Law Commons^™

Sustainable Development And Air Quality: The Need To Replace Basic Technologies With Cleaner Alternatives, David M. Driesen

College of Law - Faculty Scholarship

This book chapter reviews United States efforts to comply with Agenda 21's prescriptions germane to air quality over the last five years and to meet the goals in the Rio Declaration. It concludes that the United States has improved air quality over the last five years, but that the United States has failed to meet the ambitious goals suggested by the Rio Declaration. The paper recommends that the United States move toward a phaseout of fossil fuels, better support advanced technology, and improve monitoring and enforcement.

Amicus Brief Of Economists Ackerman Et Al. In Entergy V. Riverkeepers, Douglas A. Kysar, David M. Driesen

College of Law - Faculty Scholarship

A group of academic economists filed this amicus brief in a pending Supreme Court case, Entergy v. Riverkeepers. The amicus brief addresses questions pertaining to the nature and limits of cost-benefit analysis (CBA) and thus contributes to the ongoing scholarly debate about CBA's role in environmental law. The case raises the question of whether EPA may consider CBA in writing standards based on the "best technology available for minimizing environmental impacts" from intake of water to cool industrial facilities. This intake kills fish and disrupts eco-systems. The brief explains that cost-benefit balancing may be inappropriate for an agency implementing foundational …

Firing U.S. Attorneys: An Essay, David M. Driesen

College of Law - Faculty Scholarship

This essay examines the constitutional basis for Justice Department independence, the main constitutional issue underlying the recent dismissal of United States Attorneys. It outlines a duty-based theory of executive power, a theory that Article II should be understood as a set of checks and balances to secure faithful execution of the law, rather than solely as a source of Presidential power. It shows how this theory can provide a constitutional justification for Justice Department independence. The essay reexamines the unitary executive theory which claims that the Constitution gives the President unlimited power to fire prosecutors in the context of the …

Managing Radical Disputes: Public Reason, The American Dream, And The Case Of Same-Sex Marriage, Keith J. Bybee, Cyril Ghosh

College of Law - Faculty Scholarship

This paper proposes that ambiguous arguments play a crucial role in the management of radical disputes in democratic deliberation. Lofty though it might be, public reason is an impoverished ideal, and its celebrated role in democratic deliberation is vastly overrated, particularly among liberal theorists. In the courts of law and in the larger world, radical disputes unfold as messy, incomplete, ambiguous arguments are proposed by parties. This does not mean that all communication between parties must break down because parties do not abide by the rules of argumentation and evidentiary reasoning. It only implies that the language of ambiguity offers …

The Anatomy Of Grey: A Theory Of Interracial Convergence, Kevin Noble Maillard, Janis L. Mcdonald

College of Law - Faculty Scholarship

This article offers a theory of racial identity divorced from biological considerations. Law fails to recognize the complexity of racial performance and identity, thus categorically simplifying a perceived polarity of black and white. Ground-breaking scholarship addressing racial boundaries, as written by Randall Kennedy, Elizabeth Bartholet, and Angela Onwauchi-Willig, generally focuses on the enduring legacy of race discrimination. We approach these boundaries from a different angle—whites who become “less white.” We bring together the challenges of passing and adoption to offer a theory of fluid racial boundaries.

Transracial adoption provides one viable channel to discuss the possibilities of white-to-black racial identity …

The Multiracial Epiphany, Kevin Noble Maillard

College of Law - Faculty Scholarship

The year 1967 becomes the temporal landmark for the beginning of an interracial nation. That year, the United States Supreme Court ruled state antimiscegenation laws unconstitutional in Loving v Virginia. In addition to outlawing interracial marriage, these restrictive laws had created a presumption of illegitimacy for historical claims of racial intermixture. Not all states had antimiscegenation laws, but the sting of restriction extended to other states to forge a collective forgetting of mixed race. Defenders of racial purity could depend on these laws to render interracial relationships illegitimate. Looking back to Loving as the official birth of Multiracial America reinforces …

Watergate And The Resignation Of Richard Nixon: Impact Of A Constitutional Crisis (Book Review), Robert J. Weiner Jr.

College of Law - Law Library Staff Scholarship

No abstract provided.