Congress rarely participates in litigation about the meaning of federal law. By contrast, the executive branch joins in federal litigation on a regular basis as either a party or amicus curiae. Congress simply assumes that the president’s lawyers adequately represent its interests save in those rare instances when the two branches have a direct conflict. This Article questions that assumption...
Liability Holding Companies
An international debate continues to unfold in banking, corporate governance, and finance on whether the capital structure of the world’s largest financial institutions is too heavily dependent on debt, too little on equity. Two of us, with coauthors, have argued elsewhere that there is no socially beneficial purpose for this overreliance on debt, and that such reliance increases the likelihood...
More Than Just a Formality: Instant Authorship and Copyright’s Opt-Out Future in the Digital Age
The digital age has forever changed the role of copyright in promoting the progress of science and the arts. The era of instant authorship has provided copyright to countless authors who are not motivated by copyright incentives. It has also made it impracticable for copyright to return to a system requiring author adherence to formalities, such as notice and registration. Though many...
test
Without much fanfare, at least two federal agencies—the Department of Transportation (DOT) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)—have recently made changes to their cost–benefit analysis procedures. The changes are technical and may not seem especially exciting, even to those predisposed to read regulatory impact analyses. But they have the potential to affect substantive regulations...
Lies, Honor, and the Government’s Good Name: Seditious Libel and the Stolen Valor Act
Later this term the Supreme Court will decide the constitutionality of the Stolen Valor Act, which punishes anyone who falsely represents themselves to have been awarded certain military medals. Although the Court declared the crime of seditious libel inconsistent with the First Amendment long ago, the Act revives something very like that crime. The connection between the two crimes is not...
Tinkering With the Machinery of Life
Recent adjustments by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Transportation (DOT) to their cost–benefit analysis procedures could cause tremendous changes to federal regulation. For decades, federal agencies have calculated the value of a statistical life (VSL) and have used that number when evaluating the costs and benefits of proposed regulations. If a regulation was...
Putting Down: Expressive Subordination and Equal Protection
William M. Carter, Jr., divides race-conscious policies into those that concretely disadvantage minorities and those that do not subordinate them at all, but merely express the policymaker’s race-consciousness. The main aim of this Article is to introduce a third category that his dichotomy excludes: race-conscious policies that amount to expressive subordination. To subordinate people...
Essays in Honor of Joel F. Handler
For more than five decades, Joel Handler’s remarkable influence, range, and productivity have made him one of the world’s leading scholars of social welfare policy and administration, government bureaucracy, law and social change, and sociolegal theory. The excellence of his research has been recognized through such honors as his election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Law...