Law Commons^™

The Unfulfilled Promise Of Environmental Constitutionalism, Amber Polk

UC Law Journal

The political push for the adoption of state-level “green amendments” in the United States has gained significant traction in just the last couple of years. Green amendments add an environmental right to a state’s constitution. Five such amendments were made in the 1970s in Pennsylvania, Montana, Hawaii, Massachusetts, and Illinois. This Article looks in depth at the case law that has developed the contours of these constitutional environmental rights in the wake of the political revival of environmental constitutionalism in the United States. I distill two lessons from this jurisprudence. First, constitutional environmental rights are interpreted by the courts as …

Pricing Corporate Governance, Albert H. Choi

UC Law Journal

Scholars and practitioners have long theorized that by penalizing firms with unattractive governance features, the stock market incentivizes firms to adopt the optimal governance structure at their initial public offerings (IPOs). This theory, however, does not seem to match with practice. Not only do many IPO firms offer putatively suboptimal governance arrangements, such as staggered boards and dual-class structures, but these arrangements have been gaining popularity among IPO firms. This Article argues that the IPO market is unlikely to provide the necessary discipline to incentivize companies to adopt the optimal governance package. In particular, when the optimal governance package differs …

Public Enforcement And Disability: A United States-South Korea Comparison, Joonghan (Joseph) Jo

UC Law Journal

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was enacted with the hope that it would solve issues regarding discrimination against the disabled. However, the outcome fell short of its aspirations. Many people with disabilities still suffer from ongoing discrimination. This Note argues that the ADA’s heavy reliance on private enforcement is the main reason for this shortcoming. This Note analyzes the effectiveness of public enforcement in South Korea under the Act on the Prohibition of Discrimination Against Persons with Disabilities, Remedy Against Infringement of Their Rights (Korean Disability Discrimination Act. This Note then argues that civil law country-style public enforcement based …

“It’S Like I’Ve Got This Music In My Mind”: Protecting Human Authorship In The Age Of Generative Artificial Intelligence, Justine Magowan

UC Law Journal

The music industry stands on the brink of a crisis. With unpredictable judicial standards that are inconsistent across the country, plaintiffs seeking to protect their musical works against copyright infringement face a heavy burden of proof, especially when facing defendants who are more wellknown and more well-funded. Not only that, but plaintiffs may not receive their day in court given that powerhouse artists like Taylor Swift, Sam Smith, and Bruno Mars have chosen to settle rather than defend their musical works in court. Now, Generative Artificial Intelligence (“Generative A.I.”) and A.I.-generated music will inevitably send the music industry into a …

Proving Actionable Racial Disparity Under The California Racial Justice Act, Colleen V. Chien, W. David Ball, William A. Sundstrom

UC Law Journal

Racial disparity is a fact of the United States criminal justice system, but under the Supreme Court’s holding in McCleskey v. Kemp, racial disparities—even sizable, statistically significant disparities—do not establish an equal protection violation without a showing of “purposeful discrimination.” The California Racial Justice Act (CRJA), enacted in 2020 and further amended in 2022, introduced a first-of-its-kind test for actionable racial disparity even in the absence of a showing of intent, allowing for relief when the “totality of the evidence demonstrates a significant difference” in charging, conviction, or sentencing across racial groups when compared to those who are “similarly situated” …

Comparing Reasons For Hate Crime Reporting Using Racialized Legal Status, Pamela Ho

UC Law Journal

In the past decade, Latinxs and Asians in the United States have experienced an increase in hate crime victimization. Previous research has identified correlations between hate crime reporting and race. However, few statistical studies examine the intersection of race, immigration status, and hate crime reporting. This Note explores how racialized legal status applies to Latinx and Asian communities respectively and how racialized legal status affects a hate crime victim’s decision to report the crime to police. This Note then sets forth some recommendations for increasing hate crime reporting rates by Latinx and Asian victims.

“Cancel Culture” And Criminal Justice, Steven Arrigg Koh

UC Law Journal

This Article explores the relationship between two normative systems in modern society: “cancel culture” and criminal justice. It argues that cancel culture—a ubiquitous phenomenon in contemporary life—may rectify deficiencies of over- and under-enforcement in the U.S. criminal justice system. However, the downsides of cancel culture’s structure—imprecise factfinding, potentially disproportionate sanctions leading to collateral consequences, a “thin” conception of the wrongdoer as beyond rehabilitation, and a broader cultural anxiety that “chills” certain human conduct—reflect problematic U.S. punitive impulses that characterize our era of mass incarceration. This Article thus argues that social media reform proposals obscure a deeper necessity: transcendence of blame …

Masthead

UC Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Restraining Chatgpt, Roee Sarel

UC Law Journal

ChatGPT is a prominent example of how Artificial Intelligence (AI) has stormed into our lives. Within a matter of weeks, this new AI—which produces coherent and humanlike textual answers to questions—managed to become an object of both admiration and anxiety. Can we trust generative AI systems, such as ChatGPT, without regulatory oversight?

Designing an effective legal framework for AI requires answering three main questions: (i) is there a market failure that requires legal intervention?; (ii) should AI be governed through public regulation, tort liability, or a mixture of both?; and (iii) should liability be based on strict liability or a …

Religious Liberty As A Judicial Autoimmune Disorder: The Supreme Court Repudiates Its Own Authority In Kennedy V. Bremerton School District, Andrew Koppelman

UC Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Governmental And Semi-Governmental Federal Charitable Entities, Ellen P. Aprill

UC Law Journal

The standard view of the relationship between government and the nonprofit charitable sector treats them as separate and distinct. But they are not. Numerous federal agencies have statutory authority to receive tax-deductible charitable deductions. Their ability to do so, however, undermines the oversight accomplished through the constitutionally mandated appropriations process. Congress has also created many nonprofit tax-exempt organizations. These entities enjoy flexibility as to fundraising, investment, and spending that government agencies lack. However, they avoid the accountability that various federal statutes impose on government agencies, on the one hand, and that state nonprofit laws accomplish for private nonprofit organizations, on …

The New Fourth Era Of American Religious Freedom, John Witte Jr., Eric Wang

UC Law Journal

The U.S. Supreme Court has entered decisively into a new fourth era of American religious freedom. In the first era, from 1776 to 1940, the Court largely left governance of religious freedom to the individual states and did little to enforce the First Amendment Religion Clauses. In the second era, from 1940 to 1990, the Court “incorporated” the First Amendment into the Fourteenth Amendment Due Process Clause and applied both a strong Free Exercise Clause and a strong Establishment Clause against federal, state, and local governments alike. In the third era, from the mid-1980s to 2010, the Court softened the …

The Remains Of The Establishment Clause, Ira C. Lupu, Robert W. Tuttle

UC Law Journal

The very first words of the Bill of Rights mark religion as constitutionally distinctive. Congress may not enact laws respecting an establishment of religion—in particular, acts of worship, religious instruction, or proselytizing. A pluralist, liberal democracy requires separation of civil government from these distinctively religious activities. From the middle of the twentieth century until Justice O’Connor’s retirement in 2005, the Supreme Court energetically animated that principle of distinctiveness. In a series of decisions in the last decade, however, the Court has upended its longstanding approach to what is distinctive about religion in constitutional law. Notably, this process of change has …

Masthead

UC Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Interstate Immunity And The Uncompleted Constitution, Mark D. Rosen

UC Law Journal

In a recent decision, the Supreme Court held that “the founding generation took as a given” that states would be constitutionally immune to suit in the courts of sister states, overruling an earlier ruling that interstate immunity is governed by state law. This Article rejects both approaches, showing that interstate immunity was unaddressed by the original Constitution and the Eleventh Amendment. But though interstate immunity is what this Article calls a “constitutional omission,” what ultimately fills it must be federal law. Filling in a constitutional omission necessarily requires a choice among options—what philosophers call an exercise of agency. But the …

“Engines Of The Ruling Party”: The Establishment Clause And The Power Politics Of “Managing Diversity”, Robert A. Destro

UC Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Ethics Gap: Mdl Leadership Versus The Attorney-Client Relationship, Lauren E. Godshall

UC Law Journal

Mass torts cases take up a massive swath of the nation’s federal court docket yet are governed by little to no substantive procedural laws. Instead, a host of regular practices for multidistrict litigation (“MDL”) management have emerged through repetition. One such practice is the selection of a plaintiff steering committee (“PSC”): a small group of experienced plaintiffs’ attorneys that control and direct the litigation from initiation through settlement or other resolution. The PSC is extremely important—determining which experts to use, which injuries to focus on, and so forth. Yet there are no set rules dictating PSC management of the litigation, …

Masthead

UC Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Debt As Corporate Governance, Tomer S. Stein

UC Law Journal

Corporate law is dominated by an equity-only view of corporate governance that centers on management-shareholder dynamics. This Article expands the management-shareholder paradigm by developing a novel integrated theory of corporate governance that fully accounts for the firm’s debt. To that end, the Article carries out a comprehensive analysis of debtholders’ influence on how the firm runs its affairs. This analysis reveals that debt does not merely function as a discipliner. Rather, debt forms an integral part of the ownership and governance structure of the firm through the covenants that debtholders routinely contract for. These covenants create poison pills and other …

Ethics By Appointment: An Empirical Account Of Obscured Sanctioning In Mdl Cases, Roger Michalski

UC Law Journal

Ethical norms in litigation are policed through overlapping regulatory regimes. One of these regimes is internal to litigation and split into different components, including Federal Rules of Civil Procedure 11, 26(g), and 37; Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 38; 28 U.S.C. §§ 1927 and 1447(c); as well as courts’ inherent authority to sanction litigants and attorneys. In the standard narrative, these tools provide immediate corrections to unethical conduct, unlike bar sanctions or derivative malpractice actions that are delayed and uncertain. Together, these tools aim to effectuate the goal of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 1: to make sure parties cooperate …

Local Restrictions On Renewable Energy Siting In The United States, Jesse Honig

UC Law Journal

Climate change has arrived. The next decade will provide critical opportunities to avoid the most devastating impacts of climate change. The decisions we take over the next ten years will be the difference between moderate levels of warming and warming that will cause catastrophic changes to the planet. To avoid the most devastating impacts of climate change, the United States must rapidly transition the energy sector to almost entirely renewable energy. Notwithstanding the rapid growth of renewable energy over the past decade, the United States must add renewable capacity at an unprecedented rate. To meet this challenge, many states have …

Ai Proctoring: Academic Integrity Vs. Student Rights, Samantha Mita

UC Law Journal

Advancements in artificial intelligence (“AI”) and machine learning have found their way into the classroom. The use of artificial intelligence proctoring services (“AIPS”) has risen over the past few years with little consideration for the legal and ethical consequences of their implementation. Issues such as invasion of privacy and bias often get overlooked in favor of preconceived notions of fairness and infallibility associated with the concepts of AI and machine learning. These ethical concerns are especially magnified if AIPS are used in a K-12 setting. This Note, through a lens of AI ethics, recommends a two-pronged approach that creates an …

The Ethics Of Defense Counsel’S Communications With Absent Class Members Before Class Certification, Candice Enders, Joshua P. Davis

UC Law Journal

Attention to how courts address the ethics of defense counsel’s communications with absent class members before class certification is valuable for two primary reasons. First, it provides insight into how courts approach ethics in class actions generally. In the class action context, courts tend to pay more attention to the relevant procedural rules—particularly to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23—than they do to codes of professional responsibility. Relatedly, they also seek to promote the policy goals that animate Rule 23 rather than to emphasize formalistic distinctions, such as when class counsel begin to represent absent class members or whether class …

Class Actions’ Ethical “Kiss”: The Class Action Lawyer’S Client Is The Class, Eli Wald

UC Law Journal

The legal ethics of class actions is a mess, with many lingering, unresolved questions and conflicting answers. The culprit is a fundamental lack of agreement regarding the identity of the client, without which it is impossible to consistently resolve concerns about conflicts of interest and determine the scope of lawyers’ duties of competence and communication to the class, class representative, and class members. This Essay offers a simple solution to this disagreement: the class lawyer represents the class as an entity, not the class representatives and members, who are constituents of the class client. While conceptually simple, treating the class …

Complex Litigation Funding: Ethical Problem Or Ethical Solution?, W. Bradley Wendel, Joshua P. Davis

UC Law Journal

Commentators have worried that third-party funding, particularly in complex litigation, may give rise to ethical concerns. In this Essay, we explore an alternative possibility: third-party funding may solve ethical problems rather than cause them.

We explain why third-party funding can comply with the letter and spirit of the relevant ethical rules and why whether it causes or cures ethical problems depends on the setting. We note that if third-party funding agreements are properly structured—protecting, for example, lawyers’ independent judgment—they should not pose ethical problems. On the contrary, in some contexts third-party litigation funding may ameliorate tensions between clients and counsel. …

Where Neutrality Stops And Reality Begins: Why Considering Identity Is Vital To Lead And Class Counsel Selection, Melissa Mortazavi

UC Law Journal

When courts consider a choice of class or lead counsel in multidistrict litigation (“MDL”) or class action suits, they often follow the idea of a neutral partisan model. Such a model idealizes lawyer conduct as a blank conduit for client interests. In theory, lawyers should be able to bring their legal expertise absent any personal experiences, individualized identity, and morality outside of practice. But the reality is that neither lawyers nor their clients can fully divorce their identities or moral viewpoints from the legal system.

This Essay argues that an identity-blind choice of class or lead counsel, grounded in a …

The Collapse Of Alice’S Wonderland: Mayo’S Faulty Two-Step Framework And A Possible Solution To Patent-Eligibility Jurisprudence, Philip Hawkyard

UC Law Journal

In Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories, Inc., the Supreme Court established a two-step framework to determine whether a supposed invention that involves a “natural law” can be a patent-eligible subject matter. Two years later, the Supreme Court extended this framework in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International to “abstract ideas,” and cemented the framework as the test to determine patent-eligible subject matter. Recent cases demonstrate that this framework has collapsed from a two-step inquiry into a one-step inquiry, leading to bizarre results and legal uncertainty. This Note examines why the Mayo framework should never have been extended to abstract …

Compelling Trade Secret Sharing, David S. Levine, Joshua D. Sarnoff

UC Law Journal

The unprecedented COVID-19 virus has brought to the forefront many challenges associated with exclusive rights in information, data, and know-how, all of which may constitute protected trade secrets. While patents have received more attention, trade secret information has limited the ability to perform research, develop, test, gain regulatory approval for, manufacture, and distribute globally and at sufficient scale and affordable prices the needed vaccines, therapeutics, diagnostics, medical devices, and personal protective equipment. Voluntary licensing efforts have proven inadequate to supply pandemic needs. Thus, compelling the sharing or licensing of trade secrets is needed not only to properly address COVID-19, but …

Antitrust’S Healthcare Conundrum: Cross-Market Mergers And The Rise Of System Power, Jaime S. King, Alexandra D. Montague, Daniel R. Arnold, Thomas L. Greaney

UC Law Journal

As healthcare markets continue to consolidate and prices continue to rise, economists, legal scholars, antitrust enforcers, and policymakers have the opportunity and the obligation to examine how the dynamics of our healthcare markets have changed over time and how those changes affect consumers and competition. Although antitrust merger law is designed to arrest anticompetitive harms in their incipiency, it has failed to prevent anticompetitive consolidation in most sectors of the healthcare industry. Of particular concern is the inattention of antitrust enforcers to the growing market power of healthcare systems that span multiple local geographic markets. While more than half of …

Caremark’S Climate Failure, Andrew W. Winden

UC Law Journal

Unless U.S. corporations take steps to harden their assets against natural disasters exacerbated by climate change and prepare for the transition to a zero-carbon economy, they face the prospect of catastrophic risk to their assets and market values, damaging both shareholders and, particularly where there are systemic effects, society at large. But surveys indicate that directors of American corporations do not view climate change as an important focus for their boards. In contrast, directors in Australia and Canada consider climate change one of the top two priorities for their governments and one of the top challenges for their companies. Different …