Digital Commons Network^™

Bill C-92: A Catalyst For Change In The Ycja, René Allain

Canadian Journal of Family Law

This paper examines Bill C-92, An Act respecting First Nations, Inuit and Metis children, youth and families (2019) (C-92), and how some of its principles should inform a redrafting of the Youth Criminal Justice Act (2002) (YCJA or the Act) to address the over-incarceration of Indigenous youth. Erasing the effects of centuries of racist and genocidal policies is a herculean process that will take several generations. Disrupting this status quo must begin by allowing children an opportunity to learn and prosper within their communities. Although trite, the maxim “children are our future” holds particularly true for Indigenous Nations in Canada.

“This Isn’T Justice”: Abused Women Navigate Family Law In Greater Vancouver, Wendy Chan, Rebecca Lennox

Canadian Journal of Family Law

With the implementation of the Family Law Act in 2013, the family legal system in British Columbia saw a series of progressive reforms. These include the recognition of emotional, psychological, and financial control as family violence, a new protection order process to replace the limited restraining orders formerly available to abuse victims, a mandate that courts consider how exposure to family violence impacts children, and minimum mandatory training standards for family dispute resolution professionals. While there has been a great deal of legal commentary on these new provisions, there is a paucity of scholarly research documenting the experiences of frontline …

If More Mormons Attended University, Would Canada Be Okay With Polygamy? Unpacking Literatures Of Social Exclusion In Canada’S Continued Criminalization Of Polygamy, Maxime D. Matthew

Canadian Journal of Family Law

In 2011, the British Columbia Supreme Court (BCSC) held it was constitutional to criminalize polygamy, framing the issue as principally about harm. I argue the Reference re: Section 293 of the Criminal Code of Canada furthers a literature of social exclusion, reifying an oversimplified binary: polygamy is harmful, polyamory is moral. Using narrative theory, I explore how these mutually constituted opposites build off each other. Polygamist Mormons are often denied whiteness, seen as an unpatriotic and racialized Other. Mormon women are othered by their attire and, despite still falling under section 293, denied agency. In contrast, the court views …

Robot Regulations, Henry H. Perritt Jr.

South Carolina Law Review

No abstract provided.

Pink Tax And Other Tropes, Bridget J. Crawford

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Law reform advocates should be strategic in deploying tax tropes. Through an examination of five common tax phrases—the “nanny tax,” “death tax,” “soda tax,” “Black tax,” and “pink tax”—this Article demonstrates that tax rhetoric is more likely to influence law when used to describe specific economic injustices resulting from actual government duties, as opposed to figurative inequalities. In comparison, slogans describing figurative taxes are less likely to influence law and human behavior, even if they have descriptive force in both popular and academic literature as a short-hand for group-based disparities. This Article catalogues and evaluates what makes for effective tax …

Opportunities For Transformation: Equity, Diversity, And Inclusion Across The Developmental Disabilities Network, Lydia Ocasio-Stoutenburg, Jacy Farkas

Developmental Disabilities Network Journal

No abstract provided.

Data Property, Christina Mulligan, James Grimmelmann

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Originalism, Common Good Constitutionalism, And Transparency, Michael L. Smith

Faculty Articles

A theory of interpretation that is more transparent tends to be preferable to less transparent alternatives. Increased transparency tends to promote the values of constraint, democratic legitimacy, and an understanding of what the law is. Under a transparency rubric, originalism, as a standard of interpretation, performs better than common good constitutionalism. Originalism provides a better defined (though still imperfect) basis for determining the correctness of claims about what the Constitution means. Common good constitutionalism's reliance on morally and politically loaded terminology makes it elusive as a standard of interpretation which tends to match the desires of the interpreter. At the …

Vested Patents And Equal Justice,, Adam J. Macleod

Faculty Articles

In a time of renewed interest in equal justice, the vested patent right may be timely again. Vested patent rights helped marginalized Americans to secure equal justice earlier in American history. And they helped to make sense of the law. Vested patent rights can perform those tasks again today.

The concept of vested rights render patent law coherent. And it explains patent law 's interactions with other areas of law, such as property, administrative, and constitutional law. The vested rights doctrine also can serve the requirements of equal justice, as it has several times in American history. Vested rights secure …

Legitimacy Without Legality, Or Bassok

Saint Louis University Law Journal

Beyond the controversy on women’s right to elect an abortion, in Dobbs v. Jackson there is a deep yet hidden disagreement over the Court’s source of legitimacy. The majority judgment speaks of the Court’s source of legitimacy in terms of expertise, while the dissenting opinion speaks of it in terms of public support. My starting point for exposing this disagreement is the divergence between the accurate quote of Alexander Hamilton’s famous dictum from the Federalist No. 78 in Justice Alito’s majority opinion, and dissenting Justice Breyer’s paraphrase of the same dictum in the Dobbs oral arguments. The paraphrased version replaced …

Rooted: Metaphors And Judicial Philosophy In Artis V. District Of Columbia, Richard L. Heppner Jr.

Law Faculty Publications

This article examines how the metaphors in judicial opinions reveal judicial theories of lawmaking and judicial philosophies, through a close reading of Justice Ginsburg’s majority opinion and Justice Gorsuch’s dissenting opinion in the Artis v. District of Columbia, 138 S. Ct. 594 (2018).

Artis was about what the phrase “shall be tolled” means in the federal supplemental jurisdiction statute, 28 U.S.C. §1367. Does a state-law claim’s statute of limitations pause or continue to run while the claim is in federal court? In holding that Congress used “stop the clock” tolling, an “off-the-shelf” legal device that pauses statute of limitations, …

Socioeconomic Rights, Competition, And Systemic Neutrality: Approaching The Right(S) Contribution To Emancipatory Social Movements, Joshua Curtis

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

Debate over the emancipatory potential of socioeconomic rights and their relevance to broader social movements is long-standing but is now picking up steam and taking on a life well beyond its traditionally legal disciplinary confines. This article contributes to the widening debate by emphasising the need for socioeconomic rights to be re-thought simultaneously outward (through deeper engagement with extant economic and political systems) and inward (by re-assessing various doctrines ingrained in their own construction). I pursue this ‘two-track’ methodology by first constructing a novel theory regarding the outward engagement of socioeconomic rights with competition law and policy, focusing on the …

Government By Algorithms At The Light Of Freedom Of Information Regimes: A Case-By-Case Approach On Adm Systems Within Public Education Sector, María Estrella Gutierrez

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

What the Houston Court qualified as “mysterious ‘black box’ impervious to challenge” was in practice a sophisticated software of many layers of calculations, which rated teachers’ effectiveness to make employment decisions. In the European Union, a system as such would fall under the Proposal for AI Regulation of 2021, which qualifies AI models in education and vocational training as “high-risk” systems. Automated decision-making systems (ADM systems), AI-driven or not, are being increasingly used by governments in public education for different purposes, such as handling applications for undergraduate admission or profiling students and teachers to assess their performance. Across cases and …

Climate Cap And Trade And Pollution Hot Spots: An Economics Perspective, Jeff Todd

Georgia State University Law Review

Although cap and trade is overwhelmingly preferred by economists for reducing greenhouse gases and spurring the adoption of renewables and other zero-carbon alternatives, some scholars and advocates worry that it allows firms to concentrate operations in poor and minority neighborhoods, thus leading to hot spots of harmful co-pollutants. Commentators differ on the danger of hot spots and the necessity of adjusting cap-and-trade programs to avoid them, however. This Article therefore surveys ex post economic studies of cap-and-trade programs to show that they do not lead to hot spots but may actually cool them—perhaps even better than command-and-control regulation. Accordingly, cap …

Asian American Allyship, Victor C. Romero

Indiana Journal of Law and Social Equality

No abstract provided.

What Is An Establishment Of Religion? And What Does Disestablishment Require?, Vincent Phillip Munoz

Constitutional Commentary, Vol. 37 and later (2023–present)

No abstract provided.

Wireless Investors & Apathy Obsolescence, Sergio Alberto Gramitto Ricci, Christina M. Sautter

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

This Article discusses how a subgenre of retail investors makes investors' apathy obsolete. In prior work, we dub retail investors who rely on technology and online communications in their investing and corporate governance endeavors "wireless investors." By applying game theory, this Article discusses how wireless investors' global-scale online interactions allow them to circulate information and coordinate, obliterating collective action problems.

Space Debris Mitigation: A Unified Policy Framework, Forrest Randall Jones

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Space debris is a growing problem that impacts the ability to maneuver and conduct space missions, creates hazards for people on Earth, and has the potential for severe environmental damage. Clean-up efforts are not viable in the modern era due to a lack of viable, affordable, and safe technology conducive to such lines of effort. This leaves mitigative and preventative policy measures as the most effective way to proffer a solution to the problem. Public policy has largely failed to address space debris mitigation effectively due to the fragmentation of policies standards and a lack of horizontal integration of policies …

Five Linguistic Methods For Revitalizing Indigenous Laws, Naiomi Walqwan Metallic

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Building on the ground-breaking work on the revitalization of Indigenous laws ongoing over the past decade, this article seeks to contribute to our understanding of how Indigenous languages can be used to recover Indigenous laws. It posits that there is not one single linguistic method, but at least five: 1) the ‘Meta-principle’ method; 2) the ‘Grammar as revealing worldview’ method; 3) the ‘Word-part’ method; 4) the ‘Word-clusters’ method; and 5) the ‘Place names’ method. Using the Mìgmaq language to illustrate, the article explains each method and provides examples of how they can be used to inform Indigenous law revitalization. The …

From Cryptocurrencies To Cryptocourts: Blockchain And The Financialization Of Dispute Resolution Platforms, Matthew Dylag

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

This paper contributes to emerging discussions of blockchain governance through an analysis of dispute resolution platforms that reimagine justice. We focus specifically on Kleros, a blockchain-enabled dispute resolution platform, that promises to secure, authenticate, and democratize access to justice for the twenty-first century. We advance the concept of cryptocourts whereby jurors, incentivized by accumulating cryptocurrency, rapidly mobilize using principles of on-demand crowdsourcing to resolve disputes. We critique the broader social imaginaries that cryptocourts such as Kleros will result in a more open, trustworthy, transparent, and democratic systems of justice. These platforms instead pose important questions concerning their potential impact …

It Doesn't Matter What "Interpretation" Is, Francisco J. Urbina

Constitutional Commentary, Vol. 37 and later (2023–present)

No abstract provided.

Public Health Law’S Digital Frontier: Addictive Design, Section 230, And The Freedom Of Speech, Matthew B. Lawrence

Faculty Articles

This Article argues that, even if courts are unpersuaded by the broadest arguments in favor of a public health approach to regulation of addictive design, they should nonetheless reject the platforms’ efforts to make addictive design a public-health-law-free zone. The public health and internet paradigms can be reconciled as a policy matter because addictive design threatens both public health and innovation online. The public health and internet paradigms can also be reconciled as a legal matter be-cause even strong theories of section 230 and the First Amendment, properly understood, leave states a safe harbor in which to regulate much addictive …

Offshore Entanglements, Martin W. Sybblis

Faculty Articles

For decades, scholars have struggled to determine how to deploy laws and legal institutions to spur economic prosperity. But, without knowing which legal rules and institutions to prioritize for a particular social context, the outcomes have been generally unsatisfactory. The case of offshore financial centers provides fresh and compelling new insights into this puzzle. This Article uses the sociological concept of community economic identity (“CEI”) to understand why some offshore financial centers prioritize investments in legal institutions that bolster their offshore finance enterprises while others do not. CEI refers to a community’s shared identity that is linked to a specific …

Error Aversions And Due Process, Brandon L. Garrett, Gregory Mitchell

Faculty Scholarship

William Blackstone famously expressed the view that convicting the innocent constitutes a much more serious error than acquitting the guilty. This view is the cornerstone of due process protections for those accused of crimes, giving rise to the presumption of innocence and the high burden of proof required for criminal convictions. While most legal elites share Blackstone’s view, the citizen-jurors tasked with making due process protections a reality do not share the law’s preference for false acquittals over false convictions.

Across multiple national surveys, sampling more than 10,000 people, we find that a majority of Americans views false acquittals and …

Entire Issue Vol. 16 No. 28

Yearbook of Antitrust and Regulatory Studies

No abstract provided.

Have Your Cake And Eat It Too (Unless You Are Danny Brock): The Irony Of Missouri’S Co-Employee Liability Statute, Taylor M. Harrington

Missouri Law Review

April 30, 2013, started like any other day for Danny Brock. Like each day before, he woke up, drove to work, and clocked in. A few hours later, he looked down to see his thumb completely detached from his hand, barely hanging on by the skin. When the injury occurred, Brock was following direct orders from his supervisor, Mark Edwards. Citing safety concerns, Brock opposed the request. But Edwards demanded that Brock proceed. Fearing loss of employment, Brock did as he was told. As predicted, injury ensued. Within seconds, Brock’s hand was crushed. Brock underwent three surgeries and sustained permanent …

Introduction: The Fragile Legitimacy Of The Supreme Court, Tonja Jacobi

Emory Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Any, James J. Brudney, Ethan J. Leib

Faculty Scholarship

Our statute books use the word “any” ubiquitously in coverage and exclusion provisions. As any reader of the Supreme Court’s statutory interpretation docket would know, a large number of cases turn on the contested application of this so-called universal quantifier. It is hard to make sense of the jurisprudence of “any.” And any effort to offer a unified approach—knowing precisely when its scope is expansive (along the “literal-meaning” lines of “every” and “all”) or confining (having a contained domain related to properties provided by contextual cues)—is likely to fail. This Article examines legislative drafting manuals, surveys centuries of Court decisions, …

Content Governance In The Shadows: How Telcos & Other Internet Infrastructure Companies "Moderate" Online Content, Prem M. Trivedi

Joint PIJIP/TLS Research Paper Series

No abstract provided.

Levels Of Generality & Originalism: Proposing A New Way Forward As Originalism Continues To Expand, Marquan Robertson

Mitchell Hamline Law Review

No abstract provided.