Digital Commons Network^™

Interested Voting, Matteo Gatti

BYU Law Review

Corporate law is attentive to transactions with a controlling shareholder, but such transactions hardly cover all instances in which an interested shareholder may harm the corporation by casting a pivotal vote to pass a resolution. Interested votes cast by directors, managers, acquirers, cross-holders, arbitrageurs, institutional investors, hedge funds, and several other actors can be as detrimental as votes by a controlling shareholder. Yet, despite the ever growing influence of shareholders in corporate governance, interested voting has received scant attention.

This Article is the first to offer a systematic mapping of interested voting based on type of shareholder and type of …

A Basic Needs Baseline For Distributional Analysis, Ari Glogower

BYU Law Review

Studies of income inequality and the distributive effects of taxes and government spending drive debates over progressive fiscal reform and economic justice. These distributional studies provide vital information on inequality in market outcomes and how government policies mitigate these disparities.

Despite its critical importance, however, distributional analysis encounters inevitable and familiar limitations. These studies face practical challenges in measuring income and the distributional impacts of government policies. Distributional analysis also faces inherent complications in seeking to distinguish between the effects of the market and the government.

Even if distributional analysis could precisely measure income and the effects of government policies, …

The Unconstitutional Assertion Of Inherent Powers In Multidistrict Litigations, Robert J. Pushaw, Charles Silver

BYU Law Review

This Article examines the constitutional basis of the federal courts’ independent exercise of “inherent powers” (IPs) that Congress has not specifically authorized. Our analysis illuminates the grave constitutional problems raised by the freewheeling assertion of IPs in multidistrict litigations (MDLs), which comprise over half of all pending federal cases.

The Supreme Court has rhetorically acknowledged that the Constitution allows resort to IPs only when doing so is absolutely necessary to enable Article III courts to exercise their “judicial power,” but has then sustained virtually all exercises of IP, whether essential or not. The Court’s excessive deference has emboldened trial judges …

Publius’S Protectors Of Liberty: A Still Important Role For States, Adam Reed Moore

BYU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Good Representatives, Bad Objectors, And Restitution In Class Settlements, Jay Tidmarsh, Tladi Marumo

BYU Law Review

This Article uses two recent decisions — one prohibiting incentive awards to class representatives and one permitting disgorgement of side payments to class objectors — to explore deeper connections between class action settlements and the law of restitution. The failure to correctly apply the law of restitution led both courts astray. First, courts can approve incentive awards, as long as an award properly reflects the benefit that the representative's efforts bestowed on the class. Second, restitution provides a basis to disgorge improper side payments to objectors, but only under conditions different from those that the court described. More broadly, attention …

Osha’S Covid-19 Vaccine Mandate: Why Justice Gorsuch’S Analysis Of The Mandate As An Elephant In A Mousehole Misses The Mark, Wyatt Rex Allred

BYU Law Review

Administrative law doctrines such as Chevron seek to strike a balance between adequate delegated power and sufficient checks on such power. The major questions doctrine reinforces the latter. Recent decisions finding major questions, however, have shown a departure from textualist principles, which formed the doctrine s foundation. Justice Gorsuch's opinion in NFIB v. OSHA is an example of this desertion of textualist principles and should thus be viewed as an improper application of the major questions doctrine. Rather than remodeling the major questions doctrine, textualist judges should acknowledge that this form of anti-textual analysis is nothing short of a revival …

Table Of Contents

BYU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Remand Without Vacatur And The Ab Initio Invalidity Of Unlawful Regulations In Administrative Law, John Harrison

BYU Law Review

An important administrative law doctrine developed by the lower federal courts called remand without vacatur rests on a mistaken premise. Courts that embrace the doctrine maintain that when they find that a federal agency regulation is unlawful, they have discretion to remand the regulation without vacating it. The remand gives the regulatory agency an opportunity to correct the flaws that render the regulation unlawful. When a regulation is remanded but not vacated, the courts assume the regulation binds regulated parties despite its illegality. Unlawful regulations, however, are in general void ab initio, just as unconstitutional statutory rules are void ab …

The Constitutional Model Of Mootness, Tyler B. Lindley

BYU Law Review

Article III limits the federal courts to deciding cases and controversies, and this limitation has given rise to the black-letter law of standing, ripeness, and mootness. But the law of mootness presents a puzzle: Over time, the Court has recognized various "exceptions" to ordinary mootness rules, allowing federal courts to hear arguably moot cases. On one hand, the Court consistently asserts that mootness doctrine, including its exceptions, is compelled by the original understanding of Article III. On the other hand, the scholarly consensus is that these exceptions are logically inconsistent with the Court s claims about Article III and that …

Searches Without Suspicion: Avoiding A Four Million Person Underclass, Tonja Jacobi, Addie Maguire

BYU Law Review

In Samson v. California, the Supreme Court upheld warrantless, suspicionless searches for parolees. That determination was controversial both because suspicionless searches are, by definition, anathema to the Fourth Amendment, and because they arguably undermine parolees’ rehabilitation. Less attention has been given to the fact that the implications of the case were not limited to parolees. The opinion in Samson included half a sentence of dicta that seemingly swept probationers into its analysis, implicating the rights of millions of additional people in the United States. Not only is analogizing parolees and probationers not logically sound because the two groups differ in …

The Federalist And The Fourteenth Amendment — Publius In Antebellum Public Debate 1788–1860, Kurt T. Lash

BYU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Scaling Daos Through Fiduciary Duties, Alex Dolphin

BYU Law Review

DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) are a unique type of business organization due in large part to their directly democratic governance structure. Owners of DAOs, “tokenholders,” do not delegate control to a board or a general partner. Rather, tokenholders directly control a DAO and must approve every action that a DAO takes. Because tokenholders do not delegate control to an agent, the principal-agent problem is tempered in DAOs. The principal-agent problem is the basis for the fiduciary duties that govern traditional business organizations. These fiduciary duties are meant to prevent agents entrusted with power by their principals from self-dealing. Some have …

Gender, Credentials, And M&A, Tracey E. George, Mitu Gulati, Albert Yoon

BYU Law Review

For the past several decades, women have made up roughly half of law school classes and the ranks of entering law firm associates. Attrition between entry to law firms and partnership results in women comprising 20% to 25% of partners. But is there yet more attrition to the top of the partnership pyramid? Analyzing the past decade of data on publicly filed M&A deals and detailed biographical information of M&A lawyers, we find that women make up fewer than 10% of deal leaders. When we look at the factors that determine who becomes a deal leader, we find that credentials—both …

Saying What The Law Should Be, F. Andrew Hessick

BYU Law Review

Recent years have seen a resurgence of the view that the role of the federal courts is to declare what the law is, not what the law should be. Scholars and judges, including a majority of the current U.S. Supreme Court justices, have expressed this view that the law is fixed at its creation and the function of courts is to declare its meaning. But this view is inaccurate. Descriptively, federal courts often say what the law should be. Judges fashion common law, inject their views into interpretations, and issue opinions that do not merely describe the law but have …

Rights Without A Remedy: Detained Immigrants And Unlawful Conditions Of Confinement, Brandon Galli-Graves

BYU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Frederick Douglass And The Original Originalists, Bradley Rebeiro

BYU Law Review

Constitutional scholars incessantly grapple over the significance of the Constitution’s original meaning. More specifically, they are preoccupied with, on the one hand, what that meaning is (if such meaning exists) and, on the other hand, the exact nature of that meaning’s authority (if any) over the Constitution and its interpreters. But this debate is hardly novel. In fact, one of the most compelling voices in U.S. history was immersed in similar debates and, out of the constitutional sparring of his time, forged an arresting theory of constitutional interpretation. Frederick Douglass, once a fierce opponent of the U.S. Constitution, evolved into …

Roger Rigby Durrant, Appellant, V. R&M Durrant Family, Llc, Appellee, Utah Court Of Appeals

Utah Court of Appeals Briefs (2020 –)

No abstract provided.

R & M Durrant Family, Llc, Appellee, Vs. Roger Rigby Durrant, Appellant, Utah Court Of Appeals

Utah Court of Appeals Briefs (2020 –)

Appeal from a final judgment and underlying rulings entered by the Third Judicial District Court of Utah, in and for Tooele County, the Honorable Teresa Welch, Presiding

R & M Durrant Family, Llc, Appellee, Vs. Roger Rigby Durrant, Appellant, Utah Court Of Appeals

Utah Court of Appeals Briefs (2020 –)

Appeal from a final judgment and underlying rulings entered by the Third Judicial District Court of Utah, in and for Tooele County, the Honorable Teresa Welch, Presiding

Treaty Interpretation At The Human Rights Committee: Reconciling International Law And Normativity, David H. Moore

Faculty Scholarship

The Human Rights Committee, the expert body overseeing states’ compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (“ICCPR”), is a key institution in the international human rights architecture. The Committee’s work requires constant interpretation of the ICCPR’s human rights guarantees. While international law dictates how to interpret treaty provisions, including those of the ICCPR, the Committee does not consistently follow the international law of treaty interpretation. Rather, normativity plays an influential role in the Committee’s interpretations. This approach is not uniformly negative; it has both costs and benefits. To minimize the costs, however, this Article identifies a path …

Taming Dangerousness, Shima Baradaran Baughman

Faculty Scholarship

In every courtroom across the country each day, judges determine whether thousands of individuals are either released or held before trial. These speedy and seemingly minor decisions have profound impacts on an accused’s fate and on national incarceration rates. Indeed, over the last fifty years, these individual decisions have led to a four-hundred percent increase in pretrial detention in the United States. This increase in pretrial detention accounts for 99% of the jail growth in the last fifteen years, despite record decreases in arrest and crime rates. At the same time, the United States has witnessed three meaningful periods of …

Calling The Shots: Multistate Challenges To Federal Vaccine Mandates, Elysa M. Dishman

Faculty Scholarship

Litigation brought by state attorneys general (AGs) successfully frustrated the Biden administration’s efforts to combat COVID-19 by vaccinating American workers. State challenges to vaccine mandates are consistent with trends in multistate litigation that have occurred in recent presidential administrations. At the same time, these cases reveal emerging new trends that shed light on the future of multistate public law litigation and nationwide injunctions. Challenges to vaccine mandates have raised ongoing criticisms of nationwide injunctions and offer a pathway forward for reform.

"Attacking" Big Data: Strategic Competition, The Race For Ai, And The International Law Of Cyber Sabotage, Gary P. Corn, Eric Talbot Jensen

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter begins with a discussion of the national security threat that China’s AI development efforts pose, and the importance of big data to those efforts. It then moves to a review of potential cyber-enabled operations, particularly as applied to data, that could impede or thwart China’s AI development. The chapter then proceeds to a review of the international law implications of cyber sabotage, beginning with a discussion of the jus ad bellum and followed by a review of other relevant aspects of the international law of state responsibility such as the rule of prohibited intervention, principles of state sovereignty, …

"Accompanying The Force" In Modern Armed Conflict, Eric Talbot Jensen

Faculty Scholarship

Throughout history, non-military personnel have routinely accompanied fighting forces on the battlefield for purposes of providing their goods or services to the forces. The 1863 Lieber Code codified many rules concerning the interaction of the armed forces, but it also addressed civilians accompanying such professional forces, including both those “who are attached to the army for its efficiency and promote directly the object of the war” and those “citizens who accompany an army for whatever purpose, such as sutlers, editors, or reporters of journals, or contractors.”
Because of their proximity to the fight, it was inevitable that some of these …

Frederick Douglass And The Original Originalists, Bradley Rebeiro

Faculty Scholarship

Constitutional scholars incessantly grapple over the significance of the Constitution’s original meaning. More specifically, they are preoccupied with, on the one hand, what that meaning is (if such meaning exists) and, on the other hand, the exact nature of that meaning’s authority (if any) over the Constitution and its interpreters. But this debate is hardly novel. In fact, one of the most compelling voices in U.S. history was immersed in similar debates and, out of the constitutional sparring of his time, forged an arresting theory of constitutional interpretation. Frederick Douglass, once a fierce opponent of the U.S. Constitution, evolved into …

A Tale Of Two Declarations, Bradley Rebeiro

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

State Of Utah, Plaintiff And Appellee, V. Donald Dee Anderson, Defendant And Appellant.: Reply Brief Of Appellant

Utah Appeals Court Briefs

Appeal from Sentence, Judgment, Commitment entered March 14, 2022, and denial Defendant’s motion to suppress pursuant to Sery plea of the Second Judicial District Court in and for Davis County, the Honorable Michael S. Edwards, presiding

State Of Utah, Plaintiff And Appellee, V. Donald Dee Anderson, Defendant And Appellant.: Brief Of Appellant

Utah Appeals Court Briefs

Appeal from a jury trial in the First Judicial District, in and for Box Elder County, State of Utah, the Honorable Brandon Maynard presiding.

Martin O’Loughlin, As Trustee For The Martin O’Loughlin Living Trust, Rosalind M. O’Loughlin Living Trust, And Rosalind M. O’Loughlin Irrevocable Trust, Appellant, V. Asea Enterprises, Llc, Et Al., Appellees: Principal Brief Of Appellant

Utah Appeals Court Briefs

On appeal from the Fourth Judicial District Court, Utah County, Honorable Derek P. Pullan,

Martin O’Loughlin, As Trustee For The Martin O’Loughlin Living Trust, Rosalind M. O’Loughlin Living Trust, And Rosalind M. O’Loughlin Irrevocable Trust, Appellant, V. Asea Enterprises, Llc, Et Al., Appellees: Appellee Brief Of Sorensen And The Reoxcyn Entities

Utah Appeals Court Briefs

On appeal from the Fourth Judicial District Court, Utah County, Honorable Derek P. Pullan