Digital Commons Network^™

Institutions Matter: How So?, Alper Duman

Markets, Globalization & Development Review

This paper examines the influential theory of Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson (AJR) on the role of institutions in economic development, highlighting its strengths, limitations, and areas for further research. A central contribution of their work is the emphasis on power and conflict in institutional formation and change.

The theory's focus on the interplay between inequality, political power, and institutional change provides a valuable framework for understanding development trajectories. This paper also considers critiques of AJR's work, including the lack of robustness of the positive correlation between inclusive institutions and economic performance in lower-income countries and the significant …

The New Glass Ceiling, Andrea K. Schneider, Abigail R. Bogli, Hannah L. Chin

Articles

Until the last decade, gender inequality in the legal profession was selfevident. Law school classrooms and law firm offices were overwhelmingly filled with men. In recent years, women have outnumbered men in law school classes and reached parity with men among first-year associates. These developments have created the misperception that gender equality has been achieved. In this Article, we challenge this complacency. We present new evidence from a detailed case study of law firms in a midsize city, showing that women remain underrepresented in leadership roles and underpaid relative to their colleagues. We then show how the limited opportunities and …

Understanding The Transitional Needs Of Servicemembers To Veterans: A Focus On Mental, Social, And Behavioral Health, Marieann C. Raguso

Theses and Dissertations

This applied dissertation was designed to fill the gaps on the transitional American veterans’ lived experience using their own voice. The reconstruction of an American Veteran’s identity after transitioning back into civilian life is a process with many challenges. Transitional practices often fail to help veterans to acculturate back into the civilian world. This includes the formulation of identities and associations. There is a lack of consistency in military transitional practices leading to identity loss and the formulation of mental and behavioral disorders. The aim of this study is to examine the lived experiences of veterans who have transitioned back …

Reading Law's Great Unread: Qualitative Computational Methods, Artificial Intelligence And The New Empirical Legal Research, Simon Wallace

PhD Dissertations

How will new computational technologies change legal research and our visions of what law is? Inspired by the work of digital humanists, Bourdieu, and sociologists of literature, this dissertation explores how the methods of “distant reading” can be used to develop new classes of critical insights about law. After situating the project theoretically, this dissertation reports on a series of new computational studies about Canadian law. Chapter 1 measures Canadian statutory and regulatory law, showing that law has grown unevenly over the past decade and a half. Chapter 2 uses new artificial intelligence to transcribe and analyze Supreme Court of …

Latinas In Law Enforcement: Tokenism, Barriers And Changes Along The Narrow Bridge To Promotion, Saturnino Velazquez

College of Education Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this qualitative study was to better understand and analyze themes and patterns shared among the lived experiences of 12 female Latina Law Enforcement Officers (LEOs) in male-dominated police departments in the Midwest (Illinois and Minnesota). The researcher chose to adopt a basic interpretive qualitative research methodology for this study because it provides a flexible and useful research tool, and provided a broader approach to interpreting meaning from rich and detailed data, yet complex, and account of semi-structured interviews that served as a data collection instrument. This study was guided by the theoretical framework of Kanter’s research on …

Compounding Barriers To Access: A Study Of Tax Policies And Practices That Exclude Women With Disabilities In Poverty, Cynthia Minh

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

A single parent on social assistance who cannot afford the medical interventions they require does not make enough money to offset their medical costs through taxes. A woman who experiences chronic symptoms of fibromyalgia and struggles to get diagnosed in their adulthood feels dependent on a doctor who is unsupportive of their disability benefit applications for chronic pain medication. A person who experiences paranoia is unable to access the tax information needed to apply for rental assistance programs because they forgot to complete a step when filing for a name and gender change. These are stories from individuals who have …

How To Design A Program For The Poor That Is Not A Poor Program: Explaining The Political Sustainability Of The Guaranteed Income Supplement, Daniel Béland, Patrik Marier

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

Created in 1967 as a temporary program aimed at supporting low-income people during the maturation of the Canada and Quebec Pension Plans, the Guaranteed Income Supplement (GIS) has since become a permanent policy that remains a central component of Canada’s multi-layered public pension system. In this article, we explain why GIS is a popular and politically successful program that challenges the common wisdom in political science and policy analysis that “programs for the poor are poor programs.” The article shows that the success of GIS stems from its policy design (e.g., income-tested rather than means-tested benefits), the social construction of …

Is The Canada Disability Benefits Program Consistent With The Social Model Of Disablement? The Perils And Promises Of Equality Rights Through Income Support Programs, Ravi Malhotra

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

The social model of disablement stands for the proposition that it is structural barriers that impede the lives of people with disabilities. Disabled people should be included in all spheres of life, including employment, through the removal and eradication of barriers. At first glance, the expansion of disability benefits appears to contradict the goal of inclusion of people with disabilities in employment. In this article, I argue that the passage of the Canada Disability Benefit Act is fully consonant with the social model of disability. Using the work of disability rights scholar Marta Russell and the philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis, as …

The Canada Disability Benefit Act And Women With Disabilities: Pursuing Disability Equality And Reducing Administrative Violence, Laverne Jacobs

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

Stakeholders have welcomed the Canadian Disability Benefits Act as an opportunity to rectify the long-standing socioeconomic disadvantage experienced by persons with disabilities. This article examines one specific form of marginalization that lies beneath the surface of the discussions surrounding poverty and persons with disabilities in Canada: It considers women with disabilities and disabled women from intersecting backgrounds, who face unique experiences of poverty that need to be addressed by any legislation aiming to eradicate income barriers for the disability community. By drawing on the theoretical frameworks of bureaucratic disentitlement, administrative violence, and disability equality, this article examines the lived realities …

Moral Panic And The First Amendment, Michael L. Smith

Buffalo Law Review

Debates over free speech in the United States frequently see advocates of strong, broad protections at odds with those who argue that unfettered free speech tends to harm society’s most vulnerable. Free speech advocates invoke the marketplace of ideas and argue that the antidote to false or harmful speech is more speech. In response, critics contend that speech itself causes harm and chills counter-speech— effectively excluding marginalized groups, including women and LGBTQ people, from discourse altogether. These critics support limitations on robust free speech doctrine targeting speech that harms marginalized communities.

This Article identifies a significant wrinkle in this narrative: …

Anchoring Athlete Safety: A Case Study Of The Minor Athlete Abuse Prevention Policies Of Usa Gymnastics, Daniel Ray Raney

Experience Industry Management

In response to the unprecedented scrutiny following the Larry Nassar case, USA Gymnastics initiated comprehensive policy reforms aimed at strengthening the safeguarding framework for its minor athletes. The purpose of this study was to examine the organization's current minor athlete abuse prevention policies and evaluate their effectiveness. A case study was conducted on USA Gymnastics through a tool created by the researcher with data collected from USA Gymnastics Safe Sport Policy, the US Center for Safe Sport, and USA Gymnastics governing structure. While USA Gymnastics has created a formidable policy to protect its minor athletes, significant gaps still remain. The …

The Impact Of State Laws On Officer-Involved Deaths (Oids), Morgan Steele, Ziwei Qi

Criminal Justice Faculty Publications

While the public debates whether law enforcement has a problem with mis- or over-using force, the field lacks critical information concerning how often officers use force when interacting with citizens. Moreover, researchers have not examined how differences in how states restrict officers’ ability to use force affect the frequency of force used. Consequently, the various reforms proposed have little evidence supporting them. Using data from Mapping Police Violence combined with census data, we examined the impact of the incorporation of U.S. Supreme Court jurisprudence and the overall restrictiveness each state placed on law enforcement’s ability to use force when making …

“True Crime Effect”: The Influence Of True Crime Media On Jurors’ Perceptions Of Innocence In A Criminal Trial, Abigail Curran

Honors College Theses

In the mid-2000s, the popular TV show CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and its portrayal of forensic evidence was blamed for a so-called “CSI effect” - hypothesizing that jurors had greater expectations of the use of forensic evidence than was realistic. While CSI has fallen in popularity - ultimately ending its 15-year run on television in 2015 - stories of crime and criminality remain popular. The most recent iteration of this fascination can be seen in the rise in popularity of true crime documentaries and podcasts. This study aims to investigate the existence of a “true crime effect” in which all …

New Legal Realism At 20: Rethinking Law In An Era Of Populism And Social Movements, Jeffrey Omari, Pablo Rueda-Saiz, Richard Ashby Wilson

Connecticut Law Review

This Article critically examines the New Legal Realism (NLR) movement on its twentieth anniversary and illuminates its distinctive intellectual contributions. In evaluating NLR’s unique methodological and substantive contributions, we explore the movement's relationship to other interdisciplinary theories and empirical approaches to law. NLR approaches show a commitment to a comparative, crossnational exploration of legal phenomena while allowing for grounded generalizations about the relationship between law and society. NLR approaches embrace a diverse range of methods and emphasize the importance of “looking up, down, and sideways.” Notably, NLR embraces both “top-down” and “bottom-up” methods, providing comprehensive insights into the intricate interactions …

Teaching Constitutional Law In A Crisis Of Judicial Legitimacy, William Baude

Chicago-Kent Law Review

No abstract provided.

Power To The People: Finding Solutions To Partisan Gerrymandering In A Post-Rucho World Through Independent Redistricting Commissions, Paul T. Ansani

Chicago-Kent Law Review

No abstract provided.

Impossibility Of Artificial Inventors, Matt Blaszczyk

UC Law Science and Technology Journal

Recently, the United Kingdom Supreme Court decided that only natural persons can be considered inventors. A year before, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued a similar decision. In fact, so have many of the courts all over the world. This Article analyzes these decisions, argues that the courts got it right, and finds that artificial inventorship is at odds with patent law doctrine, theory, and philosophy. This Article challenges the intellectual property (IP) post-humanists, exposing the analytical and normative perils of their argumentation, and recommends against getting rid of the nominally central place of humans …

Front Matter, Michigan Business & Entrepreneurial Law Review

Michigan Business & Entrepreneurial Law Review

Front Matter for Volume 13, Issue 1 of Michigan Business & Entrepreneurial Law Review

Originalism's Selection Problem, Darrell A.H. Miller

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

This Essay examines the problem of selection with any originalist theory and what it means for constitutional adjudication. Part I surveys the major branches of originalism, explains how each share a commitment to the pursuit of objective, knowable, falsifiable fact, and then use that fact as a fixed point to constrain discretion. Part II discusses how each of these theories are vulnerable to methodological challenges familiar to all empirical projects. Part III explores the implications of these methodological challenges for originalism in particular and for constitutional doctrine and theory more generally.

This abstract has been taken from the author's introduction.

Constitutionalism, Social Justice, And Social Contract: Unpacking The Debate On Scheduled Caste Reservation For Christian And Muslim Dalits, Arvind Kumar

National Law School Journal

This article examines the constitutional, historical, and political debates surrounding the demand for extending Scheduled Caste (SC) status to Christian and Muslim Dalits in India. Drawing on Constituent Assembly Debates, archival materials, judicial decisions, government affidavits, petitions, and my previous scholarship, it challenges the claim that SC reservation was originally conceived as religion-neutral. The article argues that SC reservation emerged as a specific pre-constitutional agreement rooted in the Poona Pact and designed to address the historical injustice of untouchability within Hindu society. Its provisions were subsequently extended to Sikh and Buddhist converts under particular historical and political circumstances but did …

Interactional Ordering: Reconstructing Lon Fuller's Theory Of Private Law, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

Faculty Scholarship

While Lon Fuller is best remembered for his contributions to the fields of general jurisprudence and contract law, his work in each has long been seen as unrelated to the other. This Article shows that in a significantly underappreciated body of work, Fuller did connect the two and, in the process, developed the outlines of a robust theory of private law, best characterized as “interactional ordering.” Driven by Fuller’s efforts to develop a jurisprudence of form that was derived from conventionalism and natural law thinking, interactional ordering sees all normativity as originating in horizontal interactions between individuals in society, seeking …

New Legal Realism At 20: Rethinking Law In An Era Of Populism And Social Movements, Jeffrey Omari, Pablo Rueda-Saiz, Richard Ashby Wilson

Articles

This Article critically examines the New Legal Realism (NLR) movement on its twentieth anniversary and illuminates its distinctive intellectual contributions. In evaluating NLR's unique methodological and substantive contributions, we explore the movement's relationship to other interdisciplinary theories and empirical approaches to law. NLR approaches show a commitment to a comparative, cross-national exploration of legal phenomena while allowing for grounded generalizations about the relationship between law and society. NLR approaches embrace a diverse range of methods and emphasize the importance of "looking up, down, and sideways." Notably, NLR embraces both "top-down" and "bottom-up" methods, providing comprehensive insights into the intricate interactions …

Reshaping Intellectual Property Scholarship From Within, Peter K. Yu

Faculty Scholarship

Written for the Symposium collecting papers from the Race + IP 23 Conference, this article explores intellectual property scholarship that has been either overlooked or marginalized. Because scholars of color are often outsiders looking in, the article identifies opportunities to reshape intellectual property scholarship from within. Even though the focus of this article was chosen with readers of this Symposium in mind, its insights will be relevant to all scholars.

This article begins by calling on scholars to develop a deeper appreciation of the intrinsic motivations of authors and inventors. It then discusses the oft-overlooked inequalities of creativity and innovation …

Legality Beyond The State, David Lefkowitz

Buffalo Law Review

Inquiry into law beyond the state, or indeed within it, necessarily presupposes a concept of law. Consider, for example, H.L.A.’s account of international law.1 Hart famously characterizes law in terms of a union of primary and secondary rules.2 Understood in functional terms, primary rules govern actions, while secondary rules govern rules. Hart also pays particular attention to a special class of secondary rules, namely those that create specific offices whose occupants are empowered to identify, alter, apply, and enforce a society’s rules. An advanced legal system, then, is a practice of holding accountable constituted by both a hierarchy of norms—primary …

The Rule Of Interlegality, Nicole Roughan

Buffalo Law Review

A “recognition model of legality” grounds legality upon the normative significance of recognition of the role of the official of law, and the requirements of a moral relation of recognition between law’s officials and subjects. On this model, plural overlapping claims to legality can undermine the rule of law by disrupting recognition of both the role of the official and the moral relation of legality between officials and subjects. This Essay examines the legality deficits that arise from conflicting recognitions of officiality and subjection in contexts of overlapping state and Indigenous legal orders. In such contexts of plural overlapping claims …

The Workings Of Legal Exceptionalism: Arbitration As A Portal To Stateless Law-In-Action Regimes, Thomas Schultz

Buffalo Law Review

This Essay seeks to explores the fertility of thinking about arbitration as a portal to stateless legal regimes. Using the distinction between law in books and law in action, as well as the concepts of social and political disembeddedness and quiet politics, it argues that under the current paradigm of arbitration, it operates as a porous portal, getting corporate and natural citizens to escape into stateless law-in-action legal regimes (though in practice not into a law-in-books stateless legal regime). This raises questions of control of and accountability for the political effects of such stateless law-inaction legal regimes on the rest …

When European State Courts Face Post-Colonial Legality: A Private International Law Approach Inspired By Decolonial Theory, Sandrine Brachotte

Buffalo Law Review

This Essay develops avenues for private international law (PIL) to deal with cases involving the interaction between Western state law and distinctive forms of law that citizens from post-colonial states, especially African states, bring with them to Europe. Laws of the second type, which I call “postcolonial legality,” incorporate both traditional forms of legality usually dubbed “religious” and “customary” law along with state law that originates from colonial law. Drawing on some lessons from decolonial theory, I try to apply to this particular context a “less colonial” PIL theory and subsequent PIL rules and reasoning. The argument builds on the …

The Priority Of International Law, Pavlos Eleftheriadis

Buffalo Law Review

What is international law? Any theory of international law must explain both its technical nature and its moral force and must also show how the two come together in practice in order to give it the priority that it claims. For example, the genocide cases before the International Court of Justice exhibit a puzzling dedication to procedure. The Court is invited to examine the war in Gaza strictly on the basis of the Genocide Convention, without assessing any allegations of war crimes or other alleged violations of international law. The reason is a well-known procedural rule—namely that states have to …

Jurisdiction Over Justice: How Misinterpreting Procedures Under The Federal Tort Claims Act Harms Plaintiffs, Kara L. Anderson

University of the Pacific Law Review

No abstract provided.

Two Forms Of Formalism In Contract Law, Gregory Klass

Cardozo Law Review

Formalism in contract interpretation has had many defenders and many critics. What lawmakers need, however, is an account of when formalism works and when it does not. This Article addresses that need by providing a general theory of contract exposition and differentiating between two forms of formalism in contract law. Formalities effect legal change by virtue of their form alone, thereby obviating interpretation. Examples include “as is,” the seal, and sometimes contract boilerplate. Evidentiary formalism, in distinction, limits the evidence that goes into interpretation. Plain meaning rules are an example of evidentiary formalism. This Article provides a detailed analysis of …