Columbia Law School Professors Picked for Top Ten Lists of 2015
Legal Theory Blog Selects Scholarly Works by Professors John C. Coffee Jr., Gillian E. Metzger, and David Pozen
New York, January 4, 2016—Works by three Columbia Law School professors won spots in “Top Ten” lists for the best books and scholarly articles of the year 2015 by the highly respected Legal Theory Blog.
John C. Coffee’s Entrepreneurial Litigation: Its Rise, Fall, and Future (Harvard University Press) was one of the year’s “most interesting” books, wrote Georgetown Law Professor Lawrence Solum, editor of the influential blog.
Coffee—the Adolf A. Berle Professor of Law and director of the Center on Corporate Governance at Columbia Law School—has been called “the preeminent expert on U.S. securities law” by The New York Review of Books, which also praised Entrepreneurial Litigation in a glowing review by Judge Jed S. Rakoff last November by : “Not only is the book more comprehensive than prior studies of class actions, it also probes more deeply, placing today’s class actions firmly within the setting of the modern trend toward turning the practice of law ever more into a business. Perhaps most impressively, Coffee’s book offers specific prescriptions . . . for reducing the weaknesses of modern class action litigation while enhancing its strengths.”
For “Downloads of the Year,” the Legal Theory Blog cited the articles “The Constitutional Duty to Supervise” (The Yale Law Journal, April 2015) by Gillian E. Metzger, the Stanley H. Fuld Professor of Law, and “Constitutional Bad Faith” (forthcoming in the Harvard Law Review) by Professor David Pozen.
Metzger’s essay argues that the exclusion of administrative systems from constitutional law is a mistake, as it “creates a deeply troubling disconnect between the realities of government and the constitutional requirements imposed on exercises of governmental power.” Pozen’s article examines why good faith and bad faith—central concepts in many areas of private and international law—go unmentioned in constitutional cases, though the U.S. Constitution twice refers to faithfulness and “insinuations of bad faith pervade constitutional discourse.”
Both articles were “highly recommended” by Solum when they were first posted on the Social Science Research Network.