Law Commons^™

Bringing Small Business Development To Urban Neighborhoods, Robert E. Suggs

Faculty Scholarship

This article describes a race-neutral policy proposal designed to increase business formation and success rates for young urban African Americans. The proposal suggests using local governments' taxing authority, in a manner analogous to tax increment financing, to create financial incentives for successful small business owners to employ, and then mentor and train as business owners, young urban entrepreneurs from deteriorating neighborhoods. The amount of financial incentive varies directly with financial success of protégés and requires the transfer of some of the mentor’s social (reputational) capital to the protégé. Business activity has created wealth and economic mobility for other ethnic groups, …

Human Rights Environmentalism: Forging Common Ground, Gabriel Eckstein, Miriam Gitlin

Faculty Scholarship

Since the early 1970s, the international community has widely acknowledged the nexus between human rights and environmental protection. References to this association and even to a human right to some minimal quality of environment, can be found in numerous international instruments. The Stockholm Declaration on the Human Environment, for example, proclaims that human beings have the "fundamental right to freedom, equality and adequate conditions of life, in an environment of a quality that permits a life of dignity and well-being." Similarly, the Additional Protocol to the American Convention on Human Rights states that "everyone shall have the right to live …

Religious Outlaws: Narratives Of Legality And The Politics Of Citizen Interpretation, Barbara L. Bezdek

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Same-Sex Sexual Harassment: Subverting The Heterosexist Paradigm Of The Title Vii, Carolyn Grose

Faculty Scholarship

This article argues that the proper starting point is to provide protection for gay men and lesbians against discrimination and harassment. Until there is such protection, any attempt to use Title VII to regulate same-sex sexual harassment will intensify the privileging of one kind of same-sex interaction over another: straight subordinates will be protected from gay supervisors, while gay subordinates will not be protected from straight supervisors. The result will be increased tolerance not for expressions of gay and lesbian sexuality, but for expressions of heterosexism and homophobia in the workplace. Part I of this article examines the development of …

To Save A Life: Why A Rabbi And A Jewish Lawyer Must Disclose A Client Confidence Symposium: Executing The Wrong Person: The Professionals' Ethical Dilemmas, Russell G. Pearce

Faculty Scholarship

As adopted by courts and legislatures, lawyer's ethical codes have the force of law. They require a lawyer to keep information confidential unless the lawyer knows the client will commit a future crime. Jewish tradition generally forbids the disclosure of confidential information as "a terrible invasion of another person's privacy."This interdiction, rooted in the Torah's prohibition on talebearing, applies even when the information disclosed is true. The great medieval commentator, Maimonides, observed that gossip "ruins the world.” He further reproached "the evil tongue of the slander-monger who speaks disparagingly of one's fellow, even if the truth is told." Accordingly, the …

Professionalism Paradigm Shift: Why Discarding Professional Ideology Will Improve The Conduct And Reputation Of The Bar, The, Russell G. Pearce

Faculty Scholarship

The Article explains how the Professionalism Paradigm distinguishes between self-interested businesspersons and altruistic professionals who place the public good above their own interests and those of their clients. The legal profession has used this Business-Profession dichotomy to obtain control of the delivery legal services, including a legislative monopoly on the practice of law. Today, the Professionalism Paradigm faces a crisis as leading lawyers, judges, and scholars complain that law has become a business and is no longer a profession. The Article “identifies this shift as a time for hope rather than as a cause for despair. Applying Thomas S. Kuhn's …

Reflections On From Slaves To Citizens Bondage, Freedom And The Constitution: The New Slavery Scholarship And Its Impact On Law And Legal Historiography, Robert J. Kaczorowski

Faculty Scholarship

The thesis of Professor Donald Nieman's paper, "From Slaves to Citizens: African-Americans, Rights Consciousness, and Reconstruction," is that the nation experienced a revolution in the United States Constitution and in the consciousness of African Americans. According to Professor Nieman, the Reconstruction Amendments represented "a dramatic departure from antebellum constitutional principles,"' because the Thirteenth Amendment reversed the pre-Civil War constitutional guarantee of slavery and "abolish[ed] slavery by federal authority." The Fourteenth Amendment rejected the Supreme Court's "racially-based definition of citizenship [in Dred Scott v. Sandford4], clearly establishing a color-blind citizenship” and the Fifteenth Amendment "wrote the principle of equality into the …

Girls And The Getaway: Cars, Culture, And The Predicament Of Gendered Space, Carol Sanger

Faculty Scholarship

What does law tell us about our relations to material things? Property theorists maintain that there are no legal relations between persons and things. Things can be owned, transferred, bequeathed, assigned, repossessed, and so on, but such arrangements really describe relationships among different persons with regard to the object rather than relationships between persons and things.

Yet the quality or shape of the legal relations among persons often depends on the cultural meaning of the thing in question, a meaning (or meanings) that exists, in some form anyway, prior to or independent of, legal concepts traditionally attached to things such …

Taking Private Ordering Seriously, Avery W. Katz

Faculty Scholarship

In recent years, the rules and practices of private groups have attracted substantial attention within the field of law and economics. In applications ranging from Robert Ellickson's seminal work on rancher/farmer relations in Shasta County, California, to Lisa Bernstein's investigation of extralegal contractual relations among wholesale diamond traders, to Robert Cooter's study of aboriginal customs in Papua New Guinea, to Robert Scott and Alan Schwartz's analysis of the rulemaking procedures of the American Law Institute, an increasing number of legal and economic scholars have shown how private systems of rules work to regulate economic relations among the communities that adopt …

The Case Against Regulating The Market For Contingent Employment, Maria O'Brien

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Some Problems With Public Reason In John Rawls's Political Liberalism, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

Political Liberalism is a major addition to the political theory of John Rawls. In many respects, it develops or alters views expressed in his famous A Theory of Justice. For changes that appeared in various articles Rawls published after the earlier book, Political Liberalism tends to offer nuances of difference. The most original chapter is about public reason, and my comments are directed to that subject, which has now become a centerpiece of Rawls's theory. I draw in Rawls's other views only as they bear on public reason.

My aim is to present some problems I see with his …