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...
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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...
Introduction In April 2016, a massive leak of confidential legal documents, now known as the “Panama Papers,” attracted international scrutiny and condemnation of offshore asset protection trust arrangements. Such trusts are legal to create but notoriously susceptible to abuse by wrongdoers seeking to hide assets from the peering eyes of tax collectors and creditors. The […]
Introduction The rapid rise of social media companies poses important questions for society, as legislatures, regulators, and courts try to balance consumer protections with the promotion of innovation and entrepreneurship. Indeed, technology is advancing much faster than the laws and regulations that govern it, creating a disconnect between the expectations of social media users and […]
In 1987, the Supreme Court held that the Constitution requires federal and state courts to retroactively apply all new federal-constitutional rules of criminal procedure to direct appeals of convictions. Since then, the Court has not addressed whether the U.S. Constitution also requires state courts to retroactively apply new criminal procedure rules derived from state law on direct review. This issue is particularly significant because state jurisdictions...
Lynn Walker Huntley was one of America’s great champions of civil rights. Her accomplishments will continue to make ours a better world for decades—assuredly outliving her short life, which ended on August 30, 2015. Her paper credentials must not be glossed over, even though Lynn was much more than the summation of her curriculum […]
There were no lawyers in my family. We had never sued or been sued. I barely knew any lawyers’ names. I enrolled at Columbia Law School sight unseen. When I entered in 1975, though, the name I heard fast and often was Lynn Walker, Class of 1970. She was the first black woman ever on […]
What a time it must have been to be alive in 1968. The United States was deep in the throes of the Vietnam War, with public support drastically waning after the Tet Offensive and the My Lai Massacre. One of the modern era’s founding fathers, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, and […]