Disproportionate employer power is at least partly responsible for the sharp increase in economic inequality in the United States, which threatens the fabric of the Republic. Workplace law reform could provide workers with an institutional source of power that countervails employer power and compresses inequality.
Bankruptcy scholars have long organized their field around a stylized story, a paradigm, of lender control. When lenders extend credit, the story goes, they insist on the borrower agreeing to strict covenants and granting blanket liens on its assets; then, if the borrower later encounters financial distress, they use their bargained-for rights as prods to steer the company toward a resolution favorable to themselves, whether or not that resolution is value maximizing for the investors as a group. As fruitful as the lender-control heuristic has been, however, it no longer corresponds to reality.
International privacy and trade law developed together but are now engaged in significant conflict. Current efforts to reconcile the two are likely to fail, and the result for globalization favors the largest international companies able to navigate the regulatory thicket. In a landmark finding, this Article shows that more than sixty countries outside the European Union are now evaluating whether foreign countries have privacy laws that are adequate to receive personal data. This core test for deciding on the permissibility of global data exchanges is currently applied in a nonuniform fashion with ominous results for the data flows that power trade today.
During the litigation surrounding the 2020 election, the independent state legislature theory (ISLT) emerged as a potentially crucial factor in the presidential election. The ISLT rests on the Electors and Elections Clauses of the Constitution, which assign decisions about federal elections to state legislatures. Proponents of the ISLT, including Supreme Court Justices, assert that state constitutions’ substantive provisions cannot apply to state election laws governing federal elections; that state courts’ statutory interpretations of such laws must be rigidly textualist and are reviewable, apparently de novo, by federal courts; and/or that delegations of decisionmaking authority to nonlegislative bodies may be limited, albeit in unspecified ways.
For centuries, courts and legal commentators defined “jurisdiction” by reference to a court’s “power.” A court that lacked jurisdiction, under this conception, simply lacked the ability to bind the parties, and its resulting rulings could therefore be regarded by both litigants and later courts as void and of no legal effect.
Implementation is at the core of lawmaking in our divided government. A rich literature covers the waterfront with respect to agencies’ implementation of legislative mandates, and another equally robust line of scholarship considers Congress’s implementation of treaties. Missing from those discussions, however, is another area of implementation central to U.S. foreign relations: the implementation of transnational regulatory agreements. This Article examines how federal agencies have harnessed far-reaching discretion from Congress on whether and how to implement thousands of international agreements.
Can antidiscrimination law effect changes in public attitudes toward minority groups? Could learning, for instance, that employment discrimination against people with clinical depression is legally prohibited cause members of the public to be more accepting toward people with mental health conditions? In this Article, we report the results of a series of experiments that test the effect of inducing the belief that discrimination against a given group is legal (versus illegal) on interpersonal attitudes toward members of that group. We find that learning that discrimination is unlawful does not simply lead people to believe that an employer is more likely to face punishment for discriminatory behavior.
For a wide variety of claims against the government, the federal courthouse doors are closed to all but those brought by powerful, organized interests. This is because hundreds of laws—colloquially known as “channeling statutes”—require disaffected groups to contest government bodies directly in appellate courts that hear cases individually. In theory, these laws promise quick, consistent, and authoritative legal decisions in appellate courts. In fact, without class actions, government bodies avoid judicial review by selectively avoiding claims brought by some of the most vulnerable people in the administrative state—from veterans and immigrants to coal miners, laborers, and the disabled. This Article proposes a novel solution: courts of appeals should hear class actions themselves.
tandard economic analysis views strict liability as preferable to negligence because it is easier to administer and leads to better risk reduction: strict liability induces injurers not only to optimally invest in precaution but also to optimally adjust their activity levels. Standard analysis thus views the prevalence of negligence as unjustifiable on efficiency grounds. This Article challenges the conventional wisdom and clarifies an efficiency rationale for negligence by spotlighting the information-production function of tort law.
