Law Commons^™

White Supremacy, Police Brutality, And Family Separation: Preventing Crimes Against Humanity Within The United States, Elena Baylis

Articles

Although the United States tends to treat crimes against humanity as a danger that exists only in authoritarian or war-torn states, in fact, there is a real risk of crimes against humanity occurring within the United States, as illustrated by events such as systemic police brutality against Black Americans, the federal government’s family separation policy that took thousands of immigrant children from their parents at the southern border, and the dramatic escalation of White supremacist and extremist violence culminating in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. In spite of this risk, the United States does not have …

Normalizing Disability In Families, Mary Crossley

Articles

In “Selection against Disability: Abortion, ART, and Access,” Alicia Ouellette probes a particularly vexing point of intersection between ART (assisted reproductive technology) and abortion: how negative assumptions about the capacities of disabled persons and the value of life with disability infect both prospective parents’ prenatal decisions about what pregnancies to pursue and fertility doctors’ decisions about providing services to disabled adults. This commentary on Ouellette’s contribution to the symposium titled “Intersections in Reproduction: Perspectives on Abortion and Assisted Reproductive Technologies" first briefly describes Ouellette’s key points and her article’s most valuable contributions. It then suggests further expanding the frame of …

Lgbt Families, Tax Nothings, Anthony C. Infanti

Articles

The federal tax laws have never been friendly territory for LGBT families. Before the enactment of the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), the federal tax laws turned a blind eye to the existence of LGBT families by tacitly embracing state law discrimination against same-sex couples. When it enacted DOMA in 1996, Congress ensured that it would be able to continue to turn a blind eye to LGBT families even if one or more states were to legally recognize families headed by same-sex couples. In a real sense, LGBT families have been, and continue to be, tax outlaws.

This overt …

Stasis And Change In Environmental Law: The Past, Present And Future Of The Fordham Environmental Law Review, Gerald S. Dickinson

Articles

The past twenty years of environmental law are marked as much by legislative stasis as by profound change in the way that lawyers, policymakers, and scholars interact with the field. Although no new federal legislation was passed over the past two decades, much has changed about the field of environmental law. This change is the result of a set of conceptual and legal challenges to the field posed by intellectual and policy movements that took root in the early 1990s. The intellectual and policy movements that have most profoundly shaped the field of environmental law in the past twenty years …

Does The Constitution Protect Abortions Based On Fetal Anomaly?: Examining The Potential For Disability-Selective Abortion Bans In The Age Of Prenatal Whole Genome Sequencing, Greer Donley

Articles

This Note examines whether the state or federal government has the power to enact a law that prevents women from obtaining abortions based on their fetus’s genetic abnormality. Such a ban has already been enacted in North Dakota and introduced in Indiana and Missouri. I argue below that this law presents a novel state intrusion on a woman’s right to obtain a pre-viability abortion. Moreover, these pieces of legislation contain an outdated understanding of prenatal genetic testing—the landscape of which is quickly evolving as a result of a new technology: prenatal whole genome sequencing. This Note argues that the incorporation …

Immigration And National Security: The Illusion Of Safety Through Local Law Enforcement Action, David A. Harris

Articles

Despite efforts to reform immigration law in the 1980s and the 1990s, the new laws passed in those decades by the Congress did not solve the long-term problems raised by undocumented people entering the United States. The issue arose anew after the terrorist attacks of September, 2001. While the advocates for immigration crackdowns in the 1980s and 1990s had cast the issue as one of economics and cultural transformation, immigration opponents after 9/11 painted a different picture: illegal immigration, they said, was a national security issue. If poor farmers from Mexico and Central America could sneak into the U.S. across …

When Judges Are Accused: An Initial Look At The New Federal Judicial Misconduct Rules, Arthur D. Hellman

Articles

On March 11, 2008, the Judicial Conference of the United States, the administrative policy-making body of the federal judiciary, approved the first set of nationally binding rules for dealing with accusations of misconduct by federal judges. The new rules implement recommendations made by a committee chaired by Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. The Breyer Committee found that although the judiciary has been doing a very good overall job in handling complaints against judges, the error rate in high-visibility cases is far too high.

The new regulatory regime comes into existence at a time when federal judges have been accused of …

Solving The Puzzle Of Mead And Christensen: What Would Justice Stevens Do?, Amy J. Wildermuth

Articles

One area in which I teach and have become increasingly interested over the last few years is administrative law. Although one might expect at a symposium honoring the jurisprudence of Justice Stevens that I might focus solely on his most famous administrative law opinion, Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., and its two-step test that requires a court to defer to a reasonable agency interpretation if the statute is ambiguous, I have instead decided to take on the United States Supreme Court's more recent consideration of what to do with those actions agencies take that, unlike the bubble rule …

Curtailing Tax Treaty Overrides: A Call To Action, Anthony C. Infanti

Articles

During the past 25 years, Congress has with increasing frequency enacted legislation that is intended to override inconsistent provisions in U.S. tax treaties. These legislative overrides are harmful, and have been decried by our treaty partners, members of the executive branch, and commentators.

Until now, commentators have generally devoted themselves to describing and deploring legislative overrides of tax treaties, and have done no more than repeatedly call on Congress to cease enacting such legislation. Congress has ignored these pleas, and has continued to enact legislative overrides with impunity.

Given this background, the essay calls on commentators to cease pleading with …