cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
The Impact of Mandated Corporate Social Responsibility: Evidence from India's Companies Act of 2013

Abstract Firms’ Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activity has become the subject of a large literature in recent years. This paper analyzes CSR activity using quasi-experimental variation created by Section 135 of India’s Companies Act of 2013, which requires (on a “comply-or-explain” basis) that firms satisfying specific size or profit thresholds spend a minimum of 2% of their net profit on CSR. We examine effects on CSR spending and related outcomes, as well as exploring broader theoretical implications. Our analysis uses financial statement data on Indian firms from the Prowess database, along with hand-collected data from firms’ disclosures of CSR activity. Using a difference-in-difference approach, we find significant increases in CSR activity among firms affected by Section 135, especially along the extensive margin (i.e. in the fraction of firms engaging in CSR spending). The fraction of firms subject to Section 135 that engage in advertising expenditures declines, consistent with substitution between advertising and CSR. For a subset of large firms, we hand-collect comprehensive CSR data and find that while firms initially spending less than 2% increased their CSR activity, large firms initially spending more than 2% reduced their CSR expenditures after Section 135 came into effect. We explore various explanations for this presumably unintended consequence of Section 135, and also seek to derive some wider implications of this analysis for understanding the role of CSR.
Controlling the Grasping Hand: Economic Development Takings after Kelo

The Supreme Court’s controversial decision in Kelo v. City of New London upheld the condemnation of private property for purposes of economic development. This Article argues that Kelo was wrongly decided and that courts should forbid economic development takings. Part I analyzes the flaws of economic development takings generally. Such condemnations allow politically powerful interest groups to capture the condemnation process for the purpose of enriching themselves at the expense of the poor and politically weak. This Part also shows that the need to eliminate holdout problems that could block desirable assembly projects cannot justify permitting economic development takings. In most cases, private developers can prevent holdouts by such noncoercive methods as assembling property in secret and adopting precommitment strategies that prevent holdouts from using their bargaining power. Part II considers the major alternatives to a categorical ban. While these proposals are not without merit, none can preve...
Should arrestee DNA databases extend to misdemeanors

In the United States, those groups of persons eligible for compulsory DNA sampling by law enforcement authorities continue to expand. The collection of DNA samples from felony arrestees will likely be adopted by many more states after the U.S. Supreme Court's 2013 decision in Maryland v. King, which upheld a state law permitting the compulsory and warrantless DNA sampling from those arrested of serious offenses. At the time of the decision, 28 states and the federal government already had arrestee DNA collection statutes in place. Nevada became the 29th state to collect DNA from arrestees in May 2013, and several others have bills under consideration. Should states collect DNA from misdemeanor arrestees as well? This article considers this as yet largely unrealized but nevertheless important potential expansion of arrestee DNA databases. The collection of DNA samples from those arrested of relatively minor offenses would increase the number of samples, and perhaps consequently the number of "hits." On balance, however, such an expansion of current DNA laws raises enough serious concerns-chiefly about police discretion, inequitable enforcement, and cost-that legislators should refrain from changing arrestee DNA laws in this way.
Online Dispute Resolution: Do You Know Where Your Children Are?

Will we ever see the day when the Internet serves as the primary venue for problem solving and dispute resolution? Social science research suggests that our online communication skills will improve as we learn relational behaviors based upon nonverbal cues available online. Dispute resolution and problem solving will move online, however, whether or not you and I master those skills. Our children already have developed effective online relational behaviors and can establish trust and intimacy online.
Internal Control Deficiency Disclosures among Chinese Reverse Merger Firms

In recent years, financial reporting problems among Chinese reverse merger firms (CRMs), listed on US exchanges, have attracted unfavourable attention from regulators, investors, and the business press. Under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX), managers' Section 302 assessments of internal control over financial reporting are intended to provide investors with early warning about the likelihood of current and future non-GAAP financial reporting problems. We investigate managers' propensity to issue unfavourable SOX 302 reports when internal control problems exist. We find that managers of CRMs have equal or greater propensity to issue adverse SOX 302 reports when serious internal control problems exist in the current quarter than those of control firms listed on US exchanges, including reverse merger and initial public offering (IPO) firms from the US and other countries as well as Chinese IPO firms. Furthermore, managers of CRMs also have an equal or greater propensity to issue adverse SOX 302 reports when internal control problems are not known to exist. One reasonable conclusion is that CRM firms tend to have weaker internal controls than comparison groups, and CRM firms are forthcoming in disclosing such weakness. Finally we analyze the specific nature of internal control deficiencies disclosed by each category of our sample firms.
Politics, the WTO and Trade Disputes: Evidence from US Cases

Do political variables play a significant role in trade disputes and does the World Trade Organization (WTO) ameliorate disputation? This paper uses US data to assess the role of the WTO and political variables in trade disputes. The data suggest that political factors are significant in the initiation of trade disputes and in their length of adjudication. The WTO disputes that require the formation of adjudication panels take fewer months to complete than under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade system, but overall the WTO appears not to play a significant role in reducing the number of disputes or shortening their duration.
Separating the Good from the Bad: Developments in Islamic Acquisition Financing

A case study of a leveraged acquisition using typical ijara financing, plus a second tier sukuk al-ijara, and a third tier, unsecured seller financing mechanism.
The effect of health insurance on home payment delinquency: Evidence from ACA Marketplace subsidies

Abstract We use administrative tax data and survey responses to quantify the effect of subsidized health insurance on rent and mortgage delinquency. We employ a regression discontinuity (RD) design, exploiting the income threshold for receiving Marketplace subsidies in states that did not expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. Among households targeted by the policy, eligibility for subsidies is associated with a roughly 25 % decline in the delinquency rate and reduced exposure to out-of-pocket medical expenditure risk. IV treatment effects are significant, indicating that the decline in the delinquency rate is related to participation in health insurance. We show that, under plausible assumptions, the social benefits implied by our RD estimates, in terms of fewer evictions and foreclosures, are substantial.
Repeat Sales Regression on Heterogeneous Properties

This paper proposes a generalized repeat sales regression (GRSR) that uses repeat sales from the entire market, in which properties may have heterogeneous value appreciation processes, to estimate price indices for not only the entire market, but also submarkets or customized portfolios of properties that only have small numbers of value observations. Monte Carlo simulations provide strong evidence that the GRSR indices more accurately measure the index for the entire market as well as individual property value appreciation than conventional RSR indices. This paper also proposes a Chi-square test to detect the heterogeneity in property value appreciation across submarkets/portfolios, and use simulations to show that the test is powerful in small samples. This paper finally illustrates the application of the GRSR using a historical dataset of the Chicago housing market from 1970 to 1986.
Cyber Civil Rights

Danielle Citron, Professor, University of Maryland School of Law Robert Kaczarowski, Professor, Fordham University School of Law Paul Ohm, Associate Professor, University of Colorado Law School, Initiative Director, Silicon Flatirons Center for Law and Technology Mary Anne Franks, Bigelow Teaching Fellow and Lecturer in Law, University of Chicago Law School Helen Norton, Associate Professor, University of Colorado Law School Nancy Ehrenreich, Professor, University of Denver Sturm College of Law
Corporate and International Tax Reform: Proposals for the Second Obama Administration (and Beyond)

This paper presents some long, medium and short-term proposals for corporate and international tax reform in the wake of the passage of the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012.
The elasticity of trade: Estimates and evidence ☆

Quantitative results from a large class of structural gravity models of international trade depend critically on a single parameter governing the elasticity of trade with respect to trade frictions. We provide a new method to estimate this elasticity and illustrate the merits of our approach relative to the estimation strategy of Eaton and Kortum (2002). We employ this method on data for 123 developed and developing countries for the year 2004 using new disaggregate price and trade ﬂow data. Our benchmark estimate for all countries is approximately 4.5, nearly 50 percent lower than the alternative estimation strategy would suggest. This difference implies a doubling of the measured welfare costs of autarky across a large class of widely used trade models.
Polygons with prescribed angles in 2D and 3D

We consider the construction of a polygon P with n vertices whose turning angles at the vertices are given by a sequence \(A=(\alpha _0,\ldots , \alpha _{n-1})\), \(\alpha _i\in (-\pi ,\pi )\), for \(i\in \{0,\ldots , n-1\}\). The problem of realizing A by a polygon can be seen as that of constructing a straight-line drawing of a graph with prescribed angles at vertices, and hence, it is a special case of the well studied problem of constructing an angle graph. In 2D, we characterize sequences A for which every generic polygon \(P\subset \mathbb {R}^2\) realizing A has at least c crossings, for every \(c\in \mathbb {N}\), and describe an efficient algorithm that constructs, for a given sequence A, a generic polygon \(P\subset \mathbb {R}^2\) that realizes A with the minimum number of crossings. In 3D, we describe an efficient algorithm that tests whether a given sequence A can be realized by a (not necessarily generic) polygon \(P\subset \mathbb {R}^3\), and for every realizable sequence the algorithm finds a realization.
THE SUBSTANTIVE PRINCIPLE OF EQUAL TREATMENT

This paper attempts to identify a principle of equal treatment that gives specific structure to our widely shared judgments about the circumstances in which we have moral reason to object to the differential adverse treatment of others. I formulate what I call a “substantive” principle of equal treatment (to be distinguished from principles of formal equality) that describes a moral constraint on the reasons we can have for picking out individuals for differentially adverse action. I argue that this constraint is violated when an action, in view of its rationale, expresses lesser respect for the moral status of an individual under some differentiating description compared to the respect reserved to another class of individuals who are not picked out by that description. I show that this substantive demand of equal treatment is not morally otiose and I reveal the fallacy underlying accounts that have concluded otherwise.
Deliberation, Participation, and Democratic Legitimacy: Should Deliberative Mini-publics Shape Public Policy?

In this article I defend the view that only a participatory conception of democracy is compatible with the criterion of democratic legitimacy that deliberative democrats endorse. I do so by analyzing proposals to use mini-publics for shaping public policy and showing that their generalized use would diminish rather than increase the legitimacy of the deliberative system as a whole. These proposals face a normative dilemma. Their implementation would be a superfluous shortcut if the shaping relies on the uptake of the mini-publics’ recommendations for deliberation in the public sphere. Alternatively, if the mini-publics’ recommendations were to directly feed into a decision-making process bypassing deliberation in the public sphere, its implementation would be incompatible with the criterion of legitimacy endorsed by deliberative democrats.
Democracy, Choice, and the Importance of Voice in Contemporary Media

Broadcast media's functionality in a democracy requires that the industry disseminate news and information that is full, complete, and appealing to an increasingly diverse constituency. This article, written for the DePaul Symposium devoted to Race as Proxy, examines and advances media's duty to report fully and holistically - a phenomenon I refer to as "multiplicity of voice." Broadcast media, which dominates the marketplace of ideas, must voluntarily and consciously adopt multiplicity of voice as a critical consideration in the dissemination of news and information. The Article concludes that the voluntary embrace of multiplicity furthers the industry's goal of capturing a sizable audience, and secures for the public a more democratic government that is checked by the "Fourth Estate."
Productive efficiency performance of minority and nonminority-owned banks: A nonparametric approach

Abstract This study examines the efficiency performance of the minority-owned banks (MOBs) as multiproduct firms relative to that of the nonminority banks (NMOBs) using a highly flexible nonparametric approach. Since MOBs and NMOBs employ distinct technologies the efficiency indices for the two groups are derived relative to their respective group-specific frontiers and are contrasted to shed light on the ownership-efficiency relationship. The MOB sample is then disaggregated and the intra-group efficiency differentials are investigated. The findings support the hypothesis that abstracting the regional, regulatory, size, and maturity characteristics of banks, efficiency differentials between MOBs and NMOBs are statistically insignificant.
Trade adjustment in the WTO system: are more safeguards the answer?

For countries to engage successfully in the international trading system, their industries, firms, and workers must respond continually to new conditions of competition. The continuing need to adjust arises both from policy changes approved in multilateral negotiations—e.g. implementation of trade liberalization commitments, preference erosion, or adverse terms-of-trade consequences of export subsidy elimination—and from ongoing changes in competitive pressures inherent in a liberal trading system—e.g. effects on comparative advantage of changes in technology or factor supplies. But the political response to a situation calling for adjustment is often a call for ‘safeguards’—whether as an ex ante provision in negotiated agreements or as an ex post measure once the agreement has been signed and the reality of new conditions takes shape. This paper examines the range of adjustment problems confronting the current and future international trading system, the economic arguments for intervention to deal with these problems, the adjustment environment as set out in the current World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreements, and proposals for reform. While the adjustment problems we discuss apply to both rich and poor WTO member countries, we highlight the issues of adjustment especially relevant for developing countries.
Derivatives and the Bankruptcy Code: Why the Special Treatment?

The collapse of Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) in Fall 1998 and the Federal Reserve Bank’s subsequent efforts to orchestrate a bail-out raise important questions about the structure of the Bankruptcy Code. The Code contains numerous provisions affording special treatment to financial derivatives contracts, the most important of which exempts these contracts from the “automatic stay” and permits counterparties to terminate derivatives contracts with a debtor in bankruptcy and seize underlying collateral. No other counterparty or creditor of the debtor has such freedom; to the contrary, the automatic stay prohibits them from undertaking any act that threatens the debtor’s assets. It is commonly believed that the exemption for derivatives contracts helps reduce “systemic risk” in financial markets, that is, the risk that multiple major financial market participants will fail at the same time and, as a result, drastically reduce market liquidity. Indeed, Congress is now contemplating reforms that would extend the exemption to include a broader array of financial contracts, all in the name of reducing systemic risk. This is a mistake. The Bankruptcy Code can do little to reduce systemic risk and may in fact exacerbate it, as the experience of LTCM suggests. Risk of a systemic meltdown arose there and prompted intervention by the Fed precisely because derivatives contracts were exempt from the automatic stay. Derivatives contracts may merit special treatment, but fear of systemic risk is a red herring. A better, efficiency-based reason for treating derivatives contracts differently arises naturally from the economic theory underlying the automatic stay. The stay protects assets to the extent they are needed to preserve a firm’s going-concern surplus (its value above and beyond the sale value of its assets). Assets are needed to preserve going-concern surplus only if they are firm-specific, that is, only if they are worth more inside the firm than outside it. This is often true for plant and equipment. It is never true for derivatives contracts. This observation helps rationalize the Code’s treatment of derivatives contracts and other features of the automatic stay. There are, however, downsides to treating derivatives contracts differently (creditors, for example, would like to disguise loans as derivatives contracts). These downsides are probably not significant, but they highlight the fragility of the Code’s treatment of derivatives contracts, which should worry members of Congress as they consider arguments to expand the Code’s exemptions for derivatives contracts. Derivatives and the Bankruptcy Code 3
Pay without Performance Overview of the issues

Executive Overview In a recent book, Pay without Performance: The Unfulfilled Promise of Executive Compensation, Bebchuk and Fried critique existing executive pay arrangements and the corporate governance processes that produce them. They also put forward proposals for improving both executive pay and corporate governance. This paper provides an overview of the main elements of their critique and proposals. The authors show that, under current legal arrangements, boards cannot be expected to contract at arm's length with the executives whose pay they set. They discuss how managers' influence can explain many features of the executive compensation landscape, including ones that researchers subscribing to the arm's-length contracting view have long considered as puzzling. The authors also explain how managerial influence can lead to inefficient arrangements that generate weak or even perverse incentives, as well as to arrangements that make the amount and performance-insensitivity of pay less transparent. F...
Expanding the Focus of Cost-Benefit Analysis for Food Safety: A Multi-Factorial Risk Prioritization Approach

A pressing need in the area of food safety is a tool for making overall, macro judgments about which risks should be given priority for management. Governments often seek to base this prioritization on public health impacts only to find that other considerations also influence the prioritization process. A multi-factorial approach formally recognizes that public health, market-level impacts, consumer risk preferences and acceptance, and the social sensitivity of particular risks all play a role in prioritization. It also provides decision makers with a variety of information outputs that allow risk prioritization to be considered along different dimensions. Macro-level prioritization of risks based on multiple factors is an important expanded use of cost-benefit analysis to manage risk.
Naturalized Jurisprudence and American Legal Realism Revisited

My thanks to Kenneth Himma for organizing this symposium on my book Naturalizing Jurisprudence : Essays on American Legal Realism and Naturalism in Legal Philosophy 1 and to the editors of Law er Philosophy for agreeing to host it. I am especially grateful to the contributors Julie Dickson, Michael Steven Green, and Mark Greenberg for their thoughtful and detailed engagement with my work. I learned from their essays, even when I disagreed, and I also found much that I agree with. In what follows, I shall focus mainly on the remaining points of scholarly disagreement, ones where further progress might be made or where I think my original view of the matter still has some merit, the criticisms notwithstanding. I shall start by addressing the essay by Green, which takes up my interpretation of the American Legal Realists (hereafter 'Realists'). I shall then turn to broader methodological issues in jurisprudence that arise in the essays by Greenberg (though his is also related to the issue of how to understand Realism) and Dickson.
Process Logic for Verifying the Correctness of Business Process Models

Process verification is a key step in business process management. In this paper, we propose process logic as a new logical formalism and mathematical method to enable advanced process verification. We formally define the syntax and semantics of process logic, establish a formal relationship between process logic and graphical representation of process models, and transform the problem of verifying the correctness of process models into a problem of determining the validity of logic argument forms.
The Interplay of Formal and Relational Contracts: Evidence from Movies

This article empirically examines the interplay of formal and relational contracting in the Spanish movie industry. Using institutional knowledge, I extend the existing theory on explicit and implicit contracts to include learning, a critical element of contracting in the movie industry. Subsequently, I show results consistent with the theory using a unique data set from a Spanish movie exhibitor with detailed information on the use of formal contracts and ex post contractual adjustments. My results show that distributors are more likely to use formal contracts for movies of higher expected value. Consistent with well-established results of the relational contracting literature, distributors use formal contracts to deter exhibitors' opportunistic behavior since their reneging temptations from implicit agreements are strongest for this type of movies. Conditional on using a formal contract, I find that ex post renegotiation is more likely to occur when the movie performs below expectations. The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Yale University. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com, Oxford University Press.
The effects of the governance environment on the choice of investment mode and the strategic implications

Direct investment and indirect (portfolio) investment require different governance mechanisms for investor protection. The literature on the effect of the governance environment (such as the legal system) on investment, which had been relatively underdeveloped, has begunto drawmore attention recently. Existing studies, however, have largely ignored the differences between the two modes of investment in terms of investor protection. Their finding that a poor governance environment deters foreign direct investmentis mis-specified and fails to explainwhy countries with a poorgovernance environment attract relatively large amount of direct investment as opposed to portfolio investment. We introduce a framework that measures thelevelof rule-basedgovernance environmentin a capital receiving economy, with an especial attention to the information and enforcement mechanisms for investor protection facilitated by different governance environments. We argue that in countries with a weak rule-based governance environment, investors prefer direct investment to indirect (portfolio) investment, because the former can be better protected by private means. Our empirical test strongly supports our hypotheses. Strategic implications for investors are drawn in conclusion.
Supervised Machine Learning for Eliciting Individual Demand

Direct elicitation, guided by theory, is the standard method for eliciting latent preferences. The canonical direct-elicitation approach for measuring individuals' valuations for goods is the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak procedure, which generates willingness-to-pay (WTP) values that are imprecise and systematically biased by understating valuations. We show that enhancing elicited WTP values with supervised machine learning (SML) can substantially improve estimates of peoples' out-of-sample purchase behavior. Furthermore, swapping WTP data with choice data generated from a simple task, two-alternative forced choice, leads to comparable performance. Combining all the data with the best-performing SML methods yields large improvements in predicting out-of-sample purchases. We quantify the benefit of using various SML methods in conjunction with using different types of data. Our results suggest that prices set by SML would increase revenue by 28% over using the stated WTP, with the same data.
The economics of oil definitions: the case of Canada's oil sands

Canada has chosen to define its 174 billion barrels of oil sand bitumen reserves as crude oil deposits, putting the country on a par with Saudi Arabia in potential oil production. However, the physical and economic definition of calling oil sand bitumen crude oil needs to be questioned. On the face of it, these definitions make Canada look as powerful as OPEC's leading producer, or Russia, on the world oil market. However, a fuller analysis shows that Canadian oil sand is quite different from crude oil and that Canada will have little if any effect on the global oil market, or on OPEC.
The economics of plaintiff-side personal injury practice

Little is known about the economics of plaintiff-side law firms, which typically work on a contingency fee basis. We begin here to fill that gap. We report on the fees received by 124 plaintiff-side personal injury firms located in four states (Illinois, Texas, and two additional undisclosed states). At all of the firms, cases with modest fees may help to keep the lights on, but occasional ‘‘blockbuster’’ cases account for an overwhelming percentage of earned fees. A one-third contingency fee is the most common arrangement but is not always collected ex post; when recoveries are low, firms often reduce or waive their fee. We also estimate the impact of various statutory contingency fee caps on these firms; the effect varies, depending on cap design and casemix. But, many contingency fee caps dramatically affect the economics of plaintiff-side personal injury practice. TABLE OF CONTENTS
Active Fundamental Performance

We propose a new measure, active fundamental performance (AFP), to identify skilled mutual fund managers. AFP evaluates fund investment skills conditioned on the release of firms’ fundamental information. For each fund, we examine the covariance between deviations of its portfolio weights from a benchmark portfolio and the underlying stock performance on days when firms publicize fundamental information. Because asset prices on these information days better reflect firm fundamentals, AFP can more effectively identify investment skills. From 1984 to 2014, funds in the top decile of high AFP subsequently outperformed those in the bottom decile by 2% to 3% per year. Received August 25, 2016; editorial decision December 17, 2017 by Editor Andrew Karolyi. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online.
Comment on Richard B. Freeman’s “Labor markets and institutions in economic development”

Freeman criticizes the economics profession on the ground that it has improperly accepted the philosophy of laissez‐faire capitalism in five different realms: economic development, unionism and minimum wage laws, socialist central planning versus decentralized markets, military dictatorships and income inequality, and the benefits of economic progress. Attempts to defend the view that the free enterprise analysis in these five different areas can withstand Freeman’s criticisms.
Returns-Chasing Behavior, Mutual Funds, and Beta's Death

I develop an agency model where returns-chasing behavior by mutual fund investors causes beta not to be priced to the degree predicted by the standard CAPM. Mutual fund investors chase returns through time, precipitating unusually large aggregate cash inflows into mutual funds just after dramatic market runups. Mutual fund investors also chase returns cross-sectionally across funds so that the highest-performing funds capture the largest fraction of the aggregate inflows into the mutu al fund sector. The interaction of these two flow-performance relationships induces an asymmetry in payoffs to mutual funds where fund managers care most about outperforming peers during bull markets. Since high-beta stocks tend to outperform in up markets, active fund managers tilt their portfolios toward high-beta stocks, reducing the beta risk premium in equilibrium. To support the model's time-series flow-performance assumption, I show empirically that market returns have a large economic impact on subsequent aggregate mutual fund flows. In addition, data on mutual fund holdings suggest that the aggregate stock portfolio held by equity funds is overweighted in high-beta stocks relative to the overall market, though this does not include the cash held by mutual funds. Fama-MacBeth tests indicate that the equity premium falls only slightly as the relative size of mutual funds increases, and the relation is not statistically significant.
Direct versus Communications-Based Prohibitions on Price Fixing

This article compares two policies toward coordinated oligopolistic price elevation. Most commentators endorse the view that the law should (and does) prohibit only those price elevations produced by certain sorts of interfirm communications, such as secret price negotiations. In contrast, little attention has been devoted to a more direct approach that encompasses all coordinated price elevations that can be detected and sanctioned effectively. It is demonstrated that the conventional formulation rests on numerous misconceptions, involves complex and costly detection if its logical implications are taken seriously, and tends to target caseswith relatively lowdeterrencebenefits and high chilling costs in contrast to those targeted under the direct approach.
Justice James D. Hopkins: Jurist, Dean, Scholar and Expert on New York Law

It is an appropriate tribute to our late Dean James D. Hopkins that this edition of Pace Law Review be dedicated to a man who many leaders of the bench, bar, and academia believe is one of the twentieth century’s greatest common law appellate jurists. Dean Hopkins, better known as Judge Hopkins, was Pace Law School’s second Dean from 1982 to 1983, an associate justice of the Supreme Court of New York, and a justice of the Appellate Division for the Second Department from 1962 to 1981. He authored hundreds of significant majority, dissenting, and concurring judicial opinions on New York law, many of which continue to be relevant to the development of substantive and procedural law in the Empire State. Hopkins’s opinions have been cited and relied on by courts throughout the nation. He is recognized and praised as a “compleat jurist,” a leading law reformer, and an outstanding scholar.
The Causal Context of Disparate Vote Denial

For nearly fifty years, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (“VRA”) and its amendments have remedied racial discrimination in the electoral process with unparalleled muscularity. Modern vote denial practices that have a disparate impact on minority political participation, however, increasingly fall outside the VRA’s ambit. As judicial tolerance of disparate impact claims has waned in other areas of law, the contours of Section 2, one of the VRA’s most powerful provisions, have also narrowed to fit the shifting landscape. Section 2’s “on account of race” standard to determine discrimination in voting has evolved from one of quasi-intent determined by a totality of the circumstances, to a short-lived intent requirement, followed by an enhanced disparate impact analysis, culminating in a more recent standard that simulates proximate cause. This Article proposes a test for Section 2 vote denial claims that comports with the narrowing construction of disparate impact claims and reclaims the robust contextual analysis that the VRA contemplates. The “causal context” test proposed here is anchored to “core values” mined from Section 2’s legislative history, particularly the “Senate factors.” The causal context analysis relies on proof of explicit or implicit bias, as well as circumstances internal and external to elections that give rise to disparate vote denial, without requiring proof of intent. This approach is historically consistent with the VRA’s totality of the circumstances test and cognizant of courts’ increasing demands for proof of a causal link within disparate impact jurisprudence. Moreover, the proposed causal context analysis is consonant with recent federal proceedings evaluating the racially disparate impact of voter identification laws, voter purges, early voting restrictions, and other forms of
REFLECTIONS ON THE MOVEMENT TOWARD A MORE CHILD-CENTERED ADOPTION

Twenty years ago, when I began to represent foster children in the historic Cook County Juvenile Court in Chicago, Illinois, 1 I discovered the deep and enduring connections children have to their kin, particularly their parents and siblings. I represented children of parents on whom the court and agencies had given up—families whose legal ties had been or were on the precipice of being terminated. In contrast to the state actors, the children remained deeply connected to their parents, even when they were resigned to never again live with them. There were also siblings who asked me to fight against termination of their parents’ parental rights or to resist their adoptions because they did not want to be separated from each other or to have no guaranty that they could continue to know and see each other or their parents; others resisted adoption because they feared their names would change. My colleagues and I fought on their behalf for legal protections that would preserve their identities and bridge these connections. In other words, we fought to maintain legal, social, and family connections after termination of parental rights and into the adoption. 2 Unfortunately, the law did not recognize these ties. Legally, the parent-child relationship was “all or nothing” and our legal strategies to protect these connections were largely unsuccessful. 3 These strategies included seeking
Puzzling Stock Options and Compensation Norms

Why do so many executives and other employees receive fixed stock options as part of their compensation packages? There is an impressive literature on compensatory options, and yet it raises more puzzles than it solves. Tax law, option theory, and agency theory all suggest that we might have expected to find quite different practices than we do observe. In particular, there is a puzzle in the popularity of conventional fixed options when indexed options would seem to be relatively attractive. The solution or story offered here develops arguments about signaling, in the form of employees' disinclination to be seen as preferring cash over options in their own employer's future. It relies on the idea that indexed options encourage more risk alteration, or inefficient differentiation, than other forms of compensation. And it introduces the notion that there is something of a norm in favor of nonconflicting fortunes within a community. The norm part of the argument says something about the more general norm of privacy with respect to money matters and it illuminates the occasional practice of confidentiality regarding one's own compensation. This practice might be stable because of the negative signals emitted by defectors. The same analysis might help explain why stock option practices are somewhat sticky.
Influences of Timeline and Perceived Strategy Effectiveness on Balanced Scorecard Performance Evaluation Judgments

ABSTRACT: This study examines evaluator ratings of subordinate performance in implementing a new corporate strategy in a Balanced Scorecard environment. We focus on two factors predicted to influence strategic performance judgments: (1) the presence or absence of an explicit timeline for strategy implementation, and (2) the evaluator's perceptions of the effectiveness of the new strategy. One hundred eleven M.B.A. students averaging over eight years of work experience participated in the study. Consistent with predictions, we find that (1) absence of an implementation timeline was associated with fixation on lagging financial performance measures outside of the subordinate's time span of control, and (2) evaluator perceptions of the strategy's effectiveness were positively associated with evaluations of strategy-congruent performance. These results extend prior research by highlighting the importance of the time dimension and perceptions of strategy effectiveness in performance judgments. Implications for...
Explaining the Political Ambivalence of Religion

In 1979, an Islamic revolution in Iran confounded American foreign policy and inspired an Islamic resurgence in Afghanistan, Kashmir, the Middle East, and elsewhere. In Turkey, after over seven decades of rule by a secular nationalist military regime, an Islamic party won elections in 2002, deepening democracy and advocating Turkey’s entry into the European Union. In the 1990s, after four decades of rule, India’s secular Congress Party yielded power to a Hindu nationalist party that promoted religious laws and discourse and provoked Hindu-Muslim violence. The teachings of the Catholic Church’s Second Vatican Council of 1962 to 1965 encouraged subsequent democratization in the Philippines, Brazil, and Poland, but not in Rwanda, Argentina, or Hungary. In Sri Lanka, a lack of separation between sangha and state has fueled war between Buddhists and Hindu Tamils, whereas Buddhism in Taiwan and South Korea has promoted human rights and religious tolerance. Over the past generation, evangelical Protestants have become a powerful voting bloc in the United States, Brazil, Guatemala, and Kenya. Defying the erstwhile dominance of the secularization thesis among western intellectuals, religion has waxed in its political influence over the past generation in every region of the globe except perhaps Western Europe (see Berger 1999; Casanova 1994; Stark 1999).
The Role of Trust Law Principles in Defining Public Trust Duties for Natural Resources

Public trusts for natural resources incorporate both limits and duties on governments in their stewardship of those natural resources. They exist in every state in the United States—in constitutional provisions, statutes, and in common law. Yet the law recognizing public trusts for natural resources may contain only the most basic provisions—often just a sentence or two. The purpose and terms of these public trusts certainly answer some questions about the limits and duties of trustees, but they do not answer all questions. When questions arise that the body of law creating or recognizing a public trust for natural resources does not fully answer, trustees, lawyers, and courts often look to trust law for help. In fact, they have been doing so for more than a century, including in the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 1892 public trust decision in Illinois Central Railroad Co. v Illinois. In this sense, trust law provides a set of background or underlying principles for interpreting and applying public trusts. Using cases from around the country, this Article sets out a four-step methodology for determining when and how to use trust law principles to help interpret public trusts. This methodology can be applied in any case involving the use of trust principles to help interpret any particular public trust. This Article also explains that the relevant trust law includes general trust principles, private trust law priciples, and charitable trust law principles, and should not be limited to private trust law. This Article uses a 2019 Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court decision, Pennsylvania Environmental Defense Fund v. Commonwealth, as a case study. The case applies Article I, Section 27 of the Pennsylvania constitution, which requires that public natural resources be conserved and maintained for the benefit of present and future generations. In that case, the court used an interpretation of private trust law to decide that the state could spend some bonus and rental payment money from oil and gas leasing on state forest and park land, which is constitutional public trust property, for nontrust purposes. This Article applies the four-part methodology to the case, explains general trust law and charitable trust law principles that the Commonwealth Court did not address, and argues that use of these principles better fits the constitutional public trust. It concludes that the money from bonus and rental payments should be spent entirely for the purposes of the trust. This Article is intended to draw attention to both the potential value of trust law principles and also to their potential danger in the interpretation and application of public trust laws for natural resources. Trust law has the potential to enhance the protectiveness of public trusts by imposing various fiduciary duties on trustees. It also has the potential to undermine public trusts, particularly through rules requiring that trust assets be financially productive. To vindicate public trusts for natural resources, environmental and natural resources lawyers need to become better trust lawyers.
WHY THE LAW OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP BARELY MATTERS

Despite valiant (if nascent) efforts to show that law, or at least courts and doctrine, matters in the broader study of entrepreneurship, I am skeptical that it really does. The reason goes to the fundamental orientation to rules and their application of law and lawyers, on one hand, and entrepreneurs, on the other. As much as law students like rules, and social scientists like theories capable of prediction and algorithms and models, there are inherent philosophical (and perhaps psychological) problems with the interaction of the lawyer and the entrepreneur. In the same way that the relationship of law to moral intuition is perennially debated and no less frequently unresolved as between empiricists and rationalists, foundationalists and anti-foundationalists, the social context of rule-following for legal ordering is at odds with the entrepreneur's orientation to rules. In this Essay (which serves as an introduction to a longer work), I want to explore several themes. First, as the philosophers have shown, there is no rule for the application of a rule, and what we perceive as a given result is a matter of social congruence rather than a result inherent in the rule itself. The social and psychological orientation of those who create law, and those who create innovation, are at odds. Second, the predominant approaches to the science of law fail to account for the inherent paradox (or antinomy) of judgment. Third, the very nature of a legal or regulatory solution, by and large, is cognitive, and fails to address the non-cognitive aspects of entrepreneurship. Finally, there is a fundamental distinction between the definition of one's presently ascertainable rights in property, and private ordering to deal with future contingency. In the former, the law comes as close as it ever does to being constitutive; in the latter, what we say now is merely ammunition for instrumental use later.
Human Rights, the Laws of War, and Reciprocity

Human rights law does not appear to enjoy as high a level of compliance as the laws of war, yet is institutionalized to a greater degree. This paper argues that the reason for this difference is related to the strategic structure of international law. The laws of war are governed by a regime of reciprocity, which can produce self-enforcing patterns of behavior, whereas the human rights regime attempts to produce public goods and is thus subject to collective action problems. The more elaborate human rights institutions are designed to overcome these problems but fall prey to second-order collective action problems. The simple laws of war institutions have been successful because they can exploit the logic of reciprocity. The paper also suggests that limits on military reprisals are in tension with self-enforcement of the laws of war. The U.S. conflict with Al Qaeda is discussed. The Bush administration’s counterterror tactics provoked a great deal of criticism from the standpoint of international law. However, the criticism in the United States and in other countries differed in important respects. In foreign countries, particularly in Europe, critics focused on violations of human rights norms, particularly those contained in the Convention Against Torture and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. In the United States, the debate centered on the Geneva Conventions. In statements issuing from the president, debates in Congress, legal memoranda produced by lawyers in the executive branch, and judicial opinions, the laws of war received a great deal more attention than human rights law, 1 University of Chicago Law School. Prepared for Conference on Rights and Reciprocity, Tel Aviv, January 2011. Thanks to Eyal Benvenisti, Gabby Blum, Ryan Goodman, Bob Keohane, Ola Mestad, Arial Porat, and Peter Rosendorff, and participants at an international law workshop at NYU Law School. James Kraehenbuehl provided helpful research assistance. 2 See, e.g., Conor Foley, In The Dock, Guardian, Oct. 18, 2007. 3 See, e.g, President George W. Bush, Missile Defense and the War on Terror: Address at the National Defense University (Oct. 23, 2007) (describing the interrogation techniques as “lawful”); see also President George W. Bush, Historical Analogies for the War on Terror: Address at the Heritage Foundation (Nov. 1, 2007) (defending his nominee to Attorney General for not answering question on water boarding by describing the technique as “lawful” and “necessary”). 4 E.g., the McCain Amendment, S. Amdt. 1977 to H.R. 2863 (Department of Defense, Emergency Supplemental Appropriations to Address Hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico, and Pandemic Influenza Act, 2006). 5 E.g., Memorandum from John Yoo, Deputy Ass’t Att’y Gen., to William J. Haynes, Gen. Counsel of the Dep’t. of Def., Application of Treaties and Laws to al Qaeda and Taliban Detainees (Jan. 9, 2002). 6 See Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, 548 U.S. 557 (2006).