Law Commons^™

Sex, Crime, And Serostatus, Courtney K. Cross

Articles

The HIV crisis in the United States is far from over. The confluence of widespread opioid usage, high rates of HIV infection, and rapidly shrinking rural medical infrastructure has created a public health powder keg across the American South. Yet few states have responded to this grim reality by expanding social and medical services. Instead, criminalizing the behavior of people with HIV remains an overused and counterproductive tool for addressing this crisis - especially in the South, where HIV-specific criminal laws are enforced with the most frequency.

People living with HIV are subject to arrest, prosecution, and lengthy prison sentences …

Incentivized Torts: An Empirical Analysis, John Shahar Dillbary, Cherie Metcalf, Brock Stoddard

Articles

Courts and scholars assume that group causation theories deter wrongdoers. This Article empirically tests, and rejects, this assumption, using a series of incentivized laboratory experiments. Contrary to common belief and theory, data from over 200 subjects show that group liability can encourage tortious behavior and incentivize individuals to act with as many tortfeasors as possible. We find that subjects can be just as likely to commit a tort under a liability regime as they would be when facing no tort liability. Group liability can also incentivize a tort by making subjects perceive it as fairer to victims and society. These …

If Only I Had Known: The Challenges Of Representation, Jenny E. Carroll

Articles

No abstract provided.

The Emerging Lessons Of Trump V. Hawaii, Shalini Ray

Articles

In the years since the Supreme Court decided Trump v. Hawaii, federal district courts have adjudicated dozens of rights-based challenges to executive action in immigration law. Plaintiffs, including U.S. citizens, civil rights organizations, and immigrants themselves, have alleged violations of the First Amendment and the equal protection component of the Due Process Clause with some regularity based on President Trump's animus toward immigrants. This Article assesses Hawaii's impact on these challenges to immigration policy, and it offers two observations. First, Hawaii has amplified federal courts' practice of privileging administrative law claims over constitutional ones. For example, courts considering separate challenges …

Abdication Through Enforcement, Shalini Ray

Articles

Presidential abdication in immigration law has long been synonymous with the perceived nonenforcement of certain provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act. President Obama’s never-implemented policy of deferred action, known as DAPA, serves as the prime example in the literature. But can the President abdicate the duty of faithful execution in immigration law by enforcing the law, i.e., by deporting deportable noncitizens? This Article argues “yes.” Every leading theory of the presidency recognizes the President’s role as supervisor of the bureaucracy, an idea crystallized by several scholars. When the President fails to establish meaningful enforcement priorities, essentially making every deportable …

Redliking: When Redlining Goes Online, Allyson Gold

Articles

Airbnb's structure, design, and algorithm create a website architecture that allows user discrimination to prevent minority hosts from realizing the same economic benefits from short-term rental platforms as White hosts, a phenomenon this Article refers to as "redliking." For hosts with an unused home, a spare room, or an extra couch, Airbnb provides an opportunity to create new income streams and increase wealth. Airbnb encourages prospective guests to view host photographs, names, and personal information when considering potential accommodations, thereby inviting bias, both implicit and overt, to permeate transactions. This bias has financial consequences. Empirical research on host earning rates …

The Least Of These: The Case For Nationwide Injunctions In Immigration Cases As A Critical Democratic Institution, Allen Slater, Richard Delgado

Articles

No abstract provided.

Safeguarding A Will: Will Deposit Statutes, Alberto Lopez

Articles

No abstract provided.

Payday, Yonathan A. Arbel

Articles

Legislation lags behind technology all too often. While trillions of dollars are exchanged in online transactions-safely, cheaply, and instantaneously-workers still must wait two weeks to a month to receive payments from their employers. In the modern economy, workers are effectively lending money to their employers, as they wait for earned wages to be paid. The same worker who taps a credit card to pay for groceries in semiautomated checkout lines depends on dated payroll systems that only transfer payments on a "payday." Workers, especially those living paycheck-to-paycheck, are hard-pressed to meet their daily needs and turn to expensive, short-term credit …

The Due Process Of Bail, Jenny E. Carroll

Articles

The Due Process Clause is a central tenet of criminal law's constitutional canon. Yet defining precisely what process is due a defendant is a deceptively complex proposition. Nowhere is this more true than in the context of pretrial detention, where the Court has relied on due process safeguards to preserve the constitutionality of bail provisions. This Article considers the lay of the bail due process landscape through the lens of the district court's opinion in ODonnell v. Harris County and the often convoluted historical description of pretrial due process. Even as the ODonnell court failed to characterize pretrial process as …

Some Musings As Llcs Approach The Fifty-Year Milestone, Susan Pace Hamill

Articles

No abstract provided.

Separating Fact From Fiction In Evaluating The Endangered Species Act: Recognizing The Need For Ongoing Conservation Management And Regulation, William L. Andreen

Articles

No abstract provided.

Farm-Raised Trout, Richard Delgado, Jean Stefancic

Articles

No abstract provided.

Safety, Crisis, And Criminal Law, Jenny E. Carroll

Articles

No abstract provided.

Health Justice Strategies To Eradicate Lead Poisoning: An Urgent Call To Safeguard Future Generations, Allyson E. Gold, Emily A. Benfer, Emily Coffey, Mona Hanna-Attisha, Bruce Lanphear, Helen Y. Li, Ruth Ann Norton, David Rosner, Kate Walz

Articles

Despite over a century of evidence that lead is a neurotoxin that causes irreparable harm, today, lead continues to pervade children's environments and remains a constant threat to health and wellbeing. One in three homes across the United States housing children under the age of six has significant lead-based paint hazards that place occupants at risk of permanent neurological harm and lifelong poor health risks. Federal, state, and local governments must use a range of primary prevention strategies in order to fully eradicate the risks and protect children from lead poisoning. This Article provides a comprehensive examination of best practices …

Essentializing Labor Before, During, And After The Coronavirus Pandemic, Deepa Das Acevedo

Articles

In the era of COVID-19, the term essential labor has become part of our daily lexicon. Between March and May 2020, essential labor was not just the only kind of paid labor occurring across most of the United States; it was also, many argued, the only thing preventing utter economic and humanitarian collapse. As a result of this sudden significance, legal scholars, workers' advocates, and politicians have scrambled to articulate exactly what makes essential labor "essential." Some commentators have also argued that the rise of essential labor as a conceptual category disrupts or should disrupt longstanding patterns in the way …

Paying For Pretrial Detention, Russell M. Gold

Articles

American criminal law vastly overuses pretrial detention even as it purports to presume defendants innocent. This Article compares financial incentives in pretrial detention to those in civil preliminary injunctions. Both are procedures where one of the parties seeks relief before judgment. And yet, these two procedures employ financial incentives in opposite ways. Civil procedure discourages interim relief by requiring plaintiffi to bear financial risk when they obtain a preliminary injunction. Criminal law does the opposite-encouraging interim relief by requiring defendants to pay to avoid pretrial detention. The reasons that civil procedure relies on financial incentives to discourage requests for interim …

The First Amendment As A Procrustean Bed?: On How And Why Bright Line First Amendment Tests Can Stifle The Scope And Vibrancy Of Democratic Deliberation, Ronald J. Krotoszynski Jr.

Articles

No abstract provided.

Presidential Laws And The Missing Interpretive Theory, Tara Leigh Grove

Articles

There is something missing in interpretive theory. Recent controversies-involving, for example, the first travel ban and funding for sanctuary cities-demonstrate that presidential "laws" (executive orders, proclamations, and other directives) raise important questions of meaning. Yet, while there is a rich literature on statutory interpretation and a growing one on regulatory interpretation, there is no theory about how to discern the meaning of presidential directives. Courts, for their part, have repeatedly assumed that presidential directives should be treated just like statutes. But that does not seem right: theories of interpretation depend on both constitutional law and institutional setting. For statutes, the …

Occupational Licensing And The Opioid Crisis, Benjamin J. Mcmichael

Articles

The United States' affordable care crisis and chronic physician shortage have required nurse practitioners to assume increasingly important roles in the healthcare system. Nurse practitioners can address critical access-to-care problems, provide safe and effective care, and lower the cost of care. However, restrictive occupational licensing laws - specifically, scope-of-practice laws - have limited their ability to care for patients. Spurred by interest groups opposed to allowing nurse practitioners to practice independently, states require physician supervision of nurse practitioners. Research has discredited many of the traditional reasons for these restrictive laws, but emerging arguments assert that independent practice will deepen the …

Rethinking Standards Of Appellate Review, Adam N. Steinman

Articles

Every appellate decision typically begins with the standard of appellate review. The Supreme Court has shown considerable interest in selecting the standard of appellate review for particular issues, frequently granting certiorari in order to decide whether de novo or deferential review governs certain trial court rulings. This Article critiques the Court's framework for making this choice and questions the desirability of assigning distinct standards of appellate review on an issue-by-issue basis. Rather, the core functions of appellate courts are better served by a single template for review that dispenses with the recurring uncertainty over which standard governs which trial court …

A Few Grains Of Incense: Law, Religion, And Politics From The Perspective Of The "Christian" And "Pagan" Dispensations, Paul Horwitz

Articles

No abstract provided.

Rodrigo And Ressentiment "I Don't Want It If You Are Going To Get It, Too" -- Why Classical Economic And Political Theory Fails To Explain The Obamacare Vote, But Legal Realism And Cls Can, Richard Delgado

Articles

No abstract provided.

Appellate Jurisdiction And The Emoluments Litigation, Adam N. Steinman

Articles

No abstract provided.

A Rule 11 For Prosecutors, Yuri R. Linetsky

Articles

This Article suggests a novel approach to allow victims of frivolous prosecutions to hold prosecutors accountable. Unique among American lawyers, prosecutors enjoy absolute immunity from civil suits alleging professional misconduct. In cases of frivolous prosecutions, where charges are dismissed by the judge or the defendants are acquitted, the former defendants are prevented from seeking damages. This is so despite former defendants often suffering significant consequences-from legal fees to loss of employment. Victims of frivolous prosecutions should be afforded a mechanism to seek redress against prosecutors who bring or maintain meritless actions.

By enacting a rule of criminal procedure that mirrors …

"Sorry" Is Never Enough: How State Apology Laws Fail To Reduce Medical Malpractice Liability Risk, Benjamin Mcmichael, R. Lawrence Van Horn, W. Kip Viscusi

Articles

Based on case studies indicating that apologies from physicians to patients can promote healing, understanding, and dispute resolution, thirty-nine states (and the District of Columbia) have sought to reduce litigation and medical malpractice liability by enacting apology laws. Apology laws facilitate apologies by making them inadmissible as evidence in subsequent malpractice trials.

The underlying assumption of these laws is that after receiving an apology, patients will be less likely to pursue malpractice claims and will be more likely to settle claims that are filed. However, once a patient has been made aware that the physician has committed a medical error, …

What The Police Don't Know May Hurt Us: An Argument For Enhanced Legal Training Of Police Officers, Yuri R. Linetsky

Articles

No abstract provided.

Beyond Physicians: The Effect Of Licensing And Liability Laws On The Supply Of Nurse Practitioners And Physician Assistants, Benjamin Mcmichael

Articles

The increased use of nurse practitioners (NPs) and physician assistants (PAs) represents an important option for increasing access to healthcare. I explore the effect of two types of laws on the supply of NPs and PAs: occupational licensing laws that limit the practices of NPs and PAs and caps on noneconomic damages. Relaxing licensing laws to allow NPs to practice with less physician oversight increases the supply of NPs in areas with few practicing physicians by 60 percent - though the size of this increases as the supply of physicians grows. I find similar, but weaker, evidence for granting PAs …

Nonmajority Opinions And Biconditional Rules, Adam Steinman

Articles

In Hughes v. United States, the Supreme Court will revisit a thorny question: how to determine the precedential effect of decisions with no majority opinion. For four decades, the clearest instruction from the Court has been the rule from Marks v. United States: the Court's holding is "the position taken by those Members who concurred in the judgments on the narrowest grounds." The Marks rule raises particular concerns, however, when it is applied to biconditional rules. Biconditionals are distinctive in that they set a standard that dictates both success and failure for a given issue. More formulaically, they combine an …

The Ideological Origins Of The Right To Counsel, John Felipe Acevedo

Articles

The defense counsel is a paramount actor in modem criminal trials, but this was not always the case. Indeed, the allowance of counsel to felony defendants can be traced to only a few hundred years ago, a relatively modem innovation in the area of legal history. This Essay examines the intellectual origins of the right to counsel, which it situates in the era of the English Revolution. Drawing on pamphlet literature, cases, and statutes from the seventeenth century in both England and North America, it argues that the right originated from a fear of unfairness brought on by a mistrust …