Global Health Research Center of Central Asia
Columbia Law School Scholarship ArchiveNot a member yet
5770 research outputs found
Sort by
Trade Openness and Antitrust Law
Get PDFOpenness to international trade and adoption of antitrust laws can both curb anti-competitive behavior. But scholars have long debated the relationship between the two. Some argue that greater trade openness makes antitrust unnecessary, while others contend that antitrust laws are still needed to realize the benefits of trade liberalization. Data limitations have made this debate largely theoretical to date. We study the relationship between trade and antitrust empirically using new data on antitrust laws and enforcement activities. We find that trade openness and stringency of antitrust laws are positively correlated from 1950 to 2010 overall, but the positive correlation disappears in the early 1990s as a large number of new countries adopt antitrust laws. However, we find a positive correlation between trade openness and antitrust enforcement resources and activities for both early and late adopters of antitrust regimes during this period
Administrative States: Beyond Presidential Administration
Get PDFPresidential administration is more entrenched and expansive than ever. Most significant policymaking comes from agency action rather than legislation. Courts endorse “the presence of Presidential power” in agency decisionmaking. Scholars give up on external checks and balances and take presidential direction as a starting point. Yet presidential administration is also quite fragile. Even as the Court embraces presidential control, it has been limiting the administrative domain over which the President presides. And when Presidents drive agency action in a polarized age, their policies are not only immediately contested but also readily reversed by their successors.
States complicate each piece of this story. In critical respects, federalism further strengthens presidential administration. Waivers, grants, nonpreemption of state law, and other intergovernmental techniques enable Presidents to effectuate policy agendas when federal agencies lack sufficient authority. States also furnish durability because their policies may outlast a President’s tenure when federal policies do not. At the same time, federalism diversifies administration and broadens its representative base. Defenses of presidential power as “accountable” and “effective” sound increasingly empty, if not dangerously autocratic. Yet it is easier to condemn presidential administration than to locate alternatives that connect the administrative state to electoral politics and representative institutions as well as to expertise and deliberation. Because state legislators and governors may furnish these connections, plural administrative states offer the most promising path forward for the contemporary administrative state
Whose Faith Matters? The Fight for Religious Liberty Beyond the Christian Right
Get PDFBy offering a sweeping account of religious liberty activism being undertaken by numerous progressive humanitarian and social justice movements, and uncovering how right-wing activists have fought for conservative Christian hegemony rather than “religious liberty” more generally, this report challenges the leading popular narrative of religious freedom
The Limits of Smart Contracts
Get PDFThis essay investigates the potential of smart contracts to replace the legal system as an infrastructure for transactions. It argues that (contract) law remains relevant for most transactions even if they are entirely structured by way of smart contract. The reason for this is that the power of smart contracts to create and enforce obligations against attempts by the legal system to thwart their execution is limited. These limitations are most relevant for obligations to perform certain actions outside the blockchain, but also apply to other obligations contingent on facts outside the records stored on the blockchain
Active Firms and Active Shareholders: Corporate Political Activity and Shareholder Proposals
Get PDFThis article reveals the positions of corporations not only as active players in politics but also as targets of activist shareholders with opposing political preferences. We examine whether a firm’s political orientation, as measured by its political spending, serves as a driver of shareholder proposal submissions, one manifestation of shareholder activism. Using data on S&P 500 companies for 1997–2014, we find that the divergence in political orientation between shareholders and corporate management is strongly associated with the number of submissions of shareholder proposals on environmental or social issues. Firms that contribute more to the Republican Party are more likely to be targeted by nonindividual, Democratic-leaning shareholders. This pattern remains even after controlling for firms’ records of corporate social responsibility and labor relations. This finding implies that corporate political spending prompts shareholders with strong political preferences to target firms on the opposite end of the political spectrum
New Report Surveys Extent of Religious Liberty Activism on the Left
Get PDFNew York, New York — A report released today from the Law, Rights, and Religion Project at Columbia Law School offers a sweeping account of religious liberty activism undertaken by social justice and humanitarian movements while demonstrating how right-wing activists have fought for conservative Christian hegemony rather than religious liberty for all. It thus challenges the leading popular narrative of religious freedom
Overview of Climate Change Litigation
Get PDFClimate change litigation is a global phenomenon. According to a database maintained by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, as of February 4, 2019 a total of 1,297 climate cases had been filed in courts or other tribunals worldwide. Of these, 1,009 — 78 percent — were from the United States, Australia was a distant second, with ninety-eight, followed by the United Kingdom with forty-seven. No other country had as many as twenty. The cases were filed in twenty-nine countries and six international tribunals, led by the Court of Justice of the European Union, which had forty-one
One of the Good Guys: \u3cem\u3eThe Making of a Justice – Reflections on My First 94 Years\u3c/em\u3e
Get PDFJohn Paul Stevens’s first published judicial opinion was a Dissent. He joined the Seventh Circuit a few days after the court issued its opinion in Groppi v. Leslie, and dissented soon afterward when the court upheld that decision on rehearing. Wilbur Pell, who until Stevens joined was the only Republican among the Seventh Circuit’s seven active judges, wrote both Groppi opinions. Yet Stevens, brand new to the court, dissented from Pell’s opinion on rehearing.
There was no reason to think Father Groppi, who was arrested for leading a demonstration that interrupted the Wisconsin Assembly’s work, was innocent of legislative contempt, but Stevens believed the Fourteenth Amendment insisted on certain procedural protections before a person’s liberty could be denied, whether by a court or a legislature. “At the foundation of our civil liberty lies the principle which denies to government officials an exceptional position before the law and which subjects them to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen,” Stevens wrote, quoting Justice Brandeis. “And in the development of our liberty,” he continued, “insistence upon procedural regularity has been a large factor. Respect for law will not be advanced by resort, in its enforcement, to means which shock the common man’s sense of decency and fair play.” Stevens couldn’t persuade his colleagues, but the Supreme Court eventually granted cert in Father Groppi’s case and unanimously adopted Stevens’s Position
Loyalty without Borders: In Honor of Arthur Jacobson
Get PDFThe essence of loyalty is partiality – putting friends, political party, a particular country ahead of its competitors. The ambiguity of this definition lies in question: putting the recipients of loyalty close in what way? In the case of loyalty to a spouse, the loyal lover forswears sex with others. In voting and supporting, say, the Democrats, one does not contribute to the Republicans. By remaining loyal to the United States, one does not offer to join the military or serve in the civil defense force of another country.
As I wrote in 1993 in Loyalty: An Essay on the Morality of Relationships, I regard loyalty as a virtue, as an expression the historical self. By this curious expression, I meant that in coming to understand one\u27s loyalties one clarifies where one stands in history, what the influences on his or her life have been.
We cannot choose our loyalties by rational reflection – nor by aesthetic comparison. The notion of brand loyalty provides a test case. What is the purpose of advertising, particularly on television? The purpose, it seems, is to repeat the name of Crest toothpaste or Ford truck so often that when it comes to buying toothpaste or a truck, the brand comes to mind as the natural choice. The preference is not rational. It is not like seeing a Manet and a Monet painting for the first time and deciding which is more beautiful. It is not like assessing and grading a sporting competition after seeing the competitors for the first time. In loyalties we are not making choice on the basis of a blank slate. In choosing to be loyal to one group rather than another, we express who we are
Informed Trading and Cybersecurity Breaches
Get PDFCybersecurity has become a significant concern in corporate and commercial settings, and for good reason: a threatened or realized cybersecurity breach can materially affect firm value for capital investors. This paper explores whether market arbitrageurs appear systematically to exploit advance knowledge of such vulnerabilities. We make use of a novel data set tracking cybersecurity breach announcements among public companies to study trading patterns in the derivatives market preceding the announcement of a breach. Using a matched sample of unaffected control firms, we find significant trading abnormalities for hacked targets, measured in terms of both open interest and volume. Our results are robust to several alternative matching techniques, as well as to both cross-sectional and longitudinal identification strategies. All told, our findings appear strongly consistent with the proposition that arbitrageurs can and do obtain early notice of impending breach disclosures, and that they are able to profit from such information. Normatively, we argue that the efficiency implications of cybersecurity trading are distinct – and generally more concerning – than those posed by garden-variety information trading within securities markets. Notwithstanding these idiosyncratic concerns, however, both securities fraud and computer fraud in their current form appear poorly adapted to address such concerns, and both would require nontrivial re-imagining to meet the challenge (even approximately)