Digital Commons Network^™

Predatory Structured Finance, Christopher L. Peterson

ExpressO

Predatory lending is a real, pervasive, and destructive problem as demonstrated by record settlements, jury awards, media exposes, and a large body of empirical scholarship. Currently the national debate over predatory mortgage lending is shifting to the controversial question of who should bear liability for predatory lending practices. In today’s subprime mortgage market, originators and brokers quickly assign home loans through a complex and opaque series of transactions involving as many as a dozen different strategically organized companies. Loans are typically transferred into large pools, and then income from those loans is “structured” to appeal to different types of investors. …

A New Clean Water Act, Paul Boudreaux

ExpressO

The Supreme Court’s new federalism has struck its strongest blows so far on the Clean Water Act. This summer, in Rapanos v. United States, a sharply divided Court nearly struck down a large chunk of the Act’s protection of wetlands and other small waterways – five years after an earlier decision had narrowed the reach of the Act because of its supposed overreaching into state prerogative. Why has the Clean Water Act been the Court’s favorite target? One reason is that the statute was fatally flawed when enacted. Congress chose to cover “navigable waters,” but its practical definition has never …

Searches & The Misunderstood History Of Suspicion & Probable Cause: Part One, Fabio Arcila

ExpressO

This article, the first of a two-part series, argues that during the Framers’ era many if not most judges believed they could issue search warrants without independently assessing the adequacy of probable cause, and that this view persisted even after the Fourth Amendment became effective. This argument challenges the leading originalist account of the Fourth Amendment, which Professor Thomas Davies published in the Michigan Law Review in 1999.

The focus in this first article is upon an analysis of the common law and how it reflected the Fourth Amendment’s restrictions. Learned treatises in particular, and to a lesser extent a …

But What Will They Do Without Unpublished Opinions?: Some Alternatives For Dealing With The Ninth Circuit's Massive Caseload Post F.R.A.P. 32.1, Bryan Wright

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Criminal Law Beyond The State: Popular Trials On The Frontier, Andrea Mcdowell

ExpressO

Before the civil war, “lynching” signified all forms of group-inflicted punishments, including vigilantism and mob killings. By this definition, lynchings happen in every country. Only in America, however, was lynching widespread and socially accepted. Scholars say this shows that the American commitment to due process often succumbed to “vigilante values,” that is, the desire for speedy, certain and severe penalties. They contend that vigilante values triumphed on the frontier, where courts were weak and vigilance committees strong. This article demonstrates that this view must be substantially qualified because due process was of great concern to Americans on the frontier, especially …

The Crimmigration Crisis: Immigrants, Crime, & Sovereign Power, Juliet P. Stumpf

ExpressO

This article provides a fresh theoretical perspective on the most important development in immigration law today: the convergence of immigration and criminal law. Although the connection between immigration and criminal law, or “crimmigration law,” is now the subject of national debate, scholarship in this area is in a fledgling state. This article begins to fill that void. It proposes a unifying theory – membership theory – for why these two areas of law recently have become so connected, and why that convergence is troubling. Membership theory restricts individual rights and privileges to those who are members of a social contract …

Commercial Law In The Cracks Of Judicial Federalism, Donald J. Smythe

ExpressO

Almost seventy years after the Supreme Court sought to rationalize the American system of judicial federalism in Erie, sales law remains trapped in a pattern more reminiscent of the Swift v. Tyson era. The extraordinarily wide separation of powers in the NCCUSL-ALI uniform law-making process has entrenched Article 2 of the UCC in the status quo. Concurrently, an imbalance between the federal and state courts in the American system of judicial federalism has conferred an unusually wide range of discretion over state commercial law on the federal courts. Ironically, therefore, state sales statutes are being reinterpreted and revised by the …

The Twilight Of The Opera Pirates: A Prehistory Of The Exclusive Right Of Public Performance For Musical Compositions, Zvi S. Rosen

ExpressO

The exclusive right of public performance of a musical composition now brings to composers and songwriters revenue of approximately one billion dollars a year in the US alone. However, this right was not firmly established until a century after America’s first copyright statute, relying until then on the common-law principles that protected unpublished works. The first effort to create this right by statute was the Ingersoll Copyright Bill, an omnibus revision in 1844 which died quickly in committee. After that 50 years passed, and in the final quarter of the nineteenth century the need for statutory protection for public performance …

The Pocahontas Exception: The Exemption Of American Indian Ancestry From Racial Purity Law, Kevin Noble Maillard

ExpressO

“The Pocahontas Exception” confronts the legal existence and cultural fascination with the eponymous “Indian Grandmother.” Laws existed in many states that prohibited marriage between whites and nonwhites to prevent the “quagmire of mongrelization.” Yet, this racial protectionism, as ingrained in law, blatantly exempted Indian blood from the threat to white racial purity. In Virginia, the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 made exceptions for whites of mixed descent who proudly claimed Native American ancestry from Pocahontas. This paper questions the juridical exceptions made for Native American ancestry in antimiscegenation statues, and analyzes the concomitant exemptions in contemporary social practice. With increasing …

A Race Or A Nation? Cherokee National Identity And The Status Of Freedmen's Descendents, S. Alan Ray

ExpressO

The Cherokee Nation today faces the challenge of determining its citizenship criteria in the context of race. The article focuses on the Cherokee Freedmen. As former slaves of Cherokee citizens, the Freedmen were adopted into the Cherokee Nation after the Civil War pursuant to a treaty with the United States, and given unqualified rights of citizenship. The incorporation of the Freedmen into the tribe was resisted from the start, and now, faced with a decision of the Cherokee Nation’s highest court affirming the descendents’ citizenship rights, the Nation prepares to vote on a constitutional amendment which would impose an Indian …

Searches And The Misunderstood History Of Suspicion And Probable Cause: Part One, Fabio Arcila

ExpressO

This article, the first of a two-part series, argues that during the Framers’ era many if not most judges believed they could issue search warrants without independently assessing the adequacy of probable cause, and that this view persisted even after the Fourth Amendment became effective. This argument challenges the leading originalist account of the Fourth Amendment, which Professor Thomas Davies published in the Michigan Law Review in 1999.

The focus in this first article is upon an analysis of the common law and how it reflected the Fourth Amendment’s restrictions. Learned treatises in particular, and to a lesser extent a …

The Origin Of The Compelling State Interest Test And Strict Scrutiny, Stephen A. Siegel

ExpressO

This article argues that strict scrutiny did not originate in equal protection cases. Rather, it originated in the First Amendment in the late 1950s and early 1960s and migrated from there to the Equal Protection Clause in the late-1960s. The Article begins by discussing strict scrutiny analytically, situating it as one of many doctrines through which the Supreme Court gives heightened protection to favored constitutional interests. It then traces the origin of strict scrutiny’s compelling state interest requirement to the First Amendment. It shows that the compelling state interest test initially appeared in First Amendment litigation in 1957 and that …

Our Sovereign Body: Narrating The Fiction Of Sovereign Immunity In The Supreme Court: Part I-A English Stories, Marc L. Roark

ExpressO

This is part I-A of a Book I am working towards on the narratives and fictions of sovereign immunity. The goal in this part is to look before the American republic and towards the background in which American Sovereignty came to be shaped by -- the feudal notion of the sovereign; the Lockean response, and the Blackstonean doctrine. The first part looks at the legal fictions surrounding the kingship, their sources and their effects. The Second part looks to the specific ways of treating the sovereign in law, namely viewing King as Property owner or patriarch, Trustee, and Constitution.

Our Sovereign Body: Narrating The Fiction Of Sovereign Immunity In The Supreme Court, Marc L. Roark

ExpressO

This is the introduction to a book I am preparing on the Normative and Narrative aspects of the U.S. Sovereign Immunity Doctrine. The introduction sets up the problem of a doctrine that is not exactly coherent with the national narrative.

Justice Thomas' Kelo Dissent, Or, "History As A Grab Bag Of Principles", David L. Breau

ExpressO

In Kelo v. City of New London, the Supreme Court held 5-4 that creating jobs and increasing tax revenues satisfy the Fifth Amendment’s requirement that property be "taken for public use." Justice Thomas joined the dissenters, but authored a separate opinion arguing that the Public Use Clause was originally understood as a substantive limitation that allowed the government to take property only if the government owns, or the public actually uses, the taken property. This article demonstrates that much of the historical evidence that Justice Thomas provides in his dissent to support a narrow original understanding of public use in …

Lost Opportunity: Bush V. Holmes And The Application Of State Constitutional Uniformity Clauses To School Voucher Programs, Jamie S. Dycus

ExpressO

This article analyzes the Florida Supreme Court’s recent decision in Bush v. Holmes, in which the court struck down Florida’s school voucher program as a violation of Florida's constitutional uniformity clause. It argues that the court erred by applying a simplistic and ahistorical definition of uniformity, and recommends that future courts applying state constitutional uniformity clauses to school voucher schemes take a different approach.

Specifically, it argues that courts in future cases should begin by acknowledging frankly the necessity of determining the meaning of uniformity. Next, drawing on case law and historical evidence, they should fashion definitions of uniformity that …

Developing Development Theory: Law & Development Orthodoxies And The Northeast Asian Experience, John K.M. Ohnesorge

ExpressO

None of the orthodox theories about law and economic development produced in recent decades has been based on a study of the "miracle" economies of Northeast Asia, nor have any of these orthodoxies seriously been tested against the Northeast Asian experience of law and development. This article conducts such a test, finding that none of these orthodoxies fares well when its claims are tested against the Northeast Asian experience. Rather than using Northeast Asia's experience to produce yet another orthodoxy, however, this article instead proposes rethinking how we understand the task of legal technical assistance, a rethinking which is based …

Constitutional Law—Commerce Clause—California Takes A Hit: The Supreme Court Upholds Congressional Authority Over The State-Approved Use Of Medicinal Marijuana. Gonzales V. Raich, 545 U.S. 1 (2005)., Rick Behring Jr.

University of Arkansas at Little Rock Law Review

No abstract provided.

Bottom-Up Versus Top-Down Lawmaking, Jeffrey J. Rachlinski

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Democratic legal systems make law in one of two ways: by abstracting general principles from the decisions made in individual cases (from the bottom up); or by declaring general principles through a centralized authority that are to be applied in individual cases (from the top down). These two processes are, respectively, adjudication and legislation. Each process highlights and hides different aspects of a legal problem. The single-case perspective of adjudication can seem narrow, and hence inferior to the broad perspectives that legislatures can incorporate into their decisionmaking processes. The adjudicative approach, however, has advantages that are less obvious. Notably, the …

The Future Of International Law Is Domestic (Or, The European Way Of Law), William W. Burke-White, Anne-Marie Slaughter

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Copyright And Incomplete Historiographies: Of Piracy, Propertization, And Thomas Jefferson, Justin Hughes

Articles

Because we learn from history, we also try to teach from history. Persuasive discourse of all kinds is replete with historical examples – some true and applicable to the issue at hand, some one but not the other, and some neither. Beginning in the 1990s, intellectual property scholars began providing descriptive accounts of a tremendous strengthening of copyright laws, expressing the normative view that this trend needs to be arrested, if not reversed. This thoughtful body of scholarly literature is sometimes bolstered with historical claims – often casual comments about the way things were. The claims about history, legal or …

Untying The Knot: An Analysis Of The English Divorce And Matrimonial Causes Court Records, 1858-1866, Danaya C. Wright

ExpressO

This paper is an analysis of the petitions, answers, affidavits, and court docket for the first nine years of the English divorce and matrimonial causes court. It examines in detail the child custody, alimony, gender, and class components of the court’s first nine years. After analyzing the petitions and court docket along gender lines for the different causes of action (divorce, separation, annulment, and restitution of conjugal rights), and their success rate by gender and by age of the marriage, it then breaks down marriages by age and speculates on a variety of causes for the different results and considers …

Bond Repudiation, Tax Codes, The Appropriations Process And Restitution Post-Eminent Domain Reform, John H. Ryskamp

ExpressO

This brief comment suggests where the anti-eminent domain movement might be heading next.

The “Csi Effect”: Better Jurors Through Television And Science?, Michael D. Mann

ExpressO

This Comment discusses how television shows such as CSI and Law & Order create heightened juror expectations. This will be published in the Buffalo Public Interest Law Journal's 2005-2006 issue.

The (Intellectual Property Law &) Economics Of Innocent Fraud: The Ip & Development Debate, Peter Matthew Beattie

ExpressO

This note/essay examines the evidence on the effect of stronger IP laws introduced during the process of international IP law harmonization initiated by the TRIPS agreement, on the economic development of developing countries. It has been argued by proponents of harmonization that stronger IP laws will provide a needed boost to the economic development of developing (and even least-developed) countries. Critics of harmonization have argued that stronger IP laws will have the opposite effect. What has been largely overlooked in this debate is the strength of the evidentiary foundation upon which the arguments of both sides depend. Many of the …

The Democratic Prosecutor: Explaining The Constitutional Function Of The Federal Grand Jury, Niki Kuckes

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Legislative Delegation And Two Conceptions Of The Legislative Power, Robert C. Sarvis

The University of New Hampshire Law Review

[Excerpt] "The current federal government, with its burgeoning administrative agencies, does not embody what most Americans would recognize as the constitutional doctrine of separation of powers. This is, in part, due to the Congress’s frequent practice of delegating legislative powers to the executive branch, i.e., giving administrative agencies the power to promulgate rules regulating private behavior and having the force of law. Legislative delegation has been the subject of academic, legal, and political wrangling since the early congresses and clearly calls into question whether modern practice adheres to constitutional norms. This article discusses legislative delegation in terms of some core …

Sectionalism, Slavery And The Threat Of War In Josiah Quincy Jr.’S 1773 Southern Journal, Daniel R. Coquillette

Daniel R. Coquillette

No abstract provided.

Lion In Winter – Tomás Moro Na Nossa Estação. Diálogos Com O Direito Constitucional, O Cristianismo E A Utopia Social, Paulo Ferreira Da Cunha

Paulo Ferreira da Cunha

Três tópicos sintetizam as preocupações da presente leitura de Tomás Moro: antes de mais, o direito constitucional e a polémica constitucional que acabou em crime político sob forma penal – a decapitação de Moro por traição; depois (mas apenas por comodidade depois, porque está antes de tudo em Moro), o cristianismo, mola propulsora da vida, do pensamento e da obra desta figura; finalmente, a utopia social, o seu contributo para a filosofia política, numa clave que normalmente não é a da maioria dos expoentes recentes do pensamento cristão – e daí, também, a sua originalidade.

Review Essay: Using All Available Information, Max Huffman

ExpressO

This is a review essay entitled “Using All Available Information,” in which I review and comment on Justice Stephen Breyer’s new book, Active Liberty: Interpreting Our Democratic Constitution, published in September 2005. Justice Breyer’s book, adapted from the Tanner Lectures given in 2005 at Harvard Law School, serves partly as a response to Justice Scalia’s 1997 volume A Matter of Interpretation: Federal Courts and the Law. I review Justice Breyer’s book in part by comparison to and contrast with Justice Scalia’s. I propose that much about Justice Breyer’s interpretive philosophy, which centers on determining the “purposes” of texts and interpreting …