Law Commons^™

An Ethical Gap In Agency Adjudication, Louis J. Virelli Iii

Buffalo Law Review

There is an ongoing crisis of confidence in American government. Accusations of incompetence and political self-dealing dominate news cycles as public institutions seek to combat—with varying degrees of success—the public health and economic consequences of a global pandemic. Highlighted in this struggle is the larger issue of the importance of integrity to the efficacy and legitimacy of administrative government. This is especially true for agency adjudication, as it is the form of agency action that most directly impacts individuals. Recusal—the process by which an adjudicator is removed, voluntarily or involuntarily, from a specific proceeding—is a time-honored way of protecting the …

The Complexities Of Conscience: Reconciling Death Penalty L Aw With Capital Jurors’ Concerns, Meredith Martin Rountree, Mary R. Rose

Buffalo Law Review

Jurors exercise unique legal power when they are asked to decide whether to sentence someone to death. The Supreme Court emphasizes the central role of the jury’s moral judgment in making this sentencing decision, noting that it is the jurors who are best able to “express the conscience of the community on the ultimate question of life or death.” Manylower courts nevertheless narrow the range of admissible evidence at the mitigation phase of a capital trial, insisting on a standard of legal relevance that interferes with the jury’s ability to exercise the very moral judgment the Supreme Court has deemed …

Pain Is Enough: Chronic Pain As Disability, Katherine L. Moore

Buffalo Law Review

States have historically failed to recognize chronic pain as a disability. In medicine, chronic pain has gained increasing recognition as a disability in and of itself, even absent a current, medically determinable physical impairment. The law, however, has been slow to catch up. This Article argues that chronic pain is a disability, even without medical evidence of an underlying impairment, because of pain’s significant functional impact on the body and mind. In the 2018 case of Saunders v. Wilkie, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit recognized that “pain is enough” for a veteran to be …

Funding Crises: An Empirical Study Of The Paycheck Protection Program, William A. Birdthistle, Joshua Silver

Buffalo Law Review

In the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States Congress funded the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) to address the devastating consequences of business closures and millions of employees losing both their jobs and healthcare coverage during a public health emergency. That program immediately pumped more than a half-trillion dollars of forgivable loans out to five million businesses. But criticism was swift and widespread, if sometimes spurious, with detractors attacking the award of loans to wealthy celebrities such as Kanye West, politically connected donors such as the Kushner family, and large corporations such as Shake Shack and Ruth’s Chris …

Ai, On The Law Of The Elephant: Toward Understanding Artificial Intelligence, Emile Loza De Siles

Buffalo Law Review

Machine learning and other artificial intelligence (AI) systems are changing our world in profound, exponentially rapid, and likely irreversible ways.3 Although AI may be harnessed for great good, it is capable of and is doing great harm at scale to people, communities, societies, and democratic institutions. The dearth of AI governance leaves unchecked AI’s potentially existential risks. Whether sounding urgent alarm or merely jumping on the bandwagon, law scholars, law students, and lawyers at bar are contributing volumes of AI policy and legislative proposals, commentaries, doctrinal theories, and calls to corporate and international organizations for ethical AI leadership. Unfortunately, erroneous, …

Judicial Populism, Anya Bernstein, Glen Staszewski

Journal Articles

Populism has taken center stage in discussions of contemporary politics. This Article details a judicial populism that resonates with political populism’s tropes, mirrors its traits, and enables its practices. Like political populism, judicial populism insists there are clear, correct answers to complex, debatable problems, treating reasonable disagreement as illegitimate. It disparages the institutions that mediate divergent interests in a republican democracy, claiming special access to the law’s clear objective meaning. And it imagines a pure, unified people locked in battle with a subversive elite.

While commentators have recognized political populism as fundamentally undemocratic, judicial populism has largely escaped recognition and …

The Ostensible (And, At Times, Actual) Virtue Of Deference, Anthony O'Rourke

Journal Articles

In Rethinking Police Expertise, Anna Lvovsky exposes how litigators leverage judicial understandings of police expertise against the government. The article is rich not only with descriptive insights, but also with normative potential. By rigorously analyzing the relationship between expertise and authority in specific cases, Professor Lvovsky offers guidance as to how judges and lawyers should factor a police officer’s expertise into an assessment of whether the officer’s conduct is lawful. This Response argues, however, that Rethinking Police Expertise’s normative potential is weakened by the sharp conceptual distinction it draws between judicial understandings of expertise as a “professional virtue” (which it …

Federalism And The Limits Of Subnational Political Heterogeneity, James A. Gardner

Journal Articles

With an epidemic of democratic backsliding now afflicting many of the world’s democracies, including the United States, some scholars have suggested that federalism might serve as a useful defense for liberal democracy by impeding the ability of an authoritarian central government to stamp it out at the subnational level. In this Essay, I dispute that contention. An examination of both federal theory on one hand and the behavior and tactics of central control employed by ancient and early modern empires on the other leads to the conclusion that the protective value of federalism against the effects of national authoritarianism is …

Legal Corpus Linguistics And The Half-Empirical Attitude, Anya Bernstein

Journal Articles

Legal writers have recently turned to corpus linguistics to interpret legal texts. Corpus linguistics, a social-science methodology, provides a sophisticated way to analyze large data sets of language use. Legal proponents have touted it as giving empirical grounding to claims about ordinary language, which pervade legal interpretation. But legal corpus linguistics cannot deliver on that promise because it ignores the crucial contexts in which legal language is produced, interpreted, and deployed.

First, legal corpus linguistics neglects the relevant legal context—the conditions that give legal language authority. Because of this, legal corpus studies’ evidence about language use perversely obscures and misstates …

The Illiberalization Of American Election Law: A Study In Democratic Deconsolidation, James A. Gardner

Journal Articles

For many years, the dominant view among American election law scholars has been that the U.S. Supreme Court’s constitutional jurisprudence of democratic practice got off to a promising start during the mid-twentieth century but has since then slowly deteriorated into incoherence. In light of the United States’ recent turn toward populist authoritarianism, that view needs to be substantially revised. With the benefit of hindsight, it now appears that the Supreme Court has functioned, in its management of the constitutional jurisprudence of democracy, as a vector of infection—a kind of super-spreader of populist authoritarianism.

There is, sadly, nothing unusual these days …

What Counts As Data?, Anya Bernstein

Journal Articles

We live in an age of information. But whether information counts as data depends on the questions we put to it. The same bit of information can constitute important data for some questions, but be irrelevant to others. And even when relevant, the same bit of data can speak to one aspect of our question while having little to say about another. Knowing what counts as data, and what it is data of, makes or breaks a data-driven approach. Yet that need for clarity sometimes gets ignored or assumed away. In this essay, I examine what counts as data in …

When Provocation Is No Excuse: Making Gun Owners Bear The Risks Of Carrying In Public, Eric A. Johnson

Buffalo Law Review

Markeis McGlockton, an unarmed 28-year-old African-American father of three, was shot to death in front of his five-year-old son by “wannabe police officer” Michael Drejka during an argument over parking. Because McGlockton had shoved Drejka before Drejka shot him, Drejka was convicted only of heat-of-passion manslaughter, not murder. This Article argues that the heat-of-passion defense shouldn’t be available in cases like Drejka’s—cases where the defendant was carrying a loaded gun in public at the time of the provocation and used the gun to kill his provoker. The heat-of-passion defense is a concession to the difficulty of complying with the law’s …

Roper’S Unfinished Business: A New Approach To Young Offender Death Penalty Eligibility, Nichole M. Austin

Buffalo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Blockchain Copyright Exchange – A Prototype, Jiarui Liu

Buffalo Law Review

The copyright market for creative works such as music and movies traditionally involves a complex web of licensing transactions and exorbitant transaction costs. Out of every dollar that consumers pay, an artist who writes, performs, and produces her own work may receive less than fifteen cents while the rest are diverted to cover the costs of financing new production, marketing new works, and distributing royalties. Although artists are typically scheduled to receive royalties on a quarterly basis, a payment may lag as far as two years after users paid. Furthermore, if a collecting society is unable to identify the rightful …

Protecting Consumer Protection: Filling The Federal Enforcement Gap, Amy Widman

Buffalo Law Review

Since 2014, when a first-of-its-kind empirical study looked at how public enforcers use their authority under unfair and deceptive acts and practices (“UDAP”) laws, the enforcement landscape has changed. Most notably, the Trump Administration weakened enforcement on the federal level. In the wake of this political shift, many state enforcers rushed to fill the gap left by weak federal enforcement. At the same time, the state enforcers themselves experienced changes both internal (including changes to budgets and stated policy priorities) and external (electoral changes regarding state Attorneys General, changes to statutory authority, and other changes governing the enforcer’s authority).

This …

Antitrust Law’S Harm To Competition: A New Understanding Of Exclusivity, Ittai Paldor

Buffalo Law Review

One of the long-accepted axioms of antitrust law is that the competitive danger posed by exclusivity agreements increases as the market share foreclosed by these arrangements increases. The larger the market share foreclosed by an exclusivity agreement, the less likely the arrangement is to be upheld by courts. And exclusivity arrangements foreclosing extremely large market shares are practically never upheld. The business community has responded by forsaking such arrangements (or concealing them). This Article challenges this very intuitive axiom. It shows that due to an unobserved feature of exclusivity, when extremely large market shares are foreclosed, the competitive danger posed …

The Constitutionalization Of Parole: Fulfilling The Promise Of Meaningful Review, Alexandra Harrington

Journal Articles

Almost 12,000 people in the United States are serving life sentences for crimes that occurred when they were children. For most of these people, a parole board will determine how long they will actually spend in prison. Recent Supreme Court decisions have endorsed parole as a mechanism to ensure that people who committed crimes as children are serving constitutionally proportionate sentences with a meaningful opportunity for release. Yet, in many states across the country, parole is an opaque process with few guarantees. Parole decisions are considered “acts of grace” often left to the unreviewable discretion of the parole board.

This …

Solidarity As A Constitutional Value, Tamar Hostovsky Brandes

Buffalo Human Rights Law Review

No abstract provided.

Considering Rehabilitation Of Minors Sentenced In Juvenile Military Courts - Initial Proposals And Thoughts For The Future, Shai Farber, Sharon Rivlin Achai

Buffalo Human Rights Law Review

No abstract provided.

Access To University Education By Learners With Physical Disabilities: Combating The Barriers, Edwin O. Abuya, Jane W. Githinji

Buffalo Human Rights Law Review

No abstract provided.

Legal Positivism As A Theory Of Law’S Existence: A Comment On Margaret Martin’S "Judging Positivism", Jorge Luis Fabra-Zamora

Journal Articles

This comment critically examines the conception of legal positivism that informs Margaret Martin’s interesting and multilayered challenge against the substance and method of this intellectual tradition. My central claim is that her characterization of the substantive theory of legal positivism sets aside a more fundamental and explanatory prior dimension concerning the positivist’s theory of the existence of legal systems and legal norms. I also argue that her understanding of the positivist’s descriptive methodology as a nonnormative project is too demanding and overlooks both the relationships between law and morality recognized by contemporary legal positivists and the pivotal distinction between internal …

Reparations For Slavery: A Productive Strategy?, Makau Wa Mutua

Contributions to Books

Published as Chapter 1 in Time for Reparations: A Global Perspective, Jacqueline Bhabha, Margareta Matache & Caroline Elkins, eds.

Subnational Constitutionalism In The United States: Powerful States In A Powerful Federation, James A. Gardner

Contributions to Books

Published as Chapter 19 in Routledge Handbook of Subnational Constitutions and Constitutionalism, Patricia Popelier, Nicholas Aroney & Giacomo Delledonne, eds.

The United States has an extremely robust network of subnational constitutions. It is one of the few federations in the world in which subnational entities are understood to be fully competent polities with virtually complete constituent powers of self-organization and self-authorization. The authority to adopt a subnational constitution is consequently understood to be an incident of subnational sovereignty, a concept in turn derived from a conception of the basic federal order itself as highly decentralized.

The Role Of International Law In The Food–Energy–Water Nexus, Waseem Ahmad Qureshi

Buffalo Environmental Law Journal

The current relationship of water, food, and energy is deeply entangled as it functions within different sectors, such as industry and agriculture, the latter of which water is essential for irrigating crops. Similarly, adequate water storage facilities are also required for hydroelectricity generation. Moreover, in many regions, electrical energy is used to operate tube wells for extracting groundwater to irrigate crops for food. Within the intricate nature of the mutual relationship of water, energy, and food, each plays its role in ensuring the security of the others. For instance, both energy security and food security are dependent upon water security, …

Lake Erie Bill Of Rights Struck Down: Why The Rights Of Nature Movement Is A Nonviable Legislative Strategy For Municipalities Plagued By Pollution, Kathleen M. Mannard

Buffalo Environmental Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Muddying The Waters: The Need For More Clarity Under The Clean Water Act, Georgia D. Reid

Buffalo Environmental Law Journal

No abstract provided.

One Man’S Trash: Constitutional Principles Of Federalism And Privacy Implicated In San Francisco’S Mandatory Recycling Ordinance And Future Similar Legislation, J. Tyler Smith

Buffalo Environmental Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Susan Bartie, Free Hands And Minds: Pioneering Australian Legal Scholars, John Henry Schlegel

Book Reviews

No abstract provided.

Edward A. Purcell, Antonin Scalia And American Constitutionalism: The Historical Significance Of A Judicial Icon, Matthew J. Steilen

Book Reviews

No abstract provided.

Judicial Application Of Strict Liability Local Ordinances, Guyora Binder, Brenner Fissell

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.