Law Commons^™

Time For Change: Bringing Massachusetts Homestead And Personal Property Exemptions Into The Twenty-First Century, Lee Harrington

University of Massachusetts Law Review

There are presently two pieces of legislation pending on Beacon Hill that are intended to offer amendments to the Homestead Statute and Exemption Statute that would offer meaningful changes and real relief for the citizens of the Commonwealth. This article provides a brief history of the two statutory schemes, provides some comparisons to the schemes in other states, and highlights the changes sought by the proposed amendments.

Opening The Gate To Money Market Fund Reform, Hester Peirce, Robert Greene

Pace Law Review

This article proceeds as follows. Part I outlines briefly the background of MMFs. Part II discusses the role of the board of directors in governing MMFs, a role upon which our proposal would build. Part III discusses MMF-related events during the financial crisis of 2007-2008 and describes the government’s response to these events. Part IV describes the reforms the SEC instituted in 2010. Part V outlines options for further reform. Part VI outlines and discusses benefits and drawbacks of our proposed solution—unrestricted discretionary gating by fund boards. Part VII concludes.

On Apology, Robert Ward

University of Massachusetts Law Review

On February 16, 2006, Dr. Aaron Lazare, Dean and Chancellor of the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, addressed an assembly at the Southern New England School of Law on his critically acclaimed book entitled: “On Apology!” According to Dr. Lazare, to be an effective apology, there must be acknowledgement, remorse, explanation and reparation. Dr. Lazare advances the hypothesis that the current proliferation of cases in our legal system is predicated on the concept that often the aggrieved party was not the beneficiary of an effective apology. In the context of the patient-physician relationship, an effective apology means telling the patient …

The Legacy Of Colonialism: Law And Women's Rights In India, Varsha Chitnis, Danaya C. Wright

Danaya C. Wright

The relationship between nineteenth century England and colonial India was complex in terms of negotiating the different constituencies that claimed an interest in the economic and moral development of the colonies. After India became subject to the sovereignty of the English Monarchy in 1858, its future became indelibly linked with that of England's, yet India's own unique history and culture meant that many of the reforms the colonialists set out to undertake worked out differently than they anticipated. In particular, the colonial ambition of civilizing the barbaric native Indian male underlay many of the legal reforms attempted in the nearly …

Closing The Doors To Justice: A Critique Of Pimentel V. Dreyfus And The Application Of Legal Formalism To The Elimination Of Food Assistance Benefits For Legal Immigrants, Hannah Zommick

Seattle University Law Review

This Comment contends that the Ninth Circuit’s opinion in Pimentel v. Dreyfus employed a legal formalist approach and that by applying this framework, the court prevented legal immigrants, who were caught between the strict eligibility restrictions of welfare reform, from asserting their rights through the justice system. The legal formalist approach “treats the law as a set of scientific formulae or principles that are derived from the study of case law. These principles create an internal analytical framework which, when applied to a set of facts, leads the decision maker, through logical deduction, to the correct outcome in a case.” …

Supreme Court, Queens County, People V. Michaelides, Christin Harris

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Supreme Court, New York County, Khrapunskiy V. Doar, Daphne Vlcek

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Proposed Amendments To The Federal Judicial Misconduct Rules: Comments And Suggestions, Arthur D. Hellman

Testimony

In 2008, the Judicial Conference of the United States – the administrative policy-making body of the federal judiciary – approved a revised set of rules for handling complaints of misconduct or disability on the part of federal judges. Moving away from the decentralizing approach of the pre-2008 Illustrative Rules, the new rules were made binding on all of the federal judicial circuits.

On September 2, 2014, the Conference’s Committee on Judicial Conduct and Disability (Conduct Committee) issued a set of draft amendments to the Rules. The announcement invited comments on the proposed amendments. This statement was submitted in response to …

A Randomized Experiment Of The Split Benefit Health Insurance Reform To Reduce High-Cost, Low-Value Consumption, Christopher Robertson, David V. Yokum, Nimish Sheth, Keith A. Joiner

Faculty Scholarship

Traditional cost sharing for health care is stymied by limited patient wealth. The “split benefit” is a new way to reduce consumption of high-cost, low-value treatments for which the risk/benefit ratio is uncertain. When a physician prescribes a costly unproven procedure, the insurer could pay a portion of the benefit directly to the patient, creating a decision opportunity for the patient. The insurer saves the remainder, unless the patient consumes. In this paper, a vignette-based randomized controlled experiment with 1,800 respondents sought to test the potential efficacy of the split benefit. The intervention reduced the odds of consumption by about …

Justice For All In The Dispute Settlement System Of The World Trade Organization, Kim Van Der Borght

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Belling The Partisan Cats: Preliminary Thoughts On Identifying And Mending A Dysfunctional Constitutional Order, Mark Graber

Mark Graber

This paper sharpens debates over whether the Constitution of the United States and the American constitutional order are presently dysfunctional, the nature of any dysfunctions, and how underlying regime flaws are likely to be corrected. Rather than focusing primarily on constitutional text, this Article explores the dynamic ways in which constitutional processes have influenced and been influenced by the structure of constitutional politics. Constitutional dysfunction is best conceptualized as the failure of a constitutional order rather than as a consequence of a flawed constitutional text, and dysfunction typically occurs when a regime is unable to transition from a dysfunctional constitutional …

Steps Toward Safety: Improving Systemic And Community Responses For Families Experiencing Domestic Violence, Leigh Goodmark, Ann Rosewater

Leigh S. Goodmark

This report is designed to mine the lessons learned from the research and reforms in child welfare and domestic violence, as well as explore possibilities for the next generation of innovation.

National Security Rulemaking, Robert Knowles

Florida State University Law Review

Agencies performing national security functions regulate citizens’ lives in increasingly intimate ways. Yet national security rulemaking is a mystery to most Americans. Many rules—like those implementing the National Security Agency’s vast surveillance schemes—remain secret. Others are published, but the deliberations that led to them and the legal justifications for them remain hidden.

Ordinarily, these rules would undergo the Administrative Procedure Act’s notice-and-comment process, which has earned wide, if not universal, praise for advancing democratic values and enhancing agency effectiveness. But a national security exception from notice-and-comment in the APA itself, along with the overuse of classification authority, combine to insulate …

Reforming Property Law To Address Devastating Land Loss, Thomas W. Mitchell

Faculty Scholarship

Tenancy-in-common ownership represents the most widespread form of common ownership of real property in the United States. Such ownership under the default rules also represents the most unstable ownership of real property in this country. Thousands of tenancy-in-common property owners, including members of many poor and minority families, have lost their commonly-owned property due to court-ordered, forced partition sales as well as much of their real estate wealth associated with such ownership as a result of such sales. Though some scholars and the media have highlighted how thousands of African-Americans have lost an untold amount of property and substantial real …

Breastfeeding And A New Type Of Employment Law, Marcy Karin, Robin Runge

Catholic University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Families Matter: Recommendations To Improve Outcomes For Children And Families In Court, Barbara A. Babb, Gloria Danziger

All Faculty Scholarship

The Families Matter initiative was designed as a major, multi-year undertaking to develop legal practice methods and approaches to reduce the destructive consequences of the family legal process. The initiative was intended to respond to the need for deep and meaningful reform of the family law process.

Convened in June 2010 by the University of Baltimore School of Law Sayra and Neil Meyerhoff Center for Families, Children and the Courts (CFCC), the Families Matter Symposium brought together an interdisciplinary group of family law experts for two days at the University of Baltimore to identify problems regarding the practice of family …

The Essential Role Of Courts For Supporting Innovation, Erin O'Hara O'Connor, Christopher R. Drahozal

Scholarly Publications

Commercial parties commonly resolve their disputes in arbitration rather than courts. In fact, some estimate that as many as 90 percent of international commercial contracts opt for arbitration of future disputes, and others claim that some industries never resort to courts. However, a study of arbitration clauses in a wide variety of contracts, including franchise agreements, CEO employment contracts, technology contracts, joint venture agreements and consumer cell phone contracts, reveals that parties very often carve out a right to resort to courts for the resolution of claims designed to protect information, innovation, and reputation. Studies of international and cross-border contracts …

America's (Not So) Golden Door: Advocating For Awarding Full Workplace Injury Recovery To Undocumented Workers, Paul Holdsworth

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Jury Reform: The Impossible Dream?, Nancy S. Marder

Tennessee Journal of Law and Policy

In his essay, Asking Jurors To Do the Impossible,' Peter Tiersma identifies several ways in which jurors have difficult, if not impossible, roles to play and suggests several steps that courts could take to aid jurors in performing these roles. He offers a number of recommendations, such as having judges instruct jurors in plain and specific language, allowing jurors to ask questions about the instructions, and explaining to jurors the reasons for certain rules. His recommendations are sensible, and courts would do well to follow his advice. With the exception of his call for the creation of expert juries in …

Securitization Of Student Loans: A Proposal To Reform Federal Accounting, Reduce Government Risk, And Introduce Market Mechanisms As Indicators Of Quality Education, Robert Proudfoot

University of Massachusetts Law Review

This Article outlines looming budgetary and accounting issues with federal student loans and proposes securitization as an innovative mechanism to reform federal accounting, reduce federal balance sheet risk, and provide a new education quality indicator. The current federal loan program is unsustainable because it overestimates the repayment rates and underestimates the cost of certain loan programs. Securitization will reduce that federal risk. Additionally, by forcing academic institutions to bear some of the risk, securitization will create a neutral pricing mechanism outside the direct control of federal regulators to show whether academic institutions provide a quality education. While complicated, this proposal …

Fisc Query Preapproval: Intelligence Burden Or Bump In The Road?, Peter Margulies

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Community Benefit 501(R)Edux: An Analysis Of The Patient Protection And Affordable Care Act’S Limitations Under Community Benefit Reform, Zachary J. Buxton

Saint Louis University Journal of Health Law & Policy

No abstract provided.

Special Kids, Special Parents, Special Education, Karen Syma Czapanskiy

Faculty Scholarship

Many parents are raising children whose mental, physical, cognitive, emotional, or developmental issues diminish their capacity to be educated in the same ways as other children. Over six million of these children receive special education services under mandates of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, called the IDEA. Once largely excluded from public education, these children are now entitled to a free appropriate education. In this article, I argue that the special education system must begin to pay attention to the needs of parents if it is going to fully serve the children. In particular, the system needs to support …

Belling The Partisan Cats: Preliminary Thoughts On Identifying And Mending A Dysfunctional Constitutional Order, Mark A. Graber

Faculty Scholarship

This paper sharpens debates over whether the Constitution of the United States and the American constitutional order are presently dysfunctional, the nature of any dysfunctions, and how underlying regime flaws are likely to be corrected. Rather than focusing primarily on constitutional text, this Article explores the dynamic ways in which constitutional processes have influenced and been influenced by the structure of constitutional politics. Constitutional dysfunction is best conceptualized as the failure of a constitutional order rather than as a consequence of a flawed constitutional text, and dysfunction typically occurs when a regime is unable to transition from a dysfunctional constitutional …

Rationalizing Voter Suppression: How North Carolina Justified The Nation's Strictest Voting Law, Megan C. Raymond

Scripps Senior Theses

In recent years, there has been a dramatic increase in instances of Republican-dominated state legislatures proposing changes to election law that some see as protecting electoral integrity and others understand as intended to suppress votes of traditionally Democratic constituencies. This thesis is a detailed collection of the rationales used to justify these changes, as examined through a case study of North Carolina’s enactment of the omnibus Voter Information Verification Act of 2013 (VIVA). By also including the arguments proffered during the legislative process by opponents of the law, and after evaluating the merits of the arguments on both sides, I …

The Fourth Era Of American Civil Procedure, Thomas O. Main, Stephen N. Subrin

Scholarly Works

Every contemporary American lawyer who has engaged in litigation is familiar with the now fifty-four-volume treatise, Federal Practice and Procedure. Both of that treatise’s named authors, Charles Alan Wright and Arthur Miller, have mourned the death of a Federal Rules regime that they spent much of their professional lives explaining and often celebrating. Wright shared a sense of gloom about federal procedure that he compared to the setting before World War I. Miller has also published a series of articles that chronicled his grief.

We agree that something has fundamentally changed. In fact, we believe that we are in …

“Exploitation Creep” And Development: A Response To Janie Chuang, Aziza Ahmed

Faculty Scholarship

In her article Exploitation Creep and the Unmaking of Human Trafficking Law, Janie Chuang insightfully describes transformations in the discourse on trafficking as it shifted from sex trafficking to human trafficking, and as human trafficking came to be understood as forced labor, and now modern day slavery. With each of these transformations, the United States government, self-anointed “global sheriff” of anti-trafficking efforts, deepened its emphasis on a prosecution-oriented strategy focused on individual perpetrator accountability. As an alternative trajectory, Chuang identifies and convincingly argues for a labor-rights approach that takes into consideration the structural causes of exploitation in the labor market, …

“Audit The Fed” From An Austrian Perspective: Financial Reform Through An Unholy Coalition Of Unwitting Misesians, Jared L. Hausmann

Saint Louis University Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Supplemental Pay Or Supplemental Power?: Why The Ohio General Assembly's Compensation Structure Unconstitutionally Centralizes Power In The General Assembly Leadership, Frank Camardo

Cleveland State Law Review

In the Ohio House and Senate, committee chairpersons and other select members of legislative committees receive a supplemental salary, in addition to their base legislator pay, for their service on the committee. The Ohio Constitution, however, mandates that legislator pay be fixed by law (hereinafter “Fixed Compensation Provision”) and that no changes to compensation take place during the term (hereinafter “No Change Provision”). Because the Speaker of the House and the Senate President have the power to discretionarily appoint and remove committee chairpersons during the term, compensation necessarily changes during the term of a removed chairperson. Such in-term changes violate …

Speaking Too Soon: The Sabotage Of Bail Reform In New South Wales, D. Brown, Julia Quilter

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Within just over one month of coming into operation in May 2014, the new Bail Act 2013 (NSW), a product of long-term law reform consideration, was reviewed and then amended after talk-back radio ‘shock jock’ and tabloid newspaper outcry over three cases. This article examines the media triggers, the main arguments of the review conducted by former New South Wales (NSW) Attorney General John Hatzistergos, and the amendments, with our analysis of the judicial interpretation of the Act thus far providing relevant background. We argue that the amendments are premature, unnecessary, create complexity and confusion, and, quite possibly, will have …