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Full-Text Articles in Law
Compliance Of The United States With International Labor Law, David Weissbrodt, Matthew Mason
Compliance Of The United States With International Labor Law, David Weissbrodt, Matthew Mason
Articles
The article focuses on the U.S. compliance with international labor law in 2014. Topics include the U.S. membership in the International Labour Organization (ILO), the number of labor conventions followed by the U.S. in 2014, and labor laws and legislation in the U.S. in 2014. Information is provided on ILO standards, including the right to organize, the rights of noncitizen workers, and workers' rights of collective bargaining and strikes.
Why Crime Rates Are Falling Throughout The Western World, Michael Tonry
Why Crime Rates Are Falling Throughout The Western World, Michael Tonry
Articles
Crime rates have moved in parallel in Western societies since the late Middle Ages. Homicide rates declined from 20 to 100 per 100,000 population in western Europe to one per 100,000 in most Western countries by the beginning of the twentieth century. Crime rates in major cities and in countries fell from the early nineteenth century until the middle of the twentieth. From the 1960s to the 1990s, rates for violent and property crimes rose in all wealthy Western countries. Since then, rates in all have fallen precipitately for homicide, burglary, auto theft, and other property crimes. The patterns appear …
Legal And Ethical Issues In The Prediction Of Recidivism, Michael Tonry
Legal And Ethical Issues In The Prediction Of Recidivism, Michael Tonry
Articles
Use of predictions of recidivism is ubiquitous in American criminal justice systems from pretrial detention to parole release and proceeds largely oblivious to fundamental ethical problems that were widely recognized and examined in the 1970s. They include the false positive problem that most people predicted to commit acts of serious violence would not, and their confinement for that reason is unjustified, that common use of fixed characteristics such as age and gender punish people for matters over which they have no control is per se unjust, that commonly used socioeconomic factors such as marital status, employment, education, and living discrimination, …
Guest Editor's Observations: Recurring Policy Issues Of Guidelines (And Non-Guidelines) Sentencing: Risk Assessments, Criminal History Enhancements, And The Enforcement Of Release Conditions, Richard Frase
Articles
No abstract provided.
Response Essay: The Personhood Rationale And Its Impact On The Durability Of Private Claims To Public Property, Alexandra Klass
Response Essay: The Personhood Rationale And Its Impact On The Durability Of Private Claims To Public Property, Alexandra Klass
Articles
No abstract provided.
Transparently Opaque: Understanding The Lack Of Transparency In Insurance Consumer Protection, Daniel Schwarcz
Transparently Opaque: Understanding The Lack Of Transparency In Insurance Consumer Protection, Daniel Schwarcz
Articles
Consumer protection in most domains of financial regulation centers on transparency. Broadly construed, transparency involves making relevant information available to consumers as well as others who might act on their behalf, such as academics, journalists, newspapers, consumer organizations or other market watchdogs. By contrast, command and control regulation that affirmatively limits financial firms’ products or pricing is relatively uncommon. This Article describes a remarkable inversion of this pattern: while state insurance regulation frequently employs aggressive command and control consumer protection regulation, it typically does little or nothing to promote transparent markets. Rather, state lawmakers routinely either completely ignore transparency-oriented reforms …
Regulating Systemic Risk In Insurance, Daniel Schwarcz, Steven L. Schwarcz
Regulating Systemic Risk In Insurance, Daniel Schwarcz, Steven L. Schwarcz
Articles
As exemplified by the dramatic failure of AIG, insurance companies and their affiliates played a central role in the 2008 global financial crisis. It is therefore not surprising that the Dodd-Frank Act — the United States’ primary legislative response to the crisis — contained an entire title dedicated to insurance regulation, which has traditionally been the responsibility of individual states. The most important insurance-focused reforms in Dodd-Frank empower the Federal Reserve Bank to impose an additional layer of regulatory scrutiny on top of state insurance regulation for a small number of “systemically important” nonbank financial companies, such as AIG. This …
Understanding Insurance Antidiscrimination Laws, Ronen Avraham, Kyle D. Logue, Daniel Schwarcz
Understanding Insurance Antidiscrimination Laws, Ronen Avraham, Kyle D. Logue, Daniel Schwarcz
Articles
Insurance companies are in the business of discrimination. Insurers attempt to segregate insureds into separate risk pools based on their differences in risk profiles, first, so that they can charge different premiums to the different groups based on their risk and, second, to incentivize risk reduction by insureds. This is why we let insurers discriminate. There are, however, limits to the types of discrimination we will allow insurers to engage in. But what exactly are those limits and how are they justified? To answer these questions, this Article articulates the leading fairness and efficiency arguments for and against limiting insurers’ …
Towards A Universal Framework For Insurance Anti-Discrimination Laws, Ronen Avraham, Kyle D. Logue, Daniel Schwarcz
Towards A Universal Framework For Insurance Anti-Discrimination Laws, Ronen Avraham, Kyle D. Logue, Daniel Schwarcz
Articles
Discrimination in insurance is principally regulated at the state level. Surprisingly, there is a great deal of variation across coverage lines and policyholder characteristics in how and the extent to which risk classification by insurers is limited. Some statutes expressly permit insurers to consider certain characteristics, while other characteristics are forbidden or limited in various ways. What explains this variation across coverage lines and policyholder characteristics? Drawing on a unique, hand-collected data-set consisting of the laws regulating insurer risk classification in fifty-one U.S. jurisdictions, this Article argues that much of the variation in state-level regulation of risk classification can in …
Make No Little Plans: Response To Ted Sichelman, Purging Patent Law Of Private Law Remedies, Tom Cotter
Make No Little Plans: Response To Ted Sichelman, Purging Patent Law Of Private Law Remedies, Tom Cotter
Articles
No abstract provided.
Taxing Manufactured Homes, Ann Burkhart
Taxing Manufactured Homes, Ann Burkhart
Articles
Manufactured homes are the most important form of unsubsidized affordable housing in this country. They are home to more than twenty-two million people. The residents are predominantly lower-income, including a large proportion of older people. Yet the costs of purchasing and living in a manufactured home are unnecessarily high, because state law incorrectly categorizes the great majority of them as personal property, rather than as real property.To correct this problem, the Uniform Law Commission recently promulgated the Uniform Manufactured Housing Act, which provides a process for converting manufactured homes from personal to real property. The act is designed to lower …
People Who Are Not Legal And Who Are Not Alive In The Eyes Of The Law, Richard W. Painter
People Who Are Not Legal And Who Are Not Alive In The Eyes Of The Law, Richard W. Painter
Articles
No abstract provided.
Who's Afraid Of Good Governance? State Fiscal Crises, Public Pension Underfunding, And The Resistance To Governance Reform, Thomas Fitzpatrick, Amy B. Monahan
Who's Afraid Of Good Governance? State Fiscal Crises, Public Pension Underfunding, And The Resistance To Governance Reform, Thomas Fitzpatrick, Amy B. Monahan
Articles
Much attention has been paid to the significant underfunding of many state and local employee pension plans, as well as efforts by states and cities to alleviate that underfunding by modifying the benefits provided to workers. Yet relatively little attention has been paid to the systemic causes of such financial distress — such as chronic underfunding that shifts financial burdens to future taxpayers, and governance rules that may reduce the likelihood that a plan’s trustees will make optimal investment decisions. This article presents the results of a qualitative study of the funding and governance provisions of twelve public pension plans …
Understanding Insurance Antidiscrimination Laws, Ronen Avraham, Kyle D. Logue, Daniel Schwarcz
Understanding Insurance Antidiscrimination Laws, Ronen Avraham, Kyle D. Logue, Daniel Schwarcz
Articles
No abstract provided.
Plugging Leaks And Lowering Levees In The Federal Government: Practical Solutions For Securities Trading Based On Political Intelligence, Donna M. Nagy, Richard W. Painter
Plugging Leaks And Lowering Levees In The Federal Government: Practical Solutions For Securities Trading Based On Political Intelligence, Donna M. Nagy, Richard W. Painter
Articles
From its founding, the U.S. federal government has been a potential gold mine for nonpublic market-moving information. By selectively disclosing this information to securities traders outside the government (or to persons who advise them), federal officials can substantially privilege certain wealthy or otherwise well-connected investors over ordinary investors in the securities market. The trading profits that can be derived from the use of this material nonpublic government information are often tremendous. Such disparity of access to government information undermines the public’s confidence in the fairness and integrity of securities markets -- and in the federal government itself. But absent an …
The Rhetoric Of War: Words, Conflict, And Categorization Post 9/11, Oren Gross, Fionnuala Ní Aoláin
The Rhetoric Of War: Words, Conflict, And Categorization Post 9/11, Oren Gross, Fionnuala Ní Aoláin
Articles
No abstract provided.
The Right To Travel: Breaking Down The Thousand Petty Fortresses Of State Self-Deportation Laws, Linus Chan
The Right To Travel: Breaking Down The Thousand Petty Fortresses Of State Self-Deportation Laws, Linus Chan
Articles
No abstract provided.
The Rule Of Law At A Crossroad: Enforcing Corporate Responsibility In International Investment Through The Alien Tort Statute, Jennie Green
The Rule Of Law At A Crossroad: Enforcing Corporate Responsibility In International Investment Through The Alien Tort Statute, Jennie Green
Articles
No abstract provided.
An Exploration Of "Non-Economic" Damages In Civil Jury Awards, Herbert M. Kritzer, Guangya Liu, Neil Vidmar
An Exploration Of "Non-Economic" Damages In Civil Jury Awards, Herbert M. Kritzer, Guangya Liu, Neil Vidmar
Articles
Using three primary data sources plus three supplemental sources discussed in an appendix, this paper examines how well non-economic damages could be predicted by economic damages and at how the ratio of non-economic damages to economic damages changed as the magnitude of the economic damages awarded by juries increased. We found a mixture of consistent and inconsistent patterns across our various datasets. One fairly consistent pattern was the tendency for the ratio of non-economic to economic damages to decline as the amount of economic damages increased. Moreover, the variability of the ratio also tended to decline as the amount of …
Testing, Diversity, And Merit: A Reply To Dan Subotnik And Others, Andrea A. Curcio, Carol L. Chomsky, Eileen Kaufman
Testing, Diversity, And Merit: A Reply To Dan Subotnik And Others, Andrea A. Curcio, Carol L. Chomsky, Eileen Kaufman
Articles
The false dichotomy between achieving diversity and rewarding merit frequently surfaces in discussions about decisions on university and law school admissions, scholarships, law licenses, jobs, and promotions. “Merit” judgments are often based on the results of standardized tests meant to predict who has the best chance to succeed if given the opportunity to do so. This Article criticizes over-reliance on standardized tests and responds to suggestions that challenging the use of such tests reflects a race-comes-first approach that chooses diversity over merit. Discussing the firefighter exam that led to the Supreme Court decision in Ricci v. DiStefano, as well as …
Administering The Tax System We Have, Kristin Hickman
Administering The Tax System We Have, Kristin Hickman
Articles
Traditional perceptions of tax exceptionalism from administrative law doctrines and requirements have been predicated at least in part on the importance of the tax code’s revenue raising function. Yet, Congress increasingly relies on the IRS to administer government programs that have little to do with raising revenue and much more to do with distributing government benefits to the economically disadvantaged, subsidizing approved activities, and regulating outright certain economic sectors like nonprofits, pensions, and now health care. As the attentions of the Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service shift away from raising revenue and toward these other matters, the revenue-based justification …
The Three Phases Of Mead, Kristin Hickman
The Three Phases Of Mead, Kristin Hickman
Articles
No symposium entitled ―Chevron at 30‖ would be complete without some consideration of the U.S. Supreme Court‘s subsequent decision in United States v. Mead Corp.3 As Thomas Merrill and I documented years ago, in the years leading up to Mead, courts were in substantial disarray over which agencies and actions were eligible for Chevron‘s requirement of strong, mandatory deference.4 Some disagreements concerned the nature and scope of agency authority. For example, the federal circuit courts were divided over whether an agency that lacked the power to adopt legislative rules could claim Chevron deference for its statutory interpretations.5 Other questions focused …
Committing To Doing Good And Doing Well: Fiduciary Duty In Benefit Corporations, Brett Mcdonnell
Committing To Doing Good And Doing Well: Fiduciary Duty In Benefit Corporations, Brett Mcdonnell
Articles
Can someone running a business do good while doing well? Can they benefit society and the environment while still making money? Supporters of social enterprises believe the answer is yes, as these companies aim at both making money for shareholders while also pursuing other social benefits. Since 2010, states have begun to enact statutes creating the “benefit corporation” as a new legal form designed to fit social enterprises. Benefit corporations proclaim to the world that they will pursue both social good and profits, and those who run them have a fiduciary duty to consider a broad range of social interests …
Complex Value Choices At The Environment-Energy Interface, Hari M. Osofsky
Complex Value Choices At The Environment-Energy Interface, Hari M. Osofsky
Articles
This dilemma of environment-energy decisions that have major positives and negatives from either a health or ecosystem perspective poses an important ethical challenge that this Essay explores. Namely, in many cases, one can value humans, species, and ecosystems, and still not be able to resolve the best way forward. The Essay focuses in particular on a core problem at the environment-energy interface: people demand cheap and reliable energy, which pushes us towards new technology or the massive expansion of existing technology, both of which carry risks and possibilities for a cleaner future. The Essay considers this dilemma in the U.S. …
The Geography Of Solving Global Environmental Problems: Reflections On Polycentric Efforts To Address Climate Change, Hari M. Osofsky
The Geography Of Solving Global Environmental Problems: Reflections On Polycentric Efforts To Address Climate Change, Hari M. Osofsky
Articles
This essay considers how we might fit local efforts to address climate change, especially those by very small, suburban cities, within models for solving "global problems." While acknowledging the need for more action on climate change at international, national, and state levels, and regional ones in between, this essay explores how different types of cities, as they participate in multilevel networks, can provide models for action and complement efforts to address climate change through the treaty regime. Using a diverse group of suburbs in the Twin Cities metropolitan region making innovative climate change and sustainability efforts as a case example, …
Hybrid Energy Governance, Hari M. Osofsky, Hannah J. Wiseman
Hybrid Energy Governance, Hari M. Osofsky, Hannah J. Wiseman
Articles
This Article develops a novel theory of energy governance and uses it to assess how institutional innovation can help meet critical challenges. Energy law is substantively complex and deeply fragmented. Each energy sector - including fuel extraction and pipelines, electricity generation and transmission, and transportation - has its own legal regime and federalism approach; confusion often exists at moments of crisis about how much authority federal, state, and local regulators have in these areas. The complexity and fragmentation of energy law are particularly problematic because the energy system faces major transitions due to emerging technology, more unpredictable and extreme weather …
Statutory Reading Of Opaque Constructions - Errors And Purposes, Brian H. Bix
Statutory Reading Of Opaque Constructions - Errors And Purposes, Brian H. Bix
Articles
In her excellent article, Misreading Like a Lawyer: Cognitive Bias in Statutory Interpretation,1 Professor Jill Anderson explains an intri- cacy of sentence meaning that is well known by linguists, generally handled adequately by most of us in normal conversation, but appar- ently misunderstood and badly handled by lawyers and judges. The misreading in question is based on what linguists call “opaque con- structions”: texts whose structural ambiguity creates alternative read- ings. These alternative readings are generally known (as Anderson points out) as “de re” and “de dicto” interpretations. As the article clearly explains, opaque constructions differ from other sentences by …
Human Rights Standards Concerning Transnational Corporations And Other Business Entities, David Weissbrodt
Human Rights Standards Concerning Transnational Corporations And Other Business Entities, David Weissbrodt
Articles
The rapid expansion of transnational economic activity and corresponding growth in power of transnational corporations and other business entities have prompted renewed international discourse and action over the past decade to address the human rights abuses committed by businesses. 2 The responsibility of businesses to respect human rights has been at the heart of the discussion. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), adopted in 1948, states that "every individual and every organ of society ... shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and ... to secure their universal and effective recognition and …
Comparative Law And Economics Of Standard-Essential Patents And Frand Royalties, Thomas F. Cotter
Comparative Law And Economics Of Standard-Essential Patents And Frand Royalties, Thomas F. Cotter
Articles
Standard setting organizations often require their members to declare which of their patents are essential to the practice of a prospective standard, and to agree to license any such standard-essential patents (SEPs) on "fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory" (FRAND) terms. Among the issues that have arisen in recent disputes involving FRAND-encumbered SEPs are (1) whether a FRAND commitment creates a binding contract for the benefit of third parties, obligating the SEP owner to forgo the right to seek injunctive relief for the infringement of the SEP; (2) whether the law of remedies, or other principles of generally applicable civil law such …
Questioning Gender: Police Interrogation Of Delinquent Girls, Barry C. Feld
Questioning Gender: Police Interrogation Of Delinquent Girls, Barry C. Feld
Articles
Early juvenile courts emphasized a child's "best interests" and treated youths differently based on personal characteristics such as race and gender. 1 Progressive reformers expected judges to handle boys and girls differently because their circumstances and needs differed. 2 Juvenile courts processed boys primarily for criminal behavior and girls for noncriminal status offenses - e.g. runaway, incorrigibility, or sexual precocity. 3 In the 1970s, efforts to deinstitutionalize status offenders led to substantial declines in the numbers of girls detained and confined for noncriminal misconduct. 4 More recently, juvenile justice officials and the public perceived an increase in violent crimes like …