Law Commons^™

Feminist Legal Theory And #Metoo: Revisiting Tarana Burke's Vision Of Empowerment Through Empathy, Penelope Andrews

Articles & Chapters

It is my purpose to ground this article in ubuntu and the politics of radical love as applied to the goals of #MeToo and its pursuit of redress for victims of sexual harms. Part II explores the convergences and divergences of #MeToo with feminist campaigns of an earlier era. Part III questions whether a renewed quest for gender equality, largely spawned by a Twitter/social media campaign, may lead to sustainable change built on notions of empathy and restorative justice, which influenced Tarana Burke when she founded #MeToo. Part IV examines restorative justice approaches in the South African Truth and Reconciliation …

Fool Me Once, Shame On You; Fool Me Twice, Shame On You Again: How Disparate Treatment Doctrine Perpetuates Racial Hierarchy, David Simson

Articles & Chapters

Title VII race discrimination doctrine is excessively hostile to workers of color, and many observers agree that it needs to be fixed. Yet comparatively few analyses of the doctrine weave together doctrinal and theoretical insights with systematic empirical findings from social science. This Article looks to Social Dominance Theory—a social psychology theory with a robust body of supporting empirical research—to take on this task and connect judicial interpretation of Title VII to the human tendency to create and maintain group-based hierarchies. In doing so, the Article questions the common view that Title VII race discrimination doctrine is symmetrical, protecting all …

A Tj Approach To Mental Disability Rights Research: On Sexual Autonomy And Sexual Offending, Michael L. Perlin, Heather Ellis Cucolo, Alison Lynch

Articles & Chapters

We believe it is impossible to understand the development and the power of therapeutic jurisprudence (TJ) without acknowledging that its roots in mental disability law have continued to expand and flourish over the decades, and that there is no other substantive area of the law in which every aspect – substantive and procedural, civil and criminal, statutory and constitutional. domestic and international – has been weighed and evaluated using a TJ lens. In this chapter, we consider how those roots have shaped the last three decades of research and the implications of what has developed. We look carefully at two …

Designing Without Privacy, Ari Ezra Waldman

Articles & Chapters

In Privacy on the Ground, the law and information scholars Kenneth Bamberger and Deirdre Mulligan showed that empowered chief privacy officers (CPOs) are pushing their companies to take consumer privacy seriously, integrating privacy into the designs of new technologies. But their work was just the beginning of a larger research agenda. CPOs may set policies at the top, but they alone cannot embed robust privacy norms into the corporate ethos, practice, and routine. As such, if we want the mobile apps, websites, robots, and smart devices we use to respect our privacy, we need to institutionalize privacy throughout the corporations …

Are Anti-Bullying Laws Effective?, Ari Ezra Waldman

Articles & Chapters

Since 2010, when several high profile bullying-related suicides brought bullying and cyberharassment into the national consciousness, all 50 states have passed laws that address bullying among the nation’s youth. This essay is the first in a series of three projects on federal, state, municipal, and individual school approaches to bullying. There are only 4 published studies on the relationships between law and bullying rates. This Essay adds several features to the discourse. It offers a comprehensive analysis of the contents of state anti-bullying laws, using a 16-item list of guidelines from the United States Department of Education as a frame. …

I'Ve Got My Mind Made Up: How Judicial Teleology In Cases Involving Biologically Based Evidence Violates Therapeutic Jurisprudence, Michael L. Perlin

Articles & Chapters

Courts are, and have always been, teleological in cases involving litigants with mental disabilities. By “teleological,” I refer to outcome-determinative reasoning; social science that enables judges to satisfy predetermined positions is privileged, while data that would require judges to question such ends are rejected. In this context, judges treat biologically-based evidence in criminal cases involving questions of mental disability law so as to conform to their pre-existing positions. This applies to cases involving questions of the death penalty, the insanity defense, civil competency, incompetency to stand trial, questions related to malingering, and criminal sentencing, and more.

In this paper, I …

Trust: A Model For Disclosure In Patent Law, Ari Ezra Waldman

Articles & Chapters

How to draw the line between public and private is a foundational, first-principles question of privacy law, but the answer has implications for intellectual property, as well. This project is the first in a series of papers about first-person disclosures of information in the privacy and intellectual property law contexts, and it defines the boundary between public and non-public information through the lens of social science — namely, principles of trust.

Patent law’s “public use” bar confronts the question of whether legal protection should extend to information previously disclosed to a small group of people. I present evidence that shows …

The Next Fifteen Years, Melynda Barnhart

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

'Friend To The Martyr, A Friend To The Woman Of Shame': Thinking About The Law, Shame And Humiliation, Michael L. Perlin, Naomi Weinstein

Articles & Chapters

This paper considers the intersection between law, humiliation and shame, and how the law has the capacity to allow for, to encourage, or (in some cases) to remediate humiliation, or humiliating or shaming behavior. The need for new attention to be paid to this question has increased exponentially as we begin to also take more seriously international human rights mandates, especially – although certainly not exclusively – in the context of the recently-ratified United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, a Convention that calls for “respect for inherent dignity,” and characterizes "discrimination against any person on the …

Exclusion, Punishment, Racism, And Our Schools: A Critical Race Theory Perspective On School Discipline, David Simson

Articles & Chapters

Punitive school discipline procedures have increasingly taken hold in America’s schools. While they are detrimental to the wellbeing and to the academic success of all students, they have proven to disproportionately punish minority students, especially African American youth. Such policies feed into wider social issues that, once more, disproportionately affect minority communities: the school-to-prison pipeline, high school dropout rates, the push-out phenomenon, and the criminalization of schools.

Before such pervasive racial inequality can be addressed effectively, the social and the psychological mechanisms that create racial inequality in the first place must be examined. This Comment offers insights from the field …

Mobilizing Law For Justice In Asia: A Comparative Approach, Frank W. Munger, Scott Cummings, Louise Trubek

Articles & Chapters

This article offers a comparative framework for studying why and how law is mobilized to advance justice claims by marginalized groups in Asia. In it, we build upon a series of collaborative exchanges between practitioners and scholars on the role of social justice lawyers in eleven Asian countries: Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mongolia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. Based on lessons from this collaboration, we suggest that one way to understand variation in the type and scope of legal mobilization for the politically weak is in relation to two important domestic factors: political openness and autonomy of law. …

In Praise Of Martin Chanock, Stephen Ellmann, Heinz Klug, Penelope Andrews

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Globalization And Corporate Social Responsibility: Challenges For The Academy, Future Lawyers, And Corporate Law, Faith Stevelman

Articles & Chapters

Changes in information technology, in combination with changing popular and political opinion (including concern over climate change) are moving the subject of corporate social responsibility ('CSR') to the forefront of policy reform, consumer and investor behavior, and graduate business education. Nevertheless, up to the present, CSR has not thrived within law schools’ curricula, or mainstream graduate or undergraduate programs. First, the subject is too synthetic to fit neatly within the core, established framework of academic subject areas (e.g. history, economics, sociology and management), or law schools’ conventional teaching of corporate, securities, employment, administrative, or environmental law. CSR is relevant to …

Sex And Slavery: An Analysis Of Three Models Of State Human Trafficking Legislation, Melynda Barnhart

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

What Screen Do You Have In Mind? Contesting The Visual Context Of Law And Film Studies, Richard K. Sherwin

Articles & Chapters

Law on the screen gives rise to a distinct way of doing jurisprudence. In this sense, it is incumbent upon legal scholars to discern with great care the kind of reality and the way of being that cinematic and electronic screens invite us to assume. Jurisprudence theorizes law in accordance with the cultural and cognitive meaning making tools at its disposal: story frames, character types, social scenarios, metaphors, as well as cultural and socially embedded or constructed emotional patterns, among other narratival and purely sensational elements. Law and film studies thus may be viewed as encompassing a larger concern with …

An Analysis Of The Implementation And Impact Of The 2004-2005 Amendments To The Community Reinvestment Act Regulations: The Continuting Importance Of The Cra Examination Process, Josh Silver, Richard D. Marsico

Articles & Chapters

In 2004 and 2005, the four federal banking agencies that enforce the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) amended their CRA regulations. Community groups were concerned that these amendments would have a negative impact on bank CRA performance. In particular, they were concerned that community development lending and investment and the provision of bank branches and other banking services in low- and moderate-income neighborhoods would decline. This article studies the impact of the changes. In summary, the study found that: 1) the CRA examination process has an impact on bank behavior; 2) community development lending and investment by certain lending institutions declined …

Introduction, Richard D. Marsico

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Learning To Love After Learning To Harm: Post-Conflict Reconstruction, Gender Equality And Cultural Values, Penelope Andrews

Articles & Chapters

The question that the Jacob Zuma rape trial and its aftermath raised was how a country like South Africa, with such a wonderful Constitution and expansive Bill of Rights, could generate such negative and retrogressive attitudes towards women. In line with this inquiry, this article raises three issues: The first focuses on the legacy of apartheid violence and specifically the cultures of masculinity, the underbelly of apartheid violence. Second, the article explores the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), a vital part of the post-apartheid transformation agenda, to examine how the TRC pursued violations of women's human rights. …

Making America ‘The Land Of Second Chances’: Restoring Socioeconomic Rights For Ex-Offenders, Deborah N. Archer, Kele S. Williams

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Social Citizen As Guest Worker: A Comment On The Changing Identities Of Immigrants And The Working Poor, Frank W. Munger

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Trademark Law And The Social Construction Of Trust: Creating The Legal Framework For Online Identity, Beth Simone Noveck

Articles & Chapters

Trust is the foundation of society for without trust, we cannot

cooperate. Trust, in turn, depends upon secure, reliable, and persistent

identity. Cyberspace is thought to challenge our ability to build trust

because the medium undermines the connection between online

pseudonym and offline identity. We have no assurances of who stands

behind an online avatar; it may be one person, it may be more, it may be a

computer. The legal debate to date has focused exclusively on the question

of how to maintain real world identity in cyberspace. But new "social

software" technology that enables communities from eBay to …

Democratizing Capital: The History, Law, And Reform Of The Community Reinvestment Act, Richard D. Marsico

Articles & Chapters

The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 (CRA) has made great progress in achieving its dual purposes: eliminating bank redlining and promoting reinvestment in previously redlined neighborhoods. In doing so, the CRA has helped to democratize capital by giving more people a voice in bank lending decisions and including more people in the economic mainstream by influencing banks to make loans to them to buy homes or open small businesses. Despite the CRA's success, the CRA has not reached its full potential. One of the main reasons for this is that the federal agencies that enforce the CRA are so fearful …

Law In Popular Culture, Richard Sherwin

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Poverty, Welfare, And The Affirmative State [Comments], Frank W. Munger

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Inquiry And Activism In Law And Society, Frank W. Munger

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Enforcing The Community Reinvestment Act: An Advocate's Guide To Making The Cra Work For Communities, Richard D. Marsico

Articles & Chapters

This guide to the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) is designed to provide community advocates with the basic information and skills they need to challenge bank redlining and promote economic development in their neighborhoods. The Guide includes four sections: the legal structure of the CRA; important information about banks and how to get it; analyzing a bank's CRA records, and participating in the CRA enforcement process.

Immanence And Identity: Understanding Poverty Through Law And Society Research, Frank W. Munger

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Law And Inequality: Race, Gender…And, Of Course, Class, Carroll Serron, Frank W. Munger

Articles & Chapters

This chapter discusses the concept of class in an important subfield, the sociology of law. Class, a pivotal institution of society, was central to the earliest studies of legal institutions and of law and inequality in particular. More recently, class has played a less important role. This chapter argues for the continuing importance of class and provides examples of its potential use in contemporary sociolegal research. The first part reviews early work that employed class and instrumental models of the state. Grounded, anti-formal models of law provided a contrasting view. Following wider trends in the discipline, sociology of law turned …

Fooling All Of The People Some Of The Time: 1990s Welfare Reform And The Exploitation Of American Values, Kathleen Kost, Frank W. Munger

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Working For Social Change And Preserving Client Autonomy: Is There A Role For ‘Facilitative’ Lawyering?, Richard D. Marsico

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.