Law Commons^™

The Disenfranchisement Of Ex-Felons In Florida: A Brief History, Sarah A. Lewis

UF Law Faculty Publications

This paper will explore the origins of Florida’s felony disenfranchisement laws in the period from 1865 to 1968. The first part of this paper will review the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which ended slavery, and the Florida Black Code, which sought to return freedmen to a slavery-like status. The second part of the paper will explore Florida’s reaction to the passage of the Reconstruction Act of 1867, which conditioned reentrance into the Union on the writing of new state constitutions by former Confederate states extending the right to vote to all males regardless of race, and ratification of …

Who Locked Us Up? Examining The Social Meaning Of Black Punitiveness, Darren Lenard Hutchinson

UF Law Faculty Publications

Mass incarceration has received extensive analysis in scholarly and political debates. Beginning in the 1970s, states and the federal government adopted tougher sentencing and police practices that responded to rising punitive sentiment among the general public. Many scholars have argued that U.S. criminal law and enforcement subordinate people of color by denying them political, social, and economic well-being. The harmful and disparate racial impact of U.S. crime policy mirrors historical patterns that emerged during slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, James Forman, Jr. demonstrates that many …

The New Law Of The Child, Anne C. Dailey, Laura A. Rosenbury

UF Law Faculty Publications

This Article sets forth a new paradigm for describing, understanding, and shaping children’s relationship to law. The existing legal regime, which we term the “authorities framework,” focuses too narrowly on state and parental control over children, reducing children’s interests to those of dependency and the attainment of autonomy. In place of this limited focus, we envision a “new law of the child” that promotes a broader range of children’s present and future interests, including children’s interests in parental relationships and nonparental relationships with children and other adults; exposure to new ideas; expressions of identity; personal integrity and privacy; and participation …

Unframing Legal Reasoning: A Cyclical Theory Of Legal Evolution, Larry A. Dimatteo

UF Law Faculty Publications

This article draws from legal history to inform a part of legal theory. The legal history examination focuses on two theories of legal development - Henry Sumner Maine's "progression thesis" and Nathan Isaacs's "cycle theory." After examining these two theories of legal development, the analysis shifts to how legal history informs theories of legal reasoning. There are numerous long-standing debates on how "law" should be interpreted. These debates are replicated in the question of how "contracts" should be interpreted. Contract law and contract interpretation will be the focus in examining how history informs legal theory, and more specifically, legal reasoning. …

How The War On Terror Is Transforming Private U.S. Law, Maryam Jamshidi

UF Law Faculty Publications

In thinking about the War on Terror’s impact on U.S. law, what most likely comes to mind are its corrosive effects on public law, including criminal law, immigration, and constitutional law. What is less appreciated is whether and how the fight against terrorism has also impacted private law. As this Article demonstrates, the War on Terror has had a negative influence on private law, specifically on torts, where it has upended long-standing norms, much as it has done in the public law context.

Case law construing the private right of action under the Antiterrorism Act of 1992, 18 U.S.C. § …

First Amendment Envelope Pushers: Revisiting The Incitement-To-Violence Test With Messrs. Brandenburg, Trump, & Spencer, Clay Calvert

UF Law Faculty Publications

This Article examines weaknesses with the United States Supreme Court’s Brandenburg v. Ohio incitement test as its fiftieth anniversary approaches. A lawsuit targeting Donald Trump, as well as multiple cases pitting white nationalist Richard Spencer against public universities, provide timely springboards for analysis. Specifically, In re Trump: 1) illustrates difficulties in proving Brandenburg’s intent requirement via circumstantial evidence; and 2) exposes problems regarding the extent to which past violent responses to a person’s words satisfy Brandenburg’s likelihood element. Additionally, the Spencer lawsuits raise concerns about: 1) whether Brandenburg should serve as a prior restraint mechanism for blocking potential speakers …

The Immigration-Welfare Nexus In A New Era?, Andrew Hammond

UF Law Faculty Publications

The Trump Administration’s immigration policy is one of the most hotly contested areas of American law. However, few have explored the Administration’s interest in using the obscure doctrine of public charge to further its agenda. Public charge determinations allow immigration authorities to prevent individuals from entering the country as well as deport immigrants who use public benefits. What’s more, individuals who sponsor family members to enter the United States are liable to pay the federal government back for any public benefits the sponsored family member uses once in the United States. A leaked draft Executive Order and proposed regulations suggest …

Decarbonizing Light-Duty Vehicles, Amy L. Stein, Joshua P. Fershee

UF Law Faculty Publications

Reducing the United States’ greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80% from 1990 levels by 2050 will require multiple legal pathways for changing its transportation fuel sources. The Deep Decarbonization Pathways Project (DDPP) authors characterize transforming the transportation system as part of a third pillar of fundamental changes required in the U.S. energy system: “fuel switching of end uses to electricity and other low-carbon supplies.” The goal is to shift 80%-95% of the miles driven from gasoline to energy sources like electricity and hydrogen. Relying upon the DDPP analysis, this Article, excerpted from Michael B. Gerrard & John C. Dernbach, …

Lawyers Serving Gods, Visible And Invisible, Jonathan R. Cohen

UF Law Faculty Publications

A critique of the American legal profession can be framed through the metaphor of idolatry, specifically the proclivity of lawyers to serve visible rather than invisible interests in their work. This proclivity has ramifications ranging from broad matters like lawyers' responses to deeply embedded social injustices to specific matters such as the excessive focus on pecuniary interests in ordinary legal representation and the high level of dissatisfaction that many lawyers experience in their careers. Using as a lens biblical teaching concerning idolatry, this article begins by describing "visible" as opposed to "invisible" interests in the context of legal practice. It …

2018 Erwin N. Griswold Lecture Before The American College Of Tax Counsel: Tax Policy Elegy, Martin J. Mcmahon Jr.

UF Law Faculty Publications

For over four decades there have been unrelenting calls to make the tax code “fair, simple, and efficient.” But despite nine major tax acts between 1969 and 2003, along with many less extensive tax acts, the refrain for a “fair, simple, and efficient” tax code has continued to be heard. This continuing plea is not surprising, because over the decades the tax system has evolved to ask the highest income earners to pay less in taxes, become ever more complex, and eschewed “efficiency” in favor of the allowance of an ever-increasing number of tax preferences. Tax act after tax act …

Protecting Llc Owners While Preserving Llc Flexibility, Peter Molk

UF Law Faculty Publications

LLC statutes allow owners to restrict or completely waive standard governance protections required of other business forms. Corporate law mandatory stalwarts like fiduciary duties can be entirely eliminated in an LLC. This flexible approach has the potential to generate the most efficient governance relationships: tailored negotiation among LLC investors can produce an optimal set of governance terms that corporate law’s mandatory protections cannot. Yet when owners lack sophistication or bargaining power, contractual freedom allows for opportunistic terms that misprice capital, reduce investment, and inefficiently allocate capital across LLCs. A series of cases involving opportunistic conduct have brought this problem to …

Commentary On Reid Kress Weisbord And David Horton, Boilerplate And Default Rules In Wills Law: An Empirical Analysis, Danaya C. Wright

UF Law Faculty Publications

Reid Weisbord and David Horton have undertaken an incredibly important empirical study in an area of law that suffers from a large gap in our understanding of how people actually choose to leave their property at their death and the drafting traps that can easily lead to litigation. The study is also important for illustrating how the lawyers we teach in Trusts and Estates need to be more careful in drafting the various documents to manifest their clients' testamentary intent. In particular, Weisbord and Horton studied 230 recently probated wills in Sussex County, New Jersey and discovered that the use …

More Ways To Protect Llc Owners And Preserve Llc Flexibility, Peter Molk

UF Law Faculty Publications

This online companion to Protecting LLC Owners While Preserving LLC Flexibility considers several alternative approaches that might unify LLCs’ twin goals of owner protection and governance flexibility. I examine self-regulation, private certification, investor-led market forces, lawyers in their gatekeeping capacity, and mandated disclosure systems. Ultimately, each of these alternatives proves less satisfying than a system that bifurcates LLC law based on the presumed sophistication of LLC owners.

Defamation Per Se And Transgender Status: When Macro-Level Value Judgments About Equality Trump Micro-Level Reputational Injury, Clay Calvert, Ashton T. Hampton, Austin Vining

UF Law Faculty Publications

This Article uses the September 2017 defamation decision in Simmons v. American Media, Inc. as a springboard for examining defamatory meaning and reputational injury. Specifically, it focuses on cases in which judges acknowledge that plaintiffs have suffered reputational harm yet rule for defendants because promoting the cultural value of equality weighs against redress. In Simmons, a normative, axiological judgment--that the law should neither sanction nor ratify prejudicial views about transgender individuals-- prevailed at the trial court level over a celebrity's ability to recover for alleged reputational harm. Simmons sits at a dangerous intersection: a crossroads where a noble judicial desire …

Martin Luther King Jr. And Pretext Stops (And Arrests): Reflections On How Far We Have Not Come Fifty Years Later, Tracey Maclin, Maria Savarese

UF Law Faculty Publications

By January, 1956, the Montgomery Bus boycott was in full-swing. Black citizens in Montgomery, Alabama were refusing to ride the city’s private buses to protest racially segregated seating. On the afternoon of January 26, 1956, twenty-seven-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr. had finished his day of work at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery. On his drive home, King stopped his vehicle to offer a ride to a group of bus boycotters standing at a downtown car-pool location. After the boycotters entered King’s car, two motorcycle policemen pulled-in behind King’s vehicle. While everyone in King’s car tried to remain calm, …

Two Directions Toward Ethical Peoplehood, Jonathan R. Cohen

UF Law Faculty Publications

From the biblical era through the present day, the conception of Israel as a people devoted to ethical ends has been a core Jewish value. But how is such a model to be implemented? This essay suggests two basic ways of thinking about ethical peoplehood, namely, that one can begin with a people and try to transform it into an ethical people ("from tribe to ethics") or that one can begin with ethical norms and through those norms attempt to build a people ("from ethics to tribe"). Part I of this essay begins by sketching these two modalities in Jewish …

Developing Communities Of Dialogue, Jonathan R. Cohen

UF Law Faculty Publications

We live in an age where American political discourse has become highly antagonistic. Such hostile discourse may influence not just our politics but also our private lives, for the abrasiveness that we witness in political life can readily spill over into our homes, our schools, and the other realms that we inhabit. How can we resist the spread of such antagonism? This Essay makes two basic claims. First, it is important that we consider dialogue as both an individual phenomenon and as a community-based phenomenon. How we speak with one another is a function of both our individual proclivities and …

Why Examples? Towards More Behaviorally-Intelligent Regulation, Yariv Brauner

UF Law Faculty Publications

Tax regulation authors habitually infuse regulations with explanatory examples. These examples are viewed favorably by both the government that encourages their drafting and the taxpayers who regularly rely on such examples to assist them in dealing with the notoriously complex tax rules. Despite the ubiquity of these examples, there is no published guidance for their drafting, their use, or their interpretation. The first original contribution of this article is the exposition and classification of the advantages and deficiencies in the current use of examples in tax regulations. This article is the first to question the rationale behind the ubiquitous use …

Gag Clauses And The Right To Gripe: The Consumer Review Fairness Act Of 2016 & State Efforts To Protect Online Reviews From Contractual Censorship, Clay Calvert

UF Law Faculty Publications

This article examines new legislation, including the federal Consumer Review Fairness Act, signed into law in December 2016, targeting non-disparagement clauses in consumer contracts. Such “gag clauses” typically prohibit or punish the posting of negative reviews of businesses on websites, such as Yelp and TripAdvisor. This article asserts that state and federal statutes provide the best means, from a pro-free-expression perspective, of attacking such clauses, given the disturbingly real possibility that the First Amendment has no bearing on contractual obligations between private parties.

Filtering Fake News Through A Lens Of Supreme Court Observations And Adages, Clay Calvert, Austin Vining

UF Law Faculty Publications

This Essay analyzes multiple issues affecting fake news. It does so through a prism of seven observations by the U.S. Supreme Court concerning the First Amendment, free speech, and other matters. The Court's wisdom in these quotations provides propitious points of entree for exploring how to address and remedy problems many fear fake news causes. The Essay concludes that because fake news will never be eradicated from the metaphorical marketplace of ideas, greater effort must be spent making real news - fake news's constructive flipside - more appetizing to the public.

Privacy Revisited: A Global Perspective On The Right To Be Left Alone, Jon L. Mills

UF Law Faculty Publications

Reviewing: Ronald J. Krotoszynski, Jr., Privacy Revisited: A Global Perspective on the Right to Be Left Alone (Oxford University Press 2016).

Symposium: Truth, Trust And The First Amendment In The Digital Age: Foreword: Whither The Fourth Estate?, Lyrissa Barnett Lidsky

UF Law Faculty Publications

As a professor of Media Law, I have devoted my career over the past quarter of a century to the idea that the press plays a special role in our democracy. That role is largely encapsulated by the concept of the press as Fourth Estate – an unofficial branch of government in our scheme of separation of powers that checks the power of the three official branches. In our constitutional scheme, the press is the watchdog that informs us what the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government are up to and continually replenishes the stock of news – real …

Trials By Peers: The Ebb And Flow Of The Criminal Jury In France And Belgium, Claire M. Germain

UF Law Faculty Publications

The participation of lay jurors in criminal courts has known much ebb and flow both in France and in Belgium. These two countries belong to the civil law tradition, where juries are the exception rather than the rule in criminal trials, and they only exist in criminal cases, not civil cases. In spite of some similarities, there are substantial differences between the two countries, and their systems will be examined in turn.

In France, the Cour d’assises itself was inherited from the French Revolution. Since a law of 1941, it is a mixed jury system, meaning that lay citizens sit …

Reconsidering Incitement, Tinker And The Heckler’S Veto On College Campuses: Richard Spencer And The Charlottesville Factor, Clay Calvert

UF Law Faculty Publications

This Essay analyzes key First Amendment issues surrounding Richard Spencer and Milo Yiannopoulos speaking on public university campuses. Some institutions (Ohio State University, Michigan State University and Pennsylvania State University) have flatly banned Spencer, citing fears of incitement to violence but also sparking federal lawsuits. Other schools have permitted Spencer to speak, but at massive security costs, in an attempt to prevent a so-called heckler’s veto. This Essay examines the tension between providing a public platform for controversial speakers and the costs associated with doing so, including the relevance of the Supreme Court’s aging incitement test created in Brandenburg v. …

Beyond Headlines & Holdings: Exploring Some Less Obvious Ramifications Of The Supreme Court's 2017 Free-Speech Rulings, Clay Calvert

UF Law Faculty Publications

Digging behind the holdings, this Article analyzes less conspicuous, yet highly consequential aspects of the United States Supreme Court’s First Amendment rulings during the opening half of 2017. The four facets of the opinions addressed here— items both within individual cases and cutting across them—hold vast significance for future free-speech battles. Nuances of the justices’ splintering in Matal v. Tam, Packingham v. North Carolina, and Expressions Hair Design v. Schneiderman are examined, as is the immediate impact of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s Packingham dicta regarding online social networks. Furthermore, Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s solo concurrence in the threats case of …

Byrd V United States: Unauthorized Drivers Of Rental Cars Have Fourth Amendment Rights? Not As Evident As It Seems, Tracey Maclin

UF Law Faculty Publications

No discerning student of the Supreme Court would contend that Justice Anthony Kennedy broadly interpreted the Fourth Amendment during his thirty years on the Court. His majority opinions in Maryland v. King, Drayton v. United States and his willingness to join the three key sections of Justice Scalia’s opinion in Hudson v. Maryland, which held that suppression is never a remedy for knock-and-announce violations, are just a few examples of Justice Kennedy’s narrow view of the Fourth Amendment. In light of his previous votes in search and seizure cases, surprisingly Justice Kennedy, in what would be his final Fourth Amendment …

Equal Work, Stephanie Bornstein

UF Law Faculty Publications

Most Americans have heard of the gender pay gap and the statistic that, today, women earn on average eighty cents to every dollar men earn. Far less discussed, there is an even greater racial pay gap. Black and Latino men average only seventy-one cents to the dollar of white men. Compounding these gaps is the “polluting” impact of status characteristics on pay: as women and racial minorities enter occupations formerly dominated by white men, the pay for those occupations goes down. Improvement in the gender pay gap has been stalled for nearly two decades; the racial pay gap is actually …

Fake News And The First Amendment: Reconciling A Disconnect Between Theory And Doctrine, Clay Calvert, Stephanie Mcneff, Austin Vining, Sebastian Zarate

UF Law Faculty Publications

This Article analyzes calls for regulating so-called “fake news” through the lens of both traditional theories of free expression – namely, the marketplace of ideas and democratic self-governance – and two well-established First Amendment doctrines, strict scrutiny and underinclusivity. The Article argues there is, at first glance, a seeming disconnect between theory and doctrine when it comes to either censoring or safeguarding fake news. The Article contends, however, that a structural rights interpretation of the First Amendment offers a viable means of reconciling theory and doctrine. A structural rights approach focuses on the dangers of collective power in defining the …

What Did They Know And When Did They Know It? Pretesting As A Means Setting A Baseline For Assessing Learning Outcomes, Jeffrey L. Harrison

UF Law Faculty Publications

Are legal rules intuitive or, at least, consistent with common sense? In this study, 260 law students at five law schools who had not taken contract law, were presented with eight questions based on specific contracts cases or common contracts issues. They were asked what they felt was the fair or right answer to each question and to formulate the rule they would apply. The purposes of the study were to 1) determine whether contract law is what the untrained person believes it is or should be and 2) experiment with a strategy of pretesting to determine what topics within …

Sunrise, Sunset: An Empirical And Theoretical Assessment Of Dual-Class Stock Structures, Andrew William Winden

UF Law Faculty Publications

A battle is brewing for control of America’s most dynamic companies. Entrepreneurs are increasingly seeking protection from interference or dismissal by public investors through the adoption of dual-class stock structures in initial public offerings. Institutional investors are pushing back, demanding that sucks structures be abandoned or strictly limited through subset provisions. The actual terms of dual-class stock structures, however, have been remarkably understudied, so the debate between proponents of prohibition and private ordering is ill-informed. This paper presents the first empirical analysis of the initial, or sunrise, and terminal, or sunset, provisions found in the charters of dual-class companies, with …