Law Commons^™

Campaign Finance Makes America Go ‘Round: Individual Campaign Contributions And The Effects Of Citizens United On The American Election System, Geneva Sherman

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

How political campaigns are financed directly affects every citizen in the United States. This can be attributed to the fact that campaign money is correlated to the laws that pass through congress and the interests that are taken into consideration. After the passage of Citizens United in 2010, campaign donation caps were lifted to allow for virtual unregulated money in politics with PACs, Super PACs and 501(c)(4)s. Although the 2010 passage of Citizens United has increased the influence of corporate and wealthy interests, individual campaign donations represent a major percentage of funds raised and are heavily relied upon. The present …

Political Uncertainty And The Market For Ipos, Jay B. Kesten, Murat C. Mungan

Faculty Scholarship

This Article presents a simple theory and model of the effects of political uncertainty on the market for IPOs. Our model generates four central predictions: (i) increased political uncertainty reduces the frequency of IPOs; (ii) firms that choose to conduct an IPO during periods of political uncertainty are, on average, of higher quality and generate greater return on investment in the secondary market; (iii) political uncertainty increases the cost of capital for IPO firms; but (iv) underpricing is less pronounced during periods of heightened political uncertainty. We demonstrate that each of these predictions is consistent with available empirical evidence.

Our …

State-Created Immigration Climates And Domestic Migration, Huyen Pham, Pham Hoang Van

Faculty Scholarship

With comprehensive immigration reform dead for the foreseeable future, immigration laws enacted at the subfederal level -- cities, counties, and states -- have become even more important. Arizona has dominated media coverage and become the popular representation of the states' response to immigration by enacting SB 1070 and other notoriously anti-immigrant laws. Illinois, by contrast, has received relatively little media coverage for enacting laws that benefit the immigrants within its jurisdiction. The reality on the ground is that subfederal jurisdictions in the United States have taken very divergent paths on the issue of immigration regulation.

Compiling city, county, and state …

Declining Controversial Cases: How Marriage Equality Changed The Paradigm, Elena Baylis

Articles

Until recently, state attorneys general defended their states’ laws as a matter of course. However, one attorney general’s decision not to defend his state’s law in a prominent marriage equality case sparked a cascade of attorney general declinations in other marriage equality cases. Declinations have also increased across a range of states and with respect to several other contentious subjects, including abortion and gun control. This Essay evaluates the causes and implications of this recent trend of state attorneys general abstaining from defending controversial laws on the grounds that those laws are unconstitutional, focusing on the marriage equality cases as …

Abandoned Criminal Attempts: An Economic Analysis, Murat C. Mungan

Faculty Scholarship

An attempt is 'abandoned' if the criminal, despite having a chance to continue with his criminal plan, forgoes the opportunity to do so. A regime that makes abandonment a defense to criminal attempts provides an incentive to the offender to withdraw from his criminal conduct prior to completing the previously intended offense. However, the same regime may induce offenders to initiate criminal plans more often by reducing the expected costs associated with such plans. The former effect is called the marginal deterrence effect and the latter is called the ex-ante deterrence effect of the abandonment defense. This Article formalizes a …

Deferred Action: Considering What Is Lost, Elizabeth Keyes

All Faculty Scholarship

This response to Professor Motomura considers what is lost through the elaboration of formally defined boundaries around prosecutorial discretion. Professor Motomura and others in this Issue rightly extol the many benefits of the President's November 2014 executive actions. While I share the view that those benefits are considerable, I believe a full accounting requires us to consider what gets lost in this process, including identification of the immigrants in the limbo space between the actions' prospective beneficiaries at the one end and those who are priorities for removal on the other. This Essay focuses on the cost that comes from …

Three Words And The Future Of The Affordable Care Act, Nicholas Bagley

Articles

As an essential part of its effort to achieve near universal coverage, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) extends sizable tax credits to most people who buy insurance on the newly established health care exchanges. Yet several lawsuits have been filed challenging the availability of those tax credits in the thirty-four states that refused to set up their own exchanges. The lawsuits are premised on a strained interpretation of the ACA that, if accepted, would make a hash of other provisions of the statute and undermine its effort to extend coverage to the uninsured. The courts should reject this latest effort …

Clean Energy Federalism, Felix Mormann

Faculty Scholarship

Legal scholarship tends to approach the law and policy of clean energy from an environmental law perspective. As hydraulic fracturing, renewable energy integration, nuclear reactor (re)licensing, transport biofuel mandates, and other energy issues have pushed to the forefront of the environmental law debate, clean energy law has begun to emancipate itself. The emerging literature on clean energy federalism is a symptom of this emancipation. This Article adds to that literature by offering two case studies, a novel model for policy integration, and theoretical insights to elucidate the relationship between environmental federalism and clean energy federalism.

Renewable portfolio standards and feed-in …

Newsroom: Discussing Lawyers During Holocaust, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Ratification, Reporting, And Rights: Quality Of Participation In The Convention Against Torture, Cossette D. Creamer, Beth A. Simmons

All Faculty Scholarship

The core international human rights treaty bodies play an important role in monitoring implementation of human rights standards through consideration of states parties’ reports. Yet very little research explores how seriously governments take their reporting obligations. This article examines the reporting record of parties to the Convention against Torture, finding that report submission is heavily conditioned by the practices of neighboring countries and by a government’s human rights commitment and institutional capacity. This article also introduces original data on the quality and responsiveness of reports, finding that more democratic—and particularly newly democratic—governments tend to render higher quality reports.

Lawyers Without Rights: Jewish Lawyers In Germany Under The Third Reich: An Exhibition At Roger Williams University School Of Law, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Keeping Pace: The U.S. Supreme Court And Evolving Technology, Brian Thomas

Politics Summer Fellows

Contemporary mainstream discussions of the Supreme Court are often qualified with the warning that the nine justices are out of touch with everyday American life, especially when it comes to the newest and most popular technologies. For instance, during oral argument for City of Ontario v. Quon, a 2010 case that dealt with sexting on government-issued devices, Chief Justice John Roberts famously asked what the difference was “between email and a pager,” and Justice Antonin Scalia wondered if the “spicy little conversations” held via text message could be printed and distributed. While these comments have garnered a great deal of …

Classifying Political Similarity Of Twitter Users, William K. Paustian

Computer Science Summer Fellows

The emergence of large scale social networks has led to research in approaches to classify similar users on a network. While many such approaches use data mining techniques, recent efforts have focused on measuring the similarity of users using structural properties of the underlying graph representing the network. In this paper, we identify the Twitter followers of the 2016 presidential candidates and classify them as Democrat, Republican or Bipartisan. We did this by designing a new approach to measuring structural similarity, PolRANK. PolRANK computes the similarity of a pair of users by accounting for both the number of candidates they …

Obama's Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free Decree, Paul H. Robinson

All Faculty Scholarship

While agreeing that sentences for nonviolent drug offenses are too long, this Wall Street Journal op-ed piece argues that the large-scale clemency program planned by President Obama is misguided. It sets a dangerous precedent for using the clemency power beyond its traditional and intended purpose of providing a last-resort check on fairness and justice errors in individual cases, and instead uses the power to set sentencing policy. While many people will like the results of the current program, they will be less than happy when some future president uses it as precedent to promote a sentencing policy of which they …

Newsroom: Mckay '96 To Head Christie Campaign, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Measuring Party Polarization In Congress: Lessons From Congressional Participation In Amicus Curiae, Neal Devins

Faculty Publications

First, I will detail the prevalence of party polarization and how party polarization has limited congressional interest in its institutional prerogatives vis-à-vis the executive. Second, I will discuss my research findings governing congressional amicus briefs. I will consider patterns in bipartisan filings over time (comparing the less polarized 1974–1985 Supreme Court terms with the more polarized 2002–2013 terms). I will also consider the types of issues lawmakers and their institutional counsel have pursued in their filings. This investigation will reveal a decline in briefs in institutional cases and an upswing in briefs on politically salient issues that divide the parties …

Dangerous Diagnoses, Risky Assumptions, And The Failed Experiment Of "Sexually Violent Predator" Commitment, Deirdre M. Smith

Faculty Publications

In its 1997 opinion, Kansas v. Hendricks, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a law that reflected a new model of civil commitment. The targets of this new commitment law were dubbed “Sexually Violent Predators” (SVPs), and the Court upheld indefinite detention of these individuals on the assumption that there is a psychiatrically distinct class of individuals who, unlike typical recidivists, have a mental condition that impairs their ability to refrain from violent sexual behavior. And, more specifically, the Court assumed that the justice system could reliably identify the true “predators,” those for whom this unusual and extraordinary deprivation of liberty …

The Price Of Corruption, Usha Rodrigues

Scholarly Works

The Supreme Court recently held that campaign contributions under $5200 do not create a “cognizable risk of corruption.” It was wrong. This Essay describes a nexus of timely contributions and special-interest legislation. In the most noteworthy case, a CEO made a first-time $1000 donation to a member of Congress. The next day that representative introduced a securities bill tailored to the interests of the CEO’s firm.

Armed with this real-world account of how small-dollar campaign contributions coincided with favorable legislative action, the Essay reads McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission with a critical eye. In McCutcheon the Supreme Court assumed that …

Human Rights Treaties In And Beyond The Senate: The Spirit Of Senator Proxmire, Jean Galbraith

All Faculty Scholarship

In 1995, Louis Henkin wrote a famous piece in which he suggested that the process of human rights treaty ratification was haunted by “the ghost of Senator Bricker” – the isolationist Senator who in the 1950s had waged a fierce assault on the treaty power, especially with regard to human rights treaties. Since that time, Senator Bricker’s ghost has proved even more real. Professor Henkin’s concern was with how the United States ratified human rights treaties, and specifically with the packet of reservations, declarations, and understandings (RUDs) attached by the Senate in giving its advice and consent. Today, the question …

Ferguson, The Rebellious Law Professor, And The Neoliberal University, Harold A. Mcdougall Iii

School of Law Faculty Publications

Neoliberalism, a business-oriented ideology promoting corporatism, profit-seeking, and elite management, has found its way into the modern American university. As neoliberal ideology envelops university campuses, the idea of law professors as learned academicians and advisors to students as citizens in training, has given way to the concept of professors as brokers of marketable skills with students as consumers. In a legal setting, this concept pushes law students to view their education not as a means to contribute to society and the professional field, but rather as a means to make money. These developments are especially problematic for minority students and …

A Fourth Way?: Bringing Politics Back Into Recess Appointments (And The Rest Of The Separation Of Powers, Too), Josh Chafetz

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

It sounds odd when stated forthrightly, but most separation-of-powers discussions are largely inattentive to politics. Formalist theories tend to assert that the distribution of powers is set in stone; in contrast, functionalist theories tend to focus on abstract considerations of comparative institutional competence or on ossifying past practice into a "historical gloss" binding the present. Both approaches generally ignore the live political context in which the branches continually compete with one another for decision-making power.

"Pragmatic formalist" hybrids, like that proposed by Ron Krotoszynski in his contribution to the Duke Law Journal's annual administrative law symposium, while broadening the …

Impact Of The “Nirbhaya” Rape Case: Isolated Phenomenon Or Social Change?, Tina P. Lapsia

Honors Scholar Theses

In December 2012, a twenty-three year old college student, who was given the pseudonym “Nirbhaya” (“fearless”), was fatally gang-raped on a private bus in Delhi, India, galvanizing the country to swiftly adopt new legislative measures and catapulting the issue of violence against women in India into the international spotlight. Although assault and rape cases have made India infamous for its high volume of crimes against women, the reaction to this particular incident was much different from before. This paper investigates whether the governmental and societal responses represent social change, as indicated by changing attitudes towards violence against women in India. …

All I Really Need To Know About Antitrust I Learned In 1912, Daniel A. Crane

Articles

Herbert Hovenkamp has indisputably earned the deanship of contemporary antitrust scholarship. One could point to many different attributes by which he has earned his laurels: fantastic scholarly productivity; clarity and precision in the craft of writing; analytical depth in both law and economics; moderation in a field apt to polarization; and custodianship of the influential Areeda treatise. In this Essay, I hope to honor another quality that has contributed significantly to Herb’s tremendous success as an antitrust scholar—his engagement with history. Much contemporary antitrust scholarship bursts with excitement at the discovery of new phenomena or theories that in all actuality …

Courtroom To Classroom: Judicial Policymaking And Affirmative Action, Dylan Britton Saul

Political Science Honors Projects

The judicial branch, by exercising judicial review, can replace public policies with ones of their own creation. To test the hypothesis that judicial policymaking is desirable only when courts possess high capacity and necessity, I propose an original model incorporating six variables: generalism, bi-polarity, minimalism, legitimization, structural impediments, and public support. Applying the model to a comparative case study of court-sanctioned affirmative action policies in higher education and K-12 public schools, I find that a lack of structural impediments and bi-polarity limits the desirability of judicial race-based remedies in education. Courts must restrain themselves when engaging in such policymaking.

New Start From Old Beginnings?, Michaela Ruhlmann

History Capstone Research Papers

This paper examines the extent of which START I and New START achieved effective balance of power between the United States and Russia. It addresses the purpose, agreements and the impact of START I and New Start on the effectiveness in accomplishing global balance of power. This paper argues that while the original START I accomplished a global balance of power by equalizing reduction of nuclear arsenals in both countries, but that New START did not accomplish a long-term global balance of power. To best demonstrate this, “New START from Old Beginnings?” covers START I’s historical context, examine its actual …

Mccutcheon V. Fec: Sacrificing Campaign Finance Regulation In The Name Of Free Speech, Haley S. Peterson

Maryland Law Review Online

No abstract provided.

Central Government And Secession, Tyler Zuch

Political Science Capstone Research Papers

Governments and countries throughout history have risen and fallen while some have carried on through the years. However, some countries look very different from when they existed in previous times. Rulers and leaders have utilized many responses to rebellions and secessionist movements. These responses range from bloody and/or political repression, devolution, simply declaring secession unconstitutional or illegal, economic concessions/incentives, or even simply ignoring the problem. There is not only the debate as to what is the best way to put down a rebellion or secessionist movement, but also what is the right/moral response that the government should do to keep …

Defeating The Super Pacs That Distort Our Political Process, Bruce Ledewitz

Ledewitz Papers

Published scholarship collected from academic journals, law reviews, newspaper publications & online periodicals.

Menendez And America's Public Corruption Problem, Jeffrey Bellin

Popular Media

No abstract provided.

Juries, Judges, And The Politics Of Tort Reform, David Logan

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.