Law Commons^™

Anticipating Procedural Innovation: How And When Parties Calibrate Procedure Through Contract, Henry Allen Blair

Faculty Scholarship

Despite a vast literature on contract theory, scholars are only just scratching the surface of understanding how parties design their contracts in the real world. This shortfall is particularly true of procedural customizations. Contrary to some early commentators’ estimates, in a small but significant set of circumstances, parties engage in a diverse range of procedural customization. To date, however, scholars have struggled to identify and explain the patterns of ex ante procedural contracting.

This Article argues that the first step toward understanding how transactional attorneys harness the potential of procedural autonomy is to recognize that procedural customization functions most effectively …

Teaching And Learning Law And Business: An Open Resource Tool, John O. Sonsteng, Willow Najjar Anderson, Michael Carlson, John Edell, Alexander Koch, Samuel Mccollough, Hannah Mohs

Faculty Scholarship

This dissertation examines the impacts of business law education through a multi-layered review of surveys, data, and literature. The authors examine what law schools across the country offer, explore research conducted in partnership with the Minnesota and American Bar Associations, and provide a systemic review of the relevant literature. The data shows attorneys resoundingly do not believe law school coursework prepared them adequately for the business of law.

Despite the practical changes that have been made to law school education since the 1960s to the present, there is still a disconnect between what law schools say they will provide and …

Using Dispute Resolution Skills To Heal A Community, Sharon Press

Faculty Scholarship

On July 6, 2016, Philando Castile, an African-American male, wasshot and killed by a police officer during a traffic stop in Falcon Heights, Minnesota. In the aftermath of this shooting, there were several challenging meetings of the City Council where protestors demanded answers. In response,the Mayor of Falcon Heights reached out to dispute resolution professionals to help him design a two-track process which included a Task Force to propose policy changes to the City Council and a Community Conversations series to provide an opportunity for healing.

In this article, I will describe the process design for the community conversations, the …

Preventing Sexual Violence: Alternatives To Worrying About Recidivism, Eric S. Janus

Faculty Scholarship

How can it be that in the era in which almost one million Americans are on sex offender registries—most of whom are publicly stigmatized on websites, banished from their homes, shunned from their jobs, prevented from uniting with their families and traveling internationally, forced into homelessness, all of which increases their risk for suicide, and shames their spouses and children, even if their offenses occurred long in the past—that the #MeToo movement would explode, revealing widespread sexual misconduct against women, by powerful men, protected by iconic institutions? How can we have had three decades of the most aggressive, “spare-no-expense” laws …

The Strict Scrutiny Of Black And Blaqueer Life, T. Anansi Wilson

Faculty Scholarship

Furtive Blackness: On Blackness and Being (“Furtive Blackness”) and The Strict Scrutiny of Black and BlaQueer Life (“Strict Scrutiny”) take a fresh approach to both criminal law and constitutional law; particularly as they apply to African descended peoples in the United States. This is an intervention as to the description of the terms of Blackness in light of the social order but, also, an exposure of the failures and gaps of law. This is why the categories as we have them are inefficient to account for Black life. The way legal scholars have encountered and understood the language of law …

Furtive Blackness: On Blackness And Being, T. Anansi Wilson

Faculty Scholarship

Furtive Blackness: On Blackness and Being (“Furtive Blackness”) and The Strict Scrutiny of Black and BlaQueer Life (“Strict Scrutiny”) take a fresh approach to both criminal law and constitutional law; particularly as they apply to African descended peoples in the United States. This is an intervention as to the description of the terms of Blackness in light of the social order but, also, an exposure of the failures and gaps of law. This is why the categories as we have them are inefficient to account for Black life. The way legal scholars have encountered and understood the language of law …

Video Advance Directives: Growth And Benefits Of Audiovisual Recording, Thaddeus Pope

Faculty Scholarship

The key question in Cruzan v. Director, Missouri Department of Health was one of substantiation and evidence: how can the incapacitated patient’s surrogate decision maker prove that the health care decisions she makes on the patient’s behalf are the same health care decisions that the patient would have made for herself? Answering this question, the Court observed that an advance directive would constitute adequate proof because an advance directive constitutes clear and convincing evidence of a patient’s wishes.

Today, clinicians and policymakers no longer focus on the constitutional question of how much evidence state law may require from a patient’s …

Public Official, Figures, And Controversies In Minnesota Defamation Law, Michael K. Steenson

Faculty Scholarship

In Minnesota, the plaintiff in a common law defamation claim is entitled to recover presumed damages in libel and slander per se cases. Those rules change when the First Amendment is injected into defamation cases when the plaintiff is a public official or figure or is a private person involved in a public controversy. A plaintiff who is a public official or figure must prove not only the elements of the common law defamation claim, but also that the defamatory communication was a false statement of fact and prove by clear and convincing evidence that it was made with actual …

“The Worst Idea Ever”: Lessons From One Law School’S Embrace Of Online Learning, Eric S. Janus

Faculty Scholarship

This essay explores one law school's contrarian and pioneering embrace of online education into the core of its J.D. program, a five-year journey undertaken by William Mitchell College of Law (now Mitchell Hamline School ofLaw). This essay makes a simple point. Online pedagogy ought to be part of the palette of tools available for the design of J.D. programs. But placing it at the core of a J.D. program is not universally to be desired. Like any pedagogy, these online tools have their strengths and their weaknesses. The particular combination of tools and methods represents a question of design: of …

A Typology Of Disclosure, Sharon Sandeen

Faculty Scholarship

Information and data have always been valuable to businesses, but in the Information Age, as businesses have figured out more ways to commoditize the information and data they possess, there has been a corresponding increase in expressed concerns about the unauthorized “disclosure” of information. Often, these concerns are expressed in absolute terms, as if any unauthorized disclosure of information constitutes an act of unfair competition or theft. The problem is that the common understanding of disclosure, particularly among information owners that seek to restrict access to the information they possess, belies the legal meaning of the term as used in …

Trade Secrets And The Right To Information: A Comparative Analysis Of E.U. And U.S. Approaches To Freedom Of Expression And Whistleblowing, Sharon Sandeen, Ulla-Maija Mylly

Faculty Scholarship

Both the EU Trade Secrets Directive and US trade secret law seek to balance the protection of trade secrets against other values, including freedom of expression, but the EU Trade Secret Directive is more explicit about the need to do so. This article examines EU and US trade secret law through the right to information, a recognized human right under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and implementing laws and conventions. In particular, it discusses how principles of freedom of expression and whistleblowing should apply in the trade secret context in the EU and U.S.

The Limited Effect Of “Maximum Effect”, Daniel S. Kleinberger, Douglas K. Moll

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Inclusive Economics And Home Loan Policies For Informal Workers, Kim Vu-Dinh

Faculty Scholarship

The United States has been suffering from a housing crisis that existed long before the proliferation of sub-prime loans and the Great Recession of 2008-2009. For decades, millions of gainfully employed workers have been institutionally excluded from homeownership, simply because they work in the informal economy. Because of this, the economic growth of households in this demographic has been stymied by discriminatory banking policies that heavily prioritize short-term profit maximization over borrower reliability, or loan viability. Many of those affected are historically disenfranchised people, who systematically have been excluded from the American dream of “a chicken in every pot and …