Digital Commons Network^™

Our Biggest Fans: Nuisance Immunity For Grid-Scale Wind Energy Projects In Maine, Andrew D. Hersom

Maine Law Review

Global climate change and its attendant impacts threaten to change life on Earth as we know it. The sea level rise that comes with rising temperatures is an issue of particular importance to coastal states like Maine. Thankfully, continued investment in renewable energy technology is beginning to make certain renewable energy sources competitive with their nonrenewable counterparts. This Comment highlights wind energy as a particularly effective option for meeting Maine’s energy needs while significantly reducing the harmful greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change. Despite its many benefits, wind energy technology still has its detractors. Wind energy projects (especially …

Borrowed Wombs: On Uterus Transplants And The “Right To Experience Pregnancy”, Glenn Cohen

University of Chicago Legal Forum

No abstract provided.

Mitigating Peer-To-Peer Housing Impacts: Toward A Rational Nexus P2p Housing Impact Mitigation Strategy, Arthur C. Nelson

Journal of Comparative Urban Law and Policy

Traveler lodging has been around since humans created tribes and certainly since they invented civilization. The internet and the rise of peer-to-peer, short-term housing has accelerated traveler and lodging opportunities. Today, Airbnb alone has nearly three million hosts offering more than seven million listings. This article explores the rise of “peer-to-peer,” or P2P housing, and offers economic, planning, and public policy perspectives.

United States Census Bureau Statistical Quality Standards

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

United States Census Bureau Statistical Quality Standards (April 19, 2023), the leading source of quality data about the nation's people and economy.

The Food Distribution Program On Indian Reservations: Past, Present, And Future, Samantha Doss

Arkansas Law Review

In 2018, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) proposed replacing much of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) with “America’s Harvest Box,” a program that would directly distribute a package of non-perishable food items to low-income families. The proposal was met with intense controversy. Many hunger advocates, grocery retailers, and former government officials spurned the idea, citing logistics challenges, nutrition concerns, and stigmatization associated with a direct distribution system. However, a few Indigenous advocates were quick to point out that a direct commodity distribution system has been in place in the United States for generations, often overlooked due to …

Rescaling City Property, Amnon Lehavi

Arkansas Law Review

This Article seeks to identify the growing tension between the contemporary physical and digital reality of cities across the world and the formal, often archaic, body of norms that governs city powers and duties vis-à-vis different types of persons and corporations: locals, non-local residents of the same nation-state, and foreigners. The nation-state’s continuing dominance, both in the domestic division of power across various legal systems and in the international arena, often results in a systemic mismatch.

The Enforcement Value Of Disclosure, Stephanie Bornstein

Duke Law Journal

Information disclosures often “nudge” consumers to make better choices—for example, when manufacturers include nutrition labels on food packaging or fuel economy standards on cars. Yet having to disclose can have a nudge effect on the disclosing entity, too—for example, by incentivizing a manufacturer to make healthier food or more fuel-efficient cars. Recently, regulators around the world have begun to use information disclosures to improve racial and gender equality—for example, by requiring certain businesses to disclose information on things like harassment complaints, board diversity, and employee pay. But are such disclosure efforts worth their costs? And what would indicate that policymakers …

A Canadian Perspective On Fifty Years Of International Economic Law, J. Anthony Van Duzer

Dalhousie Law Journal

In 1970, “international economic law” (IEL) was not a distinct academic subject. Fifty years later, IEL has become an important and well-recognized field of legal enquiry, though its boundaries remain unclear. Globalization of trade and investment activity and the concomitant proliferation of trade and investment treaties over the last 50 years have been key drivers of academic interest in IEL and its transformation. The impacts of trade and investment on the protection of the environment and health, Indigenous, labour, and human rights, development, and other policy priorities have become significant subjects of academic discourse and are increasingly addressed in trade …

Comments On Federal Trade Commission Non-Compete Ban Proposed Rule, Matter No. P201200, Chaz D. Brooks

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Within signed law professors and law students submitted this letter to the Federal Trade Commission, writing in their individual capacities, not as agents of their affiliated institutions, in support of the Federal Trade Commission’s proposed rule to ban most non-compete clauses (the “Proposal”) as an unfair method of competition.

This letter offers comments in response to areas where the FTC has requested public comment. To make our views clear, this letter contains the following sections: I. Summary of the Proposal; II. The Commission Should Consider Expanding Its Definition of Non-Compete Clauses to Prevent Employers from Requiring Workers to Quit Before …

Geography As Due Process In Immigration Court, Valeria Gomez

All Faculty Scholarship

Using the procedural due process framework set forth by the Supreme Court in Mathews v. Eldridge, I argue that the current geographic distribution of immigration courts violates respondents’ rights to procedural due process by inhibiting their ability to appear, present evidence, and secure counsel. In so doing, I highlight the detrimental effects that geography has on remote communities, such as their ability to build pipelines towards access to counsel. Finally, I weigh and propose alternative solutions that balance the government’s interests in efficiency with the respondents’ interests in having a meaningful opportunity to avoid the harsh consequences of deportation.

Property Says No: Relational (In)Equality, Encampments, And Property Rights, Sarah E. Hamill

Journal of Law and Social Policy

For around two decades, if not longer, Canada has seen a number of cases dealing with tent encampments, typically, but not always, located in public parks. Often these decisions arise out of municipalities seeking interlocutory or interim injunctions against the tent encampments. Property and property rights have a significant role to play in these decisions as the alleged harm to property and property rights tends to be determinative of the matter. In this article I seek to explore why it is that these decisions are showing property rights more respect than the rights of those within tent encampments. I argue, …

The Colonialism Of Eviction, Sarah Buhler, Patricia Barkaskas

Journal of Law and Social Policy

Very little scholarship has specifically considered the phenomenon of eviction as a colonial process, or examined the role of the eviction legal system in reproducing colonial structures and relations. Our aim in this article is to address this gap and thereby extend to the eviction legal system context the work of scholars who have theorized the colonialism of the criminal justice, child welfare, and carceral systems. This article begins with an overview of current issues relating to urban Indigenous housing in Canada. The next section introduces Indigenous concepts of home and homelessness, which are distinct from dominant understandings. We then …

‘Somebody’S Street’: Eviction Of Homeless Encampments As A Reflection Of Interlocking Colonial And Class Relations, Jessica Braimoh, Erin Dej, Carrie Sanders

Journal of Law and Social Policy

Homelessness, as a construct, is premised on settler colonial technologies of land ownership and private property. Encampments, as one of the most visible forms of homelessness, compel us to confront how our socio-legal processes undermine human rights and perpetuate inequity and oppression. How municipalities engage in the legal governance of encampments, often through eviction, exclusion, and criminalization, is a result of interlocking colonial and classist political economies. Borrowing from Collins’ “matrix of domination” and Smith’s “ruling relations”, this article examines the management and ultimate eviction of No Place Like Home, a tent encampment in a mid-size city in Western Canada. …

Introduction To The Special Issue On Housing Precarity And Human Rights, Alexandra Flynn, Estair Van Wagner

Journal of Law and Social Policy

This special issue brings together a collection of papers examining the legal dimensions of housing precarity. While we originally imagined a special issue focused on homelessness and human rights, we agree with our contributors that housing precarity sits along a disparate spectrum, with homelessness at one end. People weave in and out of living situations, whether in shelters, apartments, rooming houses, and encampments. Human rights, and their violation, are engaged at all stages of this spectrum. Yet this relationship has been underexamined in Canadian legal scholarship. The pieces in this issue contribute to an important conversation about the intersection of …

The Power Of State Legislatures To Invalidate Private Deed Restrictions: Is It An Unconstitutional Taking?, Ken Stahl

Pepperdine Law Review

Over the past several years, state legislatures confronting a severe housing shortage have increasingly preempted local land use regulations that restrict housing supply in an effort to facilitate more housing production. But even where state legislatures have been successful, they now confront another problem: many of the preempted land use regulations are duplicated at the neighborhood or block level through private “covenants, conditions and restrictions” (CCRs) enforced by homeowners associations (HOAs). In response, California’s legislature has begun aggressively invalidating or “overriding” these CCRs. While many states have barred HOAs from prohibiting pets, clotheslines, signs, and flags, California has moved much …

Growth ≠ Density: Zoning Deregulation And The Enduring Problem Of Sprawl, Christopher Serkin, Kelsea Best

Pepperdine Law Review

According to its many critics, zoning bears significant responsibility for the housing crisis in America and for promoting unsustainable development patterns. Reformers argue that zoning reduces the supply of new housing and therefore drives up prices in thriving communities. Zoning also increases carbon emissions by restricting density in the urban core and promoting carbon-intensive, land-consuming, automobile-dependent sprawl in single-family suburbs. A growing chorus calls for relaxing zoning limits in order to promote growth in the urban core as a response to the twin crises of housing costs and climate change. Relaxing zoning limits will almost certainly promote growth but may …

Overseas Primary Listing: U.S. Stock Markets As A Global Hub For Ipos?, Carlos Ragazzo, Rafael Costa

University of Miami Business Law Review

Between 2007 and 2021, several South American companies carried out IPOs outside their home countries, with the subsequent overseas primary listing of their shares on U.S. stock exchanges. The acceleration of this trend from January 2018 (with the IPO of PagSeguro Digital Ltd. on the New York Stock Exchange—NYSE) is not explained solely by the possibility of adopting dual-class shares structure for companies listed on U.S. stock exchanges. In this sense, factors such as: (1) biases and subjectivities in the decision-making process; (2) cultural proximity and history of successful precedents; (3) better valuation in comparison with local markets; and (4) …

Extended Privacy For Extended Reality: Xr Technology Has 99 Problems And Privacy Is Several Of Them, Suchismita Pahi, Calli Schroeder

Notre Dame Journal on Emerging Technologies

Americans are rapidly adopting innovative technologies which are pushing the frontiers of reality. But, when they look at how their privacy is protected within the new extended reality (XR), they will find that U.S. privacy laws fall short. The privacy risks inherent in XR are inadequately addressed by current U.S. data privacy laws or courtcreated frameworks that purport to protect the constitutional right to be free from unreasonable searches. Many scholars, including Ryan Calo, Danielle Citron, Sherry Colb, Margaret Hu, Orin Kerr, Kirsten Martin, Paul Ohm, Daniel Solove, Rebecca Wexler, Shoshana Zuboff, and others, have highlighted the gaps in U.S. …

The Fourth Amendment In A Digital Age: Defining Boundaries In Law Enforcement Surveillance Of The Home, Josh Hoffman, Jared Xia

Brigham Young University Prelaw Review

As our country enters a new digital age, emerging technologies have increased the ability of law enforcement to monitor American citizens more closely. The tracking of suspects through thermal imaging, video monitoring, and cell phone GPSs are just a few examples of the unlocked potential now available to investigating authorities. When directed at the home, these technologies allow for unprecedented encroachment of our most intimate sphere of daily life. With this accelerating prevalence of technology in surveillance practices comes the need to reassess what boundaries the Fourth Amendment defines for our privacy. This paper explores the application of the Reasonable …

Less Is More?: Accountability For White-Collar Offenses Through An Abolitionist Framework, Pedro Gerson

Faculty Scholarship

White-collar crime is underenforced: not enough cases are brought, not many convictions are secured, and when they are, those who were convicted usually benefit from leniency not seen in other kinds of criminal wrongdoing. Calls for accountability center on strengthening the traditional tools of criminal law enforcement to reach actors that have so far eluded criminal liability. These responses, however, risk further entrenching the systems that have led the United States to mass incarceration and its many real and tangible harms. In this Article, I question whether an abolitionist framework is possible for white-collar crime. First, I argue that given …

Imperialist Immigration Reform, Cori Alonso-Yoder

Fordham Law Review

For decades, one of the most challenging domestic policy matters has been immigration reform. Dogged by controversial notions of what makes for a “desirable” immigrant and debates about enforcement and amnesty, elected officials have largely given up on achieving comprehensive, bipartisan immigration solutions. The lack of federal action has led to an outdated and impractical legal framework, with state and local lawmakers unable to step into the breach. Well over 100 years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court firmly stated that regulation of the U.S. immigration system is within the sole constitutional authority of the federal government.

Yet there is one …

Cultural Identity And Territorial Autonomy: U.S. Virgin Islands Jurisprudence And The Insular Cases, Dolace Mclean

Fordham Law Review

This Essay utilizes the lens of postcolonial theory to analyze the development of U.S. Virgin Islands jurisprudence. This Essay asserts that the United States’s acquisition of the territory served the purpose of helping to construct an American narrative of moving from colony to colonial power that surpassed its European forebears. The colonial narrative is fractured by instances of the Supreme Court of the Virgin Islands re-narrating territorial space by utilizing legal principles that are informed by local cultural expressions. Consequently, Virgin Islands jurisprudence is transformed from “colonial dependent” to “postcolonial independent” based on intersectional, progressive principles.

The Clinic As A Site Of Grounded Pedagogy, Madalyn K. Wasilczuk

Faculty Publications

Legal education tends to focus on teaching students federal law from hefty casebooks, inculcating the ability to "think like lawyers." In a sea of Socratic lectures and hypotheticals, students often take refuge in clinics as an island of practical skills-building, client centeredness, and individual fulfillment. Yet even clinics sometimes fail to highlight for students how the place where they practice, with its particular political context and history, shapes their clients' lives and legal problems. This Article describes the law school clinic as a site of grounded pedagogy: a teaching method that centers the con­nection between local history and the present …

Localism, Pretext, And The Color Of School Dollars, Derek W. Black

Minnesota Law Review Vols. 106:2 onward (2021-present)

Educational inequality is embedded in the structure of education itself. School districts, not individual schools, are the gatekeepers of educational opportunity. Racial isolation exists between school districts, not within them. Enormous funding gaps exist between neighboring school districts, sometimes in the same city, but not within them. These fault lines dictate everything from class size and teacher quality to suspension rates, achievement test scores, and graduation. To date, courts have rejected claims and remedies that would interfere with school district boundaries or local funding. The reluctance rests on the notion that localism is the historical foundation of public education. This …

On Electric Vehicles And Environmental Policies For Innovation, Shi-Ling Hsu

UC Law Science and Technology Journal

Electric vehicles have been in existence for over a century. Impetus and progress towards commercialization have been uneven. For the most part, government policy on electric vehicle development has consisted of government funding and other support for research and development. The long, meandering path that has now resulted in the emergence of Tesla as an industry leader has been documented carefully in John Graham’s The Global Rise of the Modern Plug-in Electric Vehicle. Graham’s account is remarkably broad and thorough, leaving few stones unturned, and comprehensively detailing the history of electric vehicle policy in a number of countries, and often …

The Power Of Local: Nearby Innovators Dominate Patented Technology Development, Richard Gruner

Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property

Advances by nearby innovators – close enough to interact in person – play key roles in patented technology development. Patents frequently cite nearby innovations, identifying these local innovations as the background for further patented inventions. Such citations reveal narrow geographic areas with intensely active innovation communities advancing similar projects and technologies. Local innovators – working within a commutable distance of 40 miles or less of each other – accounted for 25 percent of all patent citations between 2010 and 2019 and about 21 percent of citations by disinterested patent examiners reviewing patent applications. These percentages of citations to local advances …

Blockchain Coming To A Block Near You: How Fintech Is Changing Real Estate Investing, Joseph Bizub, Justin Peralta, David Reiss

Cornell Law Faculty Working Papers

Until recently, real estate with a small footprint – one-to-four-family homes as well as small retail, office, and industrial buildings – were generally within the purview of small investors who invested locally. Today, because of technological advances, these owner-occupants and investors face competition from an emerging class of decentralized finance (DeFi) investors. Fintech companies are presenting DeFi investors with new approaches to the challenges that real estate investing traditionally poses: illiquidity, high capital requirements, lack of diversification, and opaque markets. This article focuses on how fintech companies are meeting those challenges and suggests that while much of their vaunted innovation …

Intersectional Management: An Analysis Of Cooperation And Competition On American Public Lands, Robin M. Rotman, Abigail M. Hunt

Faculty Publications

The United States government holds public lands in trust for the whole of the American people. This article focuses on National Monuments under the Antiquities Act. It argues that the federal government should renew its approach to the management of these lands by incorporating principles of environmental justice and long- term environmental viability. The article begins by examining the historical and legal foundations of federal lands in the United States, with a focus on the Antiquities Act. It then reflects on recent litigation and political controversy surrounding Bears Ears National Monument and Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument, to illustrate how the …

Childist Objections, Youthful Relevance, And Evidence Reconceived, Mae C. Quinn

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

Evidence rules are written by and for adults. As a result, they largely lack the vantage point of youth and are rooted in arm’s-length assumptions about the lives and legal interests of young people. Moreover, because children have been mostly treated as evidentiary afterthoughts, they have been patched into the justice system and its procedures in a piecemeal fashion. Yet, to date, there has been no comprehensive scholarly critique of evidence principles and practices for failing to meaningfully account for youth. And the evidentiary intersection of youth and race has been almost entirely overlooked in legal scholarship. This Article, in …

To Protect And To Serve, Not To Kill: Chapter 405 Raises Age And Education Requirements For California’S Police Officers, Lina Yoo

University of the Pacific Law Review

No abstract provided.