Article

Bankruptcy judges consider both value to creditors and harm to employees in deciding whether to liquidate or reorganize firms. This Article proposes to systematize what is currently an ad hoc trade-off by making bankruptcy law explicitly counter-cyclical—that is, placing more weight on preserving employment during times of high unemploy­ment. Although the suggestion that bankruptcy law should consider em­ployment effects runs counter to decades...

POLICE SUSPECTS

Kate Levine*

Recent attention to police brutality has brought to the fore how law enforcement, when they become the subject of criminal investigations, receive special procedural protections not available to any other criminal suspect. Prosecutors’ special treatment of police suspects, particularly their perceived use of grand juries to exculpate accused officers, has received the lion’s share of scholarly and media attention. But police suspects also benefit...

FREE SPEECH AND DEMOCRACY IN THE VIDEO AGE

Justin Marceau* & Alan K. Chen**

This Article examines constitutional theory and doctrine as applied to emerging government regulation of video image capture across a spec­trum of regulatory regimes. It proposes a framework that promotes free speech to the fullest extent without presenting unnecessary intrusions into legitimate property or privacy interests. The Article first argues that video recording is a form of expression or at the very least, is conduct that serves as a...

Antitrust courts often confront “mixed” conduct that has two contrasting effects, one harmful and the other beneficial. For example, a nationwide agreement not to pay college football players harms the players while benefiting fans of amateur sports. An important tool for analyzing mixed conduct is to compare the action to a hypothesized alternative and to ask whether the alternative action is “less restrictive” and hence less harmful....

Balancing the harms and benefits of speech—what this Article calls “free speech consequentialism”—is pervasive and seemingly unavoid­able. Under current doctrine, courts determine if speech can be regulated using various forms of free speech consequentialism, such as weighing whether a particular kind of speech causes harms that outweigh its benefits, or asking whether the government has especially strong reasons for regulating particular...

Federal extraterritorial prosecutions of terrorists and arms dealers and even narcotics traffickers have become an integral part of modern American criminal justice. But extraterritorial prosecutions raise foundational legal questions—about the fairness of forcing foreign defendants to stand trial in our courts and about the outer boundaries of American power. And extraterritorial prosecutions fore­ground a puzzling inconsistency in constitutional...

This Article sets forth the theory of an enduring, evolving separation of powers, one that checks and balances state power in whatever form that power happens to take. It shows how this constitutional commitment was first renewed and refashioned in the 1930s and 1940s, wherein the construction of a secondary regime of administrative checks and balances triangulated...

Over the past three decades, the Supreme Court has repeatedly insisted that due process requires that absent class members be given an opportunity to opt out of a class action seeking predominantly money damages. The Court’s asserted justification for linking opt-out rights and due process focuses on absent class members’ potential interest in seeking their own...

THE LONG-TERM EFFECTS OF HEDGE FUND ACTIVISM

Lucian A. Bebchuk,* Alon Brav,** and Wei Jiang***

We test the empirical validity of a claim that has been playing a central role in debates on corporate governance—the claim that interventions by activist hedge funds have a detrimental effect on the long-term interests of companies and their shareholders. We subject this claim to a comprehensive empirical investigation, examining a long five-year window following...

In popular, scholarly, and legal discourse, psychological trauma is an experience that belongs to victims. While we expect victims of crimes to suffer trauma, we never ask whether perpetrators likewise experience those same crimes as trauma. Indeed, if we consider trauma in the perpetration of a crime at all, it is usually to inquire whether a terrible experience earlier...