Digital Commons Network^™

A Lesson To Learn: Transgender Students Face Discriminatory School Policies In Texas, Randy Terhune

Student Works

No abstract provided.

Criminal Law— Addressing Probation Revocation Policies In Arkansas, Hunter Willis

University of Arkansas at Little Rock Law Review

No abstract provided.

Empirically Testing The "Unbiased Factfinder[S]", Chris Cox

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Person-Centered Pluralism About Contract Theory, C. Scott Pryor

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Efficient Norms In Formula One, Samuel Cole

Marquette Sports Law Review

No abstract provided.

Progressive Copyright Theory, Emily Behzadi Cárdenas

Faculty Scholarship

The legacy of colonialism, dispossession, and racial injustice is foundational to existing inequalities in modern copyright law. Traditionally, the primary purpose of copyright laws was to incentivize “progress” through the dissemination of new works, thereby conferring economic benefits to both the creator and society at large. Such economic-based notions of “progress” have historically favored the creative contributions of privileged groups while simultaneously disregarding those of historically oppressed groups. Progressive property theory acknowledges that there are social responsibilities and relationships inherent in private property ownership. Scholarship on progressive property law has exposed the need to reevaluate how property law regimes perpetuate …

Climate Litigation And Third-Party Litigation Finance, Courtney Geiss

Indiana Law Journal

For the last 200 years, human activities have been the main driver of global climate change, particularly the burning of fossil fuels. Increased emissions from fossil fuels have contributed to rising temperatures, food scarcity, and natural disasters, including fires, flooding, and droughts. Although climate change has been an issue in the public eye for the last several decades, global emissions are projected to continue increasing. At this point, it is clear that current actions at the individual and state level are not enough to meaningfully reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In this Note, I will discuss the idea of using third-party …

Super-Groups: Legal Empowerment And "Public Law", Matthew Lawrence

Indiana Law Journal

Not all interest groups are created equal. Some groups are created by or with the help of law. Law can confer political power on groups through wealth, rents, concentrated interest, and durability, creating synthetic factions that use their stategiven influence to dominate lawmaking. Deregulatory and progressive traditions in public law have long thought differently about laws that empower. A deregulatory tradition sees legal empowerment as a democratic pathology that counsels against lawmaking, citing empowerment concerns as a perennial rhetorical point against consumer protection, environmental protection, and social welfare programs, among others, for fear they will lead to “capture.” At the …

Gender-Based Persecution, Protection, And Particularity: The Case For Returning To Acosta, Meg Keiser

Minnesota Journal of Law & Inequality

No abstract provided.

About The Authors, Sjsj

Seattle Journal for Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Democratic Backsliding In Federal States, James A. Gardner

Contributions to Books

This book revitalizes the discourse on backsliding democracy and the global rise of autocracy, extending the consequences of their changes to a sustainable future. In three sections, the book systematically examines diverse pathways leading autocracies to rise and spread worldwide and debates the future consequences. Using a multidisciplinary approach, the book conceptualizes the rise of autocracy and the backsliding of democracy by studying dictatorship, authoritarianization processes, autocracy’s diffusion, and populism. It reveals the global spread of autocracy and reflects on the challenges this poses to, and the likely impacts on, a sustainable future. This book is of key interest to …

Islands Of Algorithmic Integrity: Imagining A Democratic Digital Public Sphere, Aziz Z. Huq

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

This essay offers a new analytic lens for evaluating the design of digital platforms from the perspective of democratic values. It develops a model of desirable platform design, and them ask present legal interventions move is toward that aspiration. The aspirational model is not draws on an idea found in the scholarly literatures in political science and sociology about economic development . This is the notion that development policy should aim to seed “islands of integrity,” into patrimonial or nepotistic state structures as a way of building foundations for a more robust and hence public-regarding state apparatus. This literature explores …

Forced Migration And Women's Empowerment: Evidence From Rohingya Refugees, Adam Chilton, Katerina Linos, Anup Malani

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

We explore a puzzle: high levels of satisfaction among forcibly displaced Rohingya women in informal camps in Hyderabad, India. Despite experiencing extreme poverty, loss of family and community, and high levels of gender-based violence after resettlement, both men and women—particularly women—report significant increases in satisfaction. We structured a representative household survey, employed a trusted female Muslim interviewer with deep ties to the local community, interviewed comparable numbers of men and women, and embedded list experiments in our questionnaire, to allow people to answer sensitive questions indirectly. We attribute this paradoxical finding to increased freedom post-resettlement, facilitated by economic, legal, and …

Courting Bias: Effects Of Gender Socialization And Judges' Genders On Litigants And The Judiciary, Ellie Barmes

Indiana Journal of Law and Social Equality

No abstract provided.

Invisible No More: Looking And Listening Locally To Build Conflict-Related Sexual Violence Resilience, Anjali Thakore

CMC Senior Theses

The ubiquity of sexual violence, with its devastating physical and psychological consequences, has rendered conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) one of the most effective and enduring “invisible crimes” of war. Despite receiving growing attention across academic, political, and activist circles, wartime sexual violence remains pervasive in contemporary conflict zones. Against the backdrop of these frequent and recurring violations, this thesis explores the dissonance between high-level rhetorical commitments to preventing and punishing CRSV and on-the-ground realities. What soon emerges is a troubling pattern in which gendered violence—and women’s lived experiences more generally—while increasingly visible in theory, remains marginalised in practice. By investigating …

Transnational Legal Violence: Undocumented Women V. U.S. Immigration Law, Luis A. Mendoza

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis examines how undocumented women, particularly Latinas, experience "transnational legal violence" within the U.S. immigration system. Transnational legal violence extends the framework of legal violence by identifying how immigration policies weaponize absence and distance across national boundaries, forcing women to choose between physical safety and legal recognition. The thesis is guided by a central question: What immigration system are migrant women, specifically Latinas, responding to?

The analysis rooted in the intersections of gender and citizenship reveals how immigration law remains rooted in coverture traditions that historically rendered immigrant women dependent on male U.S. citizens. For these women, deportation presents …

Legislatures And Localized Resentencing, Ronald F. Wright, Kay L. Levine

Faculty Articles

Recent legislation, exemplified in statutes from California and Washington, creates new methods for resentencing defendants in old cases. These laws place controlling authority for resentencing in the hands of local officials, especially local prosecutors, and invite variation at the county level.

While some new procedural channels for reducing the sentences of people convicted of past crimes are mandatory, in that they entitle certain defendants to resentencing if they were convicted of certain crimes or were subject to certain penalty enhancements that are no longer valid, other statutes create discretionary resentencing channels. In the discretionary channels, the chief local prosecutor has …

Customary Corruption, Ani B. Satz, Liza Vertinsky

Faculty Articles

For over a hundred years, it has been well-accepted among tort scholars that physicians—as one of the legally recognized professions— determine their own customary practices. Within tort law, and medical malpractice more specifically, customary practice establishes whether physicians breach or uphold the required standard of care toward their patients. The results of our hand-coded examination of decided cases and statutes show a more complex picture. While some states have endeavored to shift the standard away from professional custom, it continues to play a critical, and in many cases a determinative, role in establishing physician liability in most states.

Using illustrative …

Super-Groups: Legal Empowerment And “Public Law”, Matthew B. Lawrence

Faculty Articles

Not all interest groups are created equal. Some groups are created by or with the help of law. Law can confer political power on groups through wealth, rents, concentrated interest, and durability, creating synthetic factions that use their state-given influence to dominate lawmaking. Deregulatory and progressive traditions in public law have long thought differently about laws that empower. A deregulatory tradition sees legal empowerment as a democratic pathology that counsels against lawmaking, citing empowerment concerns as a perennial rhetorical point against consumer protection, environmental protection, and social welfare programs, among others, for fear they will lead to “capture.” At the …

Vice Capital, Andrew K. Jennings, Kimberly D. Krawiec

Faculty Articles

Academic and market interest in environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing has grown markedly in recent years. Although less prominent, a substantial literature also explores whether “sin pays” in the public capital markets. This literature’s underlying theory is that social norms discourage the funding of businesses that promote vice. According to this theory, some investors—particularly institutions sensitive to social norms, such as pension funds and foundations—will shun vice investments. A consequence of this aversion is a “vice premium” for those investors who will invest in such companies. Largely unexplored, however, is what industries or business models qualify as “vice,” how …

Extramural Absolutism, Deepa Das Acevedo

Faculty Articles

As battles over academia escalate, an area of intensifying concern is the speech faculty engage in outside their professional functions—what is often called “extramural” speech. Professors have been criticized, disciplined, pressured to resign, and even terminated for extramural speech that is deemed offensive by individuals inside and outside university communities. And yet, academics generally remain committed to a principle that this Article identifies as extramural absolutism.

The Article explains extramural absolutism’s unpopularity outside academia as a reasonable consequence of the way supporters have presented and justified it. Contrary to widespread scholarly portrayal, extramural absolutism is not a moderate concession justified …

Searching For A Big Score: Analyzing Drug Yield From Search Warrant Executions, Elizabeth Griffiths, Walter Campbell, Kay L. Levine, Joshua C. Hinkle

Faculty Articles

In this study, we investigated the extent to which law enforcement efforts predicted drug and other kinds of illicit yield in search warrant executions. The data are drawn from one major metropolitan police department during 2005, 2009, and 2012. Using multilevel random intercept logistic regression models and multilevel random intercept multinomial logistic regression models, we regress high yields of various kinds of drugs and other illicit items seized during searches on the investigative activities that led to search warrant applications and the enlistment of teams of officers or other agencies in executing the search. Investments in high-effort search warrant work …

การนำหลักการทางรัฐธรรมนูญที่ไม่เป็นลายลักษณ์อักษรมาใช้ในการตีความและอุดช่องว่างในการพิจารณาคดีของศาลรัฐธรรมนูญ, กฤษณ์ วงศ์วิเศษธร

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

วิทยานิพนธ์เล่มนี้ศึกษาเกี่ยวกับการนำหลักการทางรัฐธรรมนูญที่ไม่เป็นลายลักษณ์อักษรมาใช้เพื่อตีความและอุดช่องว่างบทบัญญัติรัฐธรรมนูญในการพิจารณาคดีของศาลรัฐธรรมนูญ โดยมีปัญหาสามข้อที่วิทยานิพนธ์เล่มนี้ต้องค้นหาคำตอบได้แก่ 1. หลักการทางรัฐธรรมนูญที่ไม่เป็นลายลักษณ์อักษรมีความหมายและลักษณะตลอดจนมีบทบาทอย่างไรต่อรัฐธรรมนูญลายลักษณ์อักษร 2. เราสามารถใช้หลักเกณฑ์ใดในการพิจารณาว่าการใช้หลักการทางรัฐธรรมนูญที่ไม่เป็นลายลักษณ์อักษรชอบด้วยรัฐธรรมนูญหรือไม่ และ 3. ศาลรัฐธรรมนูญไทยมีการนำเอาหลักการทางรัฐธรรมนูญที่ไม่เป็นลายลักษณ์อักษรมาใช้โดยไม่ชอบด้วยรัฐธรรมนูญหรือไม่ จากการศึกษาพบว่าหลักการทางรัฐธรรมนูญที่ไม่เป็นลายลักษณ์อักษร หมายถึงบรรดาแบบแผนเชิงบรรทัดฐานที่มีลักษณะทั่วไป อันเป็นแนวกำหนดนำ (guideline) หรือเป็นเหตุผลในทางปฏิบัติที่ส่งผลโดยตรงต่อการตัดสินใจขององค์กรรัฐเกี่ยวกับการบังคับใช้รัฐธรรมนูญ โดยหลักการทางรัฐธรรมนูญที่ไม่เป็นลายลักษณ์อักษรมีบทบาทและความสัมพันธ์กับรัฐธรรมนูญลายลักษณ์อักษรในลักษณะเป็นเครื่องมือในการตีความหรืออุดช่องว่างบทบัญญัติแห่งรัฐธรรมนูญเพื่อการบังคับใช้รัฐธรรมนูญอย่างมีประสิทธิภาพ เกณฑ์ที่ใช้ในการตรวจสอบว่าการนำหลักการทางรัฐธรรมนูญที่ไม่เป็นลายลักษณ์อักษรมาบังคับใช้โดยศาลรัฐธรรมนูญชอบด้วยรัฐธรรมนูญหรือไม่อาจตรวจสอบได้จากสองหลักเกณ์ คือ 1.เป็นการใช้หลักการทางรัฐธรรมนูญเพื่อตีความหรืออุดช่องว่างบทบัญญัติรัฐธรรมนูญอันมีผลเป็นการแก้ไขเพิ่มเติมรัฐธรรมนูญ และ 2.เป็นการนำหลักการทางรัฐธรรมนูญมาบังคับใช้แล้วเกิดผลเป็นการกระทบกระเทือนโครงสร้างและหลักพื้นฐานของรัฐธรรมนูญ โดยเรียกเกณฑ์ในการตรวจสอบนี้ว่า “การใช้หลักการทางรัฐธรรมนูญที่ไม่ชอบด้วยรัฐธรรมนูญ”ผลจากการศึกษาเกี่ยวกับการนำหลักการทางรัฐธรรมนูญที่ไม่เป็นลายลักษณ์อักษรมาใช้โดยศาลรัฐธรรมนูญไทยภายใต้กรอบวิเคราะห์เรื่องการใช้หลักการทางรัฐธรรมนูญที่ไม่ชอบด้วยรัฐธรรมนูญพบว่า ศาลรัฐธรรมนูญไทยมีการนำหลักการทางรัฐธรรมนูญมาบังคับใช้อันมีผลเป็นการแก้ไขเพิ่มเติมรัฐธรรมนูญและกระทบต่อโครงสร้างและหลักพื้นฐานของรัฐธรรมนูญอยู่ในหลายคดีด้วยกันโดยส่วนใหญ่เป็นเรื่องเกี่ยวกับการขยายเขตอำนาจศาลในการวินิจฉัยคดีต่าง ๆ วิทยานิพนธ์เล่มนี้จึงมีข้อเสนอแนะว่า 1.ศาลรัฐธรรมนูญควรนำหลักการทางรัฐธรรมนูญที่ไม่เป็นลายลักษณ์อักษรมาใช้เมื่อมีกรณีปัญหาที่ต้องอาศัยการตีความหรืออุดช่องว่างเกิดขึ้นเท่านั้น โดยศาลต้องค้นหาและสกัดหลักการทางรัฐธรรมนูญจากบทบัญญัติรัฐธรรมนูญหรือโครงสร้างและหลักพื้นฐานของรัฐธรรมนูญ 2.ศาลรัฐธรรมนูญควรชั่งน้ำหนักคุณค่าและปรับใช้หลักการทางรัฐธรรมนูญภายใต้หลักความได้สัดส่วน 3.ควรมีการแก้ไขเพิ่มเติมพระราชบัญญัติประกอบรัฐธรรมนูญมาตรา 72 กำหนดแบบในคำวินิจฉัยให้ศาลรัฐธรรมนูญต้องอธิบายที่มาและเนื้อหาทุกครั้งที่มีการใช้หลักการทางรัฐธรรมนูญ 4. ควรมีการแก้ไขเพิ่มเติมรัฐธรรมนูญแห่งราชอาณาจักรไทย มาตรา 5 วรรคสอง โดยกำหนดวิธีการและชื่อของแบบแผนเชิงบรรทัดฐานในทางรัฐธรรมนูญให้ชัดเจนยิ่งขึ้น

Healing Communities With Police Divestment: Seeking Abolition Through Transformative Reform And Community-Government Collaboration, Jessica E. Gillson

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Concerns about the efficacy and sustainability of the U.S. carceral system have persisted throughout the country’s history, recently fueling renewed activism and bipartisan calls for reform. However, proposed solutions remain divisive. This thesis first defines the current status of our prison systems, then explores collaborative alternatives to incarceration and policing that support communities and break cycles of incarceration.

Focusing on partnerships among local governments, community organizations, justice-involved individuals, and law enforcement, this study examines holistic approaches to crime prevention, reentry, and reintegration. Using an interdisciplinary framework incorporating restorative justice, community resilience, and systems theory, it investigates how community-based strategies can …

Racial Disparities In Crime-Based Removal Proceedings, Emily Ryo, Ian Peacock, Weston Ley, Christopher Levesque

Faculty Scholarship

Whether and to what extent racial minorities experience harsher treatment or face worse outcomes in court are questions of fundamental importance for any justice system. Questions of racial inequality are especially salient in the context of removal proceedings that are triggered by immigrants’ criminal history. Many individuals in crime-based removal proceedings are immigrants of color who face a host of legal disadvantages that are tantamount to double penalties for the same crime for which they have already been punished through the criminal justice system. This Article offers, for the first time, systematic empirical analyses of crime-based removal proceedings decided between …

Interlocking Directorates In The United States, Yaron Nili

Faculty Scholarship

In corporate America, directors wield increasing influence across multiple companies, often within the same industry (“horizontal directors”), which creates tension between antitrust laws and corporate governance. Horizontal directors are well-positioned to bring industry expertise and potentially increase higher profits, benefiting shareholders but also possibly enabling potential collusion. This chapter provides an overview of the prevalence of horizontal directors, the regulatory grey space in which they exist and the connection to some recently debated issues, including that of common ownership by institutional investors. To inform this debate, this chapter provides a thorough overview of horizontal directors from corporate and antitrust perspectives …

In Code We Trust: Blockchain’S Decentralization Paradox, Sangita F. Gazi

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

This Article explores blockchain technology’s decentralization and governance challenges. It interrogates the tension between the idea of a trustless, decentralized economy at the core of blockchain’s promise and the realities of power concentration and information asymmetry. Examining the ramifications of the Crypto Winter of 2022 on trust and governance within the blockchain ecosystem, the Article also underscores a critical paradox within blockchain ecosystems. It argues that despite the foundational ethos of decentralization and open participation, the governance structures of major blockchain networks manifest significant centralization, challenging the narrative of an egalitarian, user-driven evolution. The current state of blockchain’s centralities fundamentally …

On Disciplining States, Aziz Z. Huq

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

No abstract provided.

In Re Firstenergy Corp. Securities Litigation: Where Macquarie Meets Affiliated Ute, Elizabeth Cosenza, Amanda M. Payne

Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law

The central question this Article seeks to address is whether there is any world in which the Affiliated Ute presumption can still apply to cases under Rule 10b-5(b) after the Supreme Court’s decision in Macquarie? Put differently, if only half-truths and affirmative misrepresentations remain actionable under Rule 10b-5(b), is the Basic presumption the only pathway left for securities plaintiffs? The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit will likely be the first court to address this issue in In re FirstEnergy Corp. Securities Litigation. The case will test the availability of the Affiliated Ute presumption post-Macquarie in cases based …

Networking Among The Human Capitalists: The Organizational Dynamics Of Change And Power In The Large Corporate Law Firm, Alan James Klugel

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Law firms are unique creatures. They are subject to market pressures as well as ethical obligations and professional norms. They are in direct competition with other organizations for both clients and the lawyers necessary to perform work for those clients. They are comprised of lawyers who are simultaneously cooperative and competitive with one another. They are neither hierarchy nor anarchy, neither a collection of independent actors nor an entity under which its employees are subsumed. Instead, they are organizations shaped and reshaped by their members; organized around shared goals, internal contestations and external constraints; and defined by the ties between …