Forthcoming NOMOS LXVIII: CLIMATE CHANGE, Chiara Cordelli & Melissa Lane (eds.) (NYU Press).This comment traces the divergent legal academic interpretations of the Chicago School's Ronald Coase and where their influence lands--revealing the law’s inconsistent conception of just what a corporation is or should be. By following Alyssa Battistoni's investigation of the origin of the "externality," we can see the late 60s and early 1970s as a pivotal era. People were waking up to the collective costs of industrialization and pushing back against corporate power. Against this democratic wave, the writings of the Chicago School worked to separate one human person into her different roles in the economy—consumer, worker, shareholder. They used the law to solidify the divergent interests of these roles, even as they preached the gospel of shareholder democracy and personal choice. The law and economics movement helped to argue for limiting the choices and political power of shareholders over corporations, simultaneously as they insisted that profit maximizing was for the shareholders. This comment argues for the resurrection of pre-neoliberal legal conceptions of the corporation as a moral entity and a locus for political change in our fight against the climate crisis.
Mental Disability law is contaminated by sanism, an irrational prejudice similar to such other irrational prejudices as racism and sexism. The passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) - a statute that focused specifically on questions of stereotyping and stigma - appeared at first to offer an opportunity too deal frontally with sanist attitudes and, optimally, to restructure the way that citizens with mental disabilities were dealt with by the remainder of society. However, in its first decade, the ADA did not prove to be a panacea for such persons. The Supreme Court's 1999 decision in Olmstead v. L.C. - ruling that the ADA entitled certain state hospital residents to treatment in an integrated community setting, and stressing that unjustified isolation...is properly regarded as discrimination based on - appeared to have the potential to transform and revolutionize mental disability law. This Article questions whether Olmstead has done that, and whether, in fact, it has the capacity to do that. Furthermore, a review of post-Olmstead caselaw - a universe that is pretty pallid - and the meager (in volume) scholarship, conclude that, in spite of Olmstead, there are still many sanist attitudes that need to be undone.
How the recently enacted Take It Down Act could affect postings to online platforms.
The U.S. Supreme Court suggests national security may sometimes trump free speech online.
This chapter identifies the features of the corporate compliance function and the steps countries should take to induce companies to implement effective compliance. The compliance function is comprised of the set of corporate inventions that deter corporate misconduct. This chapter uses empirical psychology to identify those features and reveals that many reside outside companies' "compliance programs" as typically designed. This chapter then shows that companies cannot be relied on to implement effective compliance without state-provided inducement because they regularly profit from misconduct and weak compliance. It then shows that countries cannot rely on regulatory mandates covering all features of compliance because optimal compliance varies substantially across firms and is not cost-effectively and accurately evaluated by regulators ex ante or ex post. Instead, countries must incentivize corporations to implement effective compliance functions by holding them criminally liable for their employees' misconduct. Corporate liability must ensure that companies do not expect to profit from misconduct. It also must induce them to detect and self-report misconduct and fully cooperate as these corporate undertakings are vital to effective compliance. To induce corporate self-reporting, countries also need to adopt effective laws to protect and reward employees who report misconduct to enforcement authorities.
