Law Commons^™

Prison Transfers And The Mootness Doctrine: Disappearing The Rule Of Law In Prisons, Spearit

Book Chapters

Access to the legal system does not come easily for people in prison. There are administrative procedures that must be exhausted; federal legislation like the Prison Litigation Reform Act disadvantages prisoner-petitioners in multiple ways, including by imposing significant limits on damages and creating financial disincentives for lawyers to take on cases. Such onerous legislation and lack of legal aid ensure genuine issues evade redress. Sometimes, however, the law itself is the cause of evasion. Sometimes doctrine prevents the Rule of Law from functioning in prison, particularly when a prison-transfer moots a legal claim. In the most egregious situations, a transfer …

Tax And Time: On The Use And Misuse Of Legal Imagination, Anthony C. Infanti

Book Chapters

In daily life and in tax law, time is taken for granted as something that is ever present but beyond our control. Time moves endlessly and relentlessly forward, constantly slipping from our grasp. But what if life were more like science fiction? What if we could, at will, move through time to alter its course? Or what if we could harness time by turning it into an exchangeable commodity, truly using time as money? In fact, there is no need to open a novel or watch a movie to experience time travel or to see time used as a medium …

Edward S. Rogers, The Lanham Act, And The Common Law, Jessica Litman

Book Chapters

This book chapter is a deep dive into the story of Edward Sidney Rogers's authorship of the legislation that became the Lanham Act. Because Rogers believed that Congress lacked the power to alter the substantive law of trademark and unfair competition, he crafted draft legislation that focused on registration and other procedural details rather than substantive rights and defenses. He sought to advance two incompatible goals: he hoped to preserve the robust common law of unfair competition while requiring, or at least encouraging, all trademark owners to register their marks. Both the supporters and the opponents of the bills that …

Offenders And Sorn Laws, Amanda Agan, J.J. Prescott

Book Chapters

Chapter 7 describes what we know about the effects of SORN laws on criminal behavior. A coherent story emerges from this review: there is virtually no evidence that SORN laws reduce recidivism or otherwise increase public safety. The chapter first delineates the various ways registration and notification alter the legal environment not only for registrants but also for nonregistrants, the public, and law enforcement. There are many channels through which SORN laws might impact the frequency of sex offenses, including some that would produce an increase in overall offending. The chapter assesses these possibilities in light of a large body …

A Taxing Feminism, Anthony C. Infanti, Bridget J. Crawford

Book Chapters

Feminist perspectives are not new to tax law. The first academic piece bringing a feminist perspective to bear on tax law dates to the early 1970s, when Grace Blumberg published “Sexism in the Code: A Comparative Study of Income Taxation of Working Wives and Mothers.” Contemporaneously, none other than Ruth Bader Ginsburg (along with her tax lawyer husband Marty Ginsburg) brought a feminist perspective to bear on tax law when she argued Moritz v. Commissioner before the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, as depicted in the movie On the Basis of Sex. Since then, numerous other contributions have been …

The Law And Policy Of Child Maltreatment, Frank Vandervort

Book Chapters

Each year in the United States some four million children are reported to child protective services and hundreds of thousands of children are confirmed victims of maltreatment. This chapter provides a brief overview of the civil and criminal law’s response to child abuse and neglect. It summarizes the major federal statutes that provide funding to the states to support both civil and criminal law responses to maltreatment. It discusses the division of responsible for responding to child maltreatment between the federal and state governments (federalism). It also provides a summary of the constitutional framework for handling both civil and criminal …

Educational Equality For Children With Disabilities: The 2016 Term Cases, Samuel R. Bagenstos

Book Chapters

One of the most longstanding debates in educational policy pits the goal of equality against the goal of adequacy: Should we aim to guarantee that all children receive an equal education? Or simply that they all receive an adequate education? The debate is vexing in part because there are many ways to specify “equality” and “adequacy.” Are we talking about equality of inputs (which inputs?), equality of opportunity (to achieve what?), or equality of results (which results?)? Douglas Rae and his colleagues famously argued that there are no fewer than 108 structurally distinct conceptions of equality. And how do we …

Prisoners With Disabilities, Margo Schlanger

Book Chapters

A majority of American prisoners have at least one disability. So how jails and prisons deal with those prisoners’ needs is central to institutional safety and humaneness, and to reentry success or failure. In this chapter, I explain what current law requires of prison and jail officials, focusing on statutory and constitutional law mandating non-discrimination, accommodation, integration, and treatment. Jails and prisons have been very slow to learn the most general lesson of these strictures, which is that officials must individualize their assessment of and response to prisoners with disabilities. In addition, I look past current law to additional policies …

Private Enforcement Of Company Law And Securities Regulation In Korea, Hwa-Jin Kim

Book Chapters

This chapter offers a brief overview of the private enforcement of corporate law and securities regulation in Korea, with particular reference to the current legislative efforts in the Korean National Assembly and recent court cases. This chapter also talks about Korea’s ill-fated and misguided adoption of the fraud-on-the-market theory in securities fraud litigation.

Public Policy And The Legislative Process, Sheila A. Leander, David F. Walz

Book Chapters

No abstract provided.

Introduction To Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Tax Opinions, Anthony C. Infanti, Bridget J. Crawford

Book Chapters

Could a feminist perspective change the shape of the tax law? Most people understand that feminist reasoning has tremendous potential to affect, for example, the law of employment discrimination, sexual harassment, and reproductive rights. Few people may be aware, however, that feminist analysis can likewise transform tax law (as well as other statutory or code-based areas of the law). By highlighting the importance of perspective, background, and preconceptions on the reading and interpretation of statutes, Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Tax Opinions shows what a difference feminist analysis can make to statutory interpretation. This volume, part of the Feminist Judgments Series, brings …

Fetishizing Copies, Jessica Litman

Book Chapters

Our copyright laws encourage authors to create new works and communicate them to the public, because we hope that people will read the books, listen to the music, see the art, watch the films, run the software, and build and inhabit the buildings. That is the way that copyright promotes the Progress of Science. Recently, that not-very-controversial principle has collided with copyright owners’ conviction that they should be able to control, or at least collect royalties from, all uses of their works. A particularly ill-considered manifestation of this conviction is what I have decided to call copy-fetish. This is the …

Labor Unions And Title Vii: A Bit Player At The Creation Looks Back, Theodore St. Antoine

Book Chapters

During the debates over what became Title VII (Equal Employment Opportunity) of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, I was the junior partner of the then General Counsel of the AFL-CIO, J. Albert Woll. There were only three of us in the firm. The middle partner, Robert C. Mayer, handled the business affairs of the Federation and our other union clients. Bob was also the son-in-law of George Meany, president of the AFL-CIO, which gave us a unique access to Meany’s thinking. The Federation had only one in-house lawyer, Associate General Counsel Thomas Everett Harris. Tom was an aristocratic Southerner …

Section 5 And The Innovation Curve, Daniel A. Crane

Book Chapters

the ftc’s authority to use Section 5 of the FTC Act to reach anticompetitive conduct that would not be illegal under the Sherman or Clayton Acts has been much discussed in recent years, particularly in conjunction with the FTC’s enforcement action against Intel. As of this writing, a Section 5 action against Google seems imminent.

Making The Modern American Legislative State, William J. Novak

Book Chapters

The essays in this volume are dedicated to two propositions. First, most generally, they aim to reinvigorate scholarly interest in the subject of legislation and bring a new level of analytical sophistication to the study of the legislature. Second, they are committed to looking at legislation developmentally, that is, legislation not as the simple static textual output of a law-drafting body, but as a dynamic social and political process-a living and breathing human activity with a distinct time dimension involving a complex pattern of beginnings, evolutions, maturations, mutations, emendations, and, of course, endings. These propositions nicely intersect with recent themes …

Patents And Regulatory Exclusivity, Rebecca S. Eisenberg

Book Chapters

This article reexamines the sources of exclusivity for drugs, considers their limitations, and evaluates exclusivity under the new biologics legislation in light of these limitations. The current overlapping legal protections for exclusivity in the pharmaceutical marketplace reflect a series of political compromises, repeatedly renegotiated to correct for unintended consequences in the previous version of the rules. Patents and patent challenges play a central role in this system of protection, and many of the patents at stake are ultimately held invalid in litigation. It is not easy to untangle a complex legal regime that allocates billions of dollars of profits. But …

Midnight Rulemaking And Congress, Nina A. Mendelson

Book Chapters

This chapter focuses on Congress, our most democratic federal institution. Congress is generally responsible for defining the authorities possessed by the administrative state, and congressional oversight is key to holding agencies accountable for their actions. Midnight rulemaking also has the potential to increase congressional engagement. Two commentators have recently argued that relative inattention from Congress can facilitate midnight rulemaking, because Congress may meet less frequently during the lame duck period and there is no “repeat player” relationship between the outgoing president and the Congress. To the contrary, however, Congress retains considerable formal power to respond to and override presidential decisions, …

The Political Pathway: When Will The Us Adopt A Vat?, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Book Chapters

The reason the VAT is on the table is also stated in the referenced article by Orszag: "Although hardly anyone wants to admit it, we're not going to solve our budget deficit unless revenue is part of the equation." And while in the short term it may be possible to address the deficit by raising income tax rates(Orszag suggests letting all the Bush tax cuts expire in 2013}, in the long term it doesn't seem plausible that we can raise sufficient revenue that way to pay for Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, interest on the national debt, and defense and some …

Judicial Independence And Company Law In The Shanghai People's Courts, 1992-2008, Nicholas C. Howson

Book Chapters

This chapter draws on a detailed study of corporate law adjudication in Shanghai from 1992 to 2008. The purpose of the study was to better understand the demonstrated technical competence, institutional autonomy, and political independence of one court system in the People's Republic of China ("PRC") in a sector outside of the criminal law. The study consisted of a detailed examination and comparison of full-length corporate law opinions for more than 200 reported cases, a 2003 Shanghai High Court opinion on the 1994 Company Law (describing a decade of corporate case outcomes), a 2007 report on cases implementing the Company …

Federal Child Welfare Legislation., Frank Vandervort

Book Chapters

This chapter provides a brief overview of federal statutes that impact the practice of child welfare law. Since the enactment of the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act in 1974 (CAPTA), the federal government has played an ever increasing role in handling child maltreatment cases.

The Indian Child Welfare Act., Frank Vandervort

Book Chapters

Few child welfare lawyers routinely confront the application of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA or "the Act"). When the statute applies, however, it is crucial that its provisions be strictly followed. There are at least three reasons why counsel should attempt to ensure that ICWA's provisions are carefully applied. First, ICWA's provisions are jurisdictional. Failure to abide by its requirements invalidates the proceeding from its inception. Indeed, any party or the court may invoke ICWA at any time in the proceeding, including for the first time on appeal. Second, unlike most federal child welfare legislation which provides funding streams …

Policies To Expand Minority Entrepreneurship: Closing Comments, Michael S. Barr

Book Chapters

This essay is based on comments delivered at the Conference on on Entrepreneurship in Low- and Moderate-Income Communities, November 3-4, 2005. This has been a productive conversation. In my closing comments, I want to shift our focus somewhat, from entrepreneurship in low-income communities to minority entrepreneurship generally. I want to do so because many minority entrepreneurs are connected to or hire from low-income communities, and because minority entrepreneurs face critical barriers even when they attempt to create and grow firms outside of distressed communities. In this comment, I want to highlight key barriers and suggest five steps for Congress, the …

Choosing Metaphors, Jessica Litman

Book Chapters

The copyright law on the books is a large aggregation of specific statutory provisions; it goes on and on for pages and pages. When most people talk about copyright, though, they don't mean the long complicated statute codified in title I7 of the U.S. Code. Most people's idea of copyright law takes the form of a collection of principles and norms. They understand that those principles are expressed, if sometimes imperfectly, in the statutory language and the case law interpreting it, but they tend to believe that the underlying principles are what count. It is, thus, unsurprising that the rhetoric …

Confidentiality Of Educational Records And Child Protective Proceedings, Frank E. Vandervort

Book Chapters

The Federal Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), which provides funding for state educational programming, requires that student records be disclosed to a nonparent only with the written consent of the child’s parent, unless the disclosure falls within one of the several exceptions detailed in the statute. One of the exemptions provided for in the federal law permits a school to disclose information to “state or local officials or authorities to whom [that] information is allowed to be reported or disclosed pursuant to state statute,” if that official certifies in writing “that the information will not be disclosed to …

Not Like The South? Regional Variation And Political Participation Through The Lens Of Section 2, Ellen D. Katz

Book Chapters

Congress voted last summer to reauthorize the expiring provisions of the Voting Rights Act. Among the reauthorized provisions is the Section 5 preclearance process, which requires "covered" jurisdictions to obtain federal approval before implementing changes to their voting laws. It is widely assumed that the reauthorization of Section 5 will survive constitutional scrutiny only if the record Congress amassed to support the statute documents pervasive unconstitutional conduct in covered jurisdictions for which preclearance offers a remedy. This paper takes issue with that assumption, arguing that precedent requiring such a record for new congressional legislation enforcing civil rights ought not apply …

Federal Child Welfare Law And Policy: Understanding The Federal Law And Funding Process., Miriam Rollin, Frank Vandervort, Ann M. Haralambie

Book Chapters

This chapter provides an overview of federal and uniform statutes that impact the practice of child welfare law.

The Warn Act, David A. Santacroce

Book Chapters

Plant closings are devastating for workers, their families and the communities in which they live. The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act ("the WARN Act" or "WARN") requires some employers to give their workers sixty days' notice before a plant closing or mass layoff. The purpose of the WARN Act is to provide workers with time to seek alternative employment or retraining and to plan for the transition phase after the layoff.

The WARN Act does not prevent employers from closing a plant; instead it only requires larger employers to give notice, subject to a number of exceptions and exemptions. …

Styles Of Law And The Attainment Of Social Justice, Richard O. Lempert, Joseph Sanders

Book Chapters

In the last chapter we focused on the meaning of legal autonomy and on the constituent elements of the ideal type. We noted two requisites for the autonomous application of law: judicial formalism and equal competence. But we also argued that the autonomous application of law does not guarantee that the law as applied will not perpetuate or advance socioeconomic differences. For applied law to be autonomous in this further sense, legal norms, in addition, must be status neutral, and the distribution of welfare in society must be such that the neutral norms do not disproportionately benefit some people. These …

Computer-Aided Normalizing And Unpacking: Some Interesting Machine-Processable Transformations Of Legal Rules, Layman E. Allen, Charles S. Saxon

Book Chapters

One way of dealing with an important aspect of the natural language barrier that researchers m artificial intelligence have been wrestling with for more than two decades is to normalize the expression of the logical structure of legal rules.

The computer program, NORMALIZER, will enable a legal analyst to automatically generate Normalized Versions of legal rules and Outlines of them from Parenthesized Logical Expressions of their structure and Marked Versions of the Original Text of the rules. In brief:

Parenthesized Logical Expression & Marked Version = = > Outline & Normalized Version.

The Parenthesized Logical Expression of a normalized rule is …

The Expansion Of Federal Legislative Authority, Terrance Sandalow

Book Chapters

During the 190 years since the Constitution's adoption, the legislative authority of the Congress has greatly expanded. In the beginning, Congress's powers were closely circumscribed, but over the years the boundaries by which they were initially confined have been almost entirely obliterated. Congress has ceased to be merely the legislative authority of a federal government; it has for all practical purposes acquired the legislative authority of a unitary nation. Especially in the economic sphere, it is only a small exaggeration to say that Congress now possesses plenary authority.

Of course, Congress need not-and, in fact, does not--exercise all the power …