Law Commons^™

Outcome Report Of Workshop On International Investment And The Rights Of Indigenous Peoples, Kaitlin Y. Cordes, Jesse Coleman

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

On May 12, 2016, the United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, and the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment hosted a one-day workshop on international investment and the rights of indigenous peoples. This outcome document synthesizes the discussions that took place during the May 12 workshop.

The workshop was part of a series of consultations undertaken to support the Special Rapporteur's Second Thematic Analysis on the Impact of International Investment Agreements on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Held at the Ford Foundation in New York, the workshop brought together 53 academics, practitioners, indigenous …

Submission To Opic On Revisions To Its Environmental And Social Policy Statement, Kaitlin Y. Cordes

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

In November 2016, CCSI sent a submission to the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) regarding its draft revised Environmental and Social Policy Statement (ESPS). CCSI’s input focused on two discrete issues that CCSI has been working on: (1) contract transparency for natural resource and infrastructure projects, and (2) redress for harms in the context of project abandonment or failure. The submission urged OPIC to add into the ESPS a requirement that Applicants involved in natural resource or infrastructure projects commit to publicly disclosing any investor-state contracts related to the underlying Project. CCSI’s submission also suggested that OPIC incorporate into the …

The Origins Of The Transgender Phenomenon: The Challenge And Opportunity For Training Lawyers, Judges And Policy Makers In The Historicity Of Alfred Kinsey’S Pansexual Worldview, Judith Reisman

Faculty Publications and Presentations

How has the country gone from a “firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence” to where defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman is condemned as constitutionally irrational,and where the use of sex-separate private spaces by biological sex is subject to federal discrimination lawsuits?The answer can be traced to 1948 when Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey launched what was marketed then--and now--as the first “scientific” study of human sexuality.Indeed, Chief Judge of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, Richard Posner extols Kinsey’s study as the “high-water mark of descriptive sexology.”Influential law professors such as Columbia University’s …

Restoring Hope For Heirs Property Owners: The Uniform Partition Of Heirs Property Act, Thomas W. Mitchell

Faculty Scholarship

For well over 125 years, many Americans have lost their tenancy-in-common property involuntarily in various legal proceedings. For example, courts throughout this country have often resolved partition actions, a legal proceeding in which a tenant in common seeks to exit a tenancy in common, by ordering a forced, partition sale of the property even when these courts could have ordered a remedy that would have preserved the property rights of the tenants in common. Though partition sales have negatively impacted a broad cross section of people in this country, the sales have particularly impacted poor and disadvantaged African-Americans, Hispanics, white …

October 27, 2016: Republicans About To Practice Supreme Court Shutdown, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “Republicans About to Practice Supreme Court Shutdown“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

Inefficient Inequality, Shi-Ling Hsu

Indiana Journal of Law and Social Equality

For the past several decades, much American lawmaking has been animated by a concern for economic efficiency. At the same time, broad concerns over wealth and income inequality have roiled American politics, and still loom over lawmakers. It can be reasonably argued that a tension exists between efficiency and equality, but that argument has had too much purchase over the past few decades of lawmaking. What has been overlooked is that inequality itself can be allocatively inefficient when it gives rise to collectively inefficient behavior. Worse still, some lawmaking only masquerades as being efficiency-promoting; upon closer inspection, some of this …

Fall 2016 Newsletter: The Docket, Emma Wood

Law Library Newsletter

Copy of the Fall 2016 issue of the UMass Law Library Newsletter, The Docket.

Informing The Future Of End-Of-Life Care In Canada: Lessons From The Quebec Legislative Experience, Michelle Giroux

Dalhousie Law Journal

There have been numerous and challenging developments respecting endof-life care in Canada. In Quebec, political consensus and changes in public opinion led to the adoption of end-of-life care legislation. This paper discusses the context and foundation of that reform and reviews its content with the objective of informing the future of end-of-life care in Canada. In the first part of the paper I explore the balancing of the right to life and autonomy, with a focus on the approach chosen in Quebec by the Legal Experts Panel Report. In Part 11, I discuss Quebec's adoption of An Act Respecting End-of-Life …

Correlative Obligation In Patent Law: The Role Of Public Good In Defining The Limits Of Patent Exclusivity, Srividhya Ragavan

Faculty Scholarship

In light of the recent outrageous price-spiking of pharmaceuticals, this Article questions the underlying justifications for exclusive rights conferred by the grant of a patent. Traditionally, patents are defined as property rights granted to encourage desirable innovation. This definition is a misfit as treating patents as property rights does a poor job of defining the limits of the patent rights as well as the public benefit goals of the system. This misfit gradually caused an imbalance in the rights versus duties construct within patent law. After a thorough analysis of the historical and philosophical perspectives of patent exclusivity, this Article …

And Miles To Go Before I Sleep: The Future Of End-Of-Life Law And Policy In Canada, Jocelyn Downie

Dalhousie Law Journal

This paper reviews the legal status of a number ofend-of-life law and policy issues that have, to date, been overshadowed by debates about medical assistance in dying. It suggests that law reform is needed in relation to palliative sedation without artificial hydration and nutrition, advance directives for the withholding and withdrawal of oral hydration and nutrition, unilateral withholding and withdrawal of potentially life-sustaining treatment, and the determination of death. To leave the law in its current uncertain state is to leavepatients vulnerable to having no access to interventions that they want or at the other extreme, being forced to receive …

The Modern Corporation Statement On Company Law, Lynn A. Stout, Sergio Alberto Gramitto Ricci

Faculty Works

Corporations play a central role in modern economies. Certain beliefs about corporations and corporate law are widely held and relied upon by business experts, the financial press, and economists who study the firm. Unfortunately, some of these widely-held beliefs are mistaken. This has led to numerous common errors in the way corporate law concepts are understood and applied. The authors of this Summary are experts versed in a variety of national legal systems, including those of the U.S. and U.K. as well as the E.U. We provide this simple Summary of certain fundamentals of corporate law, applicable in almost all …

Closing The Retirement Savings Gap: Are State Automatic Enrollment Iras The Answer?, Kathryn L. Moore

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Drawing on insights from behavioral law and economics, automatic enrollment IRAs are intended to address the nation’s retirement savings gap by taking advantage of workers’ inertia. Although automatic enrollment IRAs were initially intended to apply at the federal level, they have gained little traction at the federal level, and states have begun to step into the breach. Between September 2012 and June 2016, five states enacted state automatic enrollment IRA programs.

Studies have uniformly shown that workers are more likely to participate in an automatic enrollment 401(k) plan than in a traditional opt-in 401(k) plan. Proponents of state automatic enrollment …

Should The Law Do Anything About Economic Inequality?, Matthew Dimick

Journal Articles

What should be done about rising income and wealth inequality? Should the design and adoption of legal rules take into account their effects on the distribution of income and wealth? Or should the tax-and-transfer system be the exclusive means to address concerns about inequality? A widely-held view argues for the latter: only the tax system, and not the legal system, should be used to redistribute income. While this argument comes in a variety of normative arguments and has support across the political spectrum, there is also a well-known law-and-economics version. This argument, known as the “double-distortion” argument, is simply stated. …

The Future Of Health Law: How Can Law Meet Emerging Health Challenges?, Colleen M. Flood, Lorian Hardcastle

Dalhousie Law Journal

Canadians have often prided themselves on having one of the best health-care systems in the world, but in recent years our system has fallen to the bottom of relevant international comparisons. Incremental attempts to improve the system have not resulted in significant improvements and the reality is that our most pressing challenges can be addressed only through ambitious, systemic reforms. For example, it is well established that Canada's patchwork scheme for providing long-term care will not scale to meet growing needs as a quarter ofthe population enters retirement age over the next two decades.' As yet further examples, the Canadian …

Oral Advocacy And Vocal Fry: The Unseemly, Sexist Side Of Nonverbal Persuasion, Michael J. Higdon

Scholarly Works

In 2015, Naomi Wolf warned that "the most empowered generation of women ever — today’s twentysomethings in North America and Britain — is being hobbled in some important ways by something as basic as a new fashion in how they use their voices." She was referring to the phenomenon referred to as "vocal fry" — a speech quality in which the speaker lowers her natural pitch and produces a "creaking" sound as she talks. Naomi Wolf is not alone in her warnings; vocal fry has received quite a bit of negative attention recently. Specifically, these critics warn that those who …

Sex Trafficking Of Women Around U.S. Military Bases In South Korea: Impact Of New U.S. Laws And Policies Since 2000, Amy Levesque, Donna M. Hughes Dr.

Donna M. Hughes

Newsroom: Time: Bogus On Second Amendment 09/28/2016, Arica L. Coleman, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Lost In Translation? The Difference Between Hearsay Rule's Historical Rationale And Practical Application, Christopher Lloyd Sewrattan

LLM Theses

An examination of the difference between the hearsay rules historical rationale and current application. The analysis occurs in three steps. In section 1, the historical rationale of the hearsay rule is identified through a reconciliation of competing theories. Section 2 analyses the difference between the hearsay rules historical rationale and the application of the exclusionary hearsay rule. Section 3 analyses the difference between the hearsay rules historical rationale and the application of some categorical hearsay exceptions.

Overall, the thesis finds that the hearsay rules historical rationale has three aspects: concern with the inherent reliability of hearsay evidence, concern with procedural …

Marine Law Symposium: Legal And Policy Approaches To Reduce Marine Debris In New England 11/04/2016, Roger Wiliams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

220+ Law And Economics Professors Sign Letter Opposing Isds In The Tpp, Columbia Center On Sustainable Investment

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

CCSI helped launch a letter joined by over 220 law and economics professors calling on Congress to oppose the final Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement because that treaty includes the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism. As the letter notes, the ISDS mechanism “threatens to dilute constitutional protections, weaken the judicial branch and outsource our domestic legal system to a system of private arbitration that is isolated from essential checks and balances.” Despite the Obama administration’s claims to have addressed growing concerns about the ISDS system, the final TPP would instead vastly expand the ISDS threat to the rule of law and …

Mining A Mirage: Reassessing The Shared-Value Paradigm In Light Of The Technological Advances In The Mining Sector, Aaron Cosbey, Howard Mann, Nicolas Maennling, Perrine Toledano, Jeff Geipel, Martin Dietrich Brauch

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

While there has been a strong tendency in resource rich countries to push for more stringent local content regulations, the mining sector is looking to move towards increased automation.

In this study titled "Mining a Mirage: Reassessing the Shared-Value Paradigm in Light of the Technological Advances in the Mining Sector," CCSI, IISD and Engineers Without Borders researched the technological innovations that are being developed, assessing when these technologies could be rolled out, and quantifying the potential impacts automation may have on local employment and procurement and on the shared value paradigm. The objective was to better understand how governments could …

Theory And Theoretical Approaches To Wto Law, Chios Carmody

Law Publications

This article examines the role of theory in relation to the law of the World Trade Organization (WTO), and more broadly, international economic law. It posits that an absence of agreement about an underlying theory of WTO law can be traced to lack of clarity about what a ‘theory’ is as well as the fact that the current vogue for interdisciplinary approaches to law means that WTO law, in particular, is analyzed through non-normative frameworks that are removed from the law’s legality. The article goes on to examine three theoretic frameworks – textual, political, and economic – that have been …

Legal Anarchism: Does Existence Need To Be Regulated By The State, Sirus Kashefi

PhD Dissertations

This thesis asks does existence need to be regulated by the State? The answer relies on legal anarchism, an interdisciplinary, particularly criminal law and philosophy, and unconventional research project based on multiple methodologies with a specific language. It critically analyzes and consequently rejects State law because of its unjustified and unnecessary nature founded on unlimited violence and white-collar crime (Chapters 1-4), on the one hand, and suggests some alternatives to the Governmental legal system founded on agreement and peace (Chapter 5), on the other hand. It furthermore takes into account the elements of time and space, which means the ecological, …

Why We Are All Jurisprudes (Or, At Least, Should Be), Michelle Madden Dempsey

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

Newsroom: Kuckes On Grand Jury Secrecy 8/30/2016, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Fairness And The Willingness To Accept Plea Bargain Offers, Avishalom Tor

Avishalom Tor

In contrast with the common assumption in the plea bargaining literature, we show fairness-related concerns systematically impact defendants' preferences and judgments. In the domain of preference, innocents are less willing to accept plea offers (WTAP) than guilty defendants and all defendants reject otherwise attractive offers that appear comparatively unfair. We also show that defendants who are uncertain of their culpability exhibit egocentrically biased judgments and reject plea offers as if they were innocent. The article concludes by briefly discussing the normative implications of these findings.

Law, Religion, And Politics: Understanding The Separation Of Church And State, Richard Garnett

Richard W Garnett

Professor Richard Garnett, of University of Notre Dame Law School, presented on the topic Law, Religion, and Politics: Understanding the Separation of Church and State. This workshop was presented as part of the Hesburgh Lecture Series through the Alumni & Friends of University of Notre Dame and was co-sponsored by the Notre Dame Alumni Club of Miami. This workshop examined how to understand the Constitution's "separation of church and state" and what it requires of religious believers and institutions.

Trending @ Rwu Law: Linn F. Freedman's Post: The Goal Of Gender Equality In Cybersecurity 08/23/2016, Linn F. Freedman

Law School Blogs

No abstract provided.

August 18, 2016: America Would Not Ban The Burkini, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “America Would Not Ban the Burkini“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

Econometrics In The Courtroom, Daniel L. Rubinfeld

Daniel L. Rubinfeld

No abstract provided.