Print Issues

Volume 59, Issue 6


Article

The Rise of Independent Directors in the United States, 1950-2005

Of Shareholder Value and Stock Market Prices
by  Jeffrey N. Gordon

Between 1950 and 2005, the composition of large public company boards dramatically shifted towards independent directors, from approximately 20% independents to 75% independents. The standards for independence also became increasingly rigorous over the period. The available empirical evidence provides no convincing explanation for this change. This Article explains the trend in terms of two interrelated…

Article

Should We Have Lay Justices?

by  Adrian Vermeule

By "lay Justices" I mean Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States who are not accredited lawyers. Currently the number of lay Justices is zero, although there is no constitutional or statutory rule that requires this. Commentators who urge that the Supreme Court should be diverse on all sorts of margins—methodological diversity, ideological…

Article

Criminal Procedure Within the Firm

by  Samuel W. Buell

It seems improbable that the theoretical and doctrinal framework of criminal procedure, developed mostly through a binary model of the individual and the state, would fit without modification in the tripartite model of the state, the firm, and the individual that characterizes the investigation and sanctioning of criminal conduct within legal entities. This intuition—which has…

Article

Genomics and Toxic Torts

Dismantling the Risk-Injury Divide
by  Jamie A. Grodsky

Emerging genetic and molecular technologies are revolutionizing our understanding of the relationship between genes and the environment. This Article develops an innovative framework for understanding the implications of the genomic revolution for the law of toxic torts. Professor Grodsky demonstrates how new technologies are poised to challenge longstanding distinctions between legally inconsequential "risk" and remediable…

Book Review

The Poverty of Posner’s Pragmatism

Balancing Away Liberty After 9/11
by  David Cole

Precommitments are most essential when we feel most compelled to break them. Constitutional law, our collective pact of precommitments, is never more important than in periods of crisis. History suggests that when democracies are captured by fear, they react in predictably troubling ways, in particular by targeting the most vulnerable for selective sacrifices that the…

Note

Immunity for Immunizations

Tort Liability, Biodefense, and Bioshield II
by  Lincoln Mayer

The September 11, 2001 attacks forced the United States to reassess the possibility of a mass-casualty bioterror event. If terrorists could coordinate the destruction of four large commercial aircraft, two of the tallest skyscrapers in the country, and an entire section of the Pentagon in a single day, killing thousands of people, then they might…

Comment

A Problem of Proof

How Routine Destruction of Court Records Routinely Destroys a Statutory Remedy
by  Cody Harris

Imagine the following scenario. Smith invites Jones to live as a boarder in his spacious home upon the condition that Jones will pay his share, keep up his end of the chores, and abide by the rules of the household. Jones is thrilled to have found such a nice place to live and signs the…