Information Technology and Legal Ethics: Expanding the Teaching and Understanding of Legal Ethics Through the Creation of a New Generation of Electronic Reference Materials

Cramton and Martin present a very brief summary of the inward-looking elements of the Cornell Law School prorgam to improve the basic required course in professional ethics and to encourage the pervasive teaching of the subject throughout the law curriculum. The Cornell program focuses on the preparation and dissemination of electronic material on legal ethics on a state-by-state basis

The Use of Replacement Workers in Union Contract Negotiations: The U.S. Experience, 1980-1989

It is argued in many circles that a structural change occurred in U.S. collective bargaining in the 1980s. We investigate the extent to which the hiring of replacement workers can account for this change. For a sample of over 300 major strikes since 1980, we estimate the likelihood of replacements being hired. We find that the risk of replacement declines during tight labor markets, and is lower for bargaining units with more experienced workers. We use the predicted replacement risk as an explanatory variable in a model of the union's choice between the strike and holdout threat. We find that strike usage decreases significantly as the predicted replacement risk increases. We estimate that a ban on the use of replacement workers would have increased strike incidence from 1982-1989 by 3 percentage points, a 30 percent increase.

A new perspective to rational expectations: maximin rational expectations equilibrium

We introduce a new notion of rational expectations equilibrium (REE) called maximin rational expectations equilibrium (MREE), which is based on the maximin expected utility (MEU) formulation. In particular, agents maximize maximin expected utility conditioned on their own private information and the information that the equilibrium prices generate. Maximin equilibrium allocations need not to be measurable with respect to the private information of each individual and with respect to the information that the equilibrium prices generate, as it is in the case of the Bayesian REE. We prove that a maximin REE exists universally (and not generically as in Radner (1979) and Allen (1981)), it is effcient and incentive compatible. These results are false for the Bayesian REE

The Effect of Collective Bargaining Legislation on Strikes and Wages

Using Canadian data on large, private-sector contract negotiations from January 1967 to March 1993, we find that wages and strikes are substantially influenced by labor policy. In particular, we find that prohibiting the use of replacement workers during strikes is associated with significantly higher wages, and more frequent and longer strikes. This is consistent with private information theories of bargaining. We estimate the welfare consequences of a ban on replacement workers, as well as other labor policies. Despite the higher dispute costs, union workers are better off with a ban on replacement workers. The higher wage more than compensates for the more frequent and longer strikes.

Ratifiable Mechanisms: Learning from Disagreement

In a mechanism design problem, participation constraints require that all types prefer the proposed mechanism to some status quo alternative. If the payoffs in the status quo depend on strategic actions based on the players' beliefs, then the inferences players make in the event someone objects to the proposed mechanism may alter the participation constraints. We include this possibility for learning from disagreement by modeling the mechanism design problem as a ratification game in which privately informed players simultaneously vote for or against the proposed mechanism. We develop and illustrate a new concept, ratifiability, that takes account of this inferencing problem in a consistent way. Requiring a mechanism to be ratifiable can either strengthen or weaken the standard participation constraints that arise in mechanism design problems

Reflections

The American Society of International Law Committee recommended that the Manley 0. Hudson Medal be awarded to Professor Eric Stein for his lifetime of significant contributions to international and comparative law. Stein, the Hessel E. Yntema Professor of Law, Emeritus, at the University of Michigan Law School, had been an active supporter of ASIL as Honorary Vice President, Counsellor, and Honorary Editor of, and frequent contributor to, the American Journal of International Law. His many books and articles established him as a leading thinker and writer on European Community law and on what he described in a famous article as the Uses, Misuses, and Nonuses of Comparative Law