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India\u27s Founding Moment: The Constitution of a Most Surprising Democracy
No full textBritain’s justification for colonial rule in India stressed the impossibility of Indian self-government. And the empire did its best to ensure this was the case, impoverishing Indian subjects and doing little to improve their socioeconomic reality. So when independence came, the cultivation of democratic citizenship was a foremost challenge.
Madhav Khosla explores the means India’s founders used to foster a democratic ethos. They knew the people would need to learn ways of citizenship, but the path to education did not lie in rule by a superior class of men, as the British insisted. Rather, it rested on the creation of a self-sustaining politics. The makers of the Indian Constitution instituted universal suffrage amid poverty, illiteracy, social heterogeneity, and centuries of tradition. They crafted a constitutional system that could respond to the problem of democratization under the most inhospitable conditions. On January 26, 1950, the Indian Constitution – the longest in the world – came into effect.
More than half of the world’s constitutions have been written in the past three decades. Unlike the constitutional revolutions of the late eighteenth century, these contemporary revolutions have occurred in countries characterized by low levels of economic growth and education, where voting populations are deeply divided by race, religion, and ethnicity. And these countries have democratized at once, not gradually. The events and ideas of India’s Founding Moment offer a natural reference point for these nations where democracy and constitutionalism have arrived simultaneously, and they remind us of the promise and challenge of self-rule today.https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/books/1323/thumbnail.jp
Petition for Rulemaking on Short and Distort
Get PDFToday, some hedge funds attack public companies for the sole purpose of inducing a short-lived panic which they can exploit for profit. This sort of market manipulation harms average investors who entrust financial markets with their retirement savings. While short selling serves a critical function in the capital markets, some short sellers disseminate negative opinion about a company, inducing a panic and sharp decline in the stock price, and rapidly close that position for a profit prior to the price partially or fully rebounding. We urge the SEC to enact two rules which will discourage manipulative short selling. The petition for rule-making on short and distort has been jointly signed by twelve securities law professors nationwide
Baird and Jackson\u27s Bankruptcy: Cases, Problems, and Materials
No full textThis edition retains the structure of the casebook\u27s earlier editions, but expands its focus to capture the ways that current bankruptcy practice has been reshaped by lawyers and judges. The book reflects a continued commitment to the casebook\u27s original account of bankruptcy law\u27s logic and limits for individual debtors under Chapters 7 and 13 and for corporate debtors under Chapter 11. The updated material takes the book beyond this fundamental approach and adds a focus on modern practice, including new sections that address reorganization plan negotiation, gifting, structured dismissals, and third-party releases, among other important developments. In these ways, the new edition looks backwards and forwards simultaneously toward a more complete understanding of the subject.https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/books/1280/thumbnail.jp
Getting the Most Out of Extractive Industries Transparency: How a More Explicit Treatment of Political Considerations Could Strengthen the Impact of Transparency Efforts
Get PDFWork on transparency in the extractive industries (EI) has achieved important successes over the last two decades. For example, significant commitments to disclosure have been secured, the volume of publicly available information about critical activities has increased considerably, and norms around certain information being in the public domain have been established. There is also a growing library of use cases for this information. Nonetheless, important work remains to be done to translate these efforts into impact.
Political context is crucial to determining the fate of transparency efforts. Therefore, grappling with political context more effectively will also be key to unlocking more of the potential impact of these efforts. Our intention with this project is to provide a foundation for both understanding and addressing the politics of extractive industry transparency in practice, starting with this discussion paper (the main elements of which are summarized in the PLUS Politics brief).
The time is ripe for a focus on political contexts for two reasons: First, work on transparency has matured and there is an opportunity to reflect on its track record to date, and Second, the added pressures on government, industry, civil society, and funders to adjust their priorities in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic raise the question: can EI transparency processes retain attention and resourcing at a moment when they are arguably more necessary than ever, but competing with other demands?
Focusing on political dynamics will be essential to make sure they do.
Our research provides insights and recommendations for thinking and working politically across the transparency lifecycle
The Art of Access: Innovative Protests of an Inaccessible City
Get PDFThis Essay considers inaccessible New York City through the lens of artistic production. The landscape of disability art and protest is vast and wildly diverse. This Essay proposes to capture one slice of this array. From Ellis Avery’s Zodiac of NYC transit elevators, to Shannon Finnegan’s Anti-Stairs Club Lounge at the Vessel in Hudson Yards, to Park McArthur’s work exhibiting the ramps that provided her access to galleries showing her work – these and other creative endeavors offer a unique way in to understanding the problems and potential of inaccessible cities. Legal actions have challenged some of the specific sites these artists address, which will inform the Essay’s study of the interplay between disability, creativity, and urban life
Beyond Unprecedented S1 Ep5: A Shareholder-Stakeholder Smackdown
Get PDFThe belief that a corporation’s highest purpose is to maximize profits for its shareholders, first articulated by economist Milton Friedman, has guided corporate behavior for half a century. Now, the COVID-19 pandemic, the racial equity movement, and the climate crisis are amplifying calls for corporations to focus on employee welfare, social responsibility, and environmental sustainability. Can corporations please both shareholders and stakeholders?
In the fifth episode of Beyond Unprecedented”: The Post-Pandemic Economy, Eric Talley hosts a conversation with corporate governance experts Ira M. Millstein and Leo E. Strine Jr. to discuss the history of “shareholder primacy,” the source of the pressure on public companies to boost stock prices, and the role government should play in redirecting corporate priorities.https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/beyond_unprecedented/1005/thumbnail.jp
Conceptualizing Legal Childhood in the Twenty-First Century
Get PDFThe law governing children is complex, sometimes appearing almost incoherent. The relatively simple framework established in the Progressive Era, in which parents had primary authority over children, subject to limited state oversight, has broken down over the past few decades. Lawmakers started granting children some adult rights and privileges, raising questions about their traditional status as vulnerable, dependent, and legally incompetent beings. As children emerged as legal persons, children’s rights advocates challenged the rationale for parental authority, contending that robust parental rights often harm children. And a wave of punitive reforms in response to juvenile crime in the 1990s undermined the state’s long-standing role as the protector of children.
We address this seeming incoherence by identifying a deep structure and logic in the regulation of children that is becoming clear in the twenty-first century. In our conceptual framework, the law’s central goal, across multiple legal domains, is to promote child wellbeing. This unifying purpose has roots in the Progressive Era, but three distinct characteristics distinguish the modern approach. Today, lawmakers advance child wellbeing with greater confidence and success by drawing on a wide body of research on child and adolescent development and the efficacy of related policies. This is bolstered by the clear understanding that promoting child wellbeing generally furthers social welfare, leading to a broader base of support for state policies and legal doctrines. Finally, there is a growing recognition that the regulation of children and families has long been tainted by racial and class bias and that a new commitment to minimizing these pernicious influences is essential to both the legitimacy and fairness of the regime. In combination, these features make the contemporary regulatory framework superior to earlier approaches.
Rather than pitting the state, parents, and child in competition for control over children’s lives – the conception of family regulation since the 1960s – our Child Wellbeing framework offers a surprisingly integrated regulatory approach. Properly understood, parental rights and children’s rights, as well as the direct role of the state in children’s lives, are increasingly defined and unified by a research-driven, social-welfare-regarding effort to promote child wellbeing. This normatively attractive conceptualization of legal childhood does not define every area of legal regulation, but it is a strong through-line and should be elevated and embraced more broadly. In short, our framework brings coherence to the complex legal developments of the past half-century and provides guidance moving forward for this critical area of the law
Considering Legitimacy
Get PDFThis Article on Richard Fallon’s Law and Legitimacy in the Supreme Court focuses on public acceptance of the Supreme Court’s authority, what Fallon calls sociological legitimacy. After setting out Fallon’s accounts of legitimacy and constitutional argumentation, the Article looks at public opinion data and political science scholarship on the extent to which the Court’s decisions affect public acceptance of the Court. It then turns to the normative question of whether, even if the Court’s decisions may undermine its sociological legitimacy, that impact is a legally legitimate factor for the Court to consider. The Article argues that strategic consideration of the Court’s public legitimacy can be an appropriate factor in the Justices’ decision making, but such consideration may end up actually harming the Court’s reputation if undertaken openly and candidly as Fallon would seem to require
New York Environmental Legislation in 2019
Get PDFIn 2019, with the Democrats newly in full control of the State Senate, the Assembly and the Governor’s office, New York adopted more environmental legislation than it had in more than a decade. This included a sweeping climate change statute, a new environmental justice article in the Environmental Conservation Law, and a statewide ban on plastic carryout bags. This annual survey reports on these developments and numerous other laws targeting environmental concerns
Constitutional Law and the Presidential Nomination Process
Get PDFThe Constitution says nothing about the presidential nominating process and has had little direct role in the evolution of that process from congressional caucuses to party national conventions to our current primary-dominated system of selecting convention delegates. Yet, constitutional law is a factor in empowering and constraining the principal actors in the nomination process and in shaping the framework for potential future changes.
The constitutional law of the presidential nomination process operates along two axes: government-party, and state-national. The government-party dimension focuses on the tension between the states and the federal government in writing the rules for and administering the electoral process — which may include the primary elections that determine the nominees of the political parties — and the right of the parties to determine how to pick their nominees. This government-party axis affects all nominations of candidates for state and federal office