The Legal Workshop

This Editorial summarizes my forthcoming Note, 85 N.Y.U. L. REV. (forthcoming June 2010), in which I assert that our current regulatory structure is suboptimal in its regulation of the systemic risk created by the failure of large, interconnected “nonbank” financial institutions (in general, a nonbank financial institution is any institution that… Read More »

Congress enacted the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 (PSLRA) to reduce plaintiffs’ lawyers’ influence in securities class actions. The PSLRA’s presumption that the class member with the largest financial interest would be named lead plaintiff was meant to ensure that the class, not a law firm, would be… Read More »

Whether patients should be able to contract out of the malpractice system has been a hotly debated subject in law and economics and health law literature.  Advocates of patient choice argue that if the cost of having the option to bring a malpractice suit truly outweighs the benefit to a… Read More »

Corporate law academics have long sought to fully understand the process of state corporate lawmaking. For decades the debate was premised upon strong, ongoing state-to-state competition, with sharp disagreement on the directionality of that competition. In this decade, however, a powerful revisionist perspective has emerged that states do not compete,… Read More »

In 1930, during the Great Depression, Professor Karl Llewellyn declared in the Harvard Law Review that “ferment” was abroad in the law, proclaiming “realism” a powerful new scholarly force.  In the past year, we have seen our own ferment: the world has shown us the folly of law’s most powerful… Read More »

By allowing the condemnation of private homes to make way for a “more attractive” private development, the U.S. Supreme Court in Kelo v. City of New London roused the fury of the libertarian legal academy and much of the public.  In Kelo, the Court held that a plan for private economic… Read More »

Large corporations harbor dark corners, and these shadows shelter a daunting collection of governance concerns.  There are at least three internal governance problems.  First, lazy or dishonest managers might use their control of a firm’s daily operations to make poor decisions or steal that which rightfully belongs to shareholders.  Second,… Read More »

Private resolution and public adjudication of disputes are seen as discrete, antipodal processes.  The essence of private resolution is that the parties can arrange disputed rights and entitlements without judicial intervention.  In public adjudication, the sovereign mandates the substantive and procedural laws.  This understanding is axiomatic in courthouses and academic… Read More »

Our preferences vary in intensity.  Some are relatively strong, while others are comparatively weak.  Information regarding the strength—rather than just the content—of preferences is often essential, for both efficiency and fairness reasons.  The goal of efficiency maximization requires the allocation of goods to those who value them most.  Accordingly, when… Read More »

Trade secret law is a puzzle. No one can seem to agree where trade secret law comes from or how to fit it into the broader framework of legal doctrine. Courts, lawyers, scholars, and treatise writers argue over whether trade secrets are a creature of contract, of tort, of property,… Read More »