Faculty Bibliography

Editor’s note: This article first appeared in the Spring 2008 issue of Insights on Law & Society. The history has not changed since first publication, and it remains an excellent overview of how politics shaped environmental policy over the twentieth century in ways that affect us now in the twenty-first century.

This piece endeavors to provide context for state and local officials considering tasks around development, procurement, implementation, and use of risk assessment tools. It begins with brief case studies of four states that adopted (or attempted to adopt) such tools early on and describes their experiences. It then draws lessons from these case studies and suggests some questions that procurement officials should ask of themselves, their colleagues who call for the acquisition and implementation of tools, and the developers who create them. This paper concludes by examining existing frameworks for technological and algorithmic fairness. The authors offer a framework of four questions that government procurers should be asking at the point of adopting RA tools. That framework draws from the experiences of the states we study and offers a way to think about accuracy (i.e., the RA tool’s ability to accurately predict recidivism), fairness (i.e., the extent to which an RA tool treats all defendants fairly, without exhibiting racial bias or discrimination), interpretability (the extent to which an RA tool can be interpreted by criminal justice officials and stakeholders, including judges, lawyers, and defendants), and operability (the extent to which an RA tool can be administered by officers within police, pretrial services, and corrections).

This chapter for an edited volume on the relationship between law, disgust, and prejudice in social and political life explores the role of disgust in structuring class distinctions. It argues that disgust has often been an unarticulated basis for laws that denigrate and quarantine the poor, ranging historically from vagrancy and “unsightly beggar” laws to compulsory sterilization. It explores whether and how law might be used to dismantle the status-based stratification that exacerbates and legitimates disgust. Finally, it asks whether repudiating disgust is likely to facilitate or impede efforts to mitigate economic inequality. If the visceral force of disgust helps to naturalize social hierarchy, then exposing its effects as illegitimate might serve to spur structural reform. At the same time, the power of disgust to unsettle middle-class complacency has occasionally functioned as an impetus for legal and social change.

This academic presentation is based on the slides we prepared for delivery by one of us at the Federal Trade Commission hearing on Competition and Consumer Protection in the 21st Century on December 6, 2018, which focused on common ownership. The slides discuss the implications of our research work for the common ownership debate. The research work whose implications we consider includes Bebchuk, Cohen, and Hirst, The Agency Problems of Institutional Investors (2017) (https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2982617) and Bebchuk and Hirst, Index Funds and the Future of Corporate Governance: Theory, Evidence, and Policy (2018) (https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3282794). We argue that the attack on common ownership is misguided.The claims of common ownership critics, we argue, fail to take into account how the agency problems of investment fund managers provide them with incentives to under-invest in stewardship and to be deferential toward the corporate managers of portfolio companies. Given these problems, policymakers should be primarily concerned that investment fund managers engage too little and not that they engage too much. The measures advocated by common ownership critics are not merely unnecessary but would be counterproductive; they could well discourage investment fund managers from stewardship activities that should be encouraged.

This academic presentation, based on our joint work on dual-class structures, was delivered by Lucian Bebchuk as his keynote address to the December 2018 ECGI-BIU conference on differential voting structures. The presentation focuses on the lifecycle theory of dual-class structure introduced in Bebchuk and Kastiel, The Untenable Case for Perpetual Dual-Class Stock, 2017 (https://ssrn.com/abstract=2954630). The presentation begins with discussion of precursor works to, and the motivation for developing, the lifecycle theory. The presentation then proceeds to describing the elements of the theory. In particular, it explains the reasons for expecting the efficiency benefits of dual-class structures to decline over time; for the efficiency costs to increase over time; and for controllers to choose to retain a dual-class structure even when it ceases to be efficient. The presentation also discusses a number of cases that vividly illustrate arguments advanced by the lifecycle theory. Among cases discussed are dual-class companies Viacom, CBS, and Facebook, as well as single-class companies Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo!. We also explain that time-based sunsets can address the identified problems, and we discuss the design of, and objections to, such sunsets. Finally, we discuss the influence that our lifecycle theory has had on subsequent policy discourse and on empirical work testing the theory’s predictions. The presentation concludes that the lifecycle theory has solid theoretical foundations and is confirmed by recent empirical testing. We hope that the lifecycle theory that we introduced will continue to prove useful for researchers and policymakers and to contribute to the adoption of dual-class sunsets.

In the world according to Professor Michael Stokes Paulsen, impeachment turns out to be a remarkably simple subject. So simple, in fact, that it’s unclear why it would merit a book, let alone a spate of studies. Here’s the scoop: A few sources from the late 1780s decisively show that “the impeachment judgment is properly concerned... solely with the question whether the wrongs committed are themselves sufficiently serious wrongs as to warrant exercise of the impeachment power.” Nothing else can ever be relevant. If a legislator concludes that the President’s wrongs are “sufficiently serious,” he or she is obliged to vote for the President’s removal from office. And in assessing seriousness, legislators can look only to neutral factors derived from “original objective public meaning.” This approach shields us from “considerations of strategy, practicality, and partisan politics.” It also reveals that the impeachment power has been drastically under-utilized in American history: Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, and potentially James Buchanan and Woodrow Wilson (among quite a few others), should never have completed their terms in office. Only a partisan hack — with dodgy motives and even dodgier methods — could support any other view of impeachment. That’s where we come in: we’re the hacks. Professor Paulsen is explicit on this point. In his telling, we engaged in a devious “partisan gerrymander,” deliberately reverse-engineering an impeachment standard to ensnare as many Republicans as possible while letting Democrats off the hook. We were able to do so, Paulsen adds, only because we didn’t stick to originalist methods. By falsely asserting that originalism doesn’t provide a clear and determinate framework for impeachment analysis, we invented judgment calls vulnerable to partisan manipulation. And then we engaged in precisely such skullduggery, making up new standards and invoking irrelevant considerations. But, alas, we did a bad job. Having written a whole book to oust President Donald J. Trump while saving Clinton’s legacy, we stumbled at the finish line — first by offering “contradictory warnings” about the strategic risks of impeachment, and then by failing to demand Trump’s removal. Professor Paulsen blends accusations of willful bad faith with insinuations of scholarly and strategic incompetence. These aren’t minor charges. You might therefore expect that Paulsen would have engaged seriously with our arguments. If so, you’d be disappointed. As one of our colleagues candidly remarked, “It’s almost like he didn’t read the book.” In accusing us of a partisan gerrymander and methodological dishonesty, Paulsen repeatedly and egregiously mis-describes our thesis, reasoning, and conclusions. He then ignores entire sections of the book that refute core premises of his “naïve” view. Throughout, he rips text out of context to complain about contradiction. In short, he has reviewed a book that we didn’t (and wouldn’t) write. And he has accompanied that “review” with a supposedly originalist theory of impeachment that is neither originalist nor persuasive.

In what he called "the liberal principle of legitimacy," John Rawls proposed that coercive exercises of political power can be justified to free and equal dissenters when "in accordance with a constitution (written or unwritten) the essentials of which all citizens, as reasonable and rational, can endorse . . . ." Does "unwritten constitution" there refer to empirical regularities of political practice (as opposed to normative rules and standards)? To norms that subsist only as custom but not as law? To norms that subsist as common law but not as code law? Which interpretation is best?

Professor Bowie has authored one of two Responses the Forum is running in December inspired by Professor Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz’s recently published book on impeachment, To End a Presidency. These pieces are being published contemporaneously with Professor Michael Stokes Paulsen’s book review. Bowie offers a theory of the proper scope of the impeachment power that neither Paulsen nor Tribe and Matz embrace — namely, that Congress may only impeach for conduct that violated an extant criminal law. In other words, “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” can only refer to conduct that is in fact a crime or a misdemeanor, and impeachment is best understood as a criminal, rather than civil, process. This was the theory articulated by then-former Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Curtis as he defended President Andrew Johnson from impeachment, and Bowie asserts that Curtis’s theory has been right all along. Among his many arguments, Bowie closes with a practical one: Insisting that impeachment be grounded in positive criminal law is the most effective way to ensure that, both now and in the future, it does not become a mere political weapon.

During the past half-decade, law school student demands for changes in legal education to address issues of diversity and inclusion have both proliferated and grown insistent. Although the demands are somewhat varied, they have sometimes stretched far beyond the admission and hiring of more students and faculty from minority groups. Students have advocated for basic changes in the way that law schools operate in order to make them more inclusive of groups that have been historically marginalized within these institutions.

Stock‐market–driven short‐termism is crippling the American economy, according to legal, judicial, and media analyses. Firms forgo the R&D they need, cut capital spending, and buy back their own stock so feverishly that they starve themselves of cash. The stock market is the primary cause: directors and executives cannot manage for the long term when their shareholders furiously trade their company’s stock, they cannot make long‐term investments when stockholders demand to see profits on this quarter’s financial statements, they cannot even strategize about the long term when shareholder activists demand immediate results, and they cannot keep the cash to invest in their future when stock market pressure drains away that cash in stock buybacks. This doomsday version of the stock‐market–driven short‐termism argument entails economy‐wide predictions that have not been well‐examined for their severity and accuracy. If the scenario is correct and strong, we should first see sharp increases in stock trading in recent decades and more frequent activist interventions, and these increases should be accompanied by (1) sharply declining investment spending in the United States, where large firms depend on stock markets and where activists are important, as compared to advanced economies that do not depend as much on stock markets, (2) buybacks bleeding cash out from the corporate sector, (3) economy‐wide R&D spending declining from what it should be, and (4) a stock market unwilling to support innovative, long‐term, technological firms. These are the central channels from stock‐market–driven short‐termism to overall economic degradation. They justify corporate law policies that seek to prevent these outcomes. But these predicted economy‐wide outcomes are either undemonstrated, implausible, or untrue. Corporate R&D is not declining, corporate cash is not bleeding out, and the world’s developed nations with neither American‐style quarterly oriented stock markets nor aggressive activist investors are investing no more intensely in capital equipment than the United States. The five largest American firms by stock market capitalization are tech‐oriented, R&D intensive, longer‐term operations. The economy‐wide picture is more one of capital markets moving capital from larger, older firms to younger ones; of a postindustrial economy doing more R&D than ever; and of an economy whose investment intensity depends on overall economic activity, not stock market trading nor hedge fund activism. True, the economy‐wide data could hide stock market hits that hold back R&D from increasing more and that weaken American capital spending more than is fitting for a post‐industrial economy. But if so, these effects have not been shown and several seem implausible. Hence, the calamitous form of the stock‐market–driven short‐termist argument needs to be reconsidered, recalibrated, and, quite plausibly, rejected. Then, last, comes the broadest question: why has a view that lacks strong economy‐wide evidentiary support become the rare corporate governance issue that attracts attention from the media, political players, policymakers, and the public—and that is widely accepted as true? I suggest why in this paper’s final part.

Before filing suit, a plaintiff can take a financial position in a defendant firm. A short position benefits the plaintiff by transforming a negative expected-value claim into a positive expected-value one and by enhancing the claim's settlement value. If the capital market is less than strong-form efficient, the plaintiff also benefits directly from the decline in the defendant's stock price. When the defendant is privately informed about the case's merits, bargaining failures can arise. While aggressive short-selling benefits the plaintiff at the expense of the defendant, moderate levels of short-selling can benefit the defendant and raise the settlement rate.

Aspects of an entrenched constitution that were essential parts of founding compromises, and justified as necessary when a constitution was first adopted, may become less justifiable over time. Is this the case with respect to the structure of the United States Senate? The US Senate is hardwired in the Constitution to consist of an equal number of Senators from each state—the smallest of which currently has about 585,000 residents, and the largest of which has about 39.29 million. As this essay explains, over time, as population inequalities among states have grown larger, so too has the disproportionate voting power of smaller-population states in the national Senate. As a result of the ‘one-person, one-vote’ decisions of the 1960s that applied to both houses of state legislatures, each state legislature now is arguably more representative of its state population than the US Congress is of the US population. The ‘democratic deficit’ of the Senate, compared to state legislative bodies, also affects presidential (as compared to gubernatorial) elections. When founding compromises deeply entrenched in a constitution develop harder-to-justify consequences, should constitutional interpretation change responsively? Possible implications of the ‘democratic’ difference between the national and the state legislatures for US federalism doctrine are explored, especially with respect to the ‘pre-emption’ doctrine. Finally, the essay briefly considers the possibilities of federalism for addressing longer term issues of representation, polarisation and sustaining a single nation.

The United States legal profession routinely deals with evidence in and out of courtrooms, but the profession is not evidence-based in a scientific sense. Lawyers, judges, and court administrators make decisions determining the lives of individuals and families by relying on gut intuition and instinct, not on rigorous evidence. Achieving access to justice requires employing a new legal empiricism. It starts with sharply defined research questions that are truly empirical. Disinterested investigators deploy established techniques chosen to fit the nature of those research questions, following established rules of research ethics and research integrity. New legal empiricists will follow the evidence where it leads, even when that is to unpopular conclusions challenging conventional legal thinking and practice.

Officers quietly wield a lot of unchecked prosecutorial power.

We propose a fundamental restructuring of the federal civil pretrial process to address its great expense and unreliability in resolving cases on their merits-problems largely attributable to discovery. The proposed reforms establish an affirmative-disclosure mandate that sharply reduces the role of discovery by transferring most of the parties' burden of fully revealing discoverable matter, favorable and unfavorable, to their pleadings. To effectuate the new function for pleadings, the reformed process replaces Rules 12(b)(6), (c), and (f) with pretrial merits review conducted exclusively pursuant to the procedures and standards for summary judgment under Rule 56. Responding parties will be required to fully disclose discoverable matter to which they have exclusive or superior practical access ("asymmetric information"), but only if the initiating party's pleading makes a summary judgment-proof showing on all elements of their claims or defenses that are unaffected by the information asymmetry. Discovery, if any, would generally be deferred to the postpleading stage and restricted to court-approved, targeted use as may be needed for purposes of facilitating resolution of cases by summary judgment, settlement, or trial preparation. Compared to the current regime, the reformed pretrial process should enable courts and parties to resolve more cases on the merits-more cheaply, quickly, and reliably-thus increasing deterrence and other social benefits from the use of civil liability to enforce the law. Courts in this country, including "Mandatory Initial Discovery" pilot projects, launched by the Federal Judicial Center last year, and abroad are testing the benefits of affirmative-disclosure reforms that resemble what we propose in this Article.

In the late twentieth century constitution-designers came to understand that, in addition to the three classic Montesquiean functions of law-making, law-applying, and law-interpreting, constitutional institutions had to perform an additional function, that of protecting the constitution itself. That function is performed by constitutional courts, but also by agencies concerned with elections and with corruption. A case study of an important anti-corruption inquiry in South Africa illustrates the proposition that institutions protecting the constitution must combine independence from other political actors with some degree of accountability to them. Following the case study, the Article examines some general characteristics of these institutions, sketching some of the questions about independence and accountability that constitution-designers must consider. Among those questions are the possibility of too much independence, with the institutions having a greater impact on political outcomes than is appropriate, too much responsiveness to non-political but professional concerns such as legality and the details of accounting conventions, and of course too much accountability to the very political institutions that these agencies are designed to regulate. Throughout the Article emphasizes the role of conflicts of interest both in setting the agenda for these agencies and in posing the risk that the agencies will undermine rather than protect the constitution.

Jews in America are in a period of unprecedented status and impact, but for many their identity as Jews--religiously, historically, culturally--is increasingly complicated. Many are becoming Jews without Judaism. It appears success and acceptance will accomplish what even the most virulent anti-Semitism never could---if not the disappearance of Jews themselves, the undermining of what it means to be Jewish. In this thoughtful, personal, deeply-reasoned book, Robert Mnookin explores the conundrums of Jewish identity, faith and community in America by delving deep into Jewish history, law, and custom. He talks to rabbis, scholars, and other Jews of many perspectives to explore the head, heart, and heritage of Judaism and confronts key challenges in the Jewish debate from the issue of intermarriage to the matter of Israeli policies. Mnookin shares provocative stories of the ways American Jews have forged (or disavowed) their Jewish identity over the past half-century, including his own to answer the standing question: How can Jews who have different values, perspectives, and relationships with their faith, keep the community open, vibrant, and thriving?

The updated Fourth Edition includes recent cases and developments in biotechnology, including stem cell research and gene patents, and updates to HIPPA coverage, DNA research, and bio-banks.

In this article, Fogg addresses procedural rules through which the IRS effectively dictates whether the Tax Court has jurisdiction over many collection due process cases. He discusses recent litigation of similar jurisdictional issues and recommends changes at the agency level.

https://youtu.be/lVFc5dnz7Cw

Judges sometimes disagree about the best way to resolve a case. But the conventional wisdom is that they should not be too swayed by such disagreement and should do their best to decide the case by their own lights. An emerging critique questions this view, arguing instead for widespread humility. In the face of disagreement, the argument goes, judges should generally concede ambiguity and uncertainty in almost all contested cases. Both positions are wrong. Drawing on the philosophical concepts of “peer disagreement” and “epistemic peerhood,” we argue for a different approach: A judge ought to give significant weight to the views of others, but only when those others share the judge’s basic methodology or interpretive outlook—i.e., only when those others are methodological “friends.” Thus textualists should hesitate before disagreeing with other textualists, and pragmatists should hesitate before disagreeing with like-minded pragmatists. Disagreement between the two camps is, by contrast, “old news” and so provides neither camp additional reason for pause. We also suggest that judges should give weight to the views of all of their methodological friends, not just judges. And we suggest, even more tentatively, that our proposal may explain and, to some extent, justify the seemingly ideological clusters of justices on the Supreme Court. The most productive disagreements, we think, are ones that come from arguing with friends.

In 1976, the First National Bank of Boston, Gillette, and three other Massachusetts companies announced their plan to oppose a referendum authorizing a graduated income tax. State officials responded that Massachusetts law prohibited this type of corporate political expenditure. The U.S. Supreme Court intervened, declaring that Massachusetts could not prohibit speech based solely on the “corporate identity of the speaker.” The Court reasoned that shareholders through “corporate democracy” were better positioned than states to regulate companies’ political engagement. In the wake of this decision, the Boston City Council—a municipal corporation—announced its plan to spend its corporate dollars in support of a 1978 tax referendum. That same election, Massachusetts Citizens for Life—a nonprofit corporation—financed newsletters promoting anti-abortion candidates. State and federal officials again blocked these corporate political expenditures. This time, however, the Supreme Court protected only the nonprofit, observing that a “voluntary political association” did not “suddenly present the danger of corruption merely by assuming the corporate form.” These Supreme Court decisions armed business and nonprofit corporations with a powerful new weapon—the First Amendment—that future lawyers wielded against advertising bans, labor contracts, healthcare requirements, and, of course, campaign finance laws. At the same time, the decisions left the City of Boston unable to support referenda that the Bank of Boston was free to oppose. This paper will situate this “First Amendment libertarianism” in the political, legal, and social context of 1970s Boston, a city gripped by racial crisis and dependent on business corporations, especially the Bank of Boston, for financial survival. This context helps explain why courts, lawyers, and executives expected that shareholders could responsibly oversee governments better than governments could oversee shareholders—or themselves.

This chapter examines the scholarship that has dealt with the concept of hisba and the related position of muhtasib. The discussion includes a substantial section on the historical development of the concept of hisba and the position of muhtasib and a shorter section on their contemporary uses and practices. The historical section includes attention to the definitions and origins of the terms and to the position of the muhtasib, including the official’s jurisdiction, sources of law, biographies, and practice in particular historical contexts. The contemporary section focuses on the countries that have received the most scholarly attention regarding the practice of hisba and muhtasib today, notably Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

Effy Vayena and colleagues argue that machine learning in medicine must offer data protection, algorithmic transparency, and accountability to earn the trust of patients and clinicians.

The prohibition against price fixing is competition law's most important and least controversial provision. Yet there is far less consensus than meets the eye on what constitutes price fixing, and prevalent understandings cannot be reconciled with principles of oligopoly theory. This article (1) presents a fundamental reconceptualization of our understanding of horizontal agreements, (2) develops a systematic analysis of price-fixing policy that focuses on its deterrence benefits and chilling costs, and (3) compares this direct approach to commentators’ favored formulations that typically involve some sort of formalistic communications-based prohibition. By targeting a subset of means rather than the illicit ends, conventional formulations tend to impose liability in cases with lower deterrence benefits and greater chilling costs than those reached under a direct approach and to incur greater administrative costs as well.

This paper develops a new test for identifying racial bias in the context of bail decisions – a high-stakes setting with large disparities between white and black defendants. We motivate our analysis using Becker's (1957) model of racial bias, which predicts that rates of pre-trial misconduct will be identical for marginal white and marginal black defendants if bail judges are racially unbiased. In contrast, marginal white defendants will have a higher probability of misconduct than marginal black defendants if bail judges are racially biased against blacks. To test the model, we develop a new estimator that uses the release tendencies of quasi-randomly assigned bail judges to identify the relevant race-specific misconduct rates. Estimates from Miami and Philadelphia show that bail judges are racially biased against black defendants, with substantially more racial bias among both inexperienced and part-time judges. We also find that both black and white judges are biased against black defendants. We argue that these results are consistent with bail judges making racially biased prediction errors, rather than being racially prejudiced per se.

The theory of insurance is considered here when an insured individual may be able to sue another party for the losses that the insured suffered—and thus when an insured has a potential source of compensation in addition to insurance coverage. Insurance policies reflect this possibility through so-called subrogation provisions that give insurers the right to step into the shoes of insureds and to bring suits against injurers. In a basic case, the optimal subrogation provisions involve full retention by the insurer of the proceeds from a successful suit and the pursuit of all positive expected value suits. This eliminates litigation risks for insureds and results in lower premiums—financed by the litigation income of insurers, including from suits that insureds would not otherwise have brought. Moreover, optimal subrogation provisions are characterized in the presence of moral hazard, administrative costs, and non-monetary losses, and it is demonstrated that optimal provisions entail sharing litigation proceeds with insureds in the first two cases but not when losses are non-monetary.

Dell Technologies Inc. (“Dell”) is planning a “backdoor-IPO” transaction that would bring it back to the public market with a multiclass structure. Dell’s return to the public market is expected to make it one of the ten largest multiclass companies with an aggregate capitalization substantially exceeding $50 billion. Building on our earlier work on multiclass structures, this Article identifies and analyzes three governance risks and costs that Dell’s IPO structure would create for public investors holding Dell’s low-voting stock: • Lifetime entrenchment of Michael Dell (“MD”): He would be able to retain control indefinitely even after he ceases to be a fitting leader and even if he becomes disabled or incompetent. • Small-minority controller: Although MD would initially hold a majority of the equity capital, Dell’s structure would enable him to unload most of his shares and still retain control even with a small equity stake, and his status as small-minority controller would be expected to produce substantial governance risks and costs. • Midstream changes: Dell’s governance structure would enable MD to adopt subsequent changes in governance arrangements, without any support from public investors, which would increase Dell's governance risks beyond the risks associated with a small-minority controller. Each of these governance risks can be expected to both (i) decrease the expected future value of Dell by increasing agency costs and distortions, and (ii) increase the discount to a per-share value of Dell at which low-voting shares of Dell can be expected to trade. Both types of effects would operate to reduce the value at which the low-voting shares of public investors would trade and therefore should be taken into account in assessing the risks to such investors posed by Dell’s planned structure.