St. John's University Law Faculty Blog

Professor G. Ray Warner’s article, Conflicting Norms: Impact of the Model Law on Chapter 11’s Global Restructuring Role, has been accepted for publication by the International Insolvency Review.

The article explores the conflict created in domestic United States insolvency law by the adoption of the UNCITRAL Model Law on Cross-Border Insolvency. The Model Law, now Chapter 15 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code, takes a modified universalist approach to cross-border bankruptcy that designates a debtor’s center of main interest [“COMI”] as the primary jurisdiction for a global restructuring. This COMI-centric approach is in conflict with the U.S.’s long-standing COMI-neutral policy of encouraging debtors with no significant U.S. connections to use Chapter 11 for global restructurings. The article analyzes the extent to which the Model Law’s COMI-centric norm has changed the U.S. courts’ willingness to accept Chapter 11 cases filed by foreign debtors.

Professor Peggy McGuinness was interviewed by BBC World Service about the U.S. government’s decision to revoke the visa of International Criminal Court Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda.

Professor McGuinness addressed the history of U.S. engagement with the ICC, the Trump administration’s confrontational stance toward the court, and how Bensouda’s pursuit of an investigation about potential war crimes committed by U.S. military and intelligence personnel in Afghanistan led the U.S. to block Bensounda’s plans to engage in fact finding in the U.S.

A video of the live interview can be found here.

On April 3, Professor Anna Roberts presented her article, Convictions as Guilt, at Seton Hall Law School.  Convictions as Guilt is forthcoming in the Fordham Law Review.

Here is the abstract:

A curious tension exists in scholarly discourse about the criminal justice system. On the one hand, a copious body of work exposes a variety of facets of the system that jeopardize the reliability of convictions. These include factors whose influence is pervasive: the predominance of plea bargaining, which presents carrots and sticks to innocent and guilty alike, and the subordination of the defense, symbolized by resource disparities that prevent even narratives of innocence from getting a fair hearing. On the other hand, in a variety of contexts, scholars discuss those with criminal convictions in a way that appears to assume crime commission. This assumption obscures crucial failings of the system, muddies the role of academia, and, given the unequal distribution of criminal convictions, risks compounding race- and class-based stereotypes of criminality. From careful examination of this phenomenon and its possible explanations, reform proposals emerge.

On April 1, Professor Keith Sharfman presented his article, “Economic Analysis of Jewish Law,” at Touro Law School.  A video of the presentation is available here.

Professor Sharfman is introduced by St. John’s colleague, Professor Ettie Ward, at the 2:28.11 mark, and the talk runs till the 2:48.10 mark.  The article is slated to appear in a future issue of the Touro Law Review.

On April 1, Professor Anita S. Krishnakumar presented her article, Backdoor Purposivism, at the University of Houston Law Center’s Faculty Colloquium.  Backdoor Purposivism is forthcoming in the Duke Law Journal. 

Here is the abstract:

It has become standard, among statutory interpretation commentators, to declare that “We are all textualists now.” The comment stems from the observation that in the modern, post-Scalia era, all of the Justices on the U.S. Supreme Court—including those considered purposivists—pay significant attention to statutory text when construing statutes and, relatedly, that legislative history use by the Court as a whole has declined compared to its heydey in the 1970s. The account of textualism’s triumph is so prevalent that some scholars have declared purposivism—or at least traditional purposivism—essentially defunct. Two prominent textualist scholars in particular have suggested that there is a “new purposivism” at work on the modern Court and that this purposivism is textually constrained, limiting its focus to the means identified in the text of the statute rather than the underlying policy objectives motivating the statute—or, alternately, using purpose as a threshold consideration in determining whether a statute is ambiguous in the first place.

This Article breaks from the conventional “purposivism is dead or dying” wisdom in two important ways. First, it argues, based on empirical analysis of 499 Roberts Court statutory interpretation cases decided between 2006 and 2017, that traditional purposivism is alive and well on the modern Supreme Court. That is, while purposivist Justices in the modern era do pay attention to text and invoke textual canons in a way that their 1970s purposivist counterparts did not, modern purposivists have not abandoned the traditional purposive approach of identifying a statute’s policy objective and adopting the construction that best fits that objective. On the contrary, modern purposivists regularly invoke statutory purpose, intent, and legislative history—even if the Court as a whole does not. Second, and perhaps more importantly, the Court’s textualist Justices quietly have been engaging in a form of purposive analysis that comes closer to traditional purposivism than scholars and jurists have recognized. That is, the textualist Justices have been using pragmatic reasoning, as well as traditional textual canons such as noscitur a sociis and the whole act rule, to impute a specific intent or policy goal to Congress in many cases. This practice, which I call “backdoor purposivism,” goes beyond using text as the best evidence of statutory purpose and entails significant judicial guesswork and construction of legislative purpose and intent. The Article suggests that, in the end, there may be less distance between textualists and purposivists than the old debates suggest—but because textualists have embraced purpose and intent in unexpected ways, rather than because, or merely because, purposivists have become more text-focused. It concludes by advocating that both textualists and purposivists employ interpretive resources outside their preferred toolkit, in order to check the accuracy of their initial statutory readings and to curb the influence of their inherent personal biases.