Law Commons^™

The Tyranny Of Small Things, Yxta Maya Murray

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

In this legal-literary essay, I recount a day I spent watching criminal sentencings in an Alhambra, California courthouse, highlighting the sometimes mundane, sometimes despairing, imports of those proceedings. I note that my analysis resembles that of other scholars who tackle state over-criminalization and selective law enforcement. My original addition exists in the granular attention I pay to the moment-by-moment effects of a sometimes baffling state power on poor and minority people. In this approach, I align myself with advocates of the law and literature school of thought, who believe that the study (or, in this case, practice) of literature will …

Am I My Client? Revisited: The Role Of Race In Intra-Race Legal Representation, Julie D. Lawton

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

This Article examines the challenges of intra-race legal representation for lawyers of color, law students of color, and those teaching law students of color by analyzing how the dynamics of the lawyer’s and client’s racial sameness impact legal representation. This Article brings together three strands of lawyering theory – the role of race in lawyering, critical race theory, and the role of the lawyer in intra-race legal representation. In doing so, this Article explores a number of provocative questions: Does being the same race as their clients make lawyers better legal representatives? Should lawyers of color embrace or resist race’s …

Tightening The Ooda Loop: Police Militarization, Race, And Algorithmic Surveillance, Jeffrey L. Vagle

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

This Article examines how military automated surveillance and intelligence systems and techniques, when used by civilian police departments to enhance predictive policing programs, have reinforced racial bias in policing. I will focus on two facets of this problem. First, I investigate the role played by advanced military technologies and methods within civilian police departments. These approaches have enabled a new focus on deterrence and crime prevention by creating a system of structural surveillance where decision support relies increasingly upon algorithms and automated data analysis tools and automates de facto penalization and containment based on race. Second, I will explore these …

Pushing An End To Sanctuary Cities: Will It Happen?, Raina Bhatt

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Sanctuary jurisdictions refer to city, town, and state governments (collectively, localities or local governments) that have passed provisions to limit their enforcement of federal immigration laws. Such local governments execute limiting provisions in order to bolster community cooperation, prevent racial discrimination, focus on local priorities for enforcement, or even to a show a local policy that differs from federal policy. The provisions are in the forms of executive orders, municipal ordinances, and state resolutions. Additionally, the scope of the provisions vary by locality: some prohibit law enforcement from asking about immigration status, while others prohibit the use of state resources …

Who Speaks The Culture Of The Corporation?, Gwendolyn Gordon

Michigan Business & Entrepreneurial Law Review

Recent cases – Burwell v Hobby Lobby Stores and Citizens United chief among them – evince a new understanding of the nature of the corporation and its place in society. Whether a corporation has rights – such as those of religious exercise – is not, however, just a question of legal interpretation. To answer this question requires a theory of group or cultural identity, that is, a theory of how a group may have “culture” separate and apart from those of the individuals that comprise it. And such a theory must address how to understand the meaning of culture when …

The Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Litigation: Proof Of Concept For The Manual For Complex Litigation And The 2015 Amendments To The Federal Rules Of Civil Procedure, John C. Cruden, Steve O'Rourke, Sarah D. Himmelhoch

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

On April 20, 2010, the oil rig Deepwater Horizon exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing eleven people and injuring seventeen more. Efforts to stop the spill failed. For the next eighty-seven days, hundreds of millions of barrels of oil poured into the Gulf. This catastrophe not only changed the lives of the families of the dead and injured and the communities who experienced the economic and social disruption of the spill – it challenged the survival of the ecosystem of the ninth largest water body in the world. The oil spill extended fifty miles offshore from Louisiana in the …

The Sec, Administrative Usurpation, And Insider Trading, Adam C. Pritchard

Articles

The history of insider trading law is a tale of administrative usurpation and legislative acquiescence. Congress has never enacted a prohibition against insider trading, much less defined it. Instead, the SEC has led in defining insider trading, albeit without the formality of rulemaking, and subject to varying degrees of oversight by the courts. The reason why lies in the deference that the Supreme Court gave to the SEC in its formative years. The roots of insider trading law are commonly traced to the SEC’s decision in Cady, Roberts & Co. Cady, Roberts was only made possible, however, by the …

Superfund Chaos Theory: What Happens When The Lower Federal Courts Don't Follow The Supreme Court, Steven Ferrey

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

There is legal chaos in the national Superfund. The Supreme Court reversed decisions of eleven federal circuit courts in United States v. Atlantic Research Corp. There is no instance in modern Supreme Court history where the Court reversed every federal circuit court in the country, as it did in Atlantic Research. The Supreme Court’s reversal was through a unanimous decision. This was extraordinary: It not only reversed the entire legal interpretation of one of America’s most critical statutes, but also re-allocated billions of dollars among private parties.

The Supreme Court, when it rendered its decision, seemed to be rectifying a …

Economic Law, Inequality, And Hidden Hierarchies On The Eu Internal Market, Damjan Kukovec

Michigan Journal of International Law

This Article has several aims. First, the aim is to show the continuing importance and relevance of antitrust and international trade lawyers in countering the concentration of power in the hands of the few or in some geographic areas of the world, if some of the assumptions of antitrust and trade are adjusted. Second, the goal is to articulate a particular analysis from the perspective of the (European) periphery. As the recent Euro crises and the near exit of Greece from the Union show, the European prospect of development for all has not arrived. This Article will articulate the privilege …

Black Health Matters: Disparities, Community Health, And Interest Convergence, Mary Crossley

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Health disparities represent a significant strand in the fabric of racial injustice in the United States, one that has proven exceptionally durable. Many millions of dollars have been invested in addressing racial disparities over the past three decades. Researchers have identified disparities, unpacked their causes, and tracked their trajectories, with only limited progress in narrowing the health gap between whites and racial and ethnic minorities. The implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and the movement toward value-based payment methods for health care may supply a new avenue for addressing disparities. This Article argues that the ACA’s requirement that tax-exempt …

Using Proactive Legal Strategies For Corporate Environmental Sustainability, Gerlinde Berger-Walliser, Paul Shrivastava, Adam Sulkowski

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

We argue that proactive law can help organizations be more sustainable. Toward that end, this Article first summarizes proactive law literature as it pertains to corporate sustainability. Next, it examines a series of cases on the pivotal nexus between proactive law and corporate sustainability. It then advances novel propositions that connect proactive law to central organizational design elements. The discussion traces further implications and suggests fruitful avenues for research and ways of using proactive law for firms to become more sustainable.

From Environmental Rights To Environmental Rule Of Law: A Proposal For Better Environmental Outcomes, Jessica Scott

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

With the recent lead contamination crisis in Flint, Michigan, the unfavorable United States country report of the former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the human right to safe drinking water and sanitation seems prescient. The Special Rapporteur’s report highlighted the problem of drinking water contaminated from lead pipes and the disproportionate burdens Black Americans face in accessing safe drinking water. The report argues that the U.S. should address these issues by explicitly recognizing a human right to safe drinking water and sanitation under U.S. law.

Like the Special Rapporteur, much of the literature and some environmental advocates call for environmental …

Bringing Pacific Bluefin Tuna Back From The Brink: Ensuring The Submission Of Operational Data To The Western And Central Pacific Fisheries Commission, Chris Wold, Mitsuhiko Takahashi, Siwon Park, Viv Fernandes, Sarah Butler

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

The Commission of the Convention on the Conservation and Management of Highly Migratory Fish Stocks in the Western Pacific Ocean (WCPFC) manages fish stocks of significant financial and ecological value across an area of the Pacific Ocean comprising 20% of Earth. WCPFC members, however, have disagreed sharply over management measures for tuna, sharks, and other species, in part because some WCPFC members have refused to provide the WCPFC with vessel-specific data, known as operational data, which is needed to manage the stocks sustainably. Despite a legal requirement to submit operational data to the WCPFC, these members, including Japan and Korea, …

Change In Regulation Is Necessary For Genetically Engineered Mosquitoes, Insung Hwang

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

Millions of genetically engineered (GE) mosquitoes could soon be released in Key West, Florida as an effort to eradicate wild mosquitoes that are transmitters of diseases such as malaria, dengue, and chikungunya. Both international and domestic regulations fail to provide effective regulatory schemes that can facilitate the application of this technology while ensuring all safety and environmental aspects are properly addressed. The Food and Drug Administration’s assertion of jurisdiction is based on its assessment that the GE mosquitoes are “animal drugs” under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. This is especially troublesome because the end goal of using these …

The New Labor Law, Kate Andrias

Articles

Labor law is failing. Disfigured by courts, attacked by employers, and rendered inapt by a global and fissured economy, many of labor law’s most ardent proponents have abandoned it altogether. And for good reason: the law that governs collective organization and bargaining among workers has little to offer those it purports to protect. Several scholars have suggested ways to breathe new life into the old regime, yet their proposals do not solve the basic problem. Labor law developed for the New Deal does not provide solutions to today’s inequities. But all hope is not lost. From the remnants of the …

An Empirical Study Of Implicit Takings., James E. Krier, Stewart E. Sterk

Articles

Takings scholarship has long focused on the niceties of Supreme Court doctrine, while ignoring the operation of takings law "on the ground" in the state and lower federal courts, which together decide the vast bulk of all takings cases. This study, based primarily on an empirical analysis of more than 2000 reported decisions ovcr the period 1979 through 2012, attempts to fill that void. This study establishes that the Supreme Court's categorical rules govern almost no state takings cases, and that takings claims based on government regulation almost invariably fail. By contrast, when takings claims arise out of government action …

Multinational Firms And Tax Havens, Anna Gumpert, James R. Hines Jr., Monika Schnitzer

Articles

Multinational firms with operations in high-tax countries can benefit the most from reallocating taxable income to tax havens, though this is sufficiently difficult and costly that only 20.4% of German multinational firms have any tax haven affiliates. Among German manufacturing firms, a 1 percentage point higher foreign tax rate is associated with a 2.3% greater likelihood of owning a tax haven affiliate. This is consistent with tax avoidance incentives and contrasts with earlier evidence for U.S. firms. The relationship is less strong for firms in service industries, possibly reflecting the difficulty of reallocating taxable service income.

American Bar Association Resolution 112: Championing Public Access To The Law., Nina A. Mendelson

Articles

In August 2016, the American Bar Association House of Delegates reaffirmed the fundamental democratic principle of public access to the law. ABA Resolution 112 calls on Congress to enact legislation ensuring a basic level of public access, without charge, to all regulatory law. Such legislation would address serious current obstacles to the public’s ability to see the law.

Technical Standards And Lawsuits Involving Accommodations For Health Professions Students, Samuel R. Bagenstos

Articles

This article will discuss the legal obligations of medical schools to accommodate applicants and students with disabilities. The article begins by describing the problem of denial of medical education to such students, a problem that results from both discrimination in admissions and denial of accommodations to incumbent students with disabilities. The article then discusses the disability rights legislation that prohibits discrimination against—and requires reasonable accommodation of—qualified medical students with disabilities. It concludes by reviewing a number of lawsuits involving requests for accommodation and how disability rights law was applied in those cases.

Distinguished Alumni Award Ceremony, University Of Michigan Law School

Event Materials

Program for the Distinguished Alumni Award Ceremony honoring Mary Frances Berry.

Front Matter

Michigan Business & Entrepreneurial Law Review

No abstract provided.

A Legal Obituary For Ramiro, Sheri Lynn Johnson

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Most death penalty lawyers who practice long enough will watch the execution of a client. It is always, always terrible, but not always terrible in the same way. With each client’s execution, a lawyer is confronted with the death of a human being—not an accidental death, not an inevitable death, but an avoidable one—and with his or her own failure to prevent that death. Some executions also involve a very personal loss for the lawyer because of their relationship with the client. Other executions are horrific because things go awry and impose extreme suffering on the executed individual. No matter …

Public Pensions And Fiduciary Law: A View From Equity, T. Leigh Anenson

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Controversies involving fund management may be the next frontier of public pension litigation. Recent scandals involving fraud, bribery, and corruption of public pension officials and other third parties have drawn the public eye toward the management of retirement assets. Individual and entity custodians, including pension boards of trustees, are charged with making investment and other decisions relating to pension funds. Unlike private pensions, there is no federal oversight of asset managers or others in control of retirement funds. Yet these funds hold more than three trillion dollars in assets. Until now, the guardians of these monies have operated almost invisibly …

Can Prostitution Law Reform Curb Sex Trafficking? Theory And Evidence On Scale Substitution, And Replacement Effects, Simon Hedlin

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Sex trafficking, a pervasive problem in many parts of the world, has become increasingly salient to policymakers and the general public. Activists, politicians, and scholars continue to engage in debates about how best to curb it. This Article discusses one especially contentious dimension of these debates: does banning prostitution reduce sex trafficking? Or is legalizing prostitution the optimal approach? Or is there a third, better way? Proceeding both theoretically and empirically, this Article seeks to cast light on the relationship between different types of prostitution laws and the prevalence of sex trafficking and human trafficking. It attempts to make three …

Shedding Light On The "Going Dark" Problem And The Encryption Debate, John Mylan Traylor

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

In an effort to protect the enormous volume of sensitive and valuable data that travels across the Internet and is stored on personal devices, private companies have created encryption software to secure data from criminals, hackers, and terrorists who wish to steal it. The greatest benefit of encryption also creates the biggest problem: Encryption software has become so secure that often not even the government can bypass it. The “Going Dark” problem—a scenario in which the government has obtained the legal authority to search a suspected criminal’s encrypted device but lacks the technical ability to do so—is becoming increasingly common. …

Front Matter

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

No abstract provided.

Postracial Remedies, Derrick Darby, Richard E. Levy

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The Supreme Court’s equal protection jurisprudence is decidedly postracial. The Court has restricted the Equal Protection Clause to intentional discrimination by the government, concluding that the Constitution does not prohibit private acts of discrimination and rejecting challenges based on disparate impact, even when rigorous statistical analysis indicates that race is likely a factor. It has held that remedying the effects of past societal discrimination is an insufficient basis for race-specific remedies such as affirmative action. It has also ended remedies of this sort designed to combat previous state-sponsored racial discrimination, such as court-ordered desegregation measures in the schools and the …

From Integrationism To Equal Protection: Tenbroek And The Next 25 Years Of Disability Rights, Samuel R. Bagenstos

Articles

If there is one person who we can say is most responsible for the legal theory of the disability rights movement, that person is Jacobus tenBroek. Professor tenBroek was an influential scholar of disability law, whose writings in the 1960s laid the groundwork for the disability rights laws we have today. He was also an influential disability rights activist. He was one of the founders and the president for more than two decades of the National Federation of the Blind, one of the first-and for many years undisputedly the most effective-of the organizations made up of people with disabilities that …

Jurisdiction And Resentencing: How Prosecutorial Waiver Can Offer Remedies Congress Has Denied, Leah Litman, Luke C. Beasley

Articles

This Essay is about what prosecutors can do to ensure that prisoners with meritorious legal claims have a remedy. The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) imposes draconian conditions on when prisoners may file successive petitions for post-conviction review (that is, more than one petition for post-conviction review). AEDPA’s restrictions on post-conviction review are so severe that they routinely prevent prisoners with meritorious claims from vindicating those claims.

Patent Privateers And Antitrust Fears, Matthew Sipe

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

Patent trolls are categorically demonized as threatening American innovation and industry. But whether they are a threat that antitrust law is equipped to deal with is a complex question that depends on the particular type of patent troll and activities they engage in. This Article looks specifically at privateer patent trolls: entities that acquire their patents from operating entities and assert them against other industry members. In the particular context of privateering, antitrust law is almost certainly not the proper legal solution. Privateering does raise significant issues: circumventing litigation constraints, evading licensing obligations, and raising the cost and frequency of …