Digital Commons Network^™

Money Matters: Why The Ada's Undue Hardship Framework Could Save Casey And Legal Abortion In America, Brooke M. Garrett

University of Colorado Law Review

Since Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court has upheld a woman's right to choose previability abortion on several occasions. Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey was one such case that grew out of the Court's abortion jurisprudence and changed the way states regulated abortion. However, Casey's decision is fraught with ambiguities that have facilitated legislative overreach, judicial abuse, and inconsistent interpretation and application of the constitutional standard. In some states, legislatures have regulated a woman's right to choose to such an extent that it is a practical impossibility. Recently, the Supreme Court struck down Texas's House Bill 2-a highly …

Pride And Prejudice And Administrative Zombies: How Economic Woes, Outdated Environmental Regulations, And State Exceptionalism Failed Flint, Michigan, Brie D. Sherwin

University of Colorado Law Review

It was just over forty years ago, shortly before the Safe Drinking Water Act was passed, that a group of mothers in the small, sleepy town of Woburn, Massachusetts realized there just may have been a connection between their children's leukemia and the town's water supply. They withstood the terrible smell and masked the water's rancid flavor with orange juice. For months they inquired, complained, and assembled in hopes that someone in a position of authority would notice what was so obvious to them. And for months they were dismissed and even ridiculed. Turns out they were right. It took …

Maxwell, Lewis V. Clarke, And The Trail Around Tribal Sovereign Immunity, Allison Hester

University of Colorado Law Review

Tribal sovereign immunity is an important tool available to American Indian tribes as they have rebuilt, restructured, and rejuvenated their communities in the era of Self- Determination following centuries of colonialism, land grabs, and cultural genocide. Sovereign immunity protects tribes by establishing a barrier to both trampling of tribal sovereignty through non-tribal courts and costly adverse judgments. Recent precedent from the Ninth Circuit has weakened tribal sovereign immunity. Maxwell v. County of San Diego, pivoting from previous decisions, held that tribal employees can be sued individually for money damages for actions taken in the course and scope of their employmentas …

Digging Up The Dirt: China's Exploitation Of Transgenic Seed Approvals, Lucas A. Westerman

University of Colorado Law Review

In 2013, China rejected shipments of U.S. corn imports due to the presence of an unapproved transgenic trait, creating an international trade disruption that sent ripples throughout the U.S. agriculture industry and grain markets. Syngenta, the seed company that began selling the trait to U.S. farmers prior to receiving China's import approval, largely shouldered the blame. U.S. farmers held Syngenta singularly liable and initiated a class action in an attempt to force Syngenta to pay for the drop in grain prices due to the disruption. The highly publicized domestic legal dispute left China's opportunistic actions largely unnoticed. The time has …

Save Some For The Fishes: Analyzing The St. Jude's Co. Decision And What It Means For Beneficial Use In Colorado, John Sittler

University of Colorado Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Law And Policy Of People Analytics, Matthew T. Bodie, Miriam A. Cherry, Marcia L. Mccormick, Jintong Tang

University of Colorado Law Review

No abstract provided.

With Great Power Comes No Responsibility: The Tragedy And The Irony Of Erisa Preemption, Jessica Frenkel

University of Colorado Law Review

Under the current health care financing regime, managed care organizations have significant power to determine patients' care but no legal responsibility when they use that power to pursue profits and harm patients. Managed care organizations are shielded from liability because the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA) preempts state causes of action and does not provide a comparable remedy. This Comment attempts to restart a conversation about the dangers of allowing managed care organizations to retain significant power over patient care without any risk of liability of an especially vulnerable subgroup of patients: the severely mentally ill. It …

Achieving American Retirement Prosperity By Changing Americans' Thinking About Retirement, Peter H. Huang

Publications

There are many decisions that Americans have to make about retirement before, at, and after retirement. For example, Americans have to decide when to start saving for retirement, how much to save, how to invest those savings, when to retire, when to claim social security, and how to take required minimum distributions from 401(k) plans or Individual Retirement Accounts. Different things can go wrong at each of these decisions for different reasons. Many Americans, for various reasons, including insufficient energy, money, motivation, time, and understanding, do no retirement planning. Some Americans do some retirement planning, yet worry they are doing …

Immigration Exceptionalism, Pratheepan Gulasekaram, David S. Rubenstein

Publications

The Supreme Court's jurisprudence is littered with special immigration doctrines that depart from mainstream constitutional norms. This Article reconciles these doctrines of "immigration exceptionalism" across constitutional dimensions. Historically, courts and commentators have considered whether immigration warrants exceptional treatment as pertains to rights, federalism, or separation of powers-as if developments in each doctrinal setting can be siloed. This Article rejects that approach, beginning with its underlying premise. Using contemporary examples, we demonstrate how the Court's immigration doctrines dynamically interact with each other, and with politics, in ways that affect the whole system. This intervention provides a far more accurate rendering of …

Averting Robot Eyes, Margot Kaminski, Matthew Rueben, William D. Smart, Cindy M. Grimm

Publications

Home robots will cause privacy harms. At the same time, they can provide beneficial services—as long as consumers trust them. This Essay evaluates potential technological solutions that could help home robots keep their promises, avert their eyes, and otherwise mitigate privacy harms. Our goals are to inform regulators of robot-related privacy harms and the available technological tools for mitigating them, and to spur technologists to employ existing tools and develop new ones by articulating principles for avoiding privacy harms.

We posit that home robots will raise privacy problems of three basic types: (1) data privacy problems; (2) boundary management problems; …

Beyond Zero-Sum Environmentalism, Sarah Krakoff, Shalanda Baker, Robin Kundis Craig, John Dernbach, Keith Hirokawa, Jessica Owley, Melissa Powers, Shannon Roesler, Jonathan Rosenbloom, J.B. Ruhl, Jim Salzman, Inara Scott, David Takacs

Publications

No abstract provided.

Beyond Administrative Tunnel Vision: Widening The Lens Of Costs And Benefits, Govind Persad

Publications

Choices in one sector or department of public policy, such as health, frequently produce costs and benefits in other sectors, such as education or the environment. In this article, I argue that administrators should not make decisions in ways that ignore effects on other policy sectors, and arguablythough more debatably-should not give special priority to the interests of their own sector In Part I, I review contexts where administrators are directed to ignore or give a lower priority to effects on other policy sectors. In Part II, I lay out an argument that agencies should not ignore these effects (using …

A Contextual Approach To Harmless Error Review, Justin Murray

Publications

Harmless error review is profoundly important, but arguably broken, in the form that courts currently employ it in criminal cases. One significant reason for this brokenness lies in the dissonance between the reductionism of modern harmless error methodology and the diverse normative ambitions of criminal procedure. Nearly all harmless error rules used by courts today focus exclusively on whether the procedural error under review affected the result of a judicial proceeding. I refer to these rules as “result-based harmless error review.” The singular preoccupation of result-based harmless error review with the outputs of criminal processes stands in marked contrast with …

Responsible Resource Development And Prevention Of Sex Trafficking: Safeguarding Native Women And Children On The Fort Berthold Reservation, Kathleen Finn, Erica Gajda, Thomas Perin, Carla Fredericks

Publications

In 2010, large deposits of oil and natural gas were found in the Bakken shale formation, much of which is encompassed by the Fort Berthold Indian reservation, home to the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation (“MHA Nation” or “Three Affiliated Tribes” or “the Tribe”). However, rapid oil and gas development has brought an unprecedented rise of violent crime on and near the Fort Berthold reservation. Specifically, the influx of well-paid male oil and gas workers, living in temporary housing often referred to as “man camps,” has coincided with a disturbing increase in sex trafficking of Native women. The social risks …

The Algorithm As A Human Artifact: Implications For Legal [Re]Search, Susan Nevelow Mart

Publications

The results of using the search algorithms in Westlaw, Lexis Advance, Fastcase, Google Scholar, Ravel, and Casetext are compared. Six groups of humans created six different algorithms, and the results are a testament to the variability of human problem solving. That variability has implications both for researching and teaching research.

Agency Law And The New Economy, Mark J. Loewenstein

Publications

This article considers the status of workers in the "new economy," defined as the sharing economy (e.g., Uber, Lyft) and the on-demand economy. The latter refers to the extensive and growing use of staffing companies by established businesses in many different industries to provide all or a portion of their workforce. Workers in both the sharing economy and the on-demand economy are, generally speaking, at a disadvantage in comparison to traditional employees. Uber drivers, for example, are typically considered independent contractors, not employees, and therefore are not covered under federal and state laws that protect or provide benefits to employees. …

Agency Innovation In Vermont Yankee's White Space, Emily S. Bremer, Sharon B. Jacobs

Publications

The literature on “agency discretion” has, with a few notable exceptions, largely focused on substantive policy discretion, not procedural discretion. In this essay, we seek to refocus debate on the latter, which we argue is no less worthy of attention. We do so by defining the parameters of what we call Vermont Yankee’s “white space” — the scope of agency discretion to experiment with procedures within the boundaries established by law (and thus beyond the reach of the courts). Our goal is to begin a conversation about the dimensions of this procedural negative space, in which agencies are free …

Administrative Dissents, Sharon B. Jacobs

Publications

Commissioners, like judges, dissent. They do so at length, with vigor, and with persistence. Yet while separate judicial decisions are the subject of a rich literature, their administrative counterparts have long languished in obscurity. A closer look is warranted, however, because studying administrative dissent can enhance our understanding of internal agency operations as well as the relationships between agencies and other actors. This Article presents the results of an original review of separate statements at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission dating back four decades. It uses these findings to move beyond two common generalizations about …

Can Practicing Mindfulness Improve Lawyer Decision-Making, Ethics, And Leadership?, Peter H. Huang

Publications

Jon Kabat-Zinn, the founder of mindfulness-based stress reduction, defines mindfulness as paying attention in a curious, deliberate, kind, and non-judgmental way to life as it unfolds each moment. Psychologist Ellen Langer defines mindfulness as a flexible state of mind actively engaging in the present, noticing new things, and being sensitive to context. Langer differentiates mindfulness from mindlessness, which she defines as acting based upon past behavior instead of the present and being stuck in a fixed, solitary perspective, oblivious to alternative multiple viewpoints. Something called mindfulness is currently very fashionable and has been so for some time now in American …

Entrepreneurial Administration, Philip J. Weiser

Publications

A core failing of today’s administrative state and modern administrative law scholarship is the lack of imagination as to how agencies should operate. On the conventional telling, public agencies follow specific grants of regulatory authority, use the traditional tools of notice-and-comment rulemaking and adjudication, and are checked by judicial review. In reality, however, effective administration depends on entrepreneurial leadership that spearheads policy experimentation and trial-and-error problem-solving, including the development of regulatory programs that use non-traditional tools.

Entrepreneurial administration takes place both at public agencies and private entities, each of which can address regulatory challenges and earn regulatory authority as a …

Areas Of Critical Environmental Concern: Flpma's Unfulfilled Conservation Mandate, Karin P. Sheldon, Pamela Baldwin

Colorado Environmental Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Assured Water Supply Laws In The Western States: The Current State Of Play, Monica Green, Anne Castle

Colorado Environmental Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Mountain Biking Into The Wilderness, Heidi Ruckreigle

Colorado Environmental Law Journal

No abstract provided.

In Love With The Wild: Thoughts About The Public Lands In The 2 1st Century, Bill Hedden

Colorado Environmental Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Truth Behind International Climate Agreements: Why They Fail And Why The Bottom-Up Model Is The Way Forward. A Game Theory Analysis, Krishna Prasad

Colorado Environmental Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Hard(Rock) Truth About Abandoned Mines In The Western United States: Why The Pressure Is On To Enact Good Samaritan Legislation As A Way To Recover, Erika Kuhl

Colorado Environmental Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Colorado's Ground-Level Ozone Burden, Steve Gilman

Colorado Environmental Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Mixed Blessing In Subsidized Internet Access, Rob Frieden

Colorado Technology Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Right To Be Forgotten: Much Ado About Nothing, Giancarlo F. Frosio

Colorado Technology Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Droit À L'Oubli: Canadian Perspective On The Global 'Right To Be Forgotten' Debate, Eloise Gratton, Jules Polonetsky

Colorado Technology Law Journal

No abstract provided.