Issue Archives

For over half a century, New York City’s groundbreaking Landmarks Preservation Law has protected the city’s most significant structures and spaces. Yet today, some of New York’s most celebrated interior landmarks are closed off to the public, the very group for whose benefit the spaces have been protected. In order to receive a landmark designation, an interior must be “customarily open...

The United States taxes both corporations and shareholders on corporate profits. In principle, the United States could rely on only one of these taxes, as many commentators have suggested. Although choosing to tax the corporation or its owners may seem like taking money from one pocket or the other, this Essay emphasizes a key dif­ference: These taxes prompt different planning. Relying on one or the other mitigates some distortions and leaks,...

The Supreme Court’s denial of certiorari in Madden v. Midland Funding, LLC leaves a dangerous precedent standing in the Second Circuit that poses a significant risk to the consumer-credit market writ large. This Note highlights the dangers that the Madden ruling presents and in so doing cautions against the adoption of the ruling by other circuits. Moreover, given the centrality of New York in the financial economy...

Islamophobia is escalating at a frightening clip in the United States. Scrutiny of this bigotry, presently understood as “fear and suspicion of Muslims,” is rising at an alarming rate. Its rapid rise is reflected in the legal literature, encompassing scholarship analyzing the emerging national security strategies of the state to the civil liberties infractions and threats they pose to Muslim subjects. In short time, Islamophobia has become...

Administrative law presumes a neat system of agency rulemaking and adjudication followed by judicial review. But the reality of the administrative state departs starkly from this model. One such departure is the use of audited self-regulatory organizations (SROs)—private organizations comprised of specific industries that formulate binding law to regulate themselves. Although SROs operate subject to the oversight of federal agencies, their power...

Scholars traditionally conceptualize private law around a commitment to the values of formal freedom and equality. Critics of the traditional view (including lawyer-economists) dispute the significance of a distinction between public and private law, construing private law as merely one form of public regulation. Both positions are flawed. The traditional position is conceptually misguided and normatively disap­pointing; the critical position...

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...

Each state offers a property tax exemption to qualifying charitable organizations. Municipalities both administer these charitable ex­emptions and bear their economic cost. This creates an incentive for municipalities to adopt an interpretation of their state’s exemption framework that limits the exemption’s scope and preserves tax revenue. This Note focuses on community economic de­velopment (CED) organizations to explore how overly narrowed...

In its landmark Cracker Barrel no-action letter, the SEC staff an­nounced a bright-line rule permitting exclusion of any shareholder pro­posal pertaining to a company’s management of its general workforce, even if focused on a significant social policy issue such as employment discrimination, under the “ordinary business operations” exclusion. The SEC reversed Cracker Barrel in 1998, returning to a case-specific approach...

This Essay explores an overlooked way to use the remedy of dis­gorgement in torts, contracts, and regulation. It begins with a reminder that disgorging net gains does not force the liable actor to take a loss; by definition, it allows him to break even. As a matter of incentives, it places him in a sort of equipoise. This equipoise effect has a logical up­shot that might seem counterintuitive: Substituting disgorgement for any other remedy, part...