State and Local Government Law Commons^™

Recurrent Flooding, Sea Level Rise, And The Relocation Of At-Risk Communities: Case Studies From The Commonwealth Of Virginia, Jeffrey Moore, Lauren Acker

Virginia Coastal Policy Center

No abstract provided.

Criminal Justice And The Mattering Of Lives, Deborah Tuerkheimer

Michigan Law Review

A review of James Forman Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America.

Nuleaf Clv Dispensary, Llc V. State, Dep’T Of Health And Human Serv’S, 134 Nev. Adv. Op. 17 (Mar. 29, 2018), Margaret Higgins

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

The Court determined that under NRS Chapter 453: (1) a medical marijuana establishment applicant does not have to satisfy NRS 453A.322(3)(a)(5)’s requirements for the Department of Health and Human Services to issue the applicant a provisional registration certificate, and (2) the registration certificate shall be deemed provisional until the applicant receives proper approval to commence operations from the applicable local government to commence operation.

Weed And Water Law: Regulating Legal Marijuana, Ryan Stoa

Ryan B. Stoa

Marijuana is nearing the end of its prohibition in the United States. Arguably the country’s largest cash crop, marijuana is already legal for recreational use in Colorado, Washington, Oregon, Alaska, and Washington DC. Between now and election day 2016, an additional 14 states may place marijuana legalization initiatives on their ballots. In addition, 23 states and Washington DC have legalized medical marijuana, with up to seven states pending legislation. The era of marijuana prohibition is rapidly coming to a close. At the same time, traditional doctrines of water law are struggling to cope with the modern realities of water ...

Florida Water Management Districts And The Florida Water Resources Act: The Challenges Of Basin-Level Management, Ryan Stoa

Ryan B. Stoa

Florida’s plentiful freshwater resources are indispensable to the state’s municipal, agricultural, and environmental interests. As such, decision makers presiding over complex water management decisions wield extraordinary powers. The Water Resources Act of Florida vests these powers in five water management districts drawn according to hydrological, not political, boundaries. The water management districts have robust technical, financial, and regulatory powers, and hold the key to Florida’s sustainable development. With the stakes so high, Florida’s water management districts are at the center of a broad fight for control of water resources. In particular, transboundary water conflicts, political pressure ...

Droughts, Floods, And Wildfires: Paleo Perspectives On Diaster Law In The Anthropocene, Ryan Stoa

Ryan B. Stoa

Humanity's impact on the earth has become so pronounced that momentum is building toward adopting a new term for the modem geological age-the "Anthropocene." The term signifies that human activity has reached a scale that it is now a planetary force capable of shaping ecosystems and natural processes. And yet, anthropocentric natural resources management and environmental lawmaking in the United States reveal a lack of control in managing natural systems and fostering resilience to extreme events. These systems do not easily conform to the whims of reactionary environmental policies. Droughts, floods, and wildfires, in particular are often conceptualized as ...

Marijuana Agriculture Law: Regulation At The Root Of An Industry, Ryan Stoa

Ryan B. Stoa

Marijuana legalization is sweeping the nation. Recreational marijuana use is legal in eight states. Medical marijuana use is legal in thirteen states. Only three states maintain an absolute criminal prohibition on marijuana use. Many of these legalization initiatives propose to regulate marijuana in a manner similar to alcohol, and many titles are variations of the "Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol Act." For political and public health reasons the analogy makes sense, but it also reveals a regulatory blind spot. States may be using alcohol as a model for regulating the distribution, retail, and consumption of marijuana, but marijuana is much more ...

Cooperative Federalism In Biscayne National Park, Ryan Stoa

Ryan B. Stoa

Biscayne National Park is the largest marine national park in the United States. It contains four distinct ecosystems, encompasses 173,000 acres (only five percent of which are land), and is located within densely populated Miami-Dade County. The bay has a rich history of natural resource utilization, but aggressive residential and industrial development schemes prompted Congress to create Biscayne National Monument in 1968, followed by the designation of Biscayne National Park in 1980. When the dust settled, Florida retained key management powers over the Park, including joint authority over fishery management. States and the federal government occasionally share responsibility for ...

Comparative Cannabis: Approaches To Marijuana Agriculture Regulation In The United States And Canada, Ryan Stoa

Ryan B. Stoa

The United States and Canada may be friends and allies, but the two countries' approaches to the regulation of marijuana agriculture have not evolved in tandem. On the contrary, their respective paths toward legalization and regulation of marijuana agriculture are remarkably divergent. In the United States, where marijuana remains a federally prohibited and tightly-controlled substance, legalization and regulation have remained the province of state legislatures and their administrative agencies for decades. In Canada, a succession of court cases paving the way toward medicinal marijuana use has prompted the federal government to develop a national framework committed to "legalize, regulate, and ...

Marijuana Appellations: The Case For Cannabicultural Designations Of Origin, Ryan Stoa

Ryan B. Stoa

An appellation is a certified designation of origin that may also require that certain quality or stylistic standards be met. Appellations are most commonly associated with the wine industry, but they can be applied to any agricultural product for which the geographic origin carries importance. The MMRSA [California Medical Marijuana Regulation and Safety Act] … may have far-ranging effects on the marijuana industry in the United States. [A provision of the act permits the state Bureau of Medical Marijuana Regulation to ‘establish appellations of origin for marijuana grown in California.’] As the most populous state in the Union and the most ...

You Might Just Have To Wait: Interpreting State Action Immunity And The Ability To Appeal Following The Ninth Circuit's Decision In Solarcity Corp. V. Salt River Project, Hunter Malasky

Boston College Law Review

On June 12, 2017, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held in SolarCity Corp. v. Salt River Project Agricultural Improvement and Power District that the doctrine of state action immunity confers immunity from liability, and therefore a court ruling granting or denying state action immunity may not be immediately appealed. In concluding this, the Ninth Circuit joined the Fourth and Sixth Circuits in opposition to the Fifth and Eleventh Circuits, which held that state action immunity confers immunity from suit and may be immediately appealed. The interpretation of state action immunity thus directly affects whether a ...

Default License Revocation In California Administrative Law, Jacob Reinhardt

Journal of the National Association of Administrative Law Judiciary

No abstract provided.

Taxing Under The Influence? : Corruption And U.S. State Beer Taxes, Per G. Fredriksson, Stephan Gohmann, Khawaja Mamun

Per Fredriksson

This article examines the effect of state level corruption on state beer taxes in the United States. Our lobby group model predicts that corruption reduces the beer tax, but this effect is conditional on the level of alcohol-related vehicle deaths. Using a panel of state level data from 1982 to 2001, we find that increased corruption is associated with lower state beer tax rates. The magnitude of the effect, however, declines with increases in alcohol-related traffic deaths. Our findings suggest that future empirical work estimating the effect of alcohol taxes on alcohol-related traffic fatalities should treat alcohol taxes as endogenous.

Black Courts, Ernesto A. Longa

Faculty Book Display Case

Book Abstract:

Pushing past the conventional understanding of federal and state courts and the judicial system, this volume examines eight little-known Florida courts. Part 1 details general jurisdiction courts from 1513 to 1865 while part 2 profiles modern-era special jurisdiction courts.

Beginning with the state's colonial history, Florida's Other Courts challenges narratives that paint Spain's administration of its New World holdings as corrupt, inefficient, and tyrannical, using research into archival records scattered across Spain, Cuba, and other New World sites. Contributors to the volume also demonstrate how British authorities later molded the courts after their own justice ...

Full Faith And Credit, Choice Of Laws, And Extraterritorial Regulation Of Corporate Transactions, Gregory S. Sergienko

Greg Sergienko

In a federal system in which each state may enact laws providing for the chartering and governance of corporations and in which corporations can and do conduct business in more than one state, several states may claim an interest in regulating the conduct of a given corporation. The enactment of state laws that are intended to restrict hostile corporate takeovers and that purport to extend to foreign corporations is one example of this phenomenon. "Typically, any of a number of jurisdictional links might trigger the application of such an anti-takeover statute: the target's being incorporated in the state, its ...

Persuasive Authority And The Nebraska Supreme Court: Are Certain Jurisdictions Or Secondary Resources More Persuasive Than Others?, Stefanie S. Pearlman

College of Law, Faculty Publications

In this article, the author analyzes whether the Nebraska Supreme Court—as currently composed—favors particular jurisdictions or certain types of secondary resources as authority when there is a lack of precedent on a given legal issue. For this study, the author reviewed the advance opinions in Volume 295 of the Nebraska Reports to address two hypotheses: (1) When there is an absence of binding authority, it is typically better to cite to a state similar to your state—one that borders your state or that shares the same circuit; and (2) When using secondary resources, it is better to ...

Manufactured Deadlocks? The Problematic “Bad Faith Defense” To Forced-Sales Of Delaware Corporations Under Section 226 Of The Delaware General Corporation Law, Brian C. Durkin

Boston College Law Review

Title 8, Section 226 of the Delaware General Corporation Law authorizes courts to force the sale of Delaware corporations when the stockholders or directors are in a state of complete deadlock. Some courts have tentatively acknowledged that a party may successfully oppose the sale by arguing that the stockholder bringing a Section 226 action has done so in bad faith by manufacturing a deadlock in the hopes of obtaining a court-ordered sale (i.e., the “bad faith defense”). This Note explores the idea of the manufactured deadlock in Section 226 actions, through the lens of Shawe v. Elting, a recent ...

Sin Taxes: Have Governments Gone Too Far In Their Efforts To Monetize Morality?, Franklin Liu

Boston College Law Review

In June 2016, Philadelphia became the largest city in the United States to pass a soda tax, which went into effect on January 1, 2017. Soda taxes, an umbrella term for taxes that are assessed on sugar-sweetened beverages, represent the latest incarnation in a recent wave of non-traditional “sin taxes.” Sin taxes target behaviors that the government considers to be socially undesirable, and traditionally have been levied to curb consumption of alcohol and tobacco products. As state and local governments continue to face burgeoning budget deficits, legislators have increased the amount of existing sin taxes and expanded the sin tax ...

Black Courts, Ernesto A. Longa

Ernesto A. Longa

Book Abstract: Pushing past the conventional understanding of federal and state courts and the judicial system, this volume examines eight little-known Florida courts. Part 1 details general jurisdiction courts from 1513 to 1865 while part 2 profiles modern-era special jurisdiction courts. Beginning with the state's colonial history, Florida's Other Courts challenges narratives that paint Spain's administration of its New World holdings as corrupt, inefficient, and tyrannical, using research into archival records scattered across Spain, Cuba, and other New World sites. Contributors to the volume also demonstrate how British authorities later molded the courts after their own justice ...

State Constitutions And The Protection Of Rights, John M. Greabe

Law Faculty Scholarship

This article, using a recent Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling on partisan gerrymandering, explores how state constitutions can be significantly more protective of rights than the federal constitution.