Digital Commons Network^™

Through A Glass Darkly: How Securities Disclosures Give A Distorted View Of The Economy, Gerald F. Davis

Seattle University Law Review

Our understanding of the American economy often relies on stylized facts derived from mandatory disclosures by listed corporations. Data vendors like Standard & Poor’s vacuum up 10Ks and proxy statements into databases, and scholars distill these into tentative maps. This may have been adequate for a postwar economy centered on asset-heavy manufacturers, but it is increasingly out of step with an information-based economy. Companies listed on the stock market are fewer in number and less representative than they were, light in tangible assets and people, and heavy on IP. Basic facts such as what industry they are in are increasingly …

An Organizational Theory Of Corporate Law, Emilie Aguirre, Julie Yen, Julie Battilana

Faculty Scholarship

Corporate law is in a moment of vibrant and contentious discussions about potential reforms. As firms exit Delaware, passive investment predominates, private equity expands, and public markets decline, corporate law faces a growing set of challenges that threaten its stability and efficacy. At the same time, the world faces pressing crises, including climate change, social and economic inequalities, and threats to democracy, though corporate law scholars typically consider these crises to be outside corporate law’s remit.

In this Article, we argue that to understand and address the multidimensional crises that face both corporate law and society, we must address shortcomings …

Approaches To Advancing Human Rights, Carina Van Vliet, Avidan Cover, Sara Ghebremusse, Brian Gran

Canada-United States Law Journal

A panel discussion on approaches (or lack thereof) by the United States and Canada to advance human rights. Also, whether or not human rights produce wellbeing.

Decolonial Constitutionalism, Richard Albert

Chicago Journal of International Law

The American Declaration of Independence kindled the first successful decolonial movement in the modern world, culminating in the enactment of the United States Constitution. From colony to sovereign state to great power, the United States modeled for subordinated peoples abroad how to win their own battles for sovereignty. Since the end of the Second World War, however, America’s eighteenth-century precedent of revolutionary self-determination is no longer the prevailing path to decolonization. The traditional warmaking toolkit for winning independence—revolution, illegality, and violence—has been replaced by more orderly tactics consonant with the rule of law. Evolution, lawfulness, and continuity are the touchstones …

Housing Sexual Harassment: A Department Of Justice Case Study, Rigel C. Oliveri

Faculty Publications

Sexual harassment in housing-when tenants or prospective tenants are sexually harassed by their landlords, housing providers, or other people associated with their housing-is a clear national problem. In 2019 the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced an initiative to bring attention to this issue, as well as a shared commitment to increased enforcement against harassers.

This enforcement push provides an opportunity for study. In particular, there are now a significant number of complaints and other litigation documents posted to the DOJ's website that provide a convenient and robust sample for analysis. The …

Abundance And Other Food Fixations, Margot J. Pollans

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Although most people in the United States no longer devote the majority of their time to food production, processing, and distribution, food remains a daily fixation. This Article explores three driving food fixations--abundance, thinness, and health--and situates each against an inverse fear--scarcity, fatness, and illness, respectively. Mapping these threats onto U.S. food policy, this Article examines, among other policy arenas, food waste policy, nutrition and health claim labeling law, and food additive regulations. Across food policy, these fixations feed what this Article calls the “politics of abundance.” This politics helps to insulate the food industry from deeper systemic reform aimed …

When The Math Matters: Finding The “Glue” In Class Action Commonality Determinations, Robin L. Juni

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This Article is another offering in the “When the Math Matters” series, seeking to help readers understand use of mathematical and scientific concepts in legal contexts and unpack how to do things better. This Article focuses on the seminal case of Wal- Mart Stores, Inc. v. Dukes, 564 U.S. 338 (2011), describing how the analytical approach to identify whether a class could be certified for purposes of that litigation continues to resonate through recent cases in the federal courts. The Article explains the statistical analysis that lawyers must present to unpack a correlative analysis in similar cases, focusing on adverse …

What The "Good Moral Character" Test Reveals About Eugenics In Immigration Law, Tania N. Valdez

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This Essay explores how disability factors into immigration and citizenship law by focusing on three naturalization cases that reveal aspects of the “good moral character” element. A noncitizen’s own disability has been used as grounds for exclusion since the earliest immigration laws. Yet, as it turns out, noncitizens who participate in the eugenic mission of immigration law have been greatly rewarded.

A National Zoning Atlas To Inform Housing Research, Policy, And Public Participation, Sara C. Bronin, Wenfei Xu, Scott Markley, Diana Drogaris

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Through a unique combination of data science and legal analysis techniques, the National Zoning Atlas is creating the first public, online repository of standardized data about zoning. This article first discusses the context for and methodology behind the atlas. It then establishes three possibilities for using the atlas, including facilitating research (including fair housing research), strengthening planning, and empowering the public.

Overcoming Racial Harms To Democracy From Artificial Intelligence, Spencer A. Overton

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

While the United States is becoming more racially diverse, generative artificial intelligence and related technologies threaten to undermine truly representative democracy. Left unchecked, AI will exacerbate already substantial existing challenges, such as racial polarization, cultural anxiety, antidemocratic attitudes, racial vote dilution, and voter suppression. Synthetic video and audio (“deepfakes”) receive the bulk of popular attention—but are just the tip of the iceberg. Microtargeting of racially tailored disinformation, racial bias in automated election administration, discriminatory voting restrictions, racially targeted cyberattacks, and AI-powered surveillance that chills racial justice claims are just a few examples of how AI is threatening democracy. Unfortunately, existing …

Challenging The Law, Steven Arrigg Koh

Faculty Scholarship

Frédéric Mégret’s engaging contribution, A Look Back at The Women’s Hague Peace Conference: What Contribution To International Law Today?, exposes a legal duality. On one hand, the legalist perspective: law is a closed system. From this perspective, law is objective, hard, universal, and bounded. On the other hand, the sociocultural perspective: law is a human practice. From this perspective, law is subjective, organic, particular, and porous. This Essay reads Mégret’s analysis of the 1915 International Congress of Women in The Hague as a “sociocultural challenge,” disrupting the legalist perspective on international law, war, and peace during World War I. …

The Violence Of Bright Lines, Terrell Woolfolk, Kathryn E. Miller

Articles

The U.S. Supreme Court interprets the Eighth Amendment to prohibit members of certain groups from serving extreme punishments, such as the death penalty and life without parole. For example, the Court has long banned death sentences for people with intellectual disability and for those who were under eighteen years old at the time of their crime. More recently, in Graham v. Florida and Miller v. Alabama, the Court extended this reasoning to sentences of life without parole for those under eighteen—prohibiting the sentence altogether for nonhomicide crimes and barring its mandatory imposition for homicides.

Many scholars and advocates have applauded …

Custom And Adjudication In International Law Through The Civil Law Tradition In Colombia, Juan Felipe Silva Bustamante

LL.M. Essays & Theses

International Law has often been described as a decentralized domain, in the sense that the authority to create the law doesn’t derive from a sole center of power. This is especially true in the context of normative production through Customary International Law. Multiple and disaggregated expressions of state practice and opinio iuris come together in the formation of custom, and a variety of actors, which authority is often contested, including international organizations and tribunals, play a major role in identifying the rules of customary law.

One could also speak of decentralization, or at least of non-systematization, in the domain of …

Policing, Prejudice And Change: Confronting Racial Bias In Policing, Aliya Ross

A with Honors Projects

Exploring racism, and discrimination within the Justice System and recommendation for reform.

Decentral Intelligence Agency: The Law And Autonomous Artificial Intelligence, Dr. Andrew W. Torrance , Ph. D., Dr. Bill Tomlinson , Ph.D.

Touro Law Review

Artificial intelligence (“AI”) is rapidly gaining autonomy across a range of domains, such as business, education, social relationships, and warfare. This article examines the legal and policy implications of autonomous AI agents, a rapidly evolving technology that challenges existing regulatory frameworks. Drawing from tort, agency, property, contract, privacy, human rights, and constitutional law, we propose a comprehensive approach to govern these increasingly independent entities. Our analysis begins with a historical perspective, tracing both the evolution of autonomous computational systems and of legal responses to such technologies. We then conduct a comparative study of AI governance across jurisdictions, highlighting regulatory gaps …

Article Iii Standing For Cercla Private Cost Recovery Actions: How The Test's Strained Logic Belies Its Authority, Jonathan M. Palacios

Fordham Environmental Law Review

This Note examines how Article III standing doctrine applies to

private plaintiffs’ cost recovery actions under § 107(a)(4)(B) of the

Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and

Liability Act. A review of judicial decisions reveals inconsistencies

in the analysis of injury in fact and traceability, and suggests that

current Article III standing doctrine is misaligned with its purported

objectives. In response, this Note proposes a structured framework

for assessing injury in fact and a refined approach to analyzing

traceability that distinguishes between different forms of causal

uncertainty. These doctrinal adjustments should better align case

outcomes with Article III standing doctrine’s constitutional and …

Locating Consumer Financial Regulation, Nikita Aggarwal

Articles

Recent advances in data-driven technology in consumer financial markets, commonly referred to as "fintech," have resurfaced the question of whether and to what extent data, particularly consumers' personal data, should be a locus for regulatory intervention in these markets. While innovation in fintech and the accompanying increase in the processing of personal data offer to improve the functioning of consumer financial markets, like all advances in technology, they also come with costs and risks. In 2024, in a move that favored the regulation of personal financial data per se and many of the traditional features of personal data protection regulation, …

What’S Left Of The New Deal State?, Sandeep Singh Dhaliwal

Michigan Law Review Online

A vast body of scholarship situates itself in the New Deal era. Another extensive collection explores the history of criminal justice in the United States. To date, however, there has been little effort to bring these conversations together. New Deal Law and Order, written by legal historian Anthony Gregory, fills this conspicuous gap. Gregory remarkably narrates the New Deal era through the lens of President Franklin Roosevelt’s “war on crime” (p. 1), challenging how we think about both the New Deal’s legacy and the foundations of the modern security state.

Discriminating Alignment In The Innovation Sphere, Juliet P. Kostritsky

Faculty Publications

Contracts play an important role in innovation. As a result, some. scholars have proposed theories highlighting contract provisions as devices that can serve to informally enforce agreements and build trust between parties. Others emphasize the hierarchical provisions between firms to promote efficiency. Yet another group views these agreements as a mechanism to institutionalize learning and protect property interests. This Article offers a new theory. To understand a firm’s contractual choices and governance, we must look at how the same provisions in different contracts may have distinct meanings or operate differently in different contexts. So, scholars must give context to these …

When Lsat Doesn't Matter And Other Surprising Finds From A Deep Dive Into Academic Probation In Law School, Kari Milligan, Ryan Jerome Lecount

Faculty Scholarship

Numerous students nationwide are placed on academic probation and ultimately dismissed from law school each year. While students often carefully conceal their probationary status, their lack of visibility within legal communities should not be mistaken for an absence of need. These students are frequently uniquely vulnerable—facing unexpected family emergencies or entering law school unprepared. The consequences of dismissal are dire, with students experiencing adverse mental health effects and financial exigencies. During the 2023–2024 academic year alone, tuition and fees for a single year of law school ranged from $30,000 to $48,000. Yet, little research—particularly quantitative—has been conducted in service of …

Fairness In Contract Law: An Impossibility Theorem?, Francesco Parisi, Brian H. Bix

Articles

Scholars have long debated whether contract law should prioritize maximizing efficiency and social welfare or, instead, prioritize justice, fairness and other deontological values. The debate is partly prescriptive (what should we try to do with contract law rules) and partly conceptual (how should we understand contract law). This article surveys central positions in this debate, distinguishing between the corrective and redistributive functions of contract law and between doing justice between the parties and more systemic effects. It highlights an impossibility theorem that underscores the self-defeating nature of redistributive policies in price-based contractual relationships, using a numerical example and two policy …

By Way Of Conclusion: Making Sense Of Fallacies, Claire Hill

Articles

As noted in the Introduction to this volume, our collective goal is to examine some of the key misconceptions and unquestioned assumptions – which we refer to as ‘fallacies’ – that guide, and often misguide, developments in modern corporate law and financial regulation. These fallacies are embedded and instantiated in scholarship, law, public policy and public opinion. Their intellectual and practical impact is considerable, but it is largely hidden. Critically, these fallacies too often frame legal and policy debates, strongly influencing and even determining policy choices. While our volume does not (and indeed cannot) provide an exhaustive analysis of this …

Planning For Cognitive Decline: Combining Formal Supported Decision-Making Agreements And Healthcare Power Of Attorney, Megan S. Wright

Health Matrix: The Journal of Law-Medicine

Patients who have impaired decision-making abilities may not be permitted to make contemporaneous medical decisions. Instead, a substitute decision maker, including a healthcare agent, may be asked to decide on the patient’s behalf even if the patient wants to participate in the medical decision making. Being marginalized in decisions made about their medical care may lead to a decline in wellbeing for these patients. But supported decision making, wherein a person with cognitive impairments receives decision-making assistance, may facilitate such patients making contemporaneous medical decisions. As supported decision-making legislation spreads throughout the United States, there are questions about how this …

Lawyers’ And Law Professors’ Experience With Worker Governance, Brett H. Mcdonnell

Articles

Part I surveys some of the leading arguments concerning the benefits and costs of worker governance. It also describes some of the ways in which those benefits and costs can evolve along with the growth, or lack thereof, of companies with worker governance. Part II looks at governance in law firms. It considers how the explanations for the adoption of worker governance fare with respect to law firms, notes the limited, elitist nature of worker governance within law firms, and considers the consequences of that real but elitist worker governance for the understanding of lawyers. Part III considers the same …

Who Do We Think We Are? Human Rights In A Time Of Ecological Change, Usha Natarajan

Loyola University Chicago International Law Review

This article explores the relationship between international human rights law and the environment. It begins with asking “who do we think we are” to understand the forms of subjecthood and subjectivity produced by human rights. It argues that human rights normalize a series of false conceptions about our collective self that have detrimental social and ecological consequences. The article next examines the question of “where we think we are”, probing the ontological rift between humans as subjects of rights and “the environment” as the repository of resources with which to satisfy human entitlements. The article challenges human rights as a …

Conference Speakers, Speakers

Canada-United States Law Journal

Proceedings of the 2nd Wilson Canada-United States Legal Issues Symposium

6. Mark: Sources And References, Matthew Lipman

Secondary School Curriculum

This sequential bibliography matches the 1980 edition of Mark page by page. It contains both sources—works that influenced Matthew Lipman in writing the novel—and references to philosophical works he and Ann Margaret Sharp recommend to explore the novels’ philosophical themes.

40 Years Passing By In (A) “Heartbeat”, Christopher Janney

Monsoon: South Asian Studies Association Journal

This article outlines the forty-year history go Christopher Janney’s iconic performance work “HeartBeat.” Trained as an architect and jazz musician, Janney combines these two disciplines to create large interactive light/sound installations and performances. On the one hand, he attempts to make architecture more like music, more “alive” using real-time sensing devices as on his “Harmonic Convergence” installation on the Miami International Airport. On the other hand, he attempts to make music more like architecture, more physical more visual. In his “HeartBeat” performance, a dancer wears a heartbeat device that amplifies his/her heartbeat in “real time.” Over this pulse, live musicians …

Yoga Sūtra Book Four And The Yogabindu, Christopher Key Chapple

Monsoon: South Asian Studies Association Journal

Four themes from the fourth pāda of Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtra are examined here: karma (IV:2-13), individuality (IV:16), humility (IV:20-22), and freedom (IV:29-34). Affirmations and variant interpretations of these four are provided from Haribhadra Virahāṅka’s Yogabindu, most likely composed a century or two later.

Collective Karma: From The Yogasūtra To Taylor Swift, Zoë Slatoff

Monsoon: South Asian Studies Association Journal

The Indian knowledge traditions speak at length about karma, which is divided into three categories—accumulated (saṃcita), ripe (prārabdha), and future (kriyamāṇa). While much is said about our individual karma and how it affects our repeated reincarnation in cyclic existence, how does this affect others and how do others affect us? In other words, as this paper explores, what is our reciprocal and collective karma?