United States Competition Policy in Crisis: 1890-1955
By Herbert Hovenkamp. Full text here. The development of marginalist, or neoclassical, economics led to a fifty-year long crisis in competition theory. Given an industrial structure with sufficient fixed costs, competition always became “ruinous,” forcing firms to cut prices to marginal cost without sufficient revenue remaining to pay off investment. Early neoclassicists such as Alfred Marshall…
Continue ReadingAggregating Probabilities Across Cases: Criminal Responsibility for Unspecified Offenses
By Alon Harel & Ariel Porat. Full text here. Should a court convict a defendant for unspecified offenses if there is no reasonable doubt that he committed an offense, even though no particular offense has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt? Suppose a defendant is charged with two unrelated offenses allegedly committed at different times and…
Continue ReadingCounsel and Confrontation
By Todd E. Pettys. Full text here. In a well-known series of decisions handed down over the past five years, the Supreme Court has firmly yoked its interpretation of the Confrontation Clause to Anglo-American common-law principles that were in place at the time of the Sixth Amendment’s ratification in 1791. Based on its understanding of those…
Continue ReadingNote: Embryo Adoption: The Solution to an Ambiguous Intent Standard
By Molly Miller. Full text here. When a person or couple elects to use in vitro fertilization to create embryos they often end up with more embryos than they need. Most fertilization clinics now require these people to specify what they want done with the remaining embryos (destruction, storage, donation to science, or donation to others…
Continue ReadingNote: Litigating the Contours of Constitutionality: Harmonizing Equitable Principles and Constitutional Values when Considering Preliminary Injunctive Relief
By Ryan Griffin. Full text here. Preliminary injunctions are a frequently sought form of relief in public law litigation. However, federal courts are inconsistent in the tests they employ to grant or deny this relief. Two recent cases, Winter v. Natural Resources Defense Council and Planned Parenthood v. Rounds, highlight a particularly important doctrinal grey area:…
Continue ReadingResponse Article, Speaking of Silence: A Reply to Making Defendants Speak
By Donald P. Judges & Stephen J. Cribari. Full text here. In this invited reply to an article recently published in the Minnesota Law Review, we concentrate on explaining why we do not share that article’s underlying antipathy to the Fifth Amendment right to silence at trial. That antipathy, also frequently expressed by other commentators, is…
Continue ReadingHard v. Soft Law: Alternatives, Complements, and Antagonists in International Governance
By Gregory C. Shaffer & Mark A. Pollack. Full text here. Understanding the interaction of international hard and soft law in a fragmented international law system is increasingly important in a world where international regimes are proliferating, but where there is no overarching legal hierarchy. This Article responds to the existing literature on hard and soft…
Continue ReadingProperty Rhetoric and the Public Domain
By David Fagundes. Full text here. Those who prefer broad intellectual property rights often deploy the rhetoric of physical property. By contrast, those who are concerned about maintaining public entitlements in information resist that rhetoric. In this Article, I take this dichotomy as a starting point for investigating the power of property rhetoric as a tool…
Continue ReadingAmerican Trust Law in a Chinese Mirror
By Frances H. Foster. Full text here. Comparative law scholars use the term “legal transplant” to refer to the transfer of legal rules, institutions, and norms from one legal system to another. This Article identifies a valuable, previously unrecognized, feature of legal transplants. The transplant process can generate intensive study of the donor legal system by…
Continue ReadingCorporate Control and the Need for Meaningful Board Accountability
By Michelle M. Harner. Full text here. Corporations are vulnerable to the greed, self-dealing, and conflicts of those in control of the corporation. Courts traditionally regulate these potential abuses by designating the board of directors and senior management as fiduciaries. In some instances, however, shareholders, creditors, or others outside of corporate management influence corporate decisions and,…
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