By Lisa M. Fairfax. Full text here. Corporate governance reforms strive to shore up directors’ roles, not only seeking to ensure that boards have sufficient incentives to engage in effective oversight, but also aiming to ensure that boards are held accountable for their oversight failures. The newest wave of reforms is no exception. The current financial…

By Steven M. Davidoff. Full text here. The Article traces the terms of the government’s private ownership during the financial crisis, and provides a near-term critique of the government’s corporate ownership experience. It concludes that the government largely achieved its economic and social goals. The government ultimately saved the financial system, stalled a financial panic, and…

By Stephen M. Bainbridge. Full text here. The question before us is whether Dodd-Frank’s corporate governance provisions, like those of SOX, are mere quackery. Part I of the Article focuses on the problem of quack corporate governance regulation in the abstract. What are the defining characteristics of a quack law? Why would Congress adopt such laws?…

By Daniel Schwarcz. Full text here. In certain regulatory regimes, including those governing banking and corporate law, firms are permitted to choose among multiple competing regulators. This Article examines the desirability of such regulatory competition in the context of property, casualty, and life insurance markets. It analyzes various different approaches to structuring such regulatory competition, including…

By Sanford Levinson & Jack M. Balkin. Full text here. A constitutional dictatorship is a system (or subsystem) of constitutional government that bestows on a certain individual or institution the right to make binding rules, directives, and decisions and apply them to concrete circumstances unhindered by timely legal checks to their authority. Constitutional dictatorship, far from…

By Steven L. Schwarcz. Full text here. This Article examines the dilemma of a fiduciary acting for parties who, as among themselves, have conflicting commercial interests—an inquiry fundamentally different from that of the traditional study of conflicts between fiduciaries and their beneficiaries. Existing legal principles do not fully capture this dilemma because agency law focuses primarily…

By Raymond J. McKoski. Full text here. In order to promote public trust in the independence and impartiality of the judicial system, judges are required to forego a litany of professional and personal behaviors deemed to be inconsistent with the role of the neutral magistrate. For example, codes of judicial conduct prohibit ex parte communications, the…

By Kathryn Abrams & Hila Keren. Full text here. Law and emotions scholarship has reached a critical moment in its trajectory. It has become a varied and dynamic body of work, mobilizing diverse disciplinary understandings, to analyze the range of emotions that implicate law and legal decisionmaking. Yet mainstream legal academics have often greeted it with…

By David Weissbrodt & Nathaniel H. Nesbitt. Full text here. In the absence of a single authoritative mechanism to interpret humanitarian law, a number of treaty bodies, national courts, regional human rights courts/commissions, international tribunals, and thematic mechanisms have been called upon to address humanitarian law issues. Prime among these institutions is the U.S. Supreme Court.…

By Maya Steinitz. Full text here. Third-party litigation funding, or litigation finance, is a new industry composed of institutional investors who invest in litigation by providing finance in return for an ownership stake in a legal claim and a contingency in the recovery. Its emergence has been recognized as one of the most significant developments in…