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Manipulating Random Assignment: Evidence From Consumer Bankruptcies in the Nation\u27s Largest Cities
Get PDFRandom case assignment is thought to be an important feature of decision-making in federal courts because it helps guard against favoritism (actual or perceived) toward particular parties or types of cases. In bankruptcy courts, cases are randomly assigned to both judges and trustees. In Chapter 7 cases, for example, the trustee is a quasi-judicial actor, typically a private-sector lawyer, who has been selected to audit the debtor\u27s finances, find and liquidate assets, and police compliance with the law. We study three major bankruptcy jurisdictions (covering Chicago, Los Angeles, and parts of New York) and find that the random-assignment process for Chapter 7 trustees is failing in two of them (Chicago and New York). We introduce several measures of non-random assignment. Across all measures, random assignment is failing: Trustees within the same court have substantially different case characteristics, despite the purportedly random assignment process. We present evidence that the imbalance in case characteristics is caused by attorney manipulation: Attorneys strategically time their case filings to avoid or attract particular trustees ( trustee shopping ). By contrast, among cases filed by debtors who have not hired attorneys ( pro se filers ), there is no case imbalance across trustees. Because they do not engage in manipulation, pro se filers – who account for the bottom decile of income and asset values among Chapter 7 debtors – are the debtors most burdened by trustee-shopping by bankruptcy attorneys. We conclude by presenting evidence that trustee-shopping is less prevalent in Los Angeles due to differences in its random-assignment protocol
Social Engineering : Notes on the Law and Political Economy of Integration
Get PDFOn the occasion of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Fair Housing Act, progress towards the Act’s goals of non-discrimination and integration is uneven. On both fronts, the last fifty years have seen some progress, but by several accounts more progress has been made on the anti-discrimination front than in advancing integration. The last fifty years have also given us a wealth of knowledge about the types of policy and planning devices — such as mobility voucher programs and inclusionary zoning — that might help achieve the goal of integration and ample data about the harms of segregation versus integration’s benefits. But what remains elusive is the political economy—understanding what will persuade, encourage, and compel governments and communities to adopt integration-advancing remedies, and how these policies might endure. The persistence of segregation seems overdetermined: the political, market, and legal incentives point largely away from integration. Segregation, though constructed and sustained by traceable government and institutional decisions, is often cast as a natural and inevitable product of geography; indeed, obscuring the mechanisms that created and sustained segregation seems part of the plan. The attempt to reverse course and move towards integration inevitably seems forced and top-down, disruptive of natural arrangements, market mechanisms, and individual choice. Even supporters of integration remedies often cast existing efforts largely as failures.
This Article shifts the question of how to achieve integration away from the technocratic questions of planning and policy devices, however important, to the equally important questions of political economy — how to move a legal and political infrastructure that is engineered for segregation towards integration. No doubt this question is not fully answerable in a short Article and perhaps at all. Yet, it might be possible to gather some of what is already known about the dynamics of social change towards integration, build on that knowledge, and find openings in current law, politics, and social movements for charting a future course of action. The spirit of the Article is against the prevailing narrative of despair in fair housing, examining (1) where top-down litigation might have contributed to enduring housing reform; (2) local governments that reject the incentives towards exclusion to adopt inclusionary legal and regulatory infrastructures and regulation; and (3) where communities are organizing for bottom-up legal and regulatory reforms outside of courts
Giving the Treaty a Purpose: Comparing the Durability of Treaties and Executive Agreements
Get PDFScholars have argued that Senate-approved treaties are becoming increasingly irrelevant in the United States, because their role can be fulfilled by their close but less politically costly cousin, the congressional-executive agreement. This study demonstrates that treaties are more durable than congressional-executive agreements, supporting the view that there are qualitative differences between the two instruments. Abandoning the treaty may therefore lead to unintended consequences by decreasing the tools that the executive has available to design optimal agreements
Symposium: This Case is Moot
Get PDFForget guns for a moment. Imagine that, once upon a time, Boca Raton had a rule that prohibited its residents from transporting their golf clubs to driving ranges outside the city. Boca’s finest golfers challenged the constitutionality of the rule in court. Now imagine that the city thought twice and repealed the rule and that Florida then passed a statute authorizing people to transport their clubs to the driving ranges of their choice. The golfers could live happily ever after
Edward Snowden, National Security Whistleblowing, and Civil Disobedience
Get PDFNo recent whistleblower has been more lionized or vilified than Edward Snowden. He has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and denounced as a total traitor deserving of the death penalty. In these debates, Snowden\u27s defenders tend to portray him as a civil disobedient. Yet for a range of reasons, Snowden\u27s situation does not map neatly onto traditional theories of civil disobedience. The same holds true for most cases of national security whistleblowing.
The contradictory and confused responses that these cases provoke, this essay suggests, are not just the product of polarized politics or insufficient information. Rather, they reflect the genuine difficulties of locating national security whistleblowers within our main ethical framework for assessing conscientious and communicative lawbreaking. Just as the chapters in this volume urge us to move beyond the reductive characterization of whistleblowers as heroes or traitors, we may need to move beyond the standard models of civil disobedience to gain greater normative purchase on what whistleblowers do
Bridging the Information Gap: How Access to Land Contracts Can Serve Community Rights
Get PDFLand contracts (also known as investor-state contracts, or concession agreements) show what commitments a forestry, farming or renewable energy company has made and what the government has said the company can do on the land. These promises define the positive and harmful effects the company’s project could have on community members’ livelihoods and human rights, and on the environment.
Accessing land contracts is a crucial strategy for local organizations. This briefing note explains how local organizations can use land contracts and the Open Land Contracts repository (OpenLandContracts.org) to help communities to: Understand company and government obligations related to a company project Monitor whether those obligations are being fulfilled Hold companies and the government to account for bad contracts or for failing to deliver on commitments that are important to communities
Organizations can also use OpenLandContracts.org to raise broader public awareness about government contracting practices, and to campaign for contract transparency.
Here’s what representatives from local organizations have to say about land contract transparency and OpenLandContracts.org:
Having open access to contracts has the potential to ‘level the playing field’ and address imbalances in knowledge. Knowledge is power! —Justine Sylvester, Village Focus International, Laos
Sometimes people support concessions based on the assumption that they will benefit. However, once they understand the contract, they realize many of the benefits are uncertain. People learn how to ask better questions and demand a seat at the table. —Francis Colee, Green Advocates, Liberia
We use OpenLandContracts.org to review land contracts across the African continent in order to assess provisions that governments have included in their contracts, and to provide guidance on the types of provisions governments in this region should and should not include. It is incredibly useful to have all the contract information in the same place. —Samuel Nguiffo, Centre Pour l’Environnement et le Développement, Cameroo
The Yearbook on International Investment Law & Policy 2017
Get PDFThe Yearbook on International Investment Law & Policy is an annual publication which provides a comprehensive overview of current developments in the international investment law and policy field, focusing on recent trends and issues in foreign direct investment (FDI), investment treaty practice, and investor-state arbitration.
The Yearbook monitors current developments in international investment law and policy, focusing (in Part One) on trends in foreign direct investment (FDI), international investment agreements, and investment disputes. Part Two, then, looks at central issues in the contemporary discussions on international investment law and policy. With contributions by leading experts in the field, this title provides timely, authoritative information on FDI that can be used by a wide audience, including practitioners, academics, researchers, and policy makers.
Edited by an Editorial Committee and overseen by an Advisory Board of esteemed global experts in the field of international investment law, the Yearbook is an essential tool for practitioners and academics looking for a resource of timely and authoritative information in this field.https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/sustainable_investment_books/1009/thumbnail.jp
Survey of Greenhouse Gas Considerations in Federal Environmental Impact Statements and Environmental Assessments for Fossil Fuel-Related Projects, 2017-2018
Get PDFClimate change is already generating enormous costs to the environment and public health both in the United States and around the world. These costs will only escalate over the time with increasing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), U.S. federal agencies must assess the environmental effects of proposals for major federal projects, plans and programs before deciding if they should proceed. To conduct a meaningful environmental review of proposed projects, federal agencies must carefully consider how these projects contribute to climate change and greenhouse gas emissions – particularly for projects concerning fossil fuel extraction, transport, and use. The courts have established that NEPA includes obligations to consider climate change effects. Under the Obama administration, the Council for Environmental Quality sought to clarify those obligations by issuing guidance on how NEPA analysis and documentation should address GHG emissions. The Trump administration has sought to roll back and replace those recommendations, raising new questions about how federal agencies have assessed, and will continue to assess, climate change effects during environmental review.
To evaluate how federal agencies are addressing climate change in environmental reviews under NEPA, this report surveys federal environmental impact statements (EISs) and environmental assessments (EAs) completed in 2017-2018 for projects related to fossil fuel production, processing, and transport. In total, the report reviews sixteen EISs and ten EAs which met these criteria within the selected timeframe. The report focuses on fossil fuel project proposals because of their contributions to greenhouse gas emissions
Changing the National Flood Insurance Program for a Changing Climate
Get PDFCongress established the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) in 1968 to reduce flood damages nationwide and ease the federal government’s financial burden for providing disaster recovery.1 To achieve this goal, the program was designed to perform three primary functions. First, the program provides federally backed insurance to property owners and renters. Second, the program established minimum requirements for building, land use, and floodplain management practices that local communities must adopt in order for their residents to be eligible to purchase NFIP insurance coverage. Third, the program is responsible for mapping high floodrisk areas. These maps inform local land use decisions as well as the pricing of flood insurance premiums.
Theoretically, the NFIP should have deterred development in flood-prone areas, ensured that any new development in the floodplain was designed to minimize the risk of flood damage, and reduced federal expenditures on disaster recovery costs. In practice, the rising debts of the program and growing severity and frequency of flood disasters imply the opposite is true. One significant factor contributing to this shortcoming is that the NFIP is predicated on the assumption that flood risks are static and change little over time. Climate change is proving that assumption to be extremely dangerous and costly.
This Comment will assess the current state of the NFIP and the threats to it from climate change (Part I). In addition, it explores several strategies to change the NFIP for a changing climate
Reconstituting the Future: An Equality Amendment
Get PDFA new constitutional amendment embodying a substantive intersectional equality analysis aims to rectify the founding U.S. treatment of race and sex and additional hierarchical social inequalities. Historical and doctrinal context and critique show why this step is urgently needed. A draft of the amendment is offered