Law Commons^™

Ai Report: Humanity Is Doomed. Send Lawyers, Guns, And Money!, Ashley M. London

Law Faculty Publications

AI systems are powerful technologies being built and implemented by private corporations motivated by profit, not altruism. Change makers, such as attorneys and law students, must therefore be educated on the benefits, detriments, and pitfalls of the rapid spread, and often secret implementation of this technology. The implementation is secret because private corporations place proprietary AI systems inside of black boxes to conceal what is inside. If they did not, the popular myth that AI systems are unbiased machines crunching inherently objective data would be revealed as a falsehood. Algorithms created to run AI systems reflect the inherent human categorization …

Scotus Gerrymandering Case: Roberts Didn't Defend Constitutional Democracy, Bruce Ledewitz

Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Comparative Legal History. Edited By Olivier Moréteau, Aniceto Masferrer, And Kjell A. Modéer. Cheltenham, Uk; Northampton, Ma: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2019 [Book Review], Dana Neacsu

Law Faculty Publications

Comparative Legal History stands out for both its content and its execution. At a time when most law schools devote themselves to the study of hic et nunc (here and now), Comparative Legal History proves there is something more than the rather dogmatic and pragmatic description of what is traditionally recognized as the law. In an age of hyper specialization, it discredits the absurd notion of law as (hard) science. Law, a human product, can easily be the object of scientific observations, but does that scientific observation need to be limited to the study of rules and norms in force …

The Code Of Capital. How The Law Creates Wealth And Inequality. Pistor, Katharina. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019 [Book Review], Dana Neacsu

Law Faculty Publications

In “The Little King,” Salman Rushdie’s prize-winning take on corruption and the opioid crisis, as published in The New Yorker (July 29, 2019), the law is described as “an ass,” but a useful one:

"The law is useful, in fact. It tells you who is the correct person you need to convince. Otherwise, you can waste money convincing people who don’t have the stamp. Waste not, want not. We are like this only. We know what is the oil that greases the wheels" (Rushdie, 59, 2019).

The Code of Capital. How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality is a prize-winning …

Troubling Transparency: The History And Future Of Freedom Of Information. Edited By David E. Pozen And Michael Schudson. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. [Book Review], Dana Neacsu

Law Faculty Publications

Troubling Transparency is a collection of essays written by jurists, sociologists, and journalists. The fourteen contributions to this volume were also presentations to the Columbia School of Journalism 2016 conference, which the co-editors, Michael Schudson and David Pozen also co-organized, celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the US Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The essays are organized into four parts: 1) the history and conceptual foundations of the statute, 2) the impact FOIA has on the media, 3) tactics in transparency, and 4) the impact FOIA has had globally.

Taking The Threat To Democracy Seriously, Bruce S. Ledewitz

Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

How State Courts Can Help America Recover The Rule Of Law: The Pennsylvania Experience, Bruce Ledewitz

Law Faculty Publications

Just before Thanksgiving, a jurisprudentially revealing and widely publicized debate about whether America has a rule of law took place between the President of the United States and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

Patents, Disclosure, And Biopiracy, Aman Gebru

Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Il Était Une Fois… Analyse Juridique Des Contes De Fées, Marine Ranouil And Nicolas Dissaux, Eds. Paris: Dalloz, 2018. [Book Review], Dana Neacsu

Law Faculty Publications

Il était une fois… Once Upon a Time, edited by Marine Ranouil and Nicholas Dissaux, inhabits the most tempting theory of Gramscian hegemony: Law codifies the people’s desires, especially those imparted to them through books; through the written word. Reading it brought to mind Bertrand Barère and his explanation of the French Revolution of 1789. Books did it all because they brought enlightenment into all classes of society. This seems pretentious and partially inaccurate. The Revolution was also ignited by filth and hunger, which made the masses part with their innate fear of death and bravely fight for such …

The Obama Judge And The Foundations Of The Rule Of Law, Bruce Ledewitz

Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Quelling The Silver Tsunami: Compassionate Release Of Elderly Offenders, Jalila Jefferson-Bullock

Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Statutory Damages And Standing After Spokeo V. Robins, Richard L. Heppner Jr.

Law Faculty Publications

In Spokeo v. Robins, the U.S. Supreme Court held that courts may no longer infer the existence of an injury in fact—and thus constitutional standing—from a statute’s use of a particular remedy, such as a statutory or liquidated damages provision. But Spokeo also directed courts to consider whether Congress intended to identify an intangible harm and elevate it to the status of a “concrete” injury in fact when deciding standing questions. This article argues that courts can and should continue to pay close attention to the structure and language of statutory remedial provisions in making that assessment. The article proposes …

History's Calling: Today's Racism And The Elevation Of Lawyers And Legal Practice, Emile Loza De Siles

Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Impact Of Science And Technology On The Rights Of The Individual. By Nicola Lucchi [Book Review], Dana Neacsu

Law Faculty Publications

Nicola Lucchi is an associate professor at the Jönköping International Business School, in Jönköping, Sweden. His research and teaching focus on comparative information law and policy, and the interaction between law and innovation. His current book, The Impact of Science and Technology on the Rights of the Individual, seems to be the natural progression of an earlier book Biotech Innovations and Fundamental Rights, which he co-edited in 2012 while at the University of Ferrara. While the earlier work was meant to demonstrate how “the legal regulation of scientific research and scientific investigations impact more and more directly on …

Popular Culture And Legal Pluralism: Narrative As Law. By Wendy A. Adams [Book Review], Dana Neacsu

Law Faculty Publications

Wendy Adams’ book is published in Routledge's “Law, Justice, and Power” series, edited by Austin Sarat. Like Sarat, Adams, who teaches law at McGill University, belongs to the school of "cultural studies of law". Thus, her writing is refreshingly cosmopolitan and interdisciplinary. Her project is to build a “legal narrative,” which is a framework for popular culture as law, where illegal acts could easily become re-imagined in an alternative legality. She argues that “legal texts originating with the state may well be of less significance in creating legal meaning in our lives than the representations of law in popular culture.”

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch Changes: Turn And Face The Strange...2015 Amendments To The Frcp, Steven Baicker-Mckee

Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Creation Of The Common Law: The Medieval Year Books Deciphered. By Thomas Lund. [Book Review], Dana Neacsu

Law Faculty Publications

In The Creation of the Common Law: The Medieval Year Books Deciphered, Thomas Lund delivers what he promises, and more. Written for the sophisticated student of law and history, this book explores how common law was created and taught to new generations of lawyers. In doing so, Lund achieves a feat few have ever done; he exposes law as a construct of the upper classes that is used to ensure order according to ever changing interests.

The Arab Spring: An Essay On Revolution And Constitutionalism. By Antoni Abat I Ninet And Mark Tushnet. Elgar. [Book Review], Dana Neacsu

Law Faculty Publications

An American audience may not know Professor Ninet, but they surely are aware of Professor Tushnet, who has achieved the distinction of being both on the far left of the legal profession and on its more conservative front. In its earliest inception, Critical Legal Studies (“CLS”), as Gary Minda explains,

attempted to recreate a ‘left intelligentsia’ in American law. Except for the legal realists of the thirties and forties, and a handful of sixties Marxists, there has never been a serious ‘leftist’ presence in American legal education. To establish a left intelligentsia in American law one would have to break …

Three Wrongs Do Not Make A Right: Federal Sovereign Immunity, The Feres Doctrine, And The Denial Of Claims Brought By Military Mothers And Their Children For Injuries Sustained Pre-Birth, Tara Willke

Law Faculty Publications

Through the application of the judicially created Feres doctrine, female service members who suffer injuries during pregnancy or the birthing process as a result of military medical malpractice are barred from seeking recovery under the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA) and, depending on the jurisdiction in which the negligent medical treatment occurs, their children may also be barred from seeking recovery for the injuries they sustain as the result of the negligent prenatal medical care. The Feres doctrine spawned from the United States government's passage of the FTCA in 1946, which was intended to be a broad waiver of the …

Unleashing The Fourteenth Amendment, Ann L. Schiavone

Law Faculty Publications

Do Justice Anthony Kennedy's opinions in the gay rights cases of Romer v. Evans,2 Lawrence v. Texas,³ United States v. Windsor,⁴ and Obergefell v. Hodges⁵ have any impact on the future of Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence beyond rights for gays., lesbians, and transgender persons? We don't know. It is possible these cases will simply remain siloed in their unique legal and cultural niche, but viewing tbem through the lens of 150 years of Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence suggests they may signaJ a shift in due process and equal protection analysis. This shift couJd open the doors …

Amnesty International Report On Police Use Of Force, Wesley M. Oliver

Law Faculty Publications

Amnesty International last week harshly criticized the US for not providing standards strictly limiting the use of lethal force by police to those occasions when no other options are available and such force is essential to save lives.

Charles Lindergh, Caryl Chessman, And The Exception Proving The (Potentially Waning) Rule Of Broad Prosecutorial Discretion, Wesley M. Oliver

Law Faculty Publications

Perhaps ever since legislatures started defining crimes, they have given prosecutors a variety of ways to prosecute the same conduct. Courts have, almost without exception, deferred to legislatures' broad definitions of crime. Kidnapping statutes are the exception. The high profile execution of Caryl Chessman in 1960 for kidnapping prompted considerable scholarly criticism and prompted courts nationwide to impose limiting constructions on kidnapping statutes. Recently, scholars have called for a curb in prosecutorial discretion generally, attributing the explosion in the prison population to broad criminal codes, mandatory minimums, and sentencing guidelines that provide prosecutors leverage in plea negotiations. In the last …

Designing Spaces: Planning The Physical Space For A Legal Writing Program, Jan M. Levine

Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Constrained Choice: Mothers, The State, And Domestic Violence, Rona Kaufman

Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Standards Of Legitimacy In Criminal Negotiations, Wesley M. Oliver, Rishi Batra

Law Faculty Publications

Scholarship on negotiation theory and practice is rich and well-developed. Almost no work has been done, however, to translateto the criminal context the lessons learned about negotiationfrom extensive empirical study using the disciplines of econom-ics, game theory, and psychology. This Article suggests that de-fense lawyers in criminal negotiations can employ toolsfrequently useful to negotiators in other arenas: neutral criteria as a standard of legitimacy. Judges sometimes exercise a type of discretion analogous to prosecutorial discretion. When they do so, they offer an independent, reasoned, and publicly available assessment of the factors that a prosecutor ought to consider in deciding whether …

Guest Blog On Skills: Professor Jan Levine's Legislative Drafting Course At Duquesne, Jan M. Levine

Law Faculty Publications

For more than two decades, at three law schools, I have been teaching an advanced legal writing course that builds upon the foundation created in the first-year writing courses and introduces students to new drafting skills, focusing on statutes and statutory drafting. The final project in the course requires students to solve a personally-identified legal or quasi-legal problem by drafting a report and a statute, ordinance, regulation, procedural rule, or a similar solution.

Legal Origin Theory [Book Review], Dana Neacsu

Law Faculty Publications

In this volume, Simon Deakin, Professor of Law at the University of Cambridge and Katharina Pistor, the Michael I Sovem Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, considered the merits of Legal Origin Theory (LOT) in three fields of inquiry: the study of comparative law, the analysis of the relation between law and markets, and the understanding of the role of legal systems in social ordering. In their succinct and provocative introduction, Deakin and Pistor discuss the evolution of this legal theory without shying away from its controversial nature.

Technology, Alienation, And The Future Of Litigation-Based Social Change, Dana Neacsu

Law Faculty Publications

This article addresses the apparent inconsistency of the impact technology has on the "rights vocabulary." It theorizes how, in certain circumstances, it erodes this progressive vocabulary by making it and the subsequent judicial litigation superfluous.

The Many Texts Of The Law, Michael Davis, Dana Neacsu

Law Faculty Publications

This paper contends that even as jurists invoke the official canonic version of the legal text, it is in danger of being replaced for the jurist, as well as for the lay person, if it has not been substituted already, by some apocryphal, inauthentic or casual text. We argue that in addition to the approximate nature of legal knowledge, the overuse of overedited and perverted casebooks, as well as the distribution of legal information among imperfect sources – some official but partial, others inauthentic but highly accessible, and a few reliable but highly unaffordable commercial sources – are largely responsible …

Limiting Criminal Law’S “In For A Penny, In For A Pound” Doctrine, Wesley M. Oliver

Law Faculty Publications

The Supreme Court took two cases this Term involving doctrines of criminal law typically dealt with by state courts, and in each of them, it limited criminal liability for harms not attributable to a defendant’s culpability.

Although the Court interprets federal criminal statutes with some frequency, it rarely considers provisions of statutes that would provide persuasive authority for the interpretation of state criminal codes—at least not the most used provisions of state criminal codes. Unlike state criminal laws, federal criminal laws have jurisdictional requirements and generally have more complex components. It is typically these unique aspects of federal criminal laws …