Digital Commons Network^™

Improving Familial And Communal Eldercare In The United States: Lessons From China And Japan, H. Hunter Bruton

Minnesota Law Review Headnotes, Vols. 94-106 (2009-2022)

No abstract provided.

From The Dark Tower: Unbridled Civil Asset Forfeiture, Saleema Saleema Snow

Journal Articles

The Black Lives Matter movement reinforces that race dominates all aspects of the judicial system. Police officers are significantly more likely to stop African Americans than Whites. Even when a stop or arrest is unwarranted, law enforcement agencies can still profit from the property seized under the guise of forfeiture statutes. Various state and federal civil asset forfeiture statutes legitimize law enforcement seizing cash, homes, cars, and office equipment—all with nominal due process protections. Despite evidence of discriminatory police practices, the U.S. Supreme Court deems these forfeiture practices constitutional.

This article seeks to reignite the conversation about discriminatory policing and …

Extending “Dignity Takings”: Re-Conceptualizing The Damage Caused By Criminal History And Ex-Offender Status, Jamila Jefferson-Jones

Saint Louis University Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Corporate Social Responsibility And Crowdwashing In The Gig Economy, Miriam A. Cherry

Saint Louis University Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Data Deficits In Municipal Rideshare Collaborations, Deepa Das Acevedo

Saint Louis University Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Rise And Fall Of Fear Of Abuse In Consumer Bankruptcy: Most Recent Comparative Evidence From Europe And Beyond, 96 Tex. L. Rev. 1327 (2018), Jason Kilborn

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

Prepared for a symposium celebrating the groundbreaking career of Jay Westbrook, this Article examines recent evidence of fear of abuse of the benefits of consumer bankruptcy and the gradual abatement of that fear in modern consumer insolvency law reform. It marshals evidence of a recent and accelerating retreat in both the judicial discretion that Westbrook attributed to lawmakers' fear of abuse and other more direct techniques to avoid abusive recourse to consumer discharge. Fear of abuse appears to be diminishing with accumulated experience as indicated by recent liberalizing reforms in Denmark, Slovakia, Poland, Austria, Russia, and Romania. At the same …

Resilience And Native Girls: A Critique, Addie C. Rolnick

Scholarly Works

The term resilience is often used with reference to Indigenous women and Indigenous youth. Native girls are included in each of these categories but are rarely the main focus of a campaign. Their triple vulnerability (gender, indigeneity, and age), however, means that the focus on resilience is often greatest when applied to them. This Article centers them. It traces the development of resilience in the (non-Native) ecological and psychological literature. Although resilience is used across many different disciplines, it is especially prominent in ecological literature about resilient institutions, such as communities and cities, and in psychological literature about resilient individuals. …

The Vanishing Body Of Disability Law: Power And The Making Of The Impaired Subject, Jonas-Sébastien Beaudry

Canadian Journal of Family Law

The influence of disability studies on legal scholarship is most visible in the social model, which claims that people are not disabled because of their bodily impairments, but by society in its refusal to accommodate their impairments.

However, a modest but growing discourse within disability studies argues that the notion of impairment, in addition to disability, is socially constructed. This article aims to bring this problematized conception of impairment, informed by Michel Foucault’s conception of power, into contact with legal scholarship. Judith Mosoff’s sensibility about the role of impairments in the legal treatment of disabled people illustrates this critical outlook, …

Counter-Critical Theory: An Intervention In Contemporary Critical Thought And Practice, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht's short-lived project for a critical theory journal, Krise und Kritik, foundered in 1931 on the shoals of positivism. Since then, a series of anti-foundational challenges to traditional critical theory has fragmented the landscape of critical theory and, especially, critical praxis, leaving us disarmed today, in these unprecedented times. This essay offers a way forward by means of what it calls “counter-critical theory”: a critical method that indexes the original impulse of critical theory, but liberates it from its foundation in order to allow for a more open-ended and permanent re-examination of how power circulates …

The Social Cost Of Carbon, Greenhouse Gas Policies, And Politicized Benefit/Cost Analysis, Benjamin Zycher

Texas A&M Law Review

Benefit/cost analysis can be a powerful tool for examination of proposed (or alternative) public policies, but, unsurprisingly, decisionmakers’ policy preferences can drive the analysis, rather than the reverse. That is the reality with respect to the Obama Administration computation of the social cost of carbon, a crucial parameter underlying the quantitative analysis of its proposed climate policies, now being reversed in substantial part by the Trump Administration. The Obama analysis of the social cost of carbon suffered from four central problems: the use of global benefits in the benefit/cost calculation, the failure to apply a 7% discount rate as required …

Keeping Man's Best Friend His Best Friend: Why Minors Should Not Witness Animal Abuse And Legislation That Can Prevent This Exposure, Kaleah M. Ault

Valparaiso University Law Review

No abstract provided.

"Adrenaline Of Excellence": The Career Of Judge Gerald Bruce Lee, Editors Of The American University Law Review

American University Law Review

The editors of the American University Law Review proudly dedicate this issue of the Law Review to the Honorable Gerald Bruce Lee, an alumnus of the American University Washington College of Law. As is made clear by the collection of Tributes below, Judge Lee has had a lasting impact not only on this law school and the legal community, but also on the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area. The Law Review hopes that this collection of Tributes, authored by individuals who know Judge Lee best, captures the “adrenaline of excellence” that Judge Lee brought to his career and continues to bring …

The Five Functions Of Forensic Science And The Validation Issues They Raise: A Piece To Incite Discussion On Validation, D. Michael Risinger

Seton Hall Law Review

No abstract provided.

Lobbying As A Strategy For Tribal Resilience, Kirsten Matoy Carlson

Law Faculty Research Publications

No abstract provided.

#I🔫U: Considering The Context Of Online Threats, Lyrissa Barnett Lidsky, Linda Riedemann Norbutt

UF Law Faculty Publications

The United States Supreme Court has failed to grapple with the unique interpretive difficulties presented by social media threats cases. Social media make hateful and threatening speech more common but also magnify the potential for a speaker's innocent words to be misunderstood People speak differently on different social media platforms, and architectural features of platforms, such as character limits, affect the meaning of speech. The same is true of other contextual clues unique to social media, such as gifs, hashtags, and emojis. Only by understanding social media contexts can legal decision-makers avoid overcriminalization of speech protected by the First Amendment. …

Legal Deserts: A Multi-State Perspective On Rural Access To Justice, Lisa R. Pruitt, Amanda L. Kool, Lauren Sudeall, Michele Statz, Danielle M. Conway, Hannah Haksgaard

Faculty Publications By Year

Rural America faces an increasingly dire access-to-justice crisis, which serves to exacerbate the already disproportionate share of social problems afflicting rural areas. One critical aspect of the crisis is the dearth of information and research regarding the extent of the problem and its impacts. This Article begins to fill that gap by providing surveys of rural access to justice in six geographically, demographically, and economically varied states: California, Georgia, Maine, Minnesota, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. In addition to providing insights about the distinct rural challenges confronting each of these states, the legal resources available, and existing policy responses, the Article …

Police Executive Opinions Of Legal Regulation, Roger Michalski, Stephen Rushin

Faculty Articles

By conducting a national survey, this Article empirically assesses how American police leaders perceive external legal regulation. At various times, policymakers have decried external police regulations as too expensive, too complicated, or too difficult to apply to different factual scenarios. Critics have also alleged that police regulations change too frequently, inadequately consider input from the law enforcement community, and unduly risk the safety of officers or the broader community. These complaints underscore an uncomfortable, but unavoidable reality: efforts to regulate police behavior often require policymakers to make compromises. A rule that promotes one goal may necessarily compromise another important goal. …

Prostitution And Public Policy. The Nordic Model Versus The Pimping Of Prostitution, Christopher A. Bagley

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

In this review of recent books on public policy and prostitution, Julie Bindel’s The Pimping of Prostitution is sympathetically reviewed. Her thesis, that the libertarian movement seeking to remove prostitution from legal and public policy spheres has done grave harm to the lives of boys, girls and women, is elaborated by quotations from her chapters. This book is an important resource for those who campaign for the rights of women and children to be free of commercial sexual exploitation. The reviewer offers a critical realist perspective on Bindel’s work, in advocating that future scholars should use her extensive research for …

The Quixotic Quest For Gender Equality In The Workplace, Kingsley R. Browne

Law Faculty Research Publications

No abstract provided.

Lobbying As A Strategy For Tribal Resilience, Kirsten Matoy Carlson

Law Faculty Research Publications

No abstract provided.

Informal Networks Of Corruption: Assessing The Challenges For Public Sector Whistleblowing In Nigeria, Olabisi D. Akinkugbe

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Recently, the Nigerian government adopted its first National Anti-Corruption Strategy—the first since its independence in 1960. While the strategy captures varying forms of corruption, whistleblowing is seen as one of the key strategies identified to confront anti-corruption in the public sector. The adoption of the whistleblowing policy and its on-going implementation however occurs without a legislative framework to protect whistleblowers. This article situates the whistleblower program in the wider socio-political context of anti-corruption in Nigeria, and public governance. The paper critically examines the implications of the legislative gaps for the long-term sustenance of the whistleblower protection program. This paper argues …

Improving Tax Rules By Means-Testing: Bridging Wealth Inequality And "Ability To Pay", James M. Puckett

Faculty Scholarship

The federal income tax can and should do more to address wealth disparities and income inequality. The income tax does not directly count wealth, and the realization rule and basis "step-up" at death exclude substantial amounts of income for the wealthy. The Constitution limits Congress's ability to tax wealth. Despite these serious challenges, this Article considers how to potentially bridge the gap between wealth and the income tax. For example, asset-based phase-outs in the income tax should pass muster without apportionment, although their bite would necessarily be limited. The Article posits that the public would be more receptive to phase-outs …

The Changing Tides Of Adoption: Why Marriage, Race, And Family Identity Still Matter, Jessica Dixon Weaver

SMU Law Review

This essay expounds on the shifting motivation for adoption in the United States using a critical race feminist theory lens to explore how adoption remains wedded to marriage, the control of wealth, and family identity. These three elements have been historically and legally tied to race in that the law was intentionally written to exclude certain persons of color from being able to access marriage or wealth, thereby diminishing their ability to establish family identity.

This essay proceeds in three parts. Part II sets forth an overview of the evolution of adoption by exploring the breakdown of formal adoption and …

The Empirical Turn In Family Law, Clare Huntington

Faculty Scholarship

Historically, the legal system justified family law’s rules and policies through morality, common sense, and prevailing cultural norms. In a sharp departure, and consistent with a broader trend across the legal system, empirical evidence increasingly dominates the regulation of families.

There is much to celebrate in this empirical turn. Properly used, empirical evidence in family law can help the state act more effectively and efficiently, unmask prejudice, and depoliticize contentious battles. But the empirical turn also presents substantial concerns. Beyond perennial issues of the quality of empirical evidence and the ability of legal actors to use it, there are more …

Unbundling Freedom In The Sharing Economy, Deepa Das Acevedo

Faculty Articles

Courts and scholars point to the sharing economy as proof that our labor and employment infrastructure is obsolete because it rests on a narrow and outmoded idea that only workers subjected to direct, personalized control by their employers need work-related protections and benefits. Since they diagnose the problem as being our system’s emphasis on control, these critics have long called for reducing or eliminating the primacy of the “control test” in classifying workers as either protected employees or unprotected independent contractors. Despite these persistent criticisms, however, the concept of control has been remarkably sticky in scholarly and judicial circles.

This …

Liberal Constitutionalism And The Unsettling Of The Secular, Benjamin Berger

Articles & Book Chapters

This chapter argues that certain features of our constitutional theories and practices have been more dependent than we have heretofore acknowledged on an implicit faith in the character and success of secularism. An assumption about the “secular” nature of the social world has lent certain resources to liberal constitutional theory and made possible particular ideas about the nature of contemporary constitutionalism. Yet the conviction that our political and social lives can be satisfyingly described as secular has been seriously destabilized by experience and theory alike. A simple faith in secularism thus unsettled, certain gaps or shortcomings in prevailing accounts of …

'What Gets Measured Gets Done': Exploring The Social Construction Of Globalized Knowledge For Development, Ruth Buchanan, Kimberley Byers, Kristina Mansveld

Articles & Book Chapters

The project of international development can be understood as a way of seeing the world that is both constituted by and interwoven with evolving processes of measurement, comparison and quantification. Drawing on the sociological insight that regimes of measurement can never be ‘neutral’ representations of external ‘objects’, but are instead actively engaged in shaping what can be known, this chapter critically examines the ways in which the production of globalized rankings and metrics are imbricated with the production of the social and economic hierarchies that development as a project seeks to ameliorate. The chapter illustrates the mechanisms and effects of …

Virtual Shackles: Electronic Surveillance And The Adultification Of Juvenile Courts, Chaz Arnett

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

In recent years, there has been a groundswell of attention directed at problems within the American criminal justice system, led in part by Michelle Alexander’s groundbreaking book, The New Jim Crow, and most recently through the efforts of the Black Lives Matter movement. This increased focus on the harms of over-incarceration and net-widening, has had the benefit of introducing to the public other practices utilized in the criminal justice system, such as the widespread use of ankle monitors to track the location of defendants and released offenders. Yet, despite this greater attention, legal scholarship has only recently begun to grapple …

Dialog About A New Asylum System, James C. Hathaway

Articles

The mechanisms for implementing the obligations under the Refugee Convention are fiawed in ways that too often lead States to act against their own values and interests, and which produce needless suffering amongst refugees. A five-point plan could revitalize the Refugee Convention. A managed and collectivized approach to the implementation of refugee protection obligations would include planning for refugee movements, embracing common but differentiated State responsibility and international administration of refugee protection.

Police Executive Opinions Of Legal Regulation, Stephen Rushin, Roger Michalski

Faculty Publications & Other Works

By conducting a national survey, this Article empirically assesses how American police leaders perceive external legal regulation.

At various times, policymakers have decried external police regulations as too expensive, too complicated, or too difficult to apply to different factual scenarios. Critics have also alleged that police regulations change too frequently, inadequately consider input from the law enforcement community, and unduly risk the safety of officers or the broader community.

These complaints underscore an uncomfortable but unavoidable reality: efforts to regulate police behavior often require policymakers to make compromises. A rule that promotes one goal may necessarily compromise another important goal. …