Law Commons^™

Bound To The Fire, Kelley Fanto Deetz

Civil Rights

For decades, smiling images of "Aunt Jemima" and other historical and fictional black cooks could be found on various food products and in advertising. Although these images were sanitized and romanticized in American popular culture, they represented the untold stories of enslaved men and women who had a significant impact on the nation's culinary and hospitality traditions, even as they were forced to prepare food for their oppressors.

Kelley Fanto Deetz draws upon archaeological evidence, cookbooks, plantation records, and folklore to present a nuanced study of the lives of enslaved plantation cooks from colonial times through emancipation and beyond. She …

A Political Companion To James Baldwin, Susan J. Mcwilliams

Civil Rights

In seminal works such as Go Tell It on the Mountain, Notes of a Native Son, and The Fire Next Time, acclaimed author and social critic James Baldwin (1924–1987) expresses his profound belief that writers have the power to transform society, to engage the public, and to inspire and channel conversation to achieve lasting change. While Baldwin is best known for his writings on racial consciousness and injustice, he is also one of the country's most eloquent theorists of democratic life and the national psyche. In A Political Companion to James Baldwin, a group of prominent scholars assess the prolific …

Language Changes, But Should Legal Writing Change With It?, Diane B. Kraft

Law Faculty Popular Media

No abstract provided.

An Empirical Study Of University Patent Activity, Brian L. Frye, Christopher J. Ryan

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Since 1980, a series of legislative acts and judicial decisions have affected the ownership, scope, and duration of patents. These changes have coincided with historic increases in patent activity among academic institutions.

This article presents an empirical study of how changes to patent policy precipitated responses by academic institutions, using spline regression functions to model their patent activity. We find that academic institutions typically reduced patent activity immediately before changes to the patent system, and increased patent activity immediately afterward. This is especially true among research universities. In other words, academic institutions responded to patent incentives in a strategic manner, …

A Revealed Preferences Approach To Ranking Law Schools, Brian L. Frye, Christopher J. Ryan Jr.

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The U.S. News & World Report (U.S. News) “Best Law Schools Rankings” defines the market for legal education. Law schools compete to improve their standing in the U.S. News rankings and fear any decline. But the U.S. News rankings are controversial, at least in part because they rely on factors that are poor proxies for quality, like peer reputation and expenditures per student. While many alternative law school rankings exist, none have challenged the market dominance of the U.S. News rankings. Presumably the U.S. News rankings benefit from a first-mover advantage, other rankings fail to provide a clearly superior alternative, …

Regulating Nonmarriage, Albertina Antognini

Law Faculty Popular Media

In the Closing Thoughts column of UK Law Notes, Prof. Albertina Antognini discusses her research on the regulation of nonmarriage. Two years have elapsed since the Supreme Court recognized the constitutional right to marry in the landmark case of Obergefell v. Hodges. Much ink has been spilled in the opinion’s aftermath by scholars who have in turn lauded it for its promotion of dignity and equality, criticized it for having a conservative vision of what marriage entails, or pored over its reasoning to better understand the future it has ushered in. Underlying the opinion, and the recent scholarly …

Neil M. Gorsuch | Associate Justice Of The Supreme Court Of United States, Neil M. Gorsuch

The John G. Heyburn II Initiative for Excellence in the Federal Judiciary

The Hon. Neil M. Gorsuch, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, spent Thursday evening on the University of Kentucky campus. He spoke to University of Kentucky College of Law students as well as judges, lawyers and clerks from across Kentucky.

Justice Gorsuch was here as part of the John G. Heyburn II Initiative for Excellence in the Federal Judiciary.

“The Heyburn Initiative enhances the academic experience for our students by providing them with the opportunity to listen to, and engage with, some of our nation’s top leaders in law. The College of Law is one of …

Irma Price Gouging Highlights Sad Truth: Consumer Fleecing Is The New Normal, Ramsi Woodcock

Law Faculty Popular Media

By bringing desperation to so many, Hurricane Irma is revealing a sad fact about many American companies, and not just airlines: that they have come in recent years to embrace taking advantage of desperate consumers as a central part of their business models.

The practice, called dynamic pricing, is intended to ration scarce goods and services, yet, as I show in a recent paper, it primarily harms consumers by making it easier for companies to fleece them.

Need For Non-Discrimination Laws Protecting Lgbt People In Kentucky, Ellen Riggle

Center for Equality and Social Justice Position Papers

Non-discrimination laws that include sexual orientation and gender identity provide protections for people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT). Further, inclusive non-discrimination laws signal a commitment to equality and fairness in the treatment of all individuals. However, statewide nondiscrimination laws in Kentucky do not include protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. This lack of protection creates risks for the unfair treatment of LGBT people in Kentucky.

Immigrants Benefit The Community And Economy, Jenny Minier

Center for Equality and Social Justice Position Papers

Immigration has historically been a defining characteristic of the United States, and it remains one of the country’s most significant economic advantages. Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) was implemented by President Obama to grant temporary legal status to undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children, as long as they are enrolled in school or working. Given President Trump’s recent comments about ending the DACA program, Congress must work on a policy solution that will allow the nearly 800,000 “Dreamers” currently enrolled in DACA to remain legally in the U.S. There are both moral and economic reasons …

Amazon's Whole Foods Deal Could Still Be Reversed Thanks To Forgotten Antitrust Case, Ramsi Woodcock

Law Faculty Popular Media

Amazon formally took ownership of Whole Foods this week after the Federal Trade Commission signaled on August 23 that it wouldn’t stop the deal.

The online retailer isn’t wasting any time remaking the high-end grocery chain in its low-price image. Its first act involved cutting prices on dozens of items, from avocados to tilapia. But that is not what is sending shivers down the aisles of rival food retailers like Walmart, which now controls 20 percent of the grocery market by pursuing just such a low-price strategy.

The reason, which the FTC ignored in providing its imprimatur, is that Amazon …

We Know Better: Shed Image Of Racist, Bigoted Community, Christia Spears Brown

Center for Equality and Social Justice Position Papers

Following Mayor Jim Gray’s announcement about relocating the Confederate statues at Cheapside, Lexington received the attention of national news organizations, and the attention of several racist, xenophobic and anti-Semitic hate groups.

Big Data, Price Discrimination, And Antitrust, Ramsi Woodcock

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Antitrust law today guarantees a particular distribution of wealth between consumers and firms by promoting competition in some markets, but allowing firms to retain pricing power in other markets, such as those in which a firm has achieved power through oligopoly or by fielding a superior product. By giving firms the power to identify individual consumers at the point of sale and determine the maximum price that each consumer can be made to pay for a product, big data will soon allow firms with pricing power to charge each consumer the highest price that the consumer is able to pay, …

Early Effects Of The Affordable Care Act On Health Care Access, Risky Health Behaviors, And Self-Assessed Health, Charles J. Courtemanche, James Marton, Benjamin Ukert, Aaron Yelowitz, Daniela Zapata

Institute for the Study of Free Enterprise Working Papers

The goal of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was to achieve nearly universal health insurance coverage through a combination of mandates, subsidies, marketplaces, and Medicaid expansions, most of which took effect in 2014. We use data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System to examine the impacts of the ACA on health care access, risky health behaviors, and self-assessed health after two years. We estimate difference-in-difference-in-differences models that exploit variation in treatment intensity from state participation in the Medicaid expansion and pre-ACA uninsured rates. Results suggest that the ACA led to sizeable improvements in access to health care in both …

Eu's Antitrust 'War' On Google And Facebook Uses Abandoned American Playbook, Ramsi Woodcock

Law Faculty Popular Media

On June 27, the European Union imposed a €2.4 billion (US$2.75 billion) fine on Google for giving favorable treatment in its search engine results to its own comparison shopping service. And Germany’s antitrust enforcer is investigating Facebook for asking users to sign away control over personal information.

In contrast, American antitrust enforcers have shown little interest in these companies. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) did open an investigation into whether Google has a search bias, but closed it in 2013, despite recognizing that it “may have had the effect of harming individual competitors.”

Anti-Americanism, however, does not explain these starkly …

Criminalizing Pregnancy, Cortney E. Lollar

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The state of Tennessee arrested a woman two days after she gave birth and charged her with assault of her newborn child based on her use of narcotics during her pregnancy. Tennessee's 2014 assault statute was the first to explicitly criminalize the use of drugs by a pregnant woman. But this law, along with others like it being considered by legislatures across the country, is only the most recent manifestation of a long history of using criminal law to punish poor mothers and mothers of color for their behavior while pregnant. The purported motivation for such laws is the harm …

The Right To Vote Under Local Law, Joshua A. Douglas

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

A complete analysis of the right to vote requires at least three levels of inquiry: the U.S. Constitution and federal law, state constitutions and state law, and local laws that confer voting rights for municipal elections. But most voting rights scholarship focuses on only federal or state law and omits any discussion of the third category. This Article—the first to explore in depth the local right to vote—completes the trilogy. Cities and towns across the country are expanding the right to vote in municipal elections to include sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, noncitizens, nonresident property owners, and others. Berkeley, California, for example, …

Non-Charitable Purpose Trusts: Past, Present, And Future, Richard C. Ausness

Law Faculty Popular Media

This Article focuses on non-charitable purpose trusts and how they enable estate planners to better carry out their clients’ objectives.

The Dream Is Lost, Julian Maxwell Hayter

Civil Rights

Once the capital of the Confederacy and the industrial hub of slave-based tobacco production, Richmond, Virginia has been largely overlooked in the context of twentieth century urban and political history. By the early 1960s, the city served as an important center for integrated politics, as African Americans fought for fair representation and mobilized voters in order to overcome discriminatory policies. Richmond's African Americans struggled to serve their growing communities in the face of unyielding discrimination. Yet, due to their dedication to strengthening the Voting Rights Act of 1965, African American politicians held a city council majority by the late 1970s. …

Care Of The Terminally Ill Patient In India: Comments On The Proposed Legislation, Aju Mathew, M. R. Rajagopal

Internal Medicine Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Local Democracy On The Ballot, Joshua A. Douglas

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

This Essay, focusing particularly on voter-backed local election rules, proceeds in three parts. Part I highlights how local laws play a significant role in dictating voting rights and election rules. Too often election law scholars focus solely on federal or state law. But local laws are also important in defining the right to vote and providing rules for our democracy. New local election law experiments in one place can highlight innovative reforms that other cities and states may eventually adopt. This avenue to election law reform is particularly important given the current political climate.

Part II considers local ballot initiatives …

The Case For Federal Preemption Of State Blue Sky Laws, Rutheford B. Campbell Jr.

Law Faculty Popular Media

In our market economy, imposing rules on capital formation makes economic sense. Well-constructed rules regarding capital formation can promote the efficient flow of capital to its highest and best use and prevent or ameliorate fraud or unfairness to investors. These rules, however, generate additional offering costs that may retard or in some cases completely choke off the flow of capital from investors to businesses. The problem with state blue sky laws is their registration requirements, which significantly impede efficient capital formation and provide no material economic or societal benefits, such as protection of investors from fraud.

Subcontracting And The Survival Of Plants In The Road Construction Industry: A Panel Quantile Regression Analysis, Dakshina G. De Silva, Georgia Kosmopoulou, Carlos Lamarche

Economics Faculty Publications

This paper investigates how subcontracting parts of contracted work shapes entrants’ success and survival. We find that newly developed quantile regression approaches can be adapted to study survival of firms competing for government contracts in road construction. The method is applied on a data set that includes patterns of firm entry, exit and auction related information. We find an apparent increase in the business life of firms who subcontract out part of their projects. In Texas, these subcontracting effects appear to be more pronounced for firms with few or no options outside the industry, and among firms who contract out …

The Bargaining Robot, Ramsi Woodcock

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The primary threat of the rise of the machines is not to competition itself, but to the bargaining power of consumers, given any level of competition in the market. By enabling firms to interact with each consumer on an individual basis, technology will permit firms to tailor price to the highest level each individual consumer is willing to pay and to use tailored marketing to break each consumer’s will to hold out for a better deal, reducing consumer welfare for any given level of competition. By giving consumers more outside options, the promotion of competition can limit the effects of …

Tips For Writing Concisely, Kristin J. Hazelwood

Law Faculty Popular Media

No abstract provided.

The Buffering Effect Of Brands For Companies Facing Legislative Homogenization: Evidence From The Introduction Of Sarbanes-Oxley, Felipe Thomaz, Leonce Bargeron, John Hulland, Chad Zutter

Institute for the Study of Free Enterprise Working Papers

Brands not only enhance the positive impact of marketing initiatives, but also buffer the firm from the full consequences of unexpected and negative market shifts. While this protective effect has been demonstrated for firm-specific events (e.g., product recalls, public relations crises), its impact has not been observed in response to market-wide environmental shifts. Our study demonstrates the buffering properties of strong brands in exactly such a context: the passing of new legislation. By examining responses to the introduction of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, we show that (1) firms exhibit a rapid and homogeneous response as they comply and adjust …

Equitable Resale Royalties, Brian L. Frye

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

A “resale royalty right” or droit de suite(resale right) is a legal right that gives certain artists the right to claim a percentage of the resale price of the artworks they created. The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works and the Tunis Model Law on Copyright for Developing Countries provide for an optional resale royalty right. Many countries have created a resale royalty right, although the particulars of the right differ from country to country. But the United States has repeatedly declined to create a federal resale royalty right, and a federal court recently held …

Integrated, James W. Miller

Civil Rights

In Integrated: The Lincoln Institute, Basketball, and a Vanished Tradition, James W. Miller explores an often ignored aspect of America's struggle for racial equality. He relates the story of the Lincoln Institute—an all-black high school in Shelby County, Kentucky, where students prospered both in the classroom and on the court. In 1960, the Lincoln Tigers men's basketball team defeated three all-white schools to win the regional tournament and advance to one of Kentucky's most popular events, the state high school basketball tournament. This proud tradition of African American schools—a celebration of their athletic achievements—was ironically destroyed by integration.

This …

The Case For Federal Pre-Emption Of State Blue Sky Laws, Rutheford B. Campbell Jr.

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

State blue sky laws—state laws that regulate a company’s offer and sale of securities—are a substantial barrier to businesses’ efficient access to external capital. The registration provisions in state blue sky laws have been especially harmful to small businesses, a vital component of our economy that may account for 30% of the nation’s employment. The costs associated with complying with more than fifty separate and independent obligations to register securities often exceed what small businesses can pay and thus may foreclose small businesses from the capital market. At the same time, requiring small businesses to comply with multiple registration regimes …

Clean Power Plant Update, Sean Alteri

Kentucky Journal of Equine, Agriculture, & Natural Resources Law Symposia

In this session, Sean Alteri gave an update on the Clean Power Plan in Kentucky.