Law Commons^™

A Fresh Look At Title Vii: Sexual Orientation Discrimination As Sex Discrimination, Anthony Michael Kreis

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Since 2006, the Illinois Human Rights Act has prohibited discrimination in employment because of an employee’s sexual orientation or gender identity. Until 2017, employees discriminated against because of their sexual orientation had no federal cause of action, however. In a landmark decision, Hively v. Ivy Tech, the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit became the first appellate court to hold that federal law’s prohibition of sex discrimination in the workplace also proscribed sexual orientation discrimination. The Hively decision is a substantial departure from decades’ worth of Seventh Circuit precedent and created a split between the circuits. This Article examines …

Military Justice: A Very Short Introduction (Book Review), Mark Patrick Nevitt

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This short essay reviews Professor Eugene Fidell’s recently published book, “Military Justice A Very Short Introduction” (Oxford Press). This book is a welcome addition to military law and military justice literature more generally. Eugene Fidell, a professor at Yale Law School, brings a tremendous breadth of experience as both a scholar and military justice practitioner. He also possesses a keen observational and critical eye to the subject of military justice practiced here and abroad.

The book review first provides an overview of Professor Fidell’s book, its organizational set-up, and where it sits in the broader context of military justice literature. …

The Ethics Of Medicaid’S Work Requirements And Other Personal Responsibility Policies, Harald Schmidt, Allison K. Hoffman

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Breaking controversial new ground, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) recently invited states to consider establishing work requirements as a condition of receiving Medicaid benefits. Noncompliant beneficiaries may lose some or all benefits, and if they do, will incur higher spending if they have to pay for medical care out of pocket. Current evidence suggests work requirements and related policies, which proponents claim promote personal responsibility, can create considerable risks of health and financial harm in vulnerable populations. Concerns about implementing these policies in Medicaid have been widely expressed, including by major physician organizations, and others have examined …

The Light Of Nature: John Locke, Natural Rights, And The Origins Of American Religious Liberty, Steven Heyman

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No abstract provided.

Ukraine And The Evaporating Hyphen Of Market-Democracy, Monica Eppinger

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This post is part of the series Lessons for Liberalism from the “Illiberal East”

Information wars, fake news, kompromat: surprised Ukrainians have found their lexicon for foreign interference spread as loan-words across a putative new Cold War. Narratives of hegemony long familiar in Ukraine have metastasized, and their protagonists—troll hordes, political technologists, the Paul Manaforts and Victoria Nulands—have been set loose far beyond Ukrainian borders. For those who are anxious that liberalism is stumbling into traps laid by foreign intelligence, stuck trading off with fascism and socialism or otherwise in crisis, Ukraine’s recent history …

Was The Amt Effectively Repealed?, Reed Shuldiner

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The individual alternative minimum tax (AMT) was a much disliked feature of the tax law prior to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA). Yet, despite repeated promises to repeal the AMT as part of tax reform, the TCJA dropped AMT repeal in favor of increasing the AMT exemption and its phaseout threshold. The question raised by this development is whether the AMT changes should be viewed as yet another stop-gap tweak of the AMT or whether the changes should be viewed as returning the AMT to its roots as a tax on high-income taxpayers using excessive loopholes. In this …

Proposing A Single, Simpler Test For Cash Equivalency, Fred B. Brown

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Under the cash method of accounting, generally taxpayers include income items that are received in the form of cash, checks, and property, in the year in which they are received. Under the cash equivalency doctrine, a promise to pay an amount in the future, even though it is a property right, generally will be included upon receipt only if the promise to pay constitutes a cash equivalent.

Whether an obligation is a cash equivalent is generally determined based on common law standards developed by the courts with some assistance from the Service. As a consequence, the current approach to cash …

Rethinking Judicial Review Of High Volume Agency Adjudication, Jonah B. Gelbach, David Marcus

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Article III courts annually review thousands of decisions rendered by Social Security Administrative Law Judges, Immigration Judges, and other agency adjudicators who decide large numbers of cases in short periods of time. Federal judges can provide a claim for disability benefits or for immigration relief the sort of consideration that an agency buckling under the strain of enormous caseloads cannot. Judicial review thus seems to help legitimize systems of high volume agency adjudication. Even so, influential studies rooted in the gritty realities of this decision-making have concluded that the costs of judicial review outweigh whatever benefits the process creates.

We …

Contemporary Practice Of The United States Relating To International Law (112:2 Am J Int'l L), Jean Galbraith

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This article is reproduced with permission from the April 2018 issue of the American Journal of International Law © 2018 American Society of International Law. All rights reserved.

Once the PDF is open, individual articles are accessible either by scrolling down or by clicking on the bookmark symbol.

Hipster Antitrust: New Bottles, Same Old W(H)Ine?, Christopher S. Yoo

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Although the debate over hipster antitrust is often portrayed as something new, experienced observers recognize it as a replay of an old argument that was resolved by the global consensus that antitrust should focus on consumer welfare rather than on the size of firms, the levels of industry concentration, and other considerations. Moreover, the history of the Federal Trade Commission’s Section 5 authority to prevent unfair methods of competition stands as a reminder of the dangers of allowing enforcement policy to be guided by vague and uncertain standards.

Law’S Facilitating Role In The Field Of Social Enterprise., Evelyn Brody

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A Review of Dana Brakman Reiser and Steven A. Dean. Social Enterprise Law: Trust, Public Benefit, and Capital Markets. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017, 216 pp., $44.95 (hardback) ISBN 978-0-19-024978-6To appreciate the contribution of Professors Dana Brakman Reiser and Steven A. Dean in their pathbreaking volume on social enterprise law, we must begin by recognizing what we are not discussing. As the authors declare: “social enterprises are not charities” (p. 165). By definition, social enterprises are businesses, and thus not subject to the nondistribution constraint so familiar to nonprofit scholars and practitioners. An impact investor seeks profit, perhaps limited …

Liability For Mass Sexual Abuse, Tsachi Keren-Paz, Richard Wright

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When harm is caused to victims by multiple injurers, difficult issues arise indetermining causation of, legal responsibility for, and allocation of liability forthose harms. Nowhere is this truer than in child pornography and sex traffickingcases, in which individuals have been victimized over extended periods oftime by hundreds or even many thousands of injurers, with multiple and oftenoverlapping victims of each injurer. Courts (and lawyers) struggle with thesesituations for a simple reason: they insist on applying tests of causation thatfail when the effect was over-determined by multiple conditions. The failure toproperly understand the causation issue has exacerbated failures to properlyunderstand and …

Learning What Works In Regulation, Cary Coglianese, Todd Rubin

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No abstract provided.

The State Giveth And Taketh Away: Race, Class, And Urban Hospital Closings, Shaun Ossei-Owusu

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This essay uses concepts from Bernadette Atuahene’s book We Want What’s Ours: Learning from South Africa’s Land Restitution Program to examine the trend of urban hospital closings. It does so by focusing specifically on the history of Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Hospital, a charitable hospital in South Los Angeles, California that emerged after the Watts riots in 1965. The essay illustrates how Professor Atuahene’s framework can generate unique questions about the closing of urban hospitals, and public bureaucracies more generally. The essay also demonstrates how Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Hospital’s trajectory hones some of Atuahene’s concepts in ways …

Finding The Right Balance In Appraisal Litigation: Deal Price, Deal Process, And Synergies, Lawrence A. Hamermesh, Michael L. Wachter

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This article examines the evolution of Delaware appraisal litigation and concludes that recent precedents have created a satisfactory framework in which the remedy is most effective in the case of transactions where there is the greatest reason to question the efficacy of the market for corporate control, and vice versa. We suggest that, in effect, the developing framework invites the courts to accept the deal price as the proper measure of fair value, not because of any presumption that would operate in the absence of proof, but where the proponent of the transaction affirmatively demonstrates that the transaction would survive …

The Dynamic Impact Of Periodic Review On Women’S Rights, Cosette D. Creamer, Beth A. Simmons

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Human rights treaty bodies have been frequently criticized as useless and the regime’s self-reporting procedure widely viewed as a whitewash. Yet very little research explores what, if any, influence this periodic review process has on governments’ implementation of and compliance with treaty obligations. We argue oversight committees may play an important role in improving rights on the ground by providing information for international and primarily domestic audiences. This paper examines the cumulative effects on women’s rights of self-reporting and oversight review, using original data on the history of state reporting to and review by the Committee on the Elimination of …

Convergence And Divergence In International Economic Law And Politics, Sungjoon Cho, Jürgen Kurtz

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This article explores the phenomena of convergence and divergence in international economic law. It argues that both international trade and investment law have been forced to overcome a structural (legal-institutional) prioritization of market goals via competing social regulatory concerns. It is at this stress point that we argue that a powerful set of converging and procedurally orientated hermeneutics can be identified in the jurisprudence that, properly employed, could significantly bolster the elasticity and durability of state commitment to international economic law constraints. There remain, however, continuing textual and systemic divergences at play, which opponents will often dismiss for reasons of …

Grasping For Energy Democracy, Shelley Welton

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Until recently, energy law has attracted relatively little citizen participation. Instead, Americans have preferred to leave matters of energy governance to expert bureaucrats. But the imperative to respond to climate change presents energy regulators with difficult choices over what our future energy sources should be, and how quickly we should transition to them—choices that are outside traditional regulatory expertise. For example, there are currently robust nationwide debates over what role new nuclear power plants and hydraulically fractured natural gas should play in our energy mix, and over how to maintain affordable energy for all while rewarding those who choose to …

Vaccine Licensure In The Public Interest: Lessons From The Development Of The U.S. Army Zika Vaccine, Ana Santos Rutschman

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Vaccines developed by the public sector are key to preventing future outbreaks of infectious diseases. However, the licensure of these vaccines to private-sector companies under terms that do not ensure both their availability and affordability compromises their development. This Essay analyzes the recent attempted licensing deal for a Zika vaccine between the U.S. Army and Sanofi, a French pharmaceutical company. The proposed grant of an exclusive license to Sanofi triggered widespread concern because none of its substantive terms were disclosed. While § 209 of the Patent Act imposes limitations on exclusive licensure, the Army released no information supporting its finding …

Dual Residents: A Sur-Reply To Zelinsky, Michael S. Knoll, Ruth Mason

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In this article, we respond to Professor Zelinsky’s criticism of our arguments regarding the constitutionality of New York’s tax residence rule. We argue that the Supreme Court’s decision in Wynne requires reconsideration of the New York Court of Appeal’s decision in Tamagni.

Lowering Legal Barriers To Rpki Adoption, Christopher S. Yoo, David A. Wishnick

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Across the Internet, mistaken and malicious routing announcements impose significant costs on users and network operators. To make routing announcements more reliable and secure, Internet coordination bodies have encouraged network operators to adopt the Resource Public Key Infrastructure (“RPKI”) framework. Despite this encouragement, RPKI’s adoption rates are low, especially in North America.

This report presents the results of a year-long investigation into the hypothesis—widespread within the network operator community—that legal issues pose barriers to RPKI adoption and are one cause of the disparities between North America and other regions of the world. On the basis of interviews and analysis of …

An Immodest Proposal For Birth Registration In Donor-Assisted Reproduction, In The Interest Of Science And Human Rights, Elizabeth Samuels

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No abstract provided.

The Decline Of Free Speech On The Postmodern Campus: The Troubling Evolution Of The Heckler's Veto, Kenneth Lasson

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The Twenty-First Century has presented new challenges to the traditional ways that free speech in America has been encouraged and protected. While the right to express one’s opinions has become increasingly problematic in society at large, it is particularly imperiled in the very places that pride themselves as being open marketplaces of ideas – on college and university campuses.
Today we’re faced with numerous campus speech codes that substantially limit First-Amendment rights. They are ubiquitous and often cavalierly invoked. For civil libertarians the good news is that not one of the few such codes that have been tested in court …

The Abolitionist Movement Comes Of Age: From Capital Punishment As A Lawful Sanction To A Peremptory, International Law Norm Barring Executions, John D. Bessler

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The anti-death penalty movement is rooted in the Enlightenment, dating back to the publication of the Italian philosopher Cesare Beccaria’s treatise, Dei delitti e delle pene (1764). That book, later translated into English as An Essay on Crimes and Punishments (1767), has inspired anti-death penalty advocacy for more than 250 years. This Article traces the development of the abolitionist movement since Beccaria’s time. In particular, it highlights how the debate over capital punishment has shifted from one focused primarily on the severity of monarchical punishments, to deterrence, to one framed by the concept of universal human rights, including the right …

Progress Or Profit: Reconsidering The Shortened Statutory Period Scheme, Max Oppenheimer

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No abstract provided.

The Merger Incipiency Doctrine And The Importance Of "Redundant" Competitors, Peter C. Carstensen, Robert H. Lande

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The enforcers and the courts have not implemented the merger incipiency doctrine in the vigorous manner Congress intended. We believe one important reason for this failure is that, until now, the logic underlying this doctrine has never been explained. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that markets’ need for “protective redundancy” explains the incipiency policy. We are writing this article in the hope that this will cause the enforcers and courts to implement significantly more stringent merger enforcement.

To vastly oversimplify, the current enforcement approach assumes that if N significant competitors are necessary for competition, N-1 competitors could …

The Perpetual “Invasion”: Past As Prologue In Constitutional Immigration Law, Matthew Lindsay

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Donald Trump ascended to the presidency largely on the promise to protect the American people—their physical and financial security, their culture and language, even the integrity of their electoral system—against an invading foreign menace. Only extraordinary defensive measures, including “extreme vetting” of would-be immigrants, a ban on Muslims entering the United States, and a 2,000-mile-long wall along the nation’s southern border could repel the encroaching hordes. If candidate Trump’s scapegoating of unauthorized migrants and refugees was disarmingly effective, it was also eerily familiar to those of us who study the history of immigration law and policy. Indeed, the trope of …

Feminist Judgments & #Metoo, Margaret E. Johnson

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The Feminist Judgments book series and the #MeToo movement share the feminist method of narrative. Feminist Judgments is a scholarly project of rewriting judicial opinions using feminist legal theory. #MeToo is a narrative movement by people, primarily women, telling their stories of sexual harassment or assault. Both Feminist Judgments and #MeToo bring to the surface stories that have been silenced, untold, or overlooked. These narrative collections can and do effectuate genderjustice change by empowering people, changing perspectives, opening up new learning, and affecting future legal and nonlegal outcomes.

Could Official Climate Denial Revive The Common Law As A Regulatory Backstop?, Mark P. Nevitt, Robert Percival

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The Trump Administration is rapidly turning the clock back on climate policy and environmental regulation. Despite overwhelming, peer-reviewed scientific evidence, administration officials eager to promote greater use of fossil fuels are disregarding climate science. This Article argues that this massive and historic deregulation may spawn yet another wave of legal innovation as litigants, including states and their political subdivisions, return to the common law to protect the health of the planet. Prior to the emergence of the major federal environmental laws in the 1970s, the common law of nuisance gave rise to the earliest environmental decisions in U.S. history. In …

Common Carriage’S Domain, Christopher S. Yoo

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The judicial decision invalidating the Federal Communications Commission's first Open Internet Order has led advocates to embrace common carriage as the legal basis for network neutrality. In so doing, network neutrality proponents have overlooked the academic literature on common carriage as well as lessons from its implementation history. This Essay distills these learnings into five factors that play a key role in promoting common carriage's success: (1) commodity products, (2) simple interfaces, (3) stability and uniformity in the transmission technology, (4) full deployment of the transmission network, and (5) stable demand and market shares. Applying this framework to the Internet …