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BU S3E0
No full textPhoto of Talia Gillis, Associate Professor of Law and Milton Handler Fellow at Columbia Law School.https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/beyond_unprecedented_podcast/1032/thumbnail.jp
CRT2 S1E0
No full textPhoto of Flores Forbes, Associate Vice President for Community Affairs in the Office of Government and Community Affairs, Adjunct Associate Professor in the Graduate School for Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University, and Adjunct Associate Professor at Columbia Law School.https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/crt2_podcast/1000/thumbnail.jp
CRT2 S1E3
No full textPhoto of Alejo Rodriguez, Adjunct Professor at Columbia Law School.https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/crt2_podcast/1009/thumbnail.jp
The Restatement of Property: The Curse of Incompleteness
Get PDFThe central feature of the American Law Institute’s Restatement of Property is that it remains incomplete after nearly seventeen volumes produced over nearly ninety years. The principal explanation for this is the proclivities of the Reporters who have been responsible for the first three iterations of this effort. Some of these proclivities, such as a commitment to meticulous research, have been commendable. But the incompleteness of the effort has reduced the influence of the property Restatement, relative to other Restatements like contracts and torts. The chapter concludes with a description of the Fourth Restatement of Property, now underway, and the organizational structure it has adopted in an effort to produce, at long last, a complete Restatement of Property
The Gravity of Legal Diffusion
Get PDFA persistent empirical finding is that bilateral trade between two countries is proportional to the size of their economies and inversely proportional to their geographic distance. We hypothesize that a similar pattern is likely to hold for the diffusion of laws. We specifically argue that countries’ propensity to update their laws to converge with the leading regulator in a given policy area is likely to be proportional to the size of their economies and inversely proportional to their geographic distance. We then empirically test this theory in the area of antitrust and assess countries’ convergence to the world’s leading antitrust regulator: the European Union. Using a modified gravity equation, we find that a country’s economic size is consistently positively correlated with continued legal convergence and that a county’s distance from the European Union is consistently negatively correlated with continued convergence. These results suggest that a modified gravity model may offer a simple model of legal diffusion that does not requiring strong epistemic and empirical assumptions
Specific Performance: On Freedom and Commitment in Contract Law
Get PDFWhen should specific performance be available for breach of contract? This question — at the core of contract — divides common-law and civil-law jurisdictions and it has bedeviled generations of comparativists, along with legal economists, historians, and philosophers. Yet none of these disciplines has provided a persuasive answer. This Article provides a normatively attractive and conceptually coherent account, one grounded in respect for the autonomy of the promisor’s future self. Properly understood, autonomy explains why expectation damages should be the ordinary remedy for contract breach. This same normative commitment justifies the “uniqueness exception,” where specific performance is typically awarded, and the personal services exclusion, where it is not. For the most part, the boundaries of specific performance in the common law track our underlying commitment to autonomy. But not entirely. There’s still work to be done on both sides of the common/civil-law divide, and this Article points the way with doctrinal reforms that can better align specific performance with its animating principles
China in the WTO Twenty Years On: How to Mend a Broken Relationship?
Get PDFChina’s participation in the World Trade Organization (WTO) has been a rollercoaster of milestones and frictions. China has emerged as a leading trading nation, which has contributed to the expansion of world trade. Some of its trading partners, however, and most vocally the United States, complain that China has reached its new status by eluding its WTO commitments. Under President Trump, the United States reacted strongly against China, almost bringing the WTO(but not China!) to its knees. These actions have been criticized in different ways: Some underline their unilateral character (and the ensuing legal issues they raise), whereas others focus on the regime-neutrality of the WTO, which should, in principle, be able to accommodate Western liberal democracies, developing countries, and socialist countries like China equally. In this short Article, we argue that staying idle is no solution to the China issue and that addressing it through unilateral actions is no solution either. Both approaches would only deepen the current WTO crisis. In our view, the only viable solution for the WTO system requires adding new disciplines to the existing multilateral rules
Research Priorities for Climate Litigation
Get PDFThis article characterizes key research gaps and opportunities for scientists across disciplines to do work that informs the rapidly growing number of climate lawsuits worldwide. It focuses on research that can be used to inform legal decisions about responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions and climate damages. Relevant lawsuits include claims filed against government and corporate defendants alleging that they have violated environmental, human rights, constitutional, tort, and consumer protection laws due to their contributions to climate change and failures to control emissions. Constructive attention has recently been given to the important role of attribution science in informing some of these cases (Burger et al., 2020, https://doi.org/10.7916/cjel.v45i1.4730; Stuart-Smith et al., 2021, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-021-00686-4). Here, we draw upon both the published literature and conversations with diverse legal scholars and practitioners to characterize what further climate litigation-relevant research is most needed. In addition to key gaps in litigation-relevant attribution science, we identify and characterize the need and opportunity for further social science research to address the causes of climate inaction, and for further cross-disciplinary research to inform emerging legal questions on the allocation of responsibility for emissions reductions to align with temperature limits such as those set by the Paris Climate Agreement. Our primary goal is to identify areas for researchers who are interested in contributing to climate litigation and discussions about legal responsibility for climate change. We also seek to help the research community see this as a legitimate and important domain for timely, actionable scientific research
Comments on U.S. Funding for GHG Corporate Reporting Standardization
Get PDFThe Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment (“CCSI”) and the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law (“Sabin Center”) are pleased to submit our joint comments on how appropriations made to the Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) under the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (“IRA”) can best be used to enhance the agency’s efforts to standardize corporate climate commitments, improve transparency around greenhouse gas reductions, and accelerate progress towards decarbonization in the corporate sphere. This Comment focuses on the funding provided to the EPA under Section 60111, on Greenhouse Gas (“GHG”) Reporting
Waste and Chemical Management in a 4°C World
No full textMany chemicals and hazardous substances are kept in places that can withstand ordinary rain, but not severe storms or floods. If these events occur and the chemicals are released, people and the environment may be endangered. This Article discusses the hazards posed to chemical and waste disposal facilities by extreme weather events that would be worsened as a result of climate change, and how U.S. laws do (or do not) deal with these hazards; and considers how the law would need to change to cope with what would happen to these facilities in a potentially 4°C world. It is adapted from a new book by the Environmental Law Collaborative (Katrina Kuh & Shannon Roesler eds., ELI Press forthcoming 2023)