Law Commons^™

The Tailors Of Wall Street, Graham S. Steele

University of Colorado Law Review

The narrative that emerged in the aftermath of the COVID-19 financial crisis has focused on nonbank financial intermediation as the primary vulnerability that plagued financial markets starting in March of 2020 and the exogenous nature of a public health crisis as a unique precipitating event. As a result, the crisis has largely been viewed as vindication for financial regulation as it applies to banks, with the Federal Reserve playing the role of heroic rescuer of the financial system.

This Article offers an alternative-and critical-analysis of the performance of banks during the COVID-19 financial crisis and the Fed's role as a …

The Immigration Court: Zigzagging On The Road To Judicial Independence, Mimi Tsankov

University of Colorado Law Review

The Article will begin by outlining the basic structure of the existing system and identifying some of the key changes that have impacted IJs (Immigation Judges) on the bench, which have driven us to a moment in history that many argue is our most tenuous. Part I will offer a brief overview of our court structure for context. Part II will explain how, after a tumultuous five years, Immigration Courts are currently significantly tarnished such that rehabilitation of the existing system may serve a short-term purpose but will inevitably fail to address the larger, fundamental inequities that result from a …

Afterword: Why "Taming The Megabanks" Should Remain A Top Priority For Financial Regulators And Policymakers, Arthur E. Wilmarth Jr.

University of Colorado Law Review

No abstract provided.

Authoring Prior Art, Joseph P. Fishman, Kristelia A. García

Publications

Patent law and copyright law are widely understood to diverge in how they approach prior art, the universe of information that already existed before a particular innovation’s development. For patents, prior art is paramount. An invention can’t be patented unless it is both novel and nonobvious when viewed against the backdrop of all the earlier inventions that paved the way. But for copyrights, prior art is supposed to be virtually irrelevant. Black-letter copyright doctrine doesn’t care if a creative work happens to resemble its predecessors, only that it isn’t actually copied from them. In principle, then, outside of the narrow …

Realizing Diversity, Sustainability, And Stakeholder Capitalism, Peter H. Huang

Publications

Stakeholder capitalism conceives of capitalism with companies maximizing their long-term value, while considering in addition to the interests of their shareholders, also the interests of all their other stakeholders. Examples of such additional stakeholders include customers, employees, communities, creditors, competitors, society at large, and our planet. America today does not have stakeholder capitalism. Instead, America presently has shareholder capitalism, in which publicly held corporations only maximize their stock value to shareholders.

This Essay analyzes proposals for the United States Securities Exchange Commission to require that all reporting companies make periodic mandatory Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) disclosures of comparable, standardized, …

The Case For Data Privacy Rights (Or 'Please, A Little Optimism'), Margot E. Kaminski

Publications

No abstract provided.

Endangered Claims: How The U.S. Civil Procedure System Mimics The Wild, Suzette M. Malveaux

Publications

No abstract provided.

Procedural Environmental Justice, Jonathan Skinner-Thompson

Publications

Achieving environmental justice—that is, the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income, with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies—requires providing impacted communities not just the formal right, but the substantive ability, to participate as equal partners at every level of environmental decision-making. While established administrative policy purports to provide all people with so-called “meaningful involvement” in the regulatory process, the public participation process often excludes marginalized community members from exerting meaningful influence on decision-making. Especially in the environmental arena, regulatory decisions are often buried …

Disaster Vulnerability, Lisa Grow, Brigham Daniels, Douglas M. Spencer, Chantel Sloan, Natalie Blades, Teresa Gomez

Publications

Vulnerability drives disaster law, yet the literature lacks both an overarching analysis of the different aspects of vulnerability and a nuanced examination of the factors that shape disaster outcomes. Though central to disaster law and policy, vulnerability often lurks in the shadows of a disaster, evident only once the worst is past and the bodies have been counted. The COVID-19 pandemic is a notable exception to this historical pattern: from the beginning of the pandemic, it has been clear that the virus poses different risks to different people, depending on vulnerability variables. This most recent pandemic experience thus provides a …

Introduction: Privacy Studies, Surveillance Law, Scott Skinner-Thompson

Publications

This Dialogue section examines perspectives on how privacy law scholarship and surveillance scholarship can be further enriched with more critical reflection and discussion between the disciplines and includes valuable contributions from thought leaders in each field.

Westlaw’S Key Number System, Aamir S. Abdullah

Publications

No abstract provided.

Roundtable Two: Environmental Law Education: New Techniques In The Classroom And Beyond, Lincoln Davies, Karrigan Bork, Sarah Krakoff

Publications

No abstract provided.

Distrust, Negative First Amendment Theory, And The Regulation Of Lies, Helen Norton

Publications

This symposium essay explores the relationship between “negative” First Amendment theory—rooted in distrust of the government’s potential for regulatory abuse—and the government’s regulation of lies. Negative First Amendment theory explains why many lies are protected from governmental regulation—even when the regulation neither punishes nor chills valuable speech (as was the case, for example, of the statute at issue in United States v. Alvarez). But negative theory, like any theory, also needs limiting principles that explain when the government’s regulation is constitutionally justifiable.

In my view, we engage in the principled application of negative theory when we invoke it in (the …

Technological 'Disruption' Of The Law's Imagined Scene: Some Lessons From Lex Informatica, Margot Kaminski

Publications

Joel Reidenberg in his 1998 Article Lex Informatica observed that technology can be a distinct regulatory force in its own right and claimed that law would arise in response to human needs. Today, law and technology scholarship continues to ask: does technology ever disrupt the law? This Article articulates one particular kind of “legal disruption”: how technology (or really, the social use of technology) can alter the imagined setting around which policy conversations take place—what Jack Balkin and Reva Siegal call the “imagined regulatory scene.” Sociotechnical change can alter the imagined regulatory scene’s architecture, upsetting a policy balance and undermining …

Rennard Strickland: Legal Historian And Leader, Charles Wilkinson

Publications

No abstract provided.

7 Everyday Useful Westlaw Tips. Plus, Bonus Trick List!, Aamir S. Abdullah

Publications

No abstract provided.

The (Un)Just Use Of Transition Minerals: How Efforts To Achieve A Low-Carbon Economy Continue To Violate Indigenous Rights, Kathleen Finn, Christina A.W. Stanton

Publications

No abstract provided.

Criminal Law Exceptionalism, Benjamin Levin

Publications

For over half a century, U.S. prison populations have ballooned and criminal codes have expanded. In recent years, a growing awareness of mass incarceration and the harms of criminal law across lines of race and class has led to a backlash of anti-carceral commentary and social movement energy. Academics and activists have adopted a critical posture, offering not only small-bore reforms, but full-fledged arguments for the abolition of prisons, police, and criminal legal institutions. Where criminal law was once embraced by commentators as a catchall solution to social problems, increasingly it is being rejected, or at least questioned. Instead of …

A Framework For Thinking About The Government’S Speech And The Constitution, Helen Norton

Publications

This Essay sketches a framework for mapping and navigating the constitutional implications of the government’s speech—and then illustrates this framework’s application to some contemporary constitutional disputes. My hope is that this framework will help us sort through the constitutional puzzles triggered by the government’s expressive choices—puzzles that confront courts and policymakers with increasing frequency. What I call “first-stage government speech questions” require us to determine when the government is speaking itself and when it is instead (or also) regulating others’ speech. This determination matters because the rules that apply to the government as speaker are very different from those that …

Against Domestic Violence: Public And Private Prosecution Of Batterers, Carolyn B. Ramsey

Publications

No abstract provided.

Is It Time For A New Civil Rights Act? Pursuing Procedural Justice In The Federal Civil Court System, Suzette M. Malveaux

Publications

The United States has recently been engaged in some of the largest civil rights movements since the 1960s—from Black Lives Matter to #MeToo—and calls for justice for marginalized communities are stronger than ever. Many decry the longstanding violence and systemic discrimination such communities experience, and advocate for stronger substantive civil rights. What has received less attention, however, is the violence done to those rights by the U.S. Supreme Court's obstructionist civil procedural jurisprudence. Over the last half century, the Court has systemically eroded Americans' capacity to enforce such substantive rights in the civil court system. This erosion arcs away from …

Victims’ Rights Revisited, Benjamin Levin

Publications

This Essay responds to Bennett Capers's article, "Against Prosecutors." I offer four critiques of Capers’s proposal to bring back private prosecutions: (A) that shifting power to victims still involves shifting power to the carceral state and away from defendants; (B) that defining the class of victims will pose numerous problems; C) that privatizing prosecution reinforces a troubling impulse to treat social problems at the individual level; and (D) broadly, that these critiques suggest that Capers has traded the pathologies of “public” law for the pathologies of “private” law. Further, I argue that the article reflects a new, left-leaning vision of …

The Discriminatory Executive And The Rule Of Law, Maryam Jamshidi

University of Colorado Law Review

Today, the executive enjoys unprecedented power, particularly in the area of national security. By and large, this authority is not meaningfully restrained by Congress or the courts. However, some scholars argue that the presidency is still kept in check by the rule of law and politics. According to this view, substantive and procedural laws and internal executive branch rules combine with political efforts by the public, like voting, to hold the President accountable. This Article challenges this view. It argues that the rule of law and politics do not always work together to restrain the executive. Instead, law can sometimes …

Robophobia, Andrew Keane Woods

University of Colorado Law Review

Robots-machines, algorithms, artificial intelligence-play an increasingly important role in society, often supplementing or even replacing human judgment. Scholars have rightly become concerned with the fairness, accuracy, and humanity of these systems. Indeed, anxiety about machine bias is at a fever pitch. While these concerns are important, they nearly all run in one direction: we worry about robot bias against humans; we rarely worry about human bias against robots.

This is a mistake. Not because robots deserve, in some deontological sense, to be treated fairly-although that may be true-but because our bias against nonhuman deciders is bad for us. For example, …

Leveling Up To A Reasonable Woman's Expectation Of Privacy, Victoria Schwartz

University of Colorado Law Review

Various privacy law doctrines involve a reasonable expectation of privacy or similar analyses that take into account social privacy norms. For the most part, however, neither courts nor scholars have explicitly grappled with whether courts descriptively do or normatively should consider gender in deciding what constitutes a reasonable expectation of privacy. This is despite the fact that, in various scenarios, a reasonable woman’s expectation of privacy might vary from a man’s in light of different lived experiences, biological differences, and existing societal gendered privacy norms.

This Article addresses how courts do and should take into account a reasonable woman’s expectation …

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: How Attorney General Review Undermines Our Immigration Adjudication System, Emma K. Carroll

University of Colorado Law Review

No abstract provided.

Ball Never Lies: How Guaranteed Contracts Provide Nba Players More Security Than Nfl Players To Advocate For Social Justice, Matthew Epstein

University of Colorado Law Review

No abstract provided.

Undocuamerica Monologues, Motus Theater, Alejandro Fuentes Mena, Armando Peniche, Christian Solano-Córdova, Kirsten Wilson

University of Colorado Law Review

The following work contains three monologues from Motus Theater's UndocuAmerica Project, which aims to interrupt dehumanizing portrayals of immigrants by encouraging thoughtful engagement on the challenges faced by undocumented communities and the assets immigrants bring to our country. The monologues were created in a collaboration between leaders with DACA status and Motus Theater Artistic Director Kirsten Wilson during a seventeen-week autobiographical- monologue workshop. All three pieces were presented in a virtual performance on April 8, 2021, as an introduction to the 29th Annual Rothgerber Conference.

Decitizenizing Asian Pacific American Women, Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia, Margaret Hu

University of Colorado Law Review

The Page Act of 1875 excluded Asian women immigrants from entering the United States, presuming they were prostitutes. This presumption was tragically replicated in the 2021 Atlanta Massacre of six Asian and Asian American women, reinforcing the same harmful prejudices. This Article seeks to illuminate how the Atlanta Massacre is symbolic of larger forms of discrimination, including the harms of decitizenship. These harms include limited access to full citizenship rights due to legal barriers, restricted cultural and political power, and a lack of belonging. The Article concludes that these harms result from the structure of past and present immigration laws …

The Failures Of Good Moral Character Determinations For Naturalization, Zachary New

University of Colorado Law Review

This Article examines the effects of the good-moral-character requirement in naturalization proceedings. Specifically, it looks to such character requirements as a method by which a citizen polity screens out undesirable noncitizens from those who are deserving of inclusion in the "in"g roup of citizenship. The Article discusses historical methods of good-moral-character adjudication, and especially how such methods carried an undercurrent of forgiveness and redemption-an undercurrent lacking in the current method of statutory bars to showings of good moral character. By looking at specific examples of statutory bars to showings of good moral character, this Article argues that the overinclusive nature …