Law Commons^™

Unprotected Sex: The Pregnancy Discrimination Act At 35, Deborah L. Brake, Joanna L. Grossman

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Thirty-five years ago, Congress passed the Pregnancy Discrimination Act to overturn a Supreme Court decision refusing to recognize pregnancy discrimination as a form of discrimination based on sex. Now, three and a half decades later, women whose work lives are impacted by pregnancy are again finding themselves unprotected from discrimination. Lower court rulings have eviscerated the Act’s protections at the same time that an expansion of worker rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act should redound to the benefit of pregnant women by expanding the pool of comparators who receive accommodations. By following trends in discrimination law generally - equating …

A Community Of Procedure Scholars: Teaching Procedure And The Legal Academy, Elizabeth G. Thornburg, Erik S. Knutsen, Carla Crifo, Camille Cameron

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This article asks whether the way in which procedure is taught has an impact on the extent and accomplishments of a scholarly community of proceduralists. Not surprisingly, we find a strong correlation between the placement of procedure as a required course in an academic context and the resulting body of scholars and scholarship. Those countries in which more civil procedure is taught as part of a university degree — and in which procedure is recognized as a legitimate academic subject — have larger scholarly communities, a larger and broader corpus of works analyzing procedural issues, and a richer web of …

The Mobile Health Revolution?, Nathan Cortez

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Rarely does a class of technologies excite physicians, patients, financeers, gadgeteers, and policymakers alike. But mobile health — the use of mobile devices like smartphones and tablets for health or medical purposes — has captured our collective imagination. Observers predict that mobile health, also referred to as “mHealth” or “medical apps,” can save millions of lives, billions in spending, and democratize access to health care. Proponents argue that mobile health technologies will transform the ways in which we deliver, consume, measure, and pay for care; disrupting our sclerotic health care system.

This Article evaluates mobile health and its many ambitions. …

Patent Misjoinder, David O. Taylor

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The Leahy-Smith America Invents Act effectively repealed aspects of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure by creating a new statutory section governing joinder of accused infringers and consolidation of actions for trial in most patent infringement cases. This new law codifies a substantial barrier to joinder and consolidation, contradicting two of the primary policies embraced by the drafters of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure: the promotion of liberal standards both for evaluating the sufficiency of pleadings and for evaluating the propriety of joinder of parties. Remarkably, the new statutory section does so despite the absence of any detailed scholarly …

Death And Rehabilitation, Meghan J. Ryan

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

While rehabilitation is reemerging as an important penological goal, the Supreme Court is eroding the long-revered divide between capital and non-capital sentences. This raises the question of whether and how rehabilitation applies in the capital context. Courts and scholars have long concluded that it does not — that death is completely irrelevant to rehabilitation. Yet, historically, the death penalty in this country has been imposed in large part to induce the rehabilitation of offenders’ characters. Additionally, there are tales of the worst offenders transforming their characters when they are facing death, and several legal doctrines are based on the idea …

Agency Of Risk: The Competing Balance Between Protecting Military Forces And The Civilian Population During Counterinsurgency Operations In Afghanistan, Chris Jenks

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Using both the International Security Assistance Force’s tactical directive on use of force in Afghanistan and doctrinal concepts from the US military’s counterinsurgency manual, this chapter explores the allocation of risk between the military force and Afghan civilian population. The chapter first reviews civilian and military casualty figures and then uses those numbers as a touchstone against which to consider each group’s perception of the risk they face.

The History Of Texas Civil Procedure, William V. Dorsaneo Iii

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The promulgation of rules of court by the Texas Supreme Court has been the principal mechanism for the regulation of proceedings in Texas courts. This article provides a historical overview of the development of these rules, the rule-making process, the impact of procedural rule-making on the administration of justice in Texas courts, and the continuing need for revision and reorganization of the Texas Rules of Civil Procedure. This article also acknowledges the enormous debt that is owed to the Texas judges, lawyers, and professors who have participated in the rule-making process, mostly without plaudits or even public recognition. In a …

Freedom Of Expression In Post-Soviet Russia, Jeffrey D. Kahn

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This Article assesses the freedom of expression in Russia and prospects for its future: what has the Russian state promised its citizens, in what legal forms have those promises been made, and how well are those paper promises being kept in practice? The Article considers recent state actions and statutes enacted to regulate speech, association, and other forms of expression, and determines that these are possible because of the very weak separation of powers in the Russian Federation. The Article concludes by looking at the European Convention on Human Rights as one hope for a power capable of exerting influence …

Transnational Dealings - Morrison Continues To Make Waves, Marc I. Steinberg, Kelly Flanagan

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Morrison v. National Australia Bank Ltd. drastically altered the landscape for transnational securities litigation and the way that courts determine proper application of a statute concerning a transnational claim. The Supreme Court’s characterization of extraterritoriality under the Securities Exchange Act as a merits-based inquiry has led to a reexamination of limitations under other federal statutes that were previously thought to be jurisdictional issues. Significantly, Morrison created a road map for courts to follow when the extraterritoriality of a statute is brought into question. The key to proper application of a statute is to decipher the minimum U.S. contacts required to …

The Alien Tort Statute And The Law Of Nations In Kiobel And Beyond, Anthony J. Colangelo

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

In Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum the U.S. Supreme Court wrongly applied a presumption against extraterritoriality to claims authorized by the Alien Tort Statute (ATS). Even assuming such a presumption properly could extend to the ATS and claims authorized thereunder, the presumption is easily overcome by Congress’s unambiguous instruction that the statute encompasses violations of “the law of nations,” which includes both substantive and jurisdictional components — including principles of extraterritorial jurisdiction. Early 19th Century case law and congressional reaction thereto clearly demonstrate that Congress expressly invoked “the law of nations” to overturn the Court’s imposition of a limiting presumption …

Strange Bedfellows: How Expanding The Public Safety Exception To Miranda Benefits Counterterrorism Suspects, Geoffrey S. Corn, Chris Jenks

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

When should a suspected terrorist receive Miranda warnings, and should confessions obtained without obtaining a waiver of the Miranda right to silence and assistance of counsel be admissible at trial? The answer to this question turns on the scope of what is known as the Public Safety Exception (PSE) to the Miranda warning and waiver requirement. Established by the Supreme Court in 1984 in New York v. Quarles, the exception allows the use of confessions obtained from suspects questioned after being placed in custody (the situation that triggers the Miranda warning and waiver requirement) when the questions respond to an …

Formalism And Antiformalism In Patent Law Adjudication: Rules And Standards, David O. Taylor

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit exists at least in part to achieve goals related to patent law that the Supreme Court singularly failed to achieve. Since the Federal Circuit’s inception just over thirty years ago, however, critics have shifted blame for problems with the patent system from the Supreme Court to the Federal Circuit. A common criticism that has gained strength is that the Federal Circuit engages in overly formalistic rule-based adjudication in patent cases. One aspect of this criticism is that the Federal Circuit too often creates rules to govern patent law. In this …

A Concise History Of Corporate Mergers And The Antitrust Laws In The United States, C. Paul Rogers Iii

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

American merger control law today is governed primarily by regulators and not courts, focusing on consumer welfare and efficiency. This was not always the case though, and the author traces the development of this area of law from its nascent beginnings with the Sherman Act to the era of private enforcement witnessed today. As the Indian economy continues to expand,mergers and acquisitions have become frequent bringing with them difficult questions of anti-competitive behaviour. A study of the American experience, it is argued, would provide valuable insight in enforcing the rather untested anti-merger provisions in the Competition Act of India.

Grandma In The White House: Legal Support For Intergenerational Caregiving, Jessica Dixon Weaver

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Marian Robinson’s status as the live-in First Grandmother is an example of a growing trend in the United States - the multigenerational family. The 2010 United States Census Data reflects that the number of households with multiple generations living under one roof has increased by 25% this decade. Mrs. Robinson also reflects another new development in American families: grandparents helping their adult children with caregiving. More than 70% of grandparents are taking care of their grandkids on a regular basis, and 13% are primary caretakers. Many grandparents treat their role as caregiver like a profession, and they sacrifice jobs, residences, …

Independent Together, Joanna L. Grossman

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

No abstract provided.

A Private Underworld: The Naked Body In Law And Society, Lawrence M. Friedman, Joanna L. Grossman

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

In general, the literature on privacy stresses, quite naturally, our right to keep things private, or to make our own decisions. The individual, the citizen, is the center of gravity. There is a great deal of material on the limits of privacy, on threats to privacy, and the like. In this Article, the authors want to discuss what one might call mandatory privacy: those aspects of life that we are required to keep secret, hidden, or private, the things that we must keep private, whether we want to or not. This is a subject that has been mostly, though not …

Do Graphic Tobacco Warnings Violate The First Amendment?, Nathan Cortez

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

When Congress passed the nation’s first comprehensive tobacco bill in 2009, it replaced the familiar Surgeon General’s warnings, last updated in 1984, with nine blunter warnings. The law also directed the U.S. Food and Drug Administration ('FDA') to require color graphics to accompany the textual warnings. By law, the warnings would cover the top fifty percent of the front and back of tobacco packaging and the top twenty percent of print advertisements, bringing the United States closer to many peer countries that now require graphic warnings. Tobacco companies challenged the requirement on First Amendment grounds, arguing that the compelled disclosures …

Kiobel: Muddling The Distinction Between Prescriptive And Adjudicative Jurisdiction, Anthony J. Colangelo

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This brief symposium Essay addresses whether and in what ways the Alien Tort Statute (ATS) constitutes an exercise of prescriptive jurisdiction by the United States to regulate conduct or an exercise of adjudicative jurisdiction by U.S. courts to entertain suit, as well as the implications of that classification. The Essay begins with a central and hotly contested focal point in ATS suits — most prominently, in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum recently decided by the Supreme Court. Namely: how to conceptualize the applicable law in ATS suits and, more specifically, whether courts apply international law directly or some form of …

Spatial Legality, Due Process, And Choice Of Law In Human Rights Litigation Under U.S. State Law, Anthony J. Colangelo, Kristina Kiik

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Framing the topic of this symposium as “Human Rights Litigation in State Courts and Under State Law” effectively orients the discussion around the rights of plaintiffs from the outset, the central question being whether they have enforceable rights in U.S. state courts under state law. Standing in the way are various legal doctrines. In broad strokes, the relevant questions become: Which doctrines do, or should, either facilitate or obstruct human rights litigation in U.S. state courts and under state law? How are courts applying these doctrines? How should courts apply these doctrines?

Many of the doctrines that potentially stand in …

Fear Of Adversariness: Using Gideon To Restrict Defendants' Invocation Of Adversary Procedures, Pamela R. Metzger

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Fifty years ago Gideon promised that an attorney would vindicate the constitutional rights of any accused too poor to afford an attorney. But Gideon also promised more. Writ small, Gideon promised to protect individual defendants; writ large, Gideon promised to protect our system of constitutional criminal procedure. Much has been written about Gideon’s broken promise to our poor; this Essay is about Gideon’s broken promise to our system.

With its army of zealous public defenders, Gideon should have produced litigation that vigorously protected the core structures of our adversary trial system. Instead, courts have converted Gideon representation into a Gideon …

Windsor Products: Equal Protection From Animus, Dale Carpenter

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The Supreme Court's opinion in United States v. Windsor has puzzled commentators, who have tended to overlook or dismiss its ultimate conclusion that the Defense of Marriage Act was unconstitutional because it arose from animus. What we have in Justice Kennedy’s opinion is Windsor Products — an outpouring of decades of constitutional development whose fountainhead is Carolene Products and whose tributaries are the gay-rights and federalism streams. This paper presents the constitutional anti-animus principle, including what constitutes animus, why it offends the Constitution, and how the Supreme Court determines it is present. The paper also discusses why the Court was …

Correspondents' Reports United States Of America, Chris Jenks

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This correspondent report compiles examples of where and how in 2013 the United States demonstrated its compliance with international humanitarian law by prosecuting its service members in military courts-martial and captured enemy belligerents in military commissions and by US federal courts hearing detainee habeas challenges.

Effective Remedies For Ineffective Assistance, Jenia I. Turner

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

In two recent cases, Missouri v. Frye and Lafler v. Cooper, the Supreme Court affirmed that criminal defendants have a right to competent counsel during plea bargaining. The Court also established that the injury caused by ineffective assistance is not mooted by the subsequent conviction of the defendant at trial. The cases were broadly celebrated for clarifying that the Sixth Amendment applies fully to plea bargaining — the standard process by which our justice system resolves criminal cases today.

The most significant and surprising part of Lafler, however, was the Court’s holding concerning remedies. The Court held that trial courts …

The U.S. Women's Jury Movements And Strategic Adoption: A More Just Verdict, Joanna L. Grossman

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

No abstract provided.

Jurisdiction, Immunity, Legality, And Jus Cogens, Anthony J. Colangelo

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Immunities in international law expose multifaceted tensions between goals of international stability and legal accountability. This Article seeks to clarify the law in this area by providing conceptual and doctrinal coherence to relationships between immunity and jurisdiction. It first explains that foreign sovereign immunity and official status-based immunity are jurisdictional in that they block the exercise of adjudicative jurisdiction by foreign states’ courts. The Article then explains that these immunities do not block the prescriptive jurisdiction of foreign states’ laws to regulate conduct, even conduct inside other states, if a basis of prescriptive jurisdiction exists in international law.

The Article …

Where The Fcra Meets The Fdcpa: The Impact Of Unfair Collection Practices On The Credit Report, Mary B. Spector

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This Article explores the impact that contemporary practices in consumer debt collection litigation may have on credit reporting and scoring. In doing so, it pays particular attention to available data regarding the use of unfair collection practices in such litigation, and considers whether consumer reports of such litigation unfairly burden consumers’ ability to obtain housing, employment, insurance, or credit. It highlights some of the obstacles consumers face at the intersection of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act and the Fair Credit Reporting Act and considers alternative proposals to provide fair and accurate information relating to consumer debts while also preventing …

The Incredible Shrinking Antitrust Law And The Antitrust Gap, C. Paul Rogers Iii.

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Substantive antitrust law has dramatically shrunk. The shrinkage, which began in the 1970s with the transition from the Warren Court to the Burger and then Rehnquist Courts, has accelerated in the last decade. Much of the shrinkage has to do with the expansion of the rule of reason and its displacement of per se rules. The Supreme Court has gone so far as to state that it "presumptively" applies the rule of reason while per se illegality is limited to a "narrow category of activity." This article considers the impact of modem antitrust law on the gap that is the …

From Space-Off To Represented Space: A Review Of Reimagining Equality: Stories Of Gender, Race, And Finding Home By Anita Hill., Lolita Buckner Inniss

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

In Reimagining Equality: Stories of Gender, Race, and Finding Home, author Anita Hill explores some of the literal and figurative meanings of "home," focusing specifically on African-American women in their quest for home. Hill layers discussions of law, literature, and culture with stories of individual women, both historic and contemporary. In Reimagining Equality, Hill takes on a topic clearly distinct from the Clarence Thomas Senate confirmation hearings, the episode for which she is best known. Her work here is, nonetheless, evocative of her struggle in those hearings, because the book addresses the interrelation between gender, race, place, space, and power. …

Prosecutor V. Perišić, Case No. It-04-81-A, International Criminal Tribunal For The Former Yugoslavia, Chris Jenks

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This note introduces a controversial ICTY decision which attempted to clarify the requisite elements required to convict the former head of the Army of Yugoslavia with aiding and abetting war crimes committed by other organizations in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia. The Perišić judgment serves as a reminder of the still unsettled nature of international criminal law on even threshold issues like the elements for a mode of liability. Given that the Special Court for Sierra Leone has already affirmatively rejected the Perišić formulation the case may, sadly, signal the fragmentation of international criminal law.

Introductory Note To Prosecutor V. Perišić, International Criminal Tribunal For The Former Yugoslavia (Icty), Chris Jenks

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This note introduces a controversial ICTY decision which attempted to clarify the requisite elements required to convict the former head of the Army of Yugoslavia with aiding and abetting war crimes committed by other organizations in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia. The Perišić judgment serves as a reminder of the still unsettled nature of international criminal law on even threshold issues like the elements for a mode of liability. Given that the Special Court for Sierra Leone has already affirmatively rejected the Perišić fomulation the case may, sadly, signal the fragmentation of international criminal law.