Law Commons^™

Unfulfilled Promise: Mental Disability Voting Rights And The Halving Of Hava’S Potential, Benjamin Hoerner

Benjamin O Hoerner

In 2012, the heated presidential election between President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney reanimated the debate surrounding the voting rights of mentally disabled citizens in the United States. A decade earlier, in October 2002, President George W. Bush signed into law the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA), aiming to protect the voting rights of the country’s disabled population. At the time of its enactment, legislators and commentators lauded HAVA as “the most important voting rights bill since the passing of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.” However, since its passage, HAVA has been subjected to a flurry of …

The Eye Of The Beholder: Participation And Impact In Telecommunications (De)Regulation, Dorit Reiss

Dorit R. Reiss

The California Public Utilities Commission addressed both pricing deregulation and universal service in telecommunications during the last decade. Both decisions had a similar cast of characters, and similarly elaborate processes. In relation to price deregulation, the utilities positions were accepted on every issue addressed; in relation to universal service, consumer organizations’ positions were accepted in about 60% of the issues. This article tells the story of how those decisions were made, and examines the reasons for the difference in impact. The article examines and reject an explanation of capture; accepts in part a focus on the influence of the commissioner …

"Not Without Political Power": Gays And Lesbians, Equal Protection, And The Suspect Class Doctrine, Darren Hutchinson

Darren L Hutchinson

The Supreme Court purportedly utilizes the suspect class doctrine in order to balance institutional concerns with the protection of important constitutional rights. The Court, however, inconsistently applies this doctrine, and it has not precisely defined its contours. The political powerlessness factor is especially undertheorized and contradictorily applied. Nevertheless, this factor has become salient in recent equal protection cases brought by gay and lesbian plaintiffs.

A growing body of and federal and state-court precedent addresses the flaws of the Court’s suspect class doctrine. This Article discusses the inadequacies of the suspect class doctrine and highlights problems within the emerging scholarship and …

Interactions Between Public And Private Resource Governance: Key Insights From The Fisheries Case, Zdravka Tzankova

Zdravka Tzankova

Growing in presence and visibility, eco-labels and other forms of green certification are the more obvious signs of a broader social and policy phenomenon: the rise of private regulation and nonstate, market-based governance of environmental and resource practices. The growth of private regulatory initiatives, especially initiatives led by NGOs and other civil society actors, is increasingly accompanied by concerns over their potential to detract from public, government regulation.

This paper seeks to generate insights on the nature and consequences of interaction between more traditional forms of public, government regulation and the growing realm of market-based regulation by nonstate actors. It …

Decorating The Structure: The Art Of Making Human Law, Brian M. Mccall

Brian M McCall

Book Review Of Arnold H. Leibowitz, An Historical-Legal Analysis Of The Impeachments Of Presidents Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, And William Clinton: Why The Process Went Wrong, Jeffrey B. Morris

Jeffrey B. Morris

No abstract provided.

Milk And Other Intoxicating Choices: Official State Symbol Adoption, Ryan Valentin

Ryan Valentin

No abstract provided.

Article: No Child Left Behind: Why Race-Based Achievement Goals Violate The Equal Protection Clause, Ayriel Bland

Ayriel Bland

In 2002, No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was passed under President George W. Bush with the goal of increasing academic proficiency for all children in the United States by 2014. Yet, many states struggled to meet this goal and the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Education allowed states to apply for waivers and bypass the 2014 deadline. Some states implemented waivers though race-based achievement standards. For example, Florida in October 2012, established that by 2018, 74 percent of African American and 81 percent of Hispanic students had to be proficient in math and reading, in comparison to 88 percent …

Deadly Dicta: Roe’S “Unwanted Motherhood”, Gonzales’S “Women’S Regret” And The Shifting Narrative Of Abortion Jurisprudence, Stacy A. Scaldo

Stacy A Scaldo

For thirty-four years, the narrative of Supreme Court jurisprudence on the issue of abortion was firmly focused on the pregnant woman. From the initial finding that the right to an abortion stemmed from a constitutional right to privacy[1], through the test applied and refined to determine when that right was abridged[2], to the striking of statutes found to over-regulate that right[3], the conversation from the Court’s perspective maintained a singular focus. Pro-life arguments focusing on the fetus as the equal or greater party of interest were systematically pushed aside by the Court.[4] The consequences of an unwanted pregnancy, or as …

The United States Constitution And Its History Through The Barristers And Political, Allen E. Shoenberger

Allen E Shoenberger

No abstract provided.

The Campaign Finance Safeguards Of Federalism, Garrick B. Pursley

Garrick B. Pursley

This article provides the first systematic account of the relationship between campaign finance and federalism. Federalism—a fundamental characteristic of the constitutional structure—depends for its stability on political mechanisms. States and their advocates and representatives in Congress, federal agencies, political parties, intergovernmental lobbying groups, and other political forums work together to check federal interference with state governments. Entire normative theories of federalism depend on the assumption that this system of political safeguards is working effectively in the background. But the federalism and constitutional theory literatures lack a rigorous account of the effects of dramatic political change on pro-federalism political dynamics. Building …

Manufacturing Moral Panic As Political Distraction: An Empirical And Social Theoretical Analysis Of Domas, Deirdre Bowen

Deirdre M Bowen

This article offers the only empirical analysis to date of national data evaluating the claim that defense of marriage acts (DOMAs) preserve and stabilize the family. After concluding that they do not, the article analyzes what variables are, in fact, correlated with family stability. Specifically, the relationships between families below the poverty line, men and women married three or more times, religiosity, percent conservative versus liberal in a state, disposable income, percent with bachelor’s degree, and median age of first marriage, and marriage and divorce trends is fully explored. Next, the article applies the sociological concepts of moral entrepreneurism, which …

Functional Government In 3-D, Robert L. Glicksman, Alejandro E. Camacho

Robert L. Glicksman

The creation of new administrative agencies and the realignment of existing governmental authority are commonplace and high-stakes events, as illustrated by the recent creation of the Department of Homeland Security after 9/11 and of new financial regulatory agencies after the global recession of 2009. Scholars and policymakers have not devoted sufficient attention to this subject, failing to clearly identify the different dimensions along which government authority may be structured or to consider the relationships among them. Analysis of these institutional design issues typically also gives short shrift to whether authority should be allocated differently based on agency function. These failures …

Render Unto Rawls: Law, Gospel, And The Evangelical Fallacy, Wayne R. Barnes

Wayne R. Barnes

Chief Justice Roberts' Individual Mandate: The Lawless Medicine Of Nfib V. Sebelius, Gregory Magarian

Gregory P. Magarian

After the U.S. Supreme Court in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius held nearly all of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act constitutional, praise rained down on Chief Justice John Roberts. The Chief Justice’s lead opinion broke with his usual conservative allies on the Court by upholding the Act’s individual mandate under the Taxing Clause. Numerous academic and popular commentators have lauded the Chief Justice for his political courage and institutional pragmatism. In this essay, Professor Magarian challenges the heroic narrative surrounding the Chief Justice’s opinion. The essay contends that the opinion is, in two distinct senses, fundamentally …

Lords Of Democracy: The Judicialization Of "Pure Politics" In The United States And Germany, Russell A. Miller

Russell A. Miller

No abstract provided.

The Geography Of Racial Stereotyping: Evidence And Implications For Vra Preclearance After Shelby County, Christopher Elmendorf, Douglas Spencer

Christopher S. Elmendorf

The Supreme Court in Shelby County v. Holder (2013) effectively enjoined the preclearance regime of the Voting Rights Act. The Court deemed the coverage formula, which determines the jurisdictions subject to preclearance, insufficiently grounded in current conditions. This paper proposes a new, legally defensible approach to coverage based on between-state differences in the proportion of voting age citizens who subscribe to negative stereotypes about racial minorities and vote accordingly. The new coverage formula could also account for racially polarized voting and minority population size, but, for constitutional reasons, subjective discrimination by voters is the essential criterion. We demonstrate that the …

Banning High Capacity Magazines: Heller And The Right To Bear Arms, Matthew Eitelberg

Matthew J Eitelberg

The debate over gun control, once moribund, is now the topic of political conversation in state legislatures and in Congress. The massacre of 20 schoolchildren and 6 school employees at Sandy Hook Elementary School has made gun control a very real possibility. One target of recent gun control measures is a prohibition on the sale and manufacture of detachable high-capacity magazines for semiautomatic weapons. Presently, at the state and federal level, legislation has been proposed, or is in the process of being implemented, that would prohibit the sale and manufacture of detachable high-capacity magazines for semiautomatic weapons. Such proposals implicate …

Can A Pluralistic Commonwealth Endure?, Brian M. Mccall

Brian M McCall

This article considers whether the American pluralist system can satisfy Cicero's definition of a commonwealth as a multitude united in a definition of law and justice. The analysis is based upon a review of Thaddeus Kozinski's book, The Problem or Religious Pluralism and Why Philosophers Can't Solve It. This book critiques the philosophy of John Rawls, Jacques Maritain and Alisdaire MacIntyre. The critique is based upon Cicero's definition of a commonwealth and the article concludes that a society which maintains a deep pluralism over the first principles of law and justice cannot survive as a commonwealth.

Altruism Trumping Privacy Hipaa, Privacy, Big Data Set Benefits, Douglas J. Henderson

DOUGLAS J HENDERSON

The United States Government must administer a publicly held cloud networked Big Data Set of Private Health Information (PHI) in order to utilize Big Data Analytics and allow free data mining of such PHI so that the health care industry can operate most cost effectively while also meeting the health care needs of the aging United States populace with the highest quality of care.

You Say You Want A Revolution? [Review Of The Book The Other Side Of The Sixties: Young Americans For Freedom And The Rise Of Conservative Politics], Nick Salvatore

Nick Salvatore

[Excerpt] Was the New Left a premature revolution, the fruits of which must await a future set of proper conditions to develop? Or was it more a victim of a giant government conspiracy that crushed a vibrant and growing oppositional tendency? Adherents of these and similar interpretations thus can explain the demise of the New Left while protecting its image as a tribune of a people in inevitable, if slow, political motion. But a perspective less protective of the New Left might reveal more. Perhaps treatments of that era have never fully captured either the complex turnings of America's political …

In The Jungle Of Cities [Review Of The Book Harold Washington And The Neighborhoods: Progressive City Reform In Chicago, 1983-1987], Nick Salvatore

Nick Salvatore

[Excerpt] At first glance such a spatial transformation of work may seem positive, as indeed it was for the largely white work force that left the city and staffed these new positions. But left behind geographically, economically, and socially were the largely black (and to a lesser extent, Mexican) working-class residents. It was at this juncture, with jobs disappearing and the urban social structure fragmented, that black Chicago, symbolized in the person of Harold Washington, finally assumed political power. In Harold Washington and the Neighborhoods, editors Pierre Clavel and Wim Wiewel have collected a group of essays that examine the …

America Reborn? Conservatives, Liberals, And American Political Culture Since 1945, Nick Salvatore

Nick Salvatore

[Excerpt] From the perspective of the early twenty‑first century, we can chide the good professor for not carefully considering the consequences of what he wished for half a century ago. For it is clear that the force of this conservative movement in America was in fact “stronger than most of us [knew]” or could have imagined in 1950, or, indeed, in 1968. This conservative “impulse”, those “irritable mental gestures”, has largely restructured American political thinking with a force and popular approval that remains stunning to consider. The growth of the conservative movement since 1945 was also accompanied by the slow …

You Are Living In A Gold Rush, Richard Delgado

Richard Delgado

This article argues that our times, characterized as they are by dreams of vast wealth, environmental destruction, and growing social inequality, resemble nothing so much as earlier get-rich-quick periods like the Gilded Age and the California gold rush. I put forward a number of parallels between those earlier periods and now and suggest that the current fever is likely to end soon. This will come as a relief to those of you who, like me, deplore the regressive social policies, bellicose foreign relations, and coarsening of public taste that we have been living through—even if some of our more libertarian …

Nonprofits, Politics, And Privacy, Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer

Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer

The time is ripe for a deeper consideration of the policy concerns that underlie public disclosure requirements for politically active tax-exempt nonprofit organizations and the related issue of privacy. To clarify the discussion, one aspect for deeper consideration is recognizing that this particular area is at the intersection of three significantly different disclosure regimes. Those three regimes are (1) federal tax law generally, (2) federal tax law as it applies to tax-exempt nonprofit organizations, and (3) federal election law. These regimes are a study in contrasts. Federal tax law strongly protects taxpayer information from public disclosure. And while federal tax …

The Role Of Science In The Uruguay Round And Nafta Trade Disciplines, David A. Wirth

David A. Wirth

The central theme of this article is the necessity for deference to decision-making processes of national regulatory authorities in the application of these new trade disciplines and the need for trade-based reviews of national regulatory measures to operate within clearly defined limits. Accordingly, this article first examines and summarizes the relevant texts, including the original 1947 GATT, the Uruguay Round, and the NAFTA texts on standards. Next, the article considers the role of science in the standard-setting process with reference to the copious literature on this topic. Finally, the article takes up the difficult question of the application of the …

At War With The Environment, David A. Wirth

David A. Wirth

In this Article, Professor Wirth reviews the book National Defense and the Environment by Stephen Dycus, a recognized expert in both environmental and national security law. The emphasis of the book is on containing and remediating the environmental excesses of the American defense-industrial complex, with a domestic policy focus. While Professor Wirth considers Dycus’ work an intellectually rewarding and refreshing new entry into the ongoing environment-as-security colloquy, he does not consider the book to be accessible to a general audience given the book’s fundamentally legalistic nature.

Consensual Amorous Relationships Between Faculty And Students: The Constitutional Right To Privacy, Elisabeth A. Keller

Elisabeth Keller

Surveys of college students in the United States revealed that a significant number of students thought they had been victims of some form of sexual harassment. Growing awareness of the magnitude, dimensions, and effects of sexual harassment at educational institutions and the potential for institutional liability have prompted educators to adopt policies to avert such problems. The policies typically prohibit sexual harassment of employees and students and alert the university community to the serious effects of sexual harassment and the potential for student exploitation. Some universities have gone beyond establishing regulations directed at widely litigated problems of sexual harassment and …

Emerging Models For Alternatives To Marriage, Sanford N. Katz

Sanford N. Katz

Perhaps one of the most important changes in family law in the past thirty years has been the inclusion of certain kinds of friendships in the range of relationships from which rights and responsibilities can flow. Domestic partnership laws, a phenomenon of the 1990s, may be seen as a natural development from the judicial recognition of contract cohabitation and the legislative and judicial response to same-sex couples who, unable to meet statutory requirements for marriage, have sought official recognition of their relationships. This essay discusses an aspect of certain kinds of domestic partnership laws-their formal requirements and the extent to …

The Three Economies: An Essay In Honor Of Joseph Sax, Zygmunt J.B. Plater

Zygmunt J.B. Plater

How does one evaluate the important public values and impacts of things that do not have a market price and then integrate them into the fabric of our system of social governance? That question lies within most or all of Joseph Sax's work over the years. The first part of this article represents an attempt to distill some of Joseph Sax's intellectual dimensions, beyond those already chronicled in the comments of other contributors to this symposium, with some linked themes and observations drawn from Sax beyond his writings. The second part, instigated by several of Sax's articles, presents "The Three …