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Christian Dignity and the Overlapping Consensus
Get PDFThis Article rejects arguments by Christian leaders, scholars, and others who lament the secularization of the West and urge Christian dignity as the foundation of universal human rights. It argues instead that only a secular conception of dignity free of Christian metaphysics can create an overlapping consensus in support of human rights.
Part I describes the roots of Christian dignity in medieval theology and status. Part II briefly recounts how the Renaissance and Enlightenment re-centered the end of dignity from knowing God to knowing oneself, while the Reformation\u27s extension of original sin to the intellect left Catholicism as the primary defender of the medieval dignity tradition in modernity. Part III shows that unprecedented religious difference and moral pluralism in the West make the Christian dignity promoted by religious conservatives implausible as the ground of universal human rights. The theological and natural law underpinnings and the political implications of Christian dignity alienate and exclude unbelievers, non-Christians, and even many Christians, impeding the formation of a stable political consensus supporting human rights. Part IV concludes with observations about why conservative Christians might find the overlapping consensus attractive, and why they might not
Christian Faith-Based Organizations as Third Party Interveners at the European Court of Human Rights
Get PDFLinguistic Estoppel: A Custodial Interrogation Subject’s Reliance on Traditional Language Customs when Facing Unknown Expectations for Legally Efficacious Speech
Get PDFFor various reasons, speakers often communicate indirectly, hiding their words’ true meaning beneath an apparent surface meaning. For example, a woman trying to brush off her co-worker’s date invitation might respond, “I have to prepare for a presentation tomorrow.” While the words’ surface meaning doesn’t relate to the date invitation, the hearer usually understands the underlying message—that is to say, the words’ function differs from their form. However, because the law’s language ideology requires directness and surface-level meaning, lay-speaking interrogation subjects often have difficulty effectively invoking their Miranda rights. Because the legal system’s search for determinacy often results in reliance on affirmative speech or actions, lay speakers often face significant disadvantages when held to the exacting expectations for legal speech because the law’s insistence on direct affirmative behavior contradicts natural and frequent linguistic behaviors, which implement indirectness. Warning lay speakers about exacting legal language requirements would allow these individuals to effectively communicate in a new language environment without improperly relying on societal conversation norms while still allowing the law to maintain its affirmative language expectations
The Case for Empowering Quality Shareholders
Get PDFAnyone can buy stock in a public company, but not all shareholders are equally committed to a company’s long-term success. In an increasingly fragmented financial world, shareholders’ attitudes toward the companies in which they invest vary widely, from time horizon to conviction. Faced with indexers, short-term traders, and activists, it is more important than ever for businesses to ensure that their shareholders are dedicated to their missions. Today’s companies need quality shareholders, as Warren Buffett called those who load up and stick around, or buy large stakes and hold for long periods.
While scholars in recent years have extensively debated indexers, short-term traders, and activists, they have paid scant attention to quality shareholders and their critical role in corporate finance and governance. This Article corrects this oversight by highlighting the quality shareholder cohort. Adding this fresh perspective confirms some of the angst about myopic short-termism on the one hand and ignorant indexing on the other, but rather than suggesting tighter regulation of such behaviors, the reframing invites attention to empowering quality shareholders. In particular, rather than taxing short-term shareholders or passing through indexer voting rights, this Article explains how companies could simply increase the voting power of their quality shareholders to recognize their value and to attract them
Disparate Impact Claims and Punitive Damages: Justified Abrogation of State Sovereign Immunity
Get PDFCourts Beyond Judging
Get PDFAcross all fifty states, a woefully understudied institution of government is responsible for a broad range of administrative, legislative, law enforcement, and judicial functions. That important institution is the state courts. While the literature has examined the federal courts and federal judges from innumerable angles, study of the state courts as institutions of state government — and not merely as sources of doctrine and resolvers of disputes — has languished. This Article remedies that oversight by drawing attention for the first time to the wide array of roles state courts serve, and by evaluating the suitability of both the allocation of these tasks and the various procedures by which they are carried out across the country.
In every state, on top of the ordinary adversarial dispute resolution function that we expect judges to serve, it is state court judges who are charged with administrative functions like approving applications to change one\u27s name, to enter the legal profession, or to exercise constitutional rights like accessing abortion care without parental knowledge or consent. And it is often state court judges who are charged with or who have taken on a range of legislative and policymaking functions like redistricting and establishing specialized criminal courts for veterans, persons in need of drug treatment, and others. And in some states, it is state court judges who have the law enforcement power to decide whether a prosecutors charging choice was a wise exercise of her discretion. These are not mere odds and ends of governing either; weighty interests hang in the balance across the board.
In addition to developing this more complete portrait of the state courts — and of important variation in how these roles are structured across the states — this Article examines whether the interests at stake in each context are appropriately served when state court judges handle them. In some arenas, they are, and this Article places these facets o f state court practice on firmer theoretical footing. In others, however, there is cause for concern. With respect to these tasks, this Article argues that state court judges need to be better guided by statute and subject to reason-giving and record-developing requirements that would channel their discretion, improve their decisionmaking, and enable more rigorous appellate review. But most important of all, this Article calls for states to make more conscious choices about structuring the roles they assign to state courts, and for scholars to devote more careful attention to these powerful and nuanced institutions
Relational Enforcement of Stock Exchange Rules
Get PDFStock exchanges, as regulating entities supervised by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), have wielded their rulemaking power on various corporate governance issues, ranging from the independent board committee requirement adopted in 2003 to the board diversity requirement approved in 2021. Simultaneously, as for-profit corporate entities, major stock exchanges have been competing against each other to attract and retain more companies. This dual status of stock exchanges — as regulators and as profit driven entities — brings into question the stock exchanges\u27 incentive to enforce their own rules against listed companies. What happens if a listed company violates stock exchange rules? As the first study that offers an analysis of original hand collected data on 838 enforcement actions by stock exchanges in 2019, this Article finds that (1) stock exchanges\u27 detection of noncompliance is mostly on the failure to meet mechanical criteria, such as the $1.00 minimum stock price requirement; (2) listed companies tend to self-report violations of corporate governance requirements before the stock exchanges detect them; and (3) even after noncompliance is detected, stock exchanges tend to extend cure periods and rarely impose the only substantive sanction for stock exchange rule violations: delisting. Focusing on stock exchanges\u27 corporate governance requirements for listed companies, our analysis of S&P 1500 companies\u27 board composition data shows that most companies diligently comply with the stock exchanges\u27 requirements despite this low likelihood of detection and enforcement. This Article argues that this curious coexistence of lax enforcement and diligent compliance can be explained as an extension of the relational contract theory to the relationship between a regulator and a regulated. Competition among stock exchanges makes a long-term, interactive relationship between stock exchanges and their listed companies valuable to both sides. The fact that the stock exchanges\u27 enforcement mechanism relies on a single, drastic measure of terminating the relationship (i.e., delisting) and that listed companies\u27 noncompliance rarely triggers delisting incentivize cooperative compliance between the regulator and the regulated. Such relational enforcement of stock exchange rules indicates that where there is an extended regulatory relationship that offers a substantial benefit to the regulated entity, diligent compliance can be regulated entity, diligent compliance can be expected even in the absence of rigorous, formal policing
Human Dignity Has No Borders: Respecting the Rights of “People on the Move” and the Rights and Religious Freedom of Those Who Aid Them
Get PDFWealth Transfer Tax Planning After the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act
Get PDFOn December 17, 2017, Congress passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA). Among its many impacts, the TCJA increased the inflation-adjusted estate tax basic exclusion amount to $10,000,000 on a temporary basis. This has dramatic implications for many existing and future estate plans, including a major crossover impact on income tax planning. In this Article, we explain the operation of the federal wealth transfer taxes (the estate tax, the gift tax, and the generation skipping transfer tax) in the wake of the TCJA and dissect the basic tax planning techniques for wealth transmission. The overall design of this Article is to bring the reader into the current wealth transfer tax planning picture while providing references to more detailed treatments of particular topics within this broad field