Digital Commons Network^™

Solving The Pro Bono Mismatch, Atinuke O. Adediran

University of Colorado Law Review

The pro bono interests of law firm lawyers tend to differ from the actual legal needs of the poor. This difference results in the mismatch problem or the incongruence between the interests of firm lawyers and the needs of the poor. Today, the mismatch problem has resulted in law firm lawyers' increased demand of immigration matters while legal needs are greatest in housing and family law. This leaves nonprofit legal services organizations scrambling to find pro bono representation for poor clients or otherwise relying on very limited resources to represent poor clients.

The literature on the mismatch problem is lacking …

Short History Of The Choice-Of-Law Clause, John F. Coyle

University of Colorado Law Review

In the field of conflict of laws, private actors are generally granted the power to choose the law to govern their contracts. This is the doctrine of party autonomy. In recent years, this doctrine has been the subject of several excellent histories that draw upon judicial opinions, scholarly writings, and legislative enactments to chronicle changing attitudes toward party autonomy over time. A moment's reflection, however, reveals that judges, scholars, and legislatures are not the most important actors in this story. The true protagonists are the contracting parties who write choice-of-law clauses into their agreements, without which there would be no …

Drug Conspiracy Sentencing And Social Injustice, Emilie Kurth

University of Colorado Law Review

The D.C. Circuit in United States v. Stoddard confronted a landmine of criminal and socioeconomic justice issues when it held that mandatory minimum sentences for drug conspiracy offenses should be imposed based on the amount of drugs attributable to the individual defendant (the individualized approach) as opposed to the amount of drugs attributable to the conspiracy as a whole (the conspiracy-wide approach). This decision reflects a nationwide circuit split implicating the courts and lawmakers' ideological balancing of the issues of justice, liberty, public safety, and equity. This Comment discusses Stoddard as well as the circuit split in its current form …

Two Legal Mothers: Cementing Parental Rights For Lesbian Parents In Colorado, Maia Labrie

University of Colorado Law Review

Two married couples decide to have a child via artificial reproduction. One parent in each couple will carry and give birth to the child. The other parent has no biological relationship with the child.

One is an opposite-sex couple. Because they are married, they know that the father will automatically be considered the legal father. But the other couple is a lesbian couple. Leading up to the birth, the lesbian couple seeks out a lawyer and expresses concern regarding the nonbiological parent's legal status. Because both are women, they know their relationship to their child will be constantly questioned. How …

An Old View Of The Cathedral: Intellectual Property Under The Colorado Uniform Partnership Act, Nathaniel T. Vasquez

University of Colorado Law Review

The Colorado Uniform Partnership Act ("CUPA") contains a subtle shortcoming. CUPA is a default statute that only operates in the absence of a governing agreement between two partners formed at the outset of the partnership. As with most things in this life, partnerships inevitably come to an end. When this happens, a partner is said to have "dissociated" from the partnership. Typically, this is followed by a dissolution of the partnership itself

Rather than terminating at that point, the partnership then goes into what is called the "winding up" period. Among other things, winding up involves liquidating all of the …

Book Review, Justin Murray

Publications

No abstract provided.

Choosing Affordable Health Insurance, Govind Persad

Publications

The Affordable Care Act ("ACA") made health insurance accessible to many. Yet unaffordable insurance still abounds. This Article proposes a strategy for improving affordability that enables health insurance purchasers to choose, within reasonable limits, which treatments their insurance covers. After critiquing recently proposed strategies for improving affordability and reviewing past legal scholarship on content choice in health insurance, this Article introduces the "Affordable Choices" framework. This framework regulates choice in four ways. First, health plans should only exclude treatments whose merits are subject to reasonable disagreement among patients and physicians. Second, plans should appeal to purchasers' health-related values- values about …

The Case For Valuing Non-Health And Indirect Benefits, Govind Persad, Jessica Du Toit

Publications

Health policy is only one part of social policy. Although spending administered by the health sector constitutes a sizeable fraction of total state spending in most countries, other sectors such as education and transportation also represent major portions of national budgets. Additionally, though health is one important aspect of economic and social activity, people pursue many other goals in their social and economic lives. Similarly, direct benefits—those that are immediate results of health policy choices—are only a small portion of the overall impact of health policy. This chapter considers what weight health policy should give to its “spill-over effects,” namely …

Second Amendment Background Principles And Heller's Sensitive Places, Adam B. Sopko

Publications

Judges and commentators have widely acknowledged that history enjoys a privileged status in Second Amendment cases, but its precise role is undertheorized and rarely controls case outcomes. In particular, courts have been unable to decide "sensitive places" cases—challenges to location-based gun laws—in a manner that adheres to Supreme Court precedent because existing Second Amendment doctrine lacks a test for sensitive places cases that uses history and tradition in a principled way. This Article proposes a solution to address that problem.

An untapped source of guidance is the Court’s takings jurisprudence. Interpreting their respective constitutional provisions, Justice Scalia observed that both …

Software As A Profession, Bryan H. Choi

Publications

No abstract provided.

Not Everything Is About Investors: The Case For Mandatory Stakeholder Disclosure, Ann Lipton

Publications

Corporations are required to disclose specific types of information to the public, but only the federal securities laws impose generalized disclosure obligations that produce a holistic overview of corporate operations. While these disclosures are intended to benefit investors, they are accessible to anyone, and thus have long been relied upon by regulators, competitors, employees, and local communities to provide a working portrait of the country’s economic life.

Today, that system is breaking down. Congress and the SEC have made it easier for companies to raise capital without triggering securities reporting obligations, allowing modern businesses to grow to enormous proportions while …

Ending Forced Labor In Ice Detention Centers: A New Approach, Jonathon J. Booth

Publications

No abstract provided.

An American's Guide To The Gdpr, Margot Kaminski, Meg Leta Jones

Publications

No abstract provided.

A Tale Of Two Privacy Laws: The Gdpr And The International Right To Privacy, Vivek Krishnamurthy

Publications

No abstract provided.

Public Purpose Finance: The Government's Role As Lender, Nadav Orian Peer

Publications

This Article explores the workings of Public Purpose Finance, and its role within the U.S. political economy. “Public Purpose Finance” (PPF) refers to the broad range of institutions through which the government extends credit to private borrowers in sectors like housing, education, agriculture and small business. At a total of $10 trillion, PPF roughly equals the entire U.S. corporate bond market, and is around one half of the U.S. Gross national debt (2018 figures). The Article begins by surveying and quantifying the scope of PPF. It then demonstrates that PPF enjoys a considerable degree of insulation from the federal budgetary …

‘‘Appearance Of Corruption’’: Linking Public Opinion And Campaign Finance Reform, Douglas M. Spencer, Alexander G. Theodoridis

Publications

At present, campaign finance regulations may only be justified if their primary purpose is to prevent quid pro quo corruption or the appearance of corruption. References to the ‘‘appearance of corruption’’ are ubiquitous in campaign finance decisions, yet courts have provided very little guidance about what the phrase means. In this article, we report findings from a broadly representative national survey in which we (1) directly ask respondents to identify behaviors that appear politically corrupt, and (2) indirectly measure perceptions of corruption using a novel paired-choice conjoint experiment asking respondents to choose which of two randomly generated candidates are more …

Hiv Law And Policy In The United States: A Tipping Point, Scott Skinner-Thompson

Publications

The fight to effectively treat and stop the spread of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) has made meaningful progress both in the United States and globally. But within the United States that progress has been uneven across various demographic groups and geographic areas, and has plateaued. While scientific advances have led to the development of medicine capable of both treating and preventing HIV, law and policy dictate who will have ready access to these medicines and other prevention techniques, and who will not. Law and policy also play a crucial role in determining whether HIV will be stigmatized, discouraging people …

Honoring Sally Jewell, Charles Wilkinson

Publications

No abstract provided.

Crowdfunding Issuers In The United States, Andrew A. Schwartz

Publications

Startup companies can now legally sell shares of stock, bonds, or other securities to the broad public using equity crowdfunding, a new type of online capital market modeled on Kickstarter and other reward crowdfunding websites. Through equity crowdfunding, entrepreneurs can go directly to the broad public (the “crowd”) for investment, without having to go through the usual (and costly) process of an initial public offering (IPO). Equity crowdfunding thus offers a chance for all entrepreneurs, regardless of their physical location, gender, or anything else, to solicit investors and raise capital.

In 2012, new federal legislation—the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) …

Administrative Law's Extraordinary Cases, Jonathan Skinner-Thompson

Publications

The Supreme Court's major questions doctrine is grounded in the Chevron framework. Reconstituting it as a "major rules" exception to Chevron or as a non-delegation principle are misguided and create greater uncertainty.

How Much Procedure Is Needed For Agencies To Change “Novel” Regulatory Policies?, Ming Hsu Chen

Publications

The use of guidance documents in administrative law has long been controversial and considered to be one of the most challenging aspects of administrative law. When an agency uses a guidance document to change or make policy, it need not provide notice to the public or allow comment on the new rule; this makes changes easier and faster and less subject to judicial review. Under the Obama Administration, guidance documents were used to implement policy shifts in many areas of administrative law, including civil rights issues such as transgender inclusion and campus sexual harassment and immigration law issues such as …

#Metoo And Mass Incarceration, Aya Gruber

Publications

This Symposium Guest Editor’s Note is an adapted version of the Introduction to The Feminist War on Crime: The Unexpected Role of Women’s Liberation in Mass Incarceration (UC Press 2020). The book examines how American feminists, in the quest to secure women’s protection from domestic violence and rape, often acted as soldiers in the war on crime by emphasizing white female victimhood, expanding the power of police and prosecutors, touting incarceration, and diverting resources toward law enforcement and away from marginalized communities Today, despite deep concerns over racist policing and mass incarceration, many feminists continue to assert that gender crime …

Contracts And Covid-19, Andrew A. Schwartz

Publications

No abstract provided.

A Recent Renaissance In Privacy Law, Margot Kaminski

Publications

Considering the recent increased attention to privacy law issues amid the typically slow pace of legal change.

(Carbon) Farming Our Way Out Of Climate Change, Alexia Brunet Marks

Publications

Numerous climate-related emergencies highlight the challenges and urgency posed by climate change: the 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Report, the Global Climate Action Summit in California and international student walkouts, to name a few. While the IPCC Report sent an urgent cry to reduce total emissions and to achieve specific results—45% reduction by 2030 and net-zero emissions by 2050—reductions need to be combined with capturing and storing atmospheric carbon dioxide. Scientific studies have shown that an annual increase of 0.4% of carbon stored in soils would make it possible to stop the present increase in atmospheric CO2.

This …

Citizenship Denied: Implications Of The Naturalization Backlog For Noncitizens In The Military, Ming H. Chen

Publications

The immigration system is in crisis. Long lines of asylum seekers at the border and immigrants in the interior spend years waiting for their day in immigration court. This is true in the agencies that process applications for immigration benefits from legal immigrants as well. Since 2016, delays in naturalization have increased to historic proportions. The problem is even worse for military naturalizations, where delays are accompanied by denials and overall declines in military naturalizations. It is the latest front in the battle on legal migration and citizenship.

These impediments to citizenship demonstrate an extreme form of policies collectively dubbed …

Reproductive Health Care Exceptionalism And The Pandemic, Helen Norton

Publications

No abstract provided.

The Failure Of The Criminal Procedure Revolution, William T. Pizzi

Publications

No abstract provided.

Monetizing Infringement, Kristelia García

Publications

The deterrence of copyright infringement and the evils of piracy have long been an axiomatic focus of both legislators and scholars. The conventional view is that infringement must be curbed and/or punished in order for copyright to fulfill its purported goals of incentivizing creation and ensuring access to works. This Essay proves this view false by demonstrating that some rightsholders don’t merely tolerate, but actually encourage infringement, both explicitly and implicitly, in a variety of different situations and for one common reason: they benefit from it. Rightsholders’ ability to monetize infringement destabilizes long-held but problematic assumptions about both rightsholder preferences, …

Making Litigating Citizenship More Fair, Ming H. Chen

Publications

No abstract provided.