Law Commons^™

The Made And The Made-Up, Steven L. Winter Walter S. Gibbs Distinguished Professor Of Constitutional Law

Law Faculty Research Publications

Truth is an ethical relation. Facts, whether descriptions of the physical world or of historical events, are necessarily mediated by our frames of reference. This contingency opens a space for disagreement that cannot be adjudicated by an absolute standard of truth. For those seeking power or profit, the temptation to exploit this state of undecidability is strong. When many question the institutions that broker meaning – science, the professions, the media – rumors, misinformation, deliberate distortions and falsehoods all proliferate. In the digital age, the ‘made’ is swiftly supplanted by the made-up. The remedy for this predicament is not technological …

Do All Dogs Go To Heaven? How Our Secular Culture Views Death, Bruce Ledewitz

Newspaper Columns

Collected biweekly contributions to the Pennsylvania Capital-Star, a nonpartisan, nonprofit news site.

The One Good Thing About The Independent State Legislature Theory, Bruce Ledewitz

Newspaper Columns

Collected biweekly contributions to the Pennsylvania Capital-Star, a nonpartisan, nonprofit news site.

Why The Courts Should Stop Philly Da Larry Krasner’S Impeachment Trial, Bruce Ledewitz

Newspaper Columns

Collected biweekly contributions to the Pennsylvania Capital-Star, a nonpartisan, nonprofit news site.

The Paradox Of Plenty: Why Guyana’S Local Content Law Needs A Reality Check, Vivian M. Williams

Publications and Research

The effectiveness of coercive local content requirements to the development of resource rich developing countries is an area attracting increasing global attention. Local content requirements are especially popular in the extractive sector though empirical studies show that they do not fulfill their intended purpose. Now recognized as the world's fastest growing economy after becoming an oil producing country, Guyana has passed a local content law. The real concern is not merely whether local content requirements fail to fulfill their objectives but whether they create market distortions that lead to the resource curse. This issue was addressed by Baruch's Adjunct Assistant …

Designing For Justice: Pandemic Lessons For Criminal Courts, Cynthia Alkon

Faculty Scholarship

March 2020 brought an unprecedented crisis to the United States: COVID-19. In a two-week period, criminal courts across the country closed. But, that is where the uniformity ended. Criminal courts did not have a clear process to decide how to conduct necessary business. As a result, criminal courts across the country took different approaches to deciding how to continue necessary operations and in doing so many did not consider the impact on justice of the operational changes that were made to manage the COVID-19 crisis. One key problem was that many courts did not use inclusive processes and include all …

Optimizing Disaster Preparedness Planning For Minority Older Adults: One Size Does Not Fit All, Omolola E. Adepoju, Luz E. Herrera, Minji Chae, Daikwon Han

Faculty Scholarship

By 2050, one in five Americans will be 65 years and older. The growing proportion of older adults in the U.S. population has implications for many aspects of health including disaster preparedness. This study assessed correlates of disaster preparedness among community-dwelling minority older adults and explored unique differences for African American and Hispanic older adults. An electronic survey was disseminated to older minority adults 55+, between November 2020 and January 2021 (n = 522). An empirical framework was used to contextualize 12 disaster-related activities into survival and planning actions. Multivariate logistic regression models were stratified by race/ethnicity to examine the …

American Voter Turnout: The Influence Of Education Levels On Voter Participation, Jack Thomas Bunzel-Hardie

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

This study is intended to explore the relevant relationship between mistrust in government officials and voter turnout. Within a research article such as this, it is important to distinguish the dependent and independent factors from one another so as not to get them confused. This article identifies the growing sense of mistrust that many Americans feel towards their government officials as the independent factor while examining the relationship that voter turnout has with that growing fear, therefore making that the dependent variable. While this issue has been studied in the past there have been many new events taking place and …

When It Comes To Prosecuting Trump, Merrick Garland Needs To Decide Already, Bruce Ledewitz

Newspaper Columns

Collected biweekly contributions to the Pennsylvania Capital-Star, a nonpartisan, nonprofit news site.

The Midterms Were Good News For Dems, But Even Better News For The Country, Bruce Ledewitz

Newspaper Columns

Collected biweekly contributions to the Pennsylvania Capital-Star, a nonpartisan, nonprofit news site.

Letting Offenders Choose Their Punishment?, Gilles Grolleau, Murat C. Mungan, Naoufel Mzoughi

Faculty Scholarship

Punishment menus allow offenders to choose the punishment to which they will be subjected from a set of options. We present several behaviorally informed rationales for why punishment menus may serve as effective deterrents, notably by causing people to refrain from entering a calculative mindset; reducing their psychological reactance; causing them to reconsider the reputational impacts of punishment; and reducing suspicions about whether the act is enforced for rent-seeking purposes. We argue that punishment menus can outperform the traditional single punishment if these effects can be harnessed properly. Our observations thus constitute a challenge, based on behavioral arguments, to the …

A Law Professors’ Symposium Asks: Should We Control The U.S. Supreme Court?, Bruce Ledewitz

Newspaper Columns

Collected biweekly contributions to the Pennsylvania Capital-Star, a nonpartisan, nonprofit news site.

There’S A Secular Need For The High Holy Days. This Is Why, Bruce Ledewitz

Newspaper Columns

Collected biweekly contributions to the Pennsylvania Capital-Star, a nonpartisan, nonprofit news site.

The Administrative Agon: A Democratic Theory For A Conflictual Regulatory State, Daniel E. Walters

Faculty Scholarship

A perennial challenge for the administrative state is to answer the “democracy question”: how can the bureaucracy be squared with the idea of self-government of, by, and for a sovereign people with few direct means of holding agencies accountable? Scholars have long argued that this challenge can be met by bringing sophisticated thinking about democracy to bear on the operation of the administrative state. These scholars have invoked various theories of democracy—in particular, pluralist, civic republican, deliberative, and minimalist theories—to explain how allowing agencies to make policy decisions is consistent with core ideas about what democracy is.

There is a …

Content Moderation As Surveillance, Hannah Bloch-Wehba

Faculty Scholarship

Technology platforms are the new governments, and content moderation is the new law, or so goes a common refrain. As platforms increasingly turn toward new, automated mechanisms of enforcing their rules, the apparent power of the private sector seems only to grow. Yet beneath the surface lies a web of complex relationships between public and private authorities that call into question whether platforms truly possess such unilateral power. Law enforcement and police are exerting influence over platform content rules, giving governments a louder voice in supposedly “private” decisions. At the same time, law enforcement avails itself of the affordances of …

Trump Isn’T Going To Jail. And That’S Good News For Democrats, Bruce Ledewitz

Newspaper Columns

Collected biweekly contributions to the Pennsylvania Capital-Star, a nonpartisan, nonprofit news site.

The Nation’S Debt Limit Serves No Purpose. It Should Be Eliminated, Bruce Ledewitz

Newspaper Columns

Collected biweekly contributions to the Pennsylvania Capital-Star, a nonpartisan, nonprofit news site.

Drawing The Line Between Talent And Desire 09-23-2022, Michelle Choate

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Only You Can Prevent Amendment Abuse, Bruce Ledewitz

Newspaper Columns

Collected biweekly contributions to the Pennsylvania Capital-Star, a nonpartisan, nonprofit news site.

Solving The Congressional Review Act’S Conundrum, Cary Coglianese

All Faculty Scholarship

Congress routinely enacts statutes that require federal agencies to adopt specific regulations. When Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act in 2010, for example, it mandated that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) adopt an anti-corruption regulation requiring energy companies to disclose payments they make to foreign governments. Although the Dodd-Frank Act specifically required the SEC to adopt this disclosure requirement, the agency’s eventual regulation was also, like other administrative rules, subject to disapproval by Congress under a process outlined in a separate statute known as the Congressional Review Act (CRA).

After the SEC issued its …

The Role Of Recognition In Kelsen's Account Of Legal Obligation And Political Duty, David Ingram

Philosophy: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Kelsen’s critique of absolute sovereignty famously appeals to a basic norm of international recognition. However, in his discussion of legal obligation, generally speaking, he notoriously rejects mutual recognition as having any normative consequence. I argue that this apparent contradiction in Kelsen's estimate regarding the normative force of recognition is resolved in his dynamic account of the democratic generation of law. Democracy is embedded within a modern political ethos that obligates legal subjects to recognize each other along four dimensions: as contractors whose mutually beneficial cooperation measures esteem by fair standards of contribution; as autonomous agents endowed with equal rights; as …

Few Lessons For Pa. From Kansas Abortion Vote. Gop Still Should Beware, Bruce Ledewitz

Newspaper Columns

Collected biweekly contributions to the Pennsylvania Capital-Star, a nonpartisan, nonprofit news site.

This Is The Right Moment For The Democrats To Run A Fiscal Hawk, Bruce Ledewitz

Newspaper Columns

Collected biweekly contributions to the Pennsylvania Capital-Star, a nonpartisan, nonprofit news site.

Dobbs Is Not A Religion Case, Bruce Ledewitz

Ledewitz Papers

Published scholarship collected from academic journals, law reviews, newspaper publications & online periodicals.

Regional Immigration Enforcement, Fatma Marouf

Faculty Scholarship

Regional disparities in immigration enforcement have existed for decades, yet they remain largely overlooked in immigration law scholarship. This Article theorizes that bottom-up pressure from states and localities, combined with top-down pressures and policies established by the President, produce these regional disparities. The Article then provides an empirical analysis demonstrating enormous variations in how Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s twenty-four field offices engage in federal enforcement around the United States. By analyzing data related to detainers, arrests, removals, and detention across these field offices, the Article demonstrates substantial differences between field offices located in sanctuary and anti-sanctuary regions, as well as …

Missouri Alot - Dc Experience, Amy Bax

Title III Professional Development Reports

I want to thank Lincoln University for sponsoring this trip. I had access to many high-level people in DC that wanted to hear my story of agriculture. These are people that have the power to create legislative practices and policies that are favorable to the agricultural industry. I had the opportunity to advocate for Lincoln and Lincoln University students.

The Supreme Court’S Abortion, Epa Rulings Could Open The Door To More Democracy, Bruce Ledewitz

Newspaper Columns

Collected biweekly contributions to the Pennsylvania Capital-Star, a nonpartisan, nonprofit news site.

President Biden's Executive Order On Competition: An Antitrust Analysis, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

In July, 2021, President Biden signed a far ranging Executive Order directed to promoting competition in the American economy. This paper analyzes issues covered by the Order that are most likely to affect the scope and enforcement of antitrust law. The only passage that the Executive Order quoted from a Supreme Court antitrust decision captures its antitrust ideology well – that the Sherman Act:

rests on the premise that the unrestrained interaction of competitive forces will yield the best allocation of our economic resources, the lowest prices, the highest quality and the greatest material progress, while at the same time …

Does The End Of Roe Mean The End Of The Anti-Abortion Movement?, Bruce Ledewitz

Newspaper Columns

Collected biweekly contributions to the Pennsylvania Capital-Star, a nonpartisan, nonprofit news site.

Designing Constitutions For A Lasting Democracy, Donald L. Horowitz, Elisabeth Perham

Judicature International

No abstract provided.