Digital Commons Network^™

Lost In The Fire: Reflections On The Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial, Alina Ball

UC Law Constitutional Quarterly

The Tulsa Race Massacre centennial, occurring on the heels of the Movement for Black Lives and its historic national spotlight on racial inequity, provides a rare moment to be reflective about how transactional lawyering can advance racial and economic justice. This Essay examines the Greenwood District to not only explain the continuing economic disenfranchisement of people of color, but also provide transactional lawyers a case study through which they can critically examine their efforts to move beyond the rhetoric of economic development to rooting out racial violence and oppression that threatens not merely minority-owned businesses, but the lives of people …

A Tokenized Future: Regulatory Lessons From Crowdfunding And Standard Form Contracts, Darian M. Ibrahim

UC Law Journal

This Article examines the world of risk investing in the cryptoeconomy. The broader crypto market is booming despite the latest downturn. People and institutions are buying in. The question is now how to regulate it.

This Article first tackles the question of whether coins, tokens, and other investable cryptoassets are securities. Second, for those cryptoassets that are not securities, this Article seeks to find a regulatory solution that balances promoting innovation with investor protection, just as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) would do. To strike the right balance, this Article adopts a proposal by Ian Ayres and Alan Schwartz …

Masthead

UC Law Constitutional Quarterly

No abstract provided.

A Candle In The Labyrinth: A Guide For Immigration Attorneys To Assert Habeas Corpus After Dhs V. Thuraissigiam, Joshua J. Schroeder

UC Law Constitutional Quarterly

In the summer of 2020, immigration law seemed to become the gravitational center of presidential power. After the Supreme Court decided several immigration cases in favor of the executive department, former President Trump cited “the DACA case” to support a new constitutional theory that “[t]he Supreme Court gave the president of the United States powers that nobody thought the president had.” Accordingly, Trump began to issue presidential legislation including “an immigration plan, a health care plan, and various other plans.”

Trump also began to occupy cities that were politically opposed to his presidency with ICE and CBP agents, including BORTAC …

Masthead

UC Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Sacrificing Sovereignty: How Tribal-State Tax Compacts Impact Economic Development In Indian Country, Pippa Browde

UC Law Journal

Economic development is a critical component of tribal sovereignty. When a state asserts taxing authority within Indian Country, there is potential for overlapping, or juridical, taxation over the same transaction. Actual or even potential juridical taxation threatens economic development opportunities for tribes. For many years, tribes and states have entered into intergovernmental agreements called tax compacts to reduce or eliminate juridical taxation. Existing literature has done little more than mention tax compacts with cursory cost-benefit analyses of the agreements. This is the first Article to critically examine the role tax compacts serve in promoting tribes’ economic development.

This Article analyzes …

The Cost Of Survival For Insulin-Dependent Diabetics, Nikol Nesterenko

UC Law Journal

Insulin, an injectable drug discovered about 100 years ago that now costs less than $5 to manufacture, is currently sold between $300 and $500 in the United States. The continuously growing price forces many insulin-dependent diabetics to forego their lifesaving medication, which can result in death. Although insulin manufacturers are a significant cause of insulin unaffordability in this country, pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), such as CVS Caremark, OptumRx, and Express Scripts, are essential in the insulin market and pressure insulin manufacturers to provide higher rebates, leading to higher prices for consumers.

Some states have addressed this issue by passing legislation …

Forensic Linguistics: Science Or Fiction?, Abigail Shim

UC Law Journal

The history of linguistics is meager and splintered due to the subject’s interdisciplinary nature. In the postwar era, the discipline attempted to revive as a scientific one, spearheaded by Noam Chomsky and his theory of generative grammar. Linguistics consequently broke away from the predominant structuralist approach of the nineteenth century, returning to rationalist roots. But with the rise of computer technology, Chomsky’s critiques of empirical, applicational linguistic approaches have lost their force. As academic linguistics splinters off again, loses its scientific edge, and regroups with the humanities, linguistics applied in the forensic context may implicate more questions than it answers, …

Does One Size Fit All? Why Our Genes Show The Need For Tailor-Made Solutions, Jack Haisman

UC Law Journal

Since the human genome was first sequenced in 2003, millions of consumers and medical professionals have swarmed the field of medical genetics, seeking to peer into the crystal ball and see what their own, or their patients’, futures may hold. Also rushing in are direct-to-consumer genetic testing companies like 23andMe and AncestryDNA, which can circumvent medical privacy laws by offering genetic testing without a medical provider.

Medical privacy regulations, such as the Health Information Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), the Genetic Information Discrimination Act of 2008 (GINA), and those promulgated by the Federal Trade Commission, do not regulate …

Masthead

UC Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Selling Antitrust, Herbert Hovenkamp

UC Law Journal

Antitrust enforcers and its other defenders have never done a good job of selling their field to the public. That is not entirely their fault. Antitrust is inherently technical, and a less engaging discipline to most people than, say, civil rights or criminal law. The more serious problem is that when the general press does talk about antitrust policy, it naturally gravitates toward the fringes, both the far right and the far left. Extreme rhetoric makes for better press than the day-to-day operations of a technical enterprise. The extremes are often stated in overdramatized black-and-white terms that avoid the real …

Prosocial Antitrust, Amelia Miazad

UC Law Journal

Antitrust law is at the center of today’s public debate. It has even emerged as a rare unifying force, with bipartisan promises to combat the concentration of economic power. Meanwhile, the business community is grappling with mounting systematic risks arising from climate change, income inequality, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Unexpectedly, the largest asset managers in the world find themselves on the front lines of these battles. Due to the rise of index investing, these “universal owners” manage portfolios that are so large and diversified, their holdings mirror the entire economy. Their diversification protects them against idiosyncratic risk, but greatly exposes …

Stockholder Politics, Roberto Tallarita

UC Law Journal

In the past few years, there has been a dramatic increase in shareholder support for proposals on political, environmental, ethical, and social issues, from climate change and employee diversity to animal welfare and corporate political spending (“social proposals”). But why do investors in a business corporation concern themselves with socially relevant issues? And how should corporate and securities law address this phenomenon?

Based on the analysis of more than 2,900 social proposals submitted from 2010 to 2021, this Article argues that shareholder activism on socially relevant issues (“stockholder politics”) cannot be entirely explained by financial motives or by special interest …

Limiting The Use Of The Categorical Approach And Setting A Statute Of Limitations For Deportation, Viridiana Ordonez

UC Law Journal

The United States relies, in part, on certain criminal convictions to determine which noncitizens are deportable. The specific types of criminal convictions subjecting an individual to deportation proceedings are found in the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). However, the INA only lists categories and types of crimes that trigger deportation. It is the courts’ responsibility to compare the state criminal statute grounding the conviction with the list provided under the INA. This process is done using the “categorical approach,” which allows courts to make a comparison and determine if a state criminal conviction matches a crime listed in the INA, …

From The Editor-In-Chief, Ashlee Raskulinecz

UC Law SF International Law Review

No abstract provided.

Corruption And Merit In The African Higher Education System: Legal, Policy And Sociological Reflections, Cristiano D'Orsi

UC Law SF International Law Review

This article analyses, under legal, political, and sociological aspects, the plight of corruption in Higher Education in Africa. On one side, the fight against corruption on the continent seems to use a growing number of legal instruments, at all levels (international, regional, sub-regional and domestic) on the other hand, however, it clashes against rooted traditions and a common mentality that often seem to justify acts of corruption in African academia. Through my work, I shed light on this, at least apparent, dichotomy and to make a synthesis of the various positions that can be found in Africa regarding this sensitive …

Dam Jurisprudence Of The Supreme Court Of India: Situating The Case Of Mullaperiyar Dam Dispute, S. G. Sreejith

UC Law SF International Law Review

The Mullaperiyar dam dispute between the South Indian states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu, which pertains to the safety of a 126-year-old dam, despite a ruling by the Supreme Court of India to retain the dam, keeps on reappearing before the Court in one way or other. The primary reason for such a recurrence is the fear of 4 million people of Kerala living downstream the century-old dam. Yet the Court has been reluctant to make a final settlement to the dispute and keeps on encouraging the states to find a solution through the political process.

The reluctance of the …

Immigration Judge Independence Under Attack: A Call To Re-Evaluate The Current Method Of Ij Appointment And Create A Separate Immigration Court System, Nicole Sequeira Tashovski

UC Law Journal of Race and Economic Justice

No abstract provided.

Keynote Address: “Asian Americans At A Crossroads”, Frank H. Wu

UC Law Journal of Race and Economic Justice

No abstract provided.

Asian And Muslim Americans Intersections, Solidarity And Striving Ahead, Khaled A. Beydoun

UC Law Journal of Race and Economic Justice

No abstract provided.

Masthead

UC Law Journal of Race and Economic Justice

No abstract provided.

Poetry Matters, Russell C. Leong

UC Law Journal of Race and Economic Justice

No abstract provided.

The Racialization Of Asian-Americans In The United States, Michael Omi

UC Law Journal of Race and Economic Justice

No abstract provided.

The Constitutionality Of Mandating Editorial Transparency, Eric Goldman

UC Law Journal

This Article explores the underappreciated constitutional problems that arise when regulators compel Internet services to disclose information about their editorial operations and decisions (what the Article calls “mandatory editorial transparency”). In particular, this Article highlights the inevitable problems caused by regulators’ attempts to confirm the accuracy of Internet services’ disclosures. The prospect of such enforcements will motivate Internet services to change their decisions to please regulators—thus having the same effect on speech as more direct, and obviously unconstitutional, speech regulations. This makes mandatory editorial transparency regulations another policy dead-end in regulators’ quest to control online speech.

Duty-Free “Apocalypse Insurance”: Revisiting Peter Thiel’S New Zealand Citizenship, Jonathan Barrett

UC Law SF International Law Review

New Zealand has often been imagined as a place of refuge in the event of social, ecological, economic or another catastrophe. The Covid-19 pandemic drew heightened attention to the desirability of access to a remote and temperate country. For ‘preppers’ of Silicon Valley, such access represents a form of apocalypse insurance. Google co-founder Larry Page was able to enter the country, when it was effectively sealed off to outsiders, to secure medical treatment for his child. To the surprise of many, who have been waiting months if not years for their residency applications to be processed, his investor category class …

Cutting-Edge Evidence: Strengths And Weaknesses Of New Digital Investigation Methods In Litigation, Alexa Koenig, Lindsay Freeman

UC Law Journal

The increased use of digital technologies in daily life has led to a steep rise in the introduction of highly technical evidence and expert witness testimony in criminal and civil litigation. The growing use of novel, quickly-developing investigation methods for digital evidence presents several challenges related to the difficulty lay persons have in judging complex forensic methodologies. The lack of judicial and legal training in the underlying methods and their potential vulnerabilities can result in fact-finders who over-rely on experts’ conclusions without properly interrogating the evidence themselves.

While many of the scientific and analytical methods employed by digital investigators can …

The Gdpr As Privacy Pretext And The Problem Of Co-Opting Privacy, Neil Richards

UC Law Journal

Privacy and data protection law’s expansion brings with it opportunities for mischief as privacy rules are used pretextually to serve other ends. This Essay examines the problem of such co-option of privacy using a case study of lawsuits in which defendants seek to use the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”) to frustrate ordinary civil discovery. In a series of cases, European civil defendants have argued that the GDPR requires them to redact all names from otherwise valid discovery requests for relevant evidence produced under a protective order, thereby turning the GDPR from a rule designed to protect the fundamental …

Masthead

UC Law SF International Law Review

No abstract provided.

Using Federal Power To Compel Fire Prevention And Address Growing Property Insurance Issues In Wildland-Urban Interface, Brandon A. Prince

UC Law Environmental Journal

The Western United States continues to experience devastating wildfire seasons. These severe disasters worsen as climate change lengthens periods of aridity and hotter temperatures. Despite this longstanding and well-documented forecast, wildland-urban interface (“WUI”) development has continued without much restriction over the past thirty years. Insurers who once issued policies in these western WUI regions now experience substantial losses on an annual basis and are reconsidering their approach to market participation in fire-prone areas. In areas with acute fire destruction like California, insurers’ resulting rate increases and non-renewals have forced state government intervention to protect property owners. This tension is emblematic …

Violations Of The Eighth Amendment: How Climate Change Is Creating Cruel And Unusual Punishment, Robert Pistone

UC Law Environmental Journal

As climate change continues to threaten human life on Earth, greenhouse gas emissions are causing more frequent record-setting temperatures and natural disasters. If the current United States prison system does not take steps to address how climate change is affecting the quality of life of its inmates, then imprisonment will be considered cruel and unusual punishment in the near future. In fact, in light of climate change, there is a strong argument that the current treatment of prisoners is already cruel and unusual punishment when other factors are taken into account. This paper focuses on the standards of what conditions …