Faculty Bibliography
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David W. Kennedy, Remarks, Towards a Heterodox Policy Analytics, Inst. Global Law & Pol’y (IGLP) Policy Workshop, Almsdorf, Austria (Oct. 7, 2017).
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Remarks, Towards a Heterodox Policy Analytics, Inst. Global Law & Pol’y (IGLP) Policy Workshop, Almsdorf, Austria (Oct. 7, 2017).
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Bankruptcy Code § 546(e) contains a safe harbor that prevents avoidance of a securities settlement payment, e.g., as a preferential or constructively fraudulent transfer. This amicus brief was filed in Merit Mgmt. Grp. v. FTI Consulting, Inc., No. 16-784 (U.S.). The brief explains how § 546(e) rationally constrains its scope via the statutory specification that the safe harbor only applies (because it need only apply) if the “transfer” sought to be avoided was allegedly “made by or to (or for the benefit of)” a protected securities market intermediary, such as a stockbroker or a financial institution. Ascertaining the meaning and function of that determinative scope language requires an understanding of (1) the concept of a “transfer” as the fundamental analytical transaction unit throughout the Code’s avoidance provisions, and (2) the relationship between that avoidable “transfer” concept and the inextricably interrelated concepts of who that “transfer” is “made by or to (or for the benefit of).” By its express terms, § 546(e) only shields a challenged “transfer” from avoidance if (1) that transfer was “made by” a debtor-transferor who was a qualifying intermediary, “or” (2) a party with potential liability — because the challenged transfer allegedly was made “to or for the benefit of” that party — was a protected intermediary.
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Nicholas Bruch, David B. Wilkins & Maria J. Esteban Ferrer, Beyond the Numbers: The Big Four’s Growing Presence in the Global Legal Market, Am. Lawyer, Oct. 2017, at 64.
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In recent years, China has enacted export restrictions on a range of minerals and other raw materials. They include export quotas, export duties, export licenses, and other administrative actions. Although such export restrictions have already been found to be inconsistent with China's WTO obligations, the practice persists. This article advances an explanation for why this is the case. It argues that the problem lies with the lack of retrospective remedies in WTO dispute settlement. Consequently, China is able to breach its WTO obligations temporarily with minimal consequence. Although such restrictions may have negative consequences for upstream extraction firms, China is able to implement the restrictions because several upstream firms are state-owned enterprises. As a result, China is able to utilize export restrictions on minerals and other raw materials effectively to foster the development of strategic emerging industries downstream. Given existing negotiating standoffs and domestic political constraints, this article suggests that it is unlikely that any potential WTO legal reforms will be enacted any time soon to address this problem.
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The article discusses obesity-related health care costs in America in relation to a debate about whether the U.S. government should allow consumers to purchase sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) and other unhealthy food products through food assistance programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) as of 2017. A choice architecture concept involving decision making by consumers is examined, along with supermarkets and American public health.
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Frank Michelman, Political Liberalism's Constitutional Horizon: Some Further Thoughts, 4 Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia del Diritto 599 (2017).
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The article discusses issues involving U.S. President Donald Trump. The behavior of President Trump can have an impact on American democracy. Other information including the initial executive order on immigration, Russia investigation, and customs of civilian-military relations and the attempt to leverage popular admiration for the military into backing for his policies are also discussed.
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Zero rating, which allows users to access select Internet services and content without incurring mobile data charges, is not a new concept. But it has become an object of debate as mobile carriers and major app providers have used it in the developing world to attract customers, with the goal of increasing Internet access and adoption. While some feel these programs violate net neutrality and create the potential for a two-tiered Internet, others argue that zero rating programs bring the developing world online and could be modified to uphold, rather than violate, net neutrality principles. At the same time, little research evaluating zero rating programs exists, and many different program formulations are lumped under the term “zero rating,” some of which are more compatible with net neutrality than others. In March of 2016, the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society gathered a diverse group of stakeholders from academia, the media, the government sector, industry, and the open software community to discuss the use of zero rating as a means to improve Internet adoption in the developing world and how and when it could be an effective tool, if at all. This paper captures the resulting dialogue and recommendations. The workshop summary is followed by a collection of briefing papers representing the viewpoints of many of the workshop participants. Key Findings: Many different models of industry initiatives currently fall into the loose definition of zero rating. Creating a better defined taxonomy of program parameters, technical mechanisms, and impacts may allow for greater nuance and understanding in the field, as well as more targeted regulatory responses. Universal Internet access and adoption is a common goal but one that requires significant investment in global infrastructure. Some assert that zero rating programs may serve as a helpful stopgap measures to increase access, while others argue that these programs contribute to the creation of a tiered Internet ecosystem without providing meaningful benefits to the targeted beneficiaries. Zero rating initiatives may be employed in pursuit of goals other than Internet adoption, such as an emergency services messaging system or security updates. The goals of a particular zero rating program may make it more or less controversial. More empirical research is required to fully assess the impact of specific zero rating initiatives, as well as zero rating generally, on Internet adoption in the developing world. This research will sometimes require access to usage information held by mobile carriers and zero rating service providers that should be handled with user privacy in mind.
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A great many Americans, especially African Americans, are in a mood of despair upon witnessing a president of the United States winking at neo-Confederates, neo- Nazis, and Ku Klux Klansmen, and doing everything in his power to expunge the achievements of his predecessor, a man who came to be known less for his race than for his decency, dignity, and honor. Far too little notice, for example, was given to the remarkable May 19 speech by Mayor Mitch Landrieu explaining the decision of the New Orleans municipal government to remove from places of public honor three monuments celebrating Confederate generals and one celebrating the violent overthrow of the state's multiracial Reconstruction government. Folks numbering in the millions and of all complexions are selfconsciously engaging in countless acts of protest: marching, organizing study groups, volunteering legal expertise, donating money to institutions dedicated to the preservation of threatened values-the NAACP, the ACLU, the Southern Coalition for Social Justice-and resolving in numberless diverse ways to become more active, informed, influential.
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In 2015, Laura Kipnis, a film-studies professor at Northwestern University, published a polemic in The Chronicle of Higher Education titled “Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe.” Kipnis argued that students’ sense of vulnerability on campus was expanding to an unwarranted degree, partly owing to new enforcement policies around Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination at educational institutions that receive federal funds. The new Title IX policies on sexual misconduct which were then sweeping campuses perpetuated “myths and fantasies about power,” Kipnis wrote, which enlarged the invasive power of institutions while undermining the goal of educating students in critical thinking and resilience. “If you wanted to produce a pacified, cowering citizenry, this would be the method,” she concluded.
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Samantha Power, Op-Ed., Why Foreign Propaganda Is More Dangerous Now, N.Y. Times, Sept. 19, 2017.
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Samantha Power, Foreword, The Inexorable Joyfulness of Elie Wiesel, in Elie Wiesel, Night: A Memoir at xiii (Hill & Wang Commemorative ed. Sept. 12, 2017)(1960).
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A memorial edition of Elie Wiesel’s seminal memoir of surviving the Nazi death camps, with tributes by President Obama and Samantha Power.
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An essay by Jeannie Suk Gersen. Over the summer, anticipation over what the Education Department might do about campus sexual assault heightened as the Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, held high-profile meetings with groups advocating for the interests of universities, sexual-assault victims, and accused students—including one men’s-rights group accused of harassing women online. DeVos’s civil-rights head, Candace Jackson, alarmingly, told the Times that “90 percent” of campus accusations are over drunk or breakup sex. As the new school year began in earnest, widespread fears of a “rollback” of Title IX enforcement accompanied DeVos’s long-awaited policy speech, which was delivered on Thursday, at George Mason University.
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Some people believe that nudges are an insult to human agency; that nudges are based on excessive trust in government; that nudges are covert; that nudges are manipulative; that nudges exploit behavioral biases; that nudges depend on a belief that human beings are irrational; and that nudges work only at the margins and cannot accomplish much. These are misconceptions. Nudges always respect, and often promote, human agency; because nudges insist on preserving freedom of choice, they do not put excessive trust in government; nudges are generally transparent rather than covert or forms of manipulation; many nudges are educative, and even when they are not, they tend to make life simpler and more navigable; and some nudges have quite large impacts.
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Peter L. Murray, Eric Green & Charles R. Nesson, Problems, Cases and Materials on Evidence (Aspen Law & Bus. 4th ed. 2017).
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This book provides cases, commentaries, case studies, and discussion questions on corporate law. It is intended for use in the introductory course in corporate law at U.S. law schools. Emphasis is placed on Delaware corporate law, though comparative perspectives are developed as well. Teaching slides and teaching notes are available from the authors. The book has a Statutory Supplement.
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During medical visits, the stakes are high for many patients, who are put in a position to make, or to begin to make, important health-related decisions. But in such visits, patients often make cognitive errors. Traditionally, those errors are thought to result from poor communication with physicians; complicated subject matter; and patient anxiety. To date, measures to improve patient understanding and recall have had only modest effects. This paper reviews the current literature on behavioral insights in the patient experience and argues that an understanding of those cognitive errors can be improved by reference to a behavioral science framework, which distinguishes between a "System 1" mindset, in which patients are reliant on intuition and vulnerable to biases and imperfectly reliable heuristics, and a "System 2" mindset, which is reflective, slow, deliberative, and detailed-oriented.
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We present the results of a randomized-assignment experiment that shows that patients perform very poorly on the Cognitive Reflection Test and thus are overwhelmingly in a System 1 state prior to a physician visit. Assigning patients the task of completing patient-reported outcomes measures immediately prior to the visit had a small numerical, but not statistically significant, shift towards a reflective frame of mind. We describe hypotheses to explain poor performance by patients, which may be due to anxiety, a bandwidth tax, or a scarcity effect, and outline further direction for study. Understanding the behavioral sources of errors on the part of patients in their interactions with physicians and in their decision-making is necessary to implement measures improve shared decision-making, patient experience, and (perhaps above all) clinical outcomes.
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Rachel Viscomi, Presenter, Dialogue through Difference: Expanding the Legal Skill Set, New England Association for Conflict Resolution (Sept. 2017).
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Presenter, Dialogue through Difference: Expanding the Legal Skill Set, New England Association for Conflict Resolution
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Among the core missions of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are protecting public health by assuring the safety and efficacy of drugs, biologics, and medical devices and advancing public health by promoting scientific research and medical innovation (1). According to its mandate, the decisions made by the FDA in fulfilling these missions should be guided by scientific considerations, not economic or political ones. However, several recent, high-profile episodes have highlighted the fact that the FDA is buffeted by many external influences (2, 3). Such controversies require us to distinguish between legitimate influences that would improve the FDA or enhance its regulatory mission, illegitimate influences that seek to corrupt or undermine the agency, and influences that may be legitimate but nevertheless harm public health or patient outcomes. We present a decision framework to assist regulators, policy-makers, judges, physicians, and the public in evaluating the legitimacy and value of external influences on the FDA.
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Normal Rationality is a selection of the most important work of Edna Ullmann-Margalit, presenting some influential and widely admired essays alongside some that are not well known. She was an unorthodox and deeply original philosopher whose work illuminated the largest mysteries of human life. Much of her writing focuses on two fundamental questions. (1) How do people proceed when they cannot act on the basis of reasons, or project likely consequences? (2) How is social order possible? Ullmann-Margalit's answers, emphasizing what might be called biased rationality, are important not only for philosophy, but also for political science, psychology, sociology, cognitive science, economics (including behavioral economics), law, and even public policy. Ullmann-Margalit demonstrates that people have identifiable strategies for making difficult decisions, whether the question is small (what to buy at a supermarket) or big (whether to transform one's life in some large-scale way). She also shows that social dilemmas are solved by norms; that invisible-hand explanations take two identifiable (and dramatically different) forms; that trust can emerge in seemingly unpromising situations; and that considerateness is the foundation on which our relationships are organized in both the thin context of the public space and the intimate context of the family. One of the distinguishing features of Ullmann-Margalit's work is its close attention to the details of human experience, and its use of those details to offer fresh understandings of social phenomena. Her essays cast new light on a diverse assortment of problems in philosophy, social science, and individual lives.
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Cohen and Wang (2013) (CW2013) provide evidence consistent with market participants perceiving staggered boards to be value reducing. Amihud and Stoyanov (2016) (AS2016) contests these findings, reporting some specifications under which the results are not statistically significant. We show that the results retain their significance under a wide array of robustness tests that address the concerns expressed by AS2016. Our empirical findings reinforce the conclusions of CW2013.
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This brief essay, for a collection edited by Carolina Deik, “Crisis of the Rule of Law,” to be published in Colombia, describes some ways in which too much law can be as problematic as too little law. After noting that law’s complexity can introduce some of the arbitrariness that the rule of law seeks to overcome, the essay uses the example of anti-corruption law to suggest how enforcing the law at the retail level might weaken the overall system of the rule of law by eroding public confidence in public institutions, and, sometimes, by weakening those institutions themselves.
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Rebecca Tushnet, Copyright Law, Fan Practices, and the Rights of the Author, in Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World 77 (Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss & C. Lee Harrington eds., 2nd ed. 2017).
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The architecture and offerings of the Internet developed without much steering by governments, much less operations by militaries. That made talk of “cyberwar” exaggerated, except in very limited instances. Today that is no longer true: States and their militaries see the value not only of controlling networks for surveillance or to deny access to adversaries, but also of subtle propaganda campaigns launched through a small number of wildly popular worldwide platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. This form of hybrid conflict – launched by states without state insignia, on privately built and publicly used services – offers a genuine challenge to those who steward the network and the private companies whose platforms are targeted. While interventions by one state may be tempered by defense by another state, there remain novel problems to solve when what users see and learn online is framed as organic and user-generated but in fact it is not.
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Four feminist law professors at Harvard Law School have called on the U.S. Department of Education to revise the previous Administration’s policies on sexual harassment and sexual assault on campus. In a memo submitted to the Education Department yesterday, they set out an agenda of fairness for all students, accusers and accused. In recent years the Education Department has pressured colleges and universities to adopt overbroad definitions of wrongdoing that are unfair to both men and women, and to set up procedures for handling complaints that are deeply skewed against the accused and also unfair to accusers. Janet Halley and Jeannie Suk Gersen, Elizabeth Bartholet, and Nancy Gertner are professors at Harvard Law School who have researched, taught, and written on Title IX, sexual harassment, sexual assault, and feminist legal reform. They were four of the signatories to the statement of twenty-eight Harvard Law School professors, published in the Boston Globe on October 15, 2014, that criticized Harvard University’s newly adopted sexual harassment policy as “overwhelmingly stacked against the accused” and “in no way required by Title IX law or regulation.” Janet Halley said “The college process needs legitimacy to fully address campus sexual assault. Now is the time to build in respect for fairness and due process, academic freedom, and sexual autonomy.” The professors submitted to the Education Department a memorandum entitled “Fairness for All Students under Title IX.”
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This chapter challenges the status-based distinction of the laws of war, calling instead for revised targeting doctrines that would place further limits on the killing of enemy soldiers. The chapter argues that the changing nature of wars and militaries casts doubts on the necessity of killing all enemy combatants indiscriminately. The chapter proposes two amendments. The first is a reinterpretation of the principle of distinction, suggesting that the status-based classification be complemented by a test of threat. The second is a reinterpretation of the principle of military necessity, introducing a least-harmful-means test, under which, whenever feasible, an alternative of capture or disabling of the enemy would be preferred to killing.
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Alan Dershowitz, Trumped Up: How Criminalization of Political Differences Endangers Democracy (2017).
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In our current age of hyper-partisan politics, nearly everyone takes sides. This is especially true with regard to the Trump presidency. It has become difficult to have a reasonable discussion about the most controversial president in our recent history. For Trump zealots, their president has not only committed no crimes, he has done nothing wrong. For anti-Trump zealots, nothing Trump has done—even in foreign policy—is good. Everything he has done is wrong, and since it is wrong, it must necessarily be criminal. This deeply undemocratic fallacy—that political sins must be investigated and prosecuted as criminal—is an exceedingly dangerous trend. Hardening positions on both sides has been manifested by increasing demands to criminalize political differences. Both sides scream “lock ‘em up” instead of making substantive criticisms of opposing views. The real fear, as Alan Dershowitz argues, in this compelling collection, is that we have weakened our national commitment to civil liberties as the Left becomes ever more intolerant and the Right slips into authoritarian rhetoric. The vibrant center is weakening, with traditional liberalism and conservatism becoming further apart, not just in approach, but in their respect for Constitutional norms that have served us well for more than two centuries. While Donald Trump is not the only cause of this profound division, his election drew it to the surface and made it the dominant paradigm of political debate. Unless we as a nation begin to focus again on what unites us rather than on what divides us, America might not survive the next decade.
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Reverse termination fees (RTFs) are required payments for bidders to “walk away” from a merger or acquisition, and vary significantly in size and design, even within apparently similar deals. Using a large sample of manually collected U.S. deal contracts involving publicly traded bidders and targets, we examine the impact of different types of RTFs. Consistent with efficient contract theory, we find that inefficient RTF sizes and triggers correlate with significantly lower bidder abnormal returns, while efficient RTF sizes and triggers correlate with significantly higher bidder abnormal returns. Consistent with signaling theory, we also find evidence that the inclusion of some RTF triggers in the merger agreements reveals private information to the market, correlating with significant abnormal returns. Our findings have implications for how practitioners approach the design and negotiation of RTFs.