Law Commons^™

Public Utility And The Low-Carbon Future, William Boyd

Publications

Substantial reductions in global power sector emissions will be needed by midcentury to avoid significant disruption of the climate system. Achieving these reductions will require greatly increased levels of financing, technological innovation, and policy reform. In the United States, the scale and complexity of the overall challenge have raised important questions regarding prevailing regulatory and business models, with much scrutiny directed at the traditional practice of public utility regulation. Recognizing the many valid criticisms leveled against public utility regulation and the important questions raised about the viability of traditional utility business models, particularly in the face of substantial growth in …

Immigration And Cooperative Federalism: Toward A Doctrinal Framework, Ming H. Chen

Publications

What can the new federalism teach us about what is happening in immigration law? The changing relationship of federal-state government in the regulation of immigrants has led to the creation of “immigration federalism” as a field of scholarship. Most of this scholarly attention has been directed at resisting restrictionist legislation that encourages vigorous law enforcement against undocumented immigrants. The scholarly tilt is especially pronounced since the Supreme Court recently struck down several provisions of S.B. 1070, Arizona’s restrictive law enforcement legislation. However, law enforcement is only one type of regulation, and the overwhelming focus on it skews the broader debate …

Introductory Remarks, James Anaya

Publications

These remarks were delivered at a Corporate Responsibility and Human Rights panel held on Wednesday, April 9, 2014.

The Administrative State's Passive Virtues, Sharon B. Jacobs

Publications

Fifty years ago, Alexander Bickel famousy suggested that courts use tools like standing, ripeness, and the political question doctrine to avoid reaching the merits of difficult cases. Yet despite the increasingly central role of administrative agencies in government, there have been no efforts to date to apply Bickel's insights to the bureaucracy. This Article remedies that deficit. The Article provides a three-part taxonomy of administrative restraint and offers case studies from federal agencies such as the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Fish and Wildlife Service. It argues that agencies sometimes use restraint strategically for reasons …

Inmates For Rent, Sovereignty For Sale: The Global Prison Market, Benjamin Levin

Publications

In 2009, Belgium and the Netherlands announced a deal to send approximately 500 Belgian inmates to Dutch prisons, in exchange for an annual payment of £26 million. The arrangement was unprecedented, but justified as beneficial to both nations: Belgium had too many prisoners and not enough prisons, whereas the Netherlands had too many prisons and not enough prisoners. The deal has yet to be replicated, nor has it triggered sustained criticism or received significant scholarly treatment. This Article aims to fill this void by examining the exchange and its possible implications for a global market in prisoners and prison space. …

Language Rights As A Legacy Of The Civil Rights Act Of 1964, Ming Hsu Chen

Publications

The fiftieth anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 offers an important opportunity to reflect on an earlier moment when civil rights evolved to accommodate new waves of immigration. This essay seeks to explain how civil rights laws evolved to include rights for immigrants and non-English speakers. More specifically, it seeks to explain how policy entrepreneurs in agencies read an affirmative right to language access.

Arbitration And The Contract Exchange, Andrew A. Schwartz

Publications

A contract exchange, defined as an organized marketplace for the creation or trading of specific contracts, provides benefits to its members as well as the public at large. But legal disputes can arise on contract exchanges, just as they do anywhere else, and those disputes can be litigated, mediated, arbitrated, or resolved in some other way. This Essay claims that arbitration, rather than litigation, is a particularly useful and appropriate means for resolving exchange-related disputes, and that this is true not only for traditional contract exchanges, like the Chicago Board of Trade, but also for online "consumer contract exchanges," such …

The Judge And The Drone, Justin Desautels-Stein

Publications

Among the most characteristic issues in modern jurisprudence is the distinction between adjudication and legislation. In the some accounts, a judge's role in deciding a particular controversy is highly constrained and limited to the application of preexisting law. Whereas legislation is inescapably political, adjudication requires at least some form of impersonal neutrality. In various ways over the past century, theorists have pressed this conventional account, complicating the conceptual underpinnings of the distinction between law-application and lawmaking. This Article contributes to this literature on the nature of adjudication through the resuscitation of a structuralist mode of legal interpretation. In the structuralist …

The Capture Of International Intellectual Property Law Through The U.S. Trade Regime, Margot E. Kaminski

Publications

For years, the United States has included intellectual property ("IP") law in its free trade agreements. This Article finds that the IP law in recent U.S. free trade agreements differs subtly but significantly from U.S. IP law. These differences are not the result of deliberate government choices, but of the capture of the U.S. trade regime.

A growing number of voices has publicly criticized the lack of transparency and democratic accountability in the trade agreement negotiating process. But legal scholarship largely praises the 'fast track" trade negotiating system. This Article reorients the debate over the trade negotiating process away from …

Book Review, Anna Spain

Publications

No abstract provided.

The President And Congress: Separation Of Powers In The United States Of America, Harold H. Bruff

Publications

Although the framers of the Australian Constitution adopted many features of the United States Constitution, they rejected the separation of legislative and executive power in favour of responsible government in a parliamentary system like that of the United Kingdom. In doing so, Australians depended on existing conventions about the nature of responsible government instead of specification of its attributes in constitutional text. The United States Constitution contains detailed provisions about separation of powers, but unwritten conventions have produced some central features of American government. This article reviews conventions developed by Congress that constrain Presidents in the domestic sphere with regard …

Indigenous Peoples And The Jurisgenerative Moment In Human Rights, Kristen A. Carpenter, Angela R. Riley

Publications

As indigenous peoples have become actively engaged in the human rights movement around the world, the sphere of international law, once deployed as a tool of imperial power and conquest, has begun to change shape. Increasingly, international human rights law serves as a basis for indigenous peoples' claims against states and even influences indigenous groups' internal processes of decolonization and revitalization. Empowered by a growing body of human rights instruments, some as embryonic as the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), indigenous peoples are embracing a global "human rights culture" to articulate rights ranging from …

Internships As Invisible Labor, Melissa Hart

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No abstract provided.

Machine Learning And Law, Harry Surden

Publications

This Article explores the application of machine learning techniques within the practice of law. Broadly speaking “machine learning” refers to computer algorithms that have the ability to “learn” or improve in performance over time on some task. In general, machine learning algorithms are designed to detect patterns in data and then apply these patterns going forward to new data in order to automate particular tasks. Outside of law, machine learning techniques have been successfully applied to automate tasks that were once thought to necessitate human intelligence — for example language translation, fraud-detection, driving automobiles, facial recognition, and data-mining. If performing …

Regulating The Internet Of Things: First Steps Toward Managing Discrimination, Privacy, Security, And Consent, Scott R. Peppet

Publications

The consumer "Internet of Things" is suddenly reality, not science fiction. Electronic sensors are now ubiquitous in our smartphones, cars, homes, electric systems, health-care devices, fitness monitors, and workplaces. These connected, sensor-based devices create new types and unprecedented quantities of detailed, high-quality information about our everyday actions, habits, personalities, and preferences. Much of this undoubtedly increases social welfare. For example, insurers can price automobile coverage more accurately by using sensors to measure exactly how you drive (e.g., Progressive 's Snapshot system), which should theoretically lower the overall cost of insurance. But the Internet of Things raises new and difficult questions …

Congratulations To The 2014 Recipients Of The Oakley Advocacy And Pagi Awards!, Susan Nevelow Mart

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No abstract provided.

Health Care, Title Vi, And Racism's New Normal, Dayna Bowen Matthew

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No abstract provided.

Constitutional Concern, Membership, And Race, Sarah Krakoff

Publications

American Indian Tribes in the United States have a unique legal and political status shaped by fluctuating federal policies and the over-arching history of this country’s brand of settler-colonialism. One of the several legacies of this history is that federally recognized tribes have membership rules that diverge significantly from typical state or national citizenship criteria. These rules and their history are poorly understood by judges and members of the public, leading to misunderstandings about the “racial” status of tribes and Indian people, and on occasion to incoherent and damaging decisions on a range of Indian law issues. This article, which …

Trans-Substantivity Beyond Procedure, Suzette M. Malveaux

Publications

No abstract provided.

A Diamond In The Rough: Trans-Substantivity Of The Federal Rules Of Civil Procedure And Its Detrimental Impact On Civil Rights, Suzette Malveaux

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No abstract provided.

Pragmatic Liberalism: The Outlook Of The Dead, Justin Desautels-Stein

Publications

At the turn of the twentieth century, the legal profession was rocked in a storm of reform. Among the sparks of change was the view that "law in the books" had drifted too far from the "law in action." This popular slogan reflected the broader postwar suspicion that the legal profession needed to be more realistic, more effective, and more in touch with the social needs of the time. A hundred years later, we face a similarly urgent demand for change. Across the blogs and journals stretches a thread of anxieties about the lack of fit between legal education and …

Race To Incarcerate: Punitive Impulse And The Bid To Repeal Stand Your Ground, Aya Gruber

Publications

Stand-your-ground laws have come to symbolize, especially for many in the center-to-left, the intense racial injustice of the modern American criminal system. The idea now ingrained in the minds of many racial justice-seekers is that only by narrowing the definition of self-defense (and thereby generally strengthening murder law) can we ensure Trayvon Martin's death was not in vain. However, when the story of Martin's killing first appeared on the national stage, the conversation was not primarily about the overly lenient nature of Florida's self-defense law. It was a multi-faceted dialogue about neighborhood warriors, criminal racial profiling, and especially the racially …

Marked!, Aya Gruber

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No abstract provided.

The White Whale: Bringing Emotion And Relevance To The Contemporary Trusts And Estates Course, Wayne M. Gazur

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No abstract provided.

Torn Between Two Selves: Should Law Care More About Experiencing Selves Or Remembering Selves?, Peter H. Huang

Publications

Based upon psychological research and neuroscience studies about subjective well-being, 2002 Nobel Laureate in Economics Daniel Kahneman poses a riddle about which of these two selves should count: experiencing selves or remembering selves. Our remembered emotions (memories) are usually rosier than our experienced emotions, and people are motivated by their predicted emotions, which tend to coincide with their emotional memories. This Article advocates that law should care more about experiencing selves than remembering selves if and when experiences result in chronic health or stress consequences that either (1) societies care about more than people do (because of externalities, public bads, …

Missing The Forest For The Trees: Gender Pay Discrimination In Academia, Melissa Hart

Publications

Women in virtually every job category still make less than men. Academia is no exception. This Article will explore some of the structural explanations for this continued disparity and the continued resistance to seriously confronting those structural barriers to equality. Using the still-unfolding story of a charge of discrimination filed against a university, this Article examines the script that has become all-too-familiar in discussions about the gender pay gap, whether in academia or elsewhere. The basic storyline in pay discrimination litigation is this: Evidence is presented about the existence of a gap between men's earnings and women's earnings. The response …

Uelma - Another First For Colorado, Susan Nevelow Mart

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No abstract provided.

Deciding To Intervene, Anna Spain

Publications

Decisions about intervention into today's armed conflicts are difficult, dangerous, and politically complicated. There are no safe choices. Amid the climate of urgency and uncertainty in which intervention decision-making occurs, international law serves as a guide by providing rules about the legality of intervention. These rules assert that, except for in cases of self-defense, choices about when and how to intervene are to be made by the United Nations Security Council. What the rules do not provide, however, is effective guidance for the political choices the Council makes, such as how to prioritize among competing norms. When, for example, should …

Teenage Crowdfunding, Andrew A. Schwartz

Publications

Teenage startups are in the public interest and should be encouraged, yet the federal CARD Act of 2009 eliminated credit card financing for many such companies, cutting off an important source of early-stage business capital for teenage entrepreneurs. Since then, however, Congress passed the CROWDFUND Act of 2012 which will allow teenagers to raise early-stage financing through Internet crowdfunding. Teens, being masters of the Internet, are well positioned to exploit this new opportunity, with the upshot being that securities crowdfunding may become an important way for youthful entrepreneurs to fund their business dreams.

Penalty Default Licenses: A Case For Uncertainty, Kristelia A. García

Publications

Research on the statutory license for certain types of copyright-protected content has revealed an unlikely symbiosis between uncertainty and efficiency. Contrary to received wisdom, which tells us that in order to increase efficiency, we must increase stability, this Article suggests that uncertainty can actually be used to increase efficiency in the marketplace. In the music industry, the battle over terrestrial performance rights--that is, the right of a copyright holder to collect royalties for plays of a sound recording on terrestrial radio--has raged for decades. In June 2012, in a deal that circumvented the statutory license for sound recordings for the …