The Legacy Of The Snail Darter, A Small Fish In A Pork Barrel,
2011
Boston College Law School
Endangered Species Act Lessons Over 30 Years, And The Legacy Of The Snail Darter, A Small Fish In A Pork Barrel, Zygmunt J.B. Plater
Zygmunt J.B. Plater
Why is it – amidst the flood of environmental statutes that poured into the law books and national consciousness in the remarkable decade of the 1970s – that the Endangered Species Act of 1973 (ESA) stands out as quite uniquely different? This Essay briefly surveys the ESA’s differentness, its special political context, the citizen suit of great notoriety that fired up the ESA’s political hotseat back in 1975, and what has changed and what has not in the years since that first eco-legal outburst.
Reflected In A River: Agency Accountability And The Tva Tellico Dam Case,
2011
Boston College Law School
Reflected In A River: Agency Accountability And The Tva Tellico Dam Case, Zygmunt J.B. Plater
Zygmunt J.B. Plater
Legal history is usually written from one of two time perspectives: as a narrative of events and changing conditions over a span of years or as an extended exploration of one fertile moment in time. In examining the intriguing entity known as the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), this article draws upon that chronological history to some extent. To a greater extent, however, it focuses upon revealing moments in the last six years of the long-running battles over completion of the TVA’s Tellico dam, which finally flooded the last remaining stretch of the Little Tennessee River Valley in the spring of …
Through The Looking Glass Of Eminent Domain: Exploring The "Arbitrary And Capricious" Test And Substantive Rationality Review Of Governmental Decisions,
2011
Boston College Law School
Through The Looking Glass Of Eminent Domain: Exploring The "Arbitrary And Capricious" Test And Substantive Rationality Review Of Governmental Decisions, Zygmunt J.B. Plater
Zygmunt J.B. Plater
The day-to-day realities of different systems of government can be discerned in the way they handle, in theory and practice, clashes between the individual and the collective will. The structure of contemporary American democracy is no exception. It is comprised of a variegated assortment of judicial formulae for balancing the interests of the individual and the state, most of these formulae tracing back with differing degrees of directness to textual bases in the first nine amendments to the federal Constitution or their state constitutional equivalents. One of these basic structural balancings, encountered early on by every student of American law …
In The Wake Of The Snail Darter: An Environmental Law Paradigm And Its Consequences,
2011
Boston College Law School
In The Wake Of The Snail Darter: An Environmental Law Paradigm And Its Consequences, Zygmunt J.B. Plater
Zygmunt J.B. Plater
Everything is connected to everything else: so goes the first law of ecology. This interconnectedness is reflected in environmental law as well, extending beyond natural science and particular resource conflicts to link environmental law intimately with the politics, philosophies, economics, and societal values that form its much larger context -- an ecology of human and natural systems. The Tellico Dam litigation reflected this interconnectedness. On its face, it was a simple environmental confrontation; it will be remembered as the "extreme" case of the little endangered fish, the snail darter, that almost stopped a Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) dam. But if …
Law, Media, & Environmental Policy: A Fundamental Linkage In Sustainable Democratic Governance,
2011
Boston College Law School
Law, Media, & Environmental Policy: A Fundamental Linkage In Sustainable Democratic Governance, Zygmunt J.B. Plater
Zygmunt J.B. Plater
The functional linkages between law and media have long been signficant in shaping American democratic governance. Over the past thirty-five years, environmental analysis has similarly become essential to shaping international and domestic governmental policy. Environmentalism—focusing as it does on realistic interconnected accounting of the full potential negative consequences as well as benefits of proposed actions, policies, and programs, over the long term as well as the short term, with careful consideration of all realistic alternatives— provides a legal perspective important for societal sustainability. Because environmental values and norms are often in tension with established industrial interests that resist public interest …
Learning From Disasters: Twenty-One Years After The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill, Will Reactions To The Deepwater Horizon Blowout Finally Address The Systemic Flaws Revealed In Alaska?,
2011
Boston College Law School
Learning From Disasters: Twenty-One Years After The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill, Will Reactions To The Deepwater Horizon Blowout Finally Address The Systemic Flaws Revealed In Alaska?, Zygmunt J.B. Plater
Zygmunt J.B. Plater
Twenty years ago, after the calamitous Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska’s Prince William Sound, the pervasive systemic flaws—that according to the Alaska Oil Spill Commission had made a major calamity not just possible but probable—were largely cloaked behind the figure of a captain with a drinking problem. In 2010, after suffering another horrific oil incident—this one almost 20 times! larger than the Exxon Valdez spill—the question for national energy law and policy is whether, this time around, we’ll acknowledge and implement the hard systemic lessons largely avoided two decades ago. The Deepwater Horizon blowout will be a doubly disastrous …
Law And The Fourth Estate: Endangered Nature, The Press, And The Dicey Game Of Democratic Governance,
2011
Boston College Law School
Law And The Fourth Estate: Endangered Nature, The Press, And The Dicey Game Of Democratic Governance, Zygmunt J.B. Plater
Zygmunt J.B. Plater
Building upon the story line of a current book project on the Tellico Dam case, this Essay explores a challenging reality of modern public interest lawyering – the critical role of public perceptions and of the Press’s role in shaping them. Most public interest attorneys come to realize that their lawyering must move simultaneously on two different tracks that determine outcomes – law and public opinion. This double task can be difficult and sometimes impossible. Both tracks require the organization and presentation of facts, but the two contexts can be quite different. A legal case requires proof of each technical …
A Ferenj Observer In The Horn Of Africa -- Perspectives On Cultural Relativity,
2011
Boston College Law School
A Ferenj Observer In The Horn Of Africa -- Perspectives On Cultural Relativity, Zygmunt J.B. Plater
Zygmunt J.B. Plater
A Speech by Prof. Zygmunt Plater delivered at the Harvard African Law Association (HALA) and the Harvard Black Law Students Association (BLSA) Conference "Ethiopia: Prospects for Democracy."
