Digital Commons Network^™

The Adjudication Business, Pamela K. Bookman

Faculty Scholarship

The recent proliferation of international commercial courts around the world is changing the global business of adjudication. The rise of these courts also challenges the traditional accounts of the competitive relationship between and among courts and arbitral tribunals for this business. London and New York have long been considered the forum of choice in international commercial contracts—whether parties opt for litigation or arbitration. More recently, however, English-language-friendly international commercial courts have been established in China (2018), Singapore (2015), Qatar (2009), Dubai (2004), the Netherlands (2019), Germany (2018), France (2010), and beyond.

The emerging scholarship addressing these new courts tends to …

Criminal Histories And Criminal Futures, Youngjae Lee

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Frequent Filer Shareholder Suits In The Wake Of Trulia: An Empirical Study, Sean J. Griffith

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Public Official, Figures, And Controversies In Minnesota Defamation Law, Michael K. Steenson

Faculty Scholarship

In Minnesota, the plaintiff in a common law defamation claim is entitled to recover presumed damages in libel and slander per se cases. Those rules change when the First Amendment is injected into defamation cases when the plaintiff is a public official or figure or is a private person involved in a public controversy. A plaintiff who is a public official or figure must prove not only the elements of the common law defamation claim, but also that the defamatory communication was a false statement of fact and prove by clear and convincing evidence that it was made with actual …

Book Review Essay: Jewish And American Law: A Comparative Study. (Vols. 1 And 2) By Samuel J. Levine, Marie Failinger

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Victim Impact Statements And Corporate Sex Crimes, Erin L. Sheley

Faculty Scholarship

This Article argues that more frequently including victim impact statements during the sentencing phase of corporate criminal trials would help lay foundation for legislative reforms geared towards punishing corporations on the occasions where genuinely corporate misconduct, such as that of USAG and the Weinstein Company, can be said to have caused sexual offenses. The Article proceeds in three Parts. First, I argue that criminal enforcement against corporations is generally untethered from harm to victims, and that this thwarts one of the most coherent justifications for the existence of corporate criminal liability. Next, I argue that a focus on victim narratives …

Hierarchies Of Elitism And Gender: The Bluebook And The Alwd Guide, Steven K. Homer

Faculty Scholarship

Hierarchies persist in legal academia. Some of these, while in plain view, are not so obvious because they manifest in seemingly small, mundane choices. Synecdoche is a rhetorical device used to show how one detail in a story tells the story of the whole. This Article examines hierarchies of elitism and gender through a lens of synecdoche. The focus is on the choice of citation guide. Even something as seemingly benign and neutral as choosing a citation guide can reveal hierarchies of elitism and gender bias in legal education and the legal profession. Put another way, the choice of citation …

Towards A More Ethical Ll.M. Degree: Let's Give International Lawyers The Value They Deserve, Carrie Teitcher, Kathleen Darvil

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Paper Terrorists: Independence Movements And The Terrorism Bar, Pooja R. Dadhania

Faculty Scholarship

This Article explores the application of the terrorism bar in immigration law to noncitizens who have participated in an independence movement. It proposes a uniform standard that immigration adjudicators can use to determine whether a foreign entity is a state in order to promote accurate applications of the terrorism bar. The terrorism bar in the Immigration and Nationality Act is broad — it can bar most forms of immigration relief, including asylum, and reaches far beyond ordinary definitions of terrorism. For example, the terrorism bar can block immigration relief for noncitizens who nonviolently supported a militia fighting for independence against …

The Damaging Myth Of Patent Exhaustion, Sean O'Connor

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Anticipating Procedural Innovation: How And When Parties Calibrate Procedure Through Contract, Henry Allen Blair

Faculty Scholarship

Despite a vast literature on contract theory, scholars are only just scratching the surface of understanding how parties design their contracts in the real world. This shortfall is particularly true of procedural customizations. Contrary to some early commentators’ estimates, in a small but significant set of circumstances, parties engage in a diverse range of procedural customization. To date, however, scholars have struggled to identify and explain the patterns of ex ante procedural contracting.

This Article argues that the first step toward understanding how transactional attorneys harness the potential of procedural autonomy is to recognize that procedural customization functions most effectively …

Teaching And Learning Law And Business: An Open Resource Tool, John O. Sonsteng, Willow Najjar Anderson, Michael Carlson, John Edell, Alexander Koch, Samuel Mccollough, Hannah Mohs

Faculty Scholarship

This dissertation examines the impacts of business law education through a multi-layered review of surveys, data, and literature. The authors examine what law schools across the country offer, explore research conducted in partnership with the Minnesota and American Bar Associations, and provide a systemic review of the relevant literature. The data shows attorneys resoundingly do not believe law school coursework prepared them adequately for the business of law.

Despite the practical changes that have been made to law school education since the 1960s to the present, there is still a disconnect between what law schools say they will provide and …

“The Worst Idea Ever”: Lessons From One Law School’S Embrace Of Online Learning, Eric S. Janus

Faculty Scholarship

This essay explores one law school's contrarian and pioneering embrace of online education into the core of its J.D. program, a five-year journey undertaken by William Mitchell College of Law (now Mitchell Hamline School ofLaw). This essay makes a simple point. Online pedagogy ought to be part of the palette of tools available for the design of J.D. programs. But placing it at the core of a J.D. program is not universally to be desired. Like any pedagogy, these online tools have their strengths and their weaknesses. The particular combination of tools and methods represents a question of design: of …

Furtive Blackness: On Blackness And Being, T. Anansi Wilson

Faculty Scholarship

Furtive Blackness: On Blackness and Being (“Furtive Blackness”) and The Strict Scrutiny of Black and BlaQueer Life (“Strict Scrutiny”) take a fresh approach to both criminal law and constitutional law; particularly as they apply to African descended peoples in the United States. This is an intervention as to the description of the terms of Blackness in light of the social order but, also, an exposure of the failures and gaps of law. This is why the categories as we have them are inefficient to account for Black life. The way legal scholars have encountered and understood the language of law …

The Strict Scrutiny Of Black And Blaqueer Life, T. Anansi Wilson

Faculty Scholarship

Furtive Blackness: On Blackness and Being (“Furtive Blackness”) and The Strict Scrutiny of Black and BlaQueer Life (“Strict Scrutiny”) take a fresh approach to both criminal law and constitutional law; particularly as they apply to African descended peoples in the United States. This is an intervention as to the description of the terms of Blackness in light of the social order but, also, an exposure of the failures and gaps of law. This is why the categories as we have them are inefficient to account for Black life. The way legal scholars have encountered and understood the language of law …

The Limited Effect Of “Maximum Effect”, Daniel S. Kleinberger, Douglas K. Moll

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Tools For Regulators In A Changing Climate: Proposed Standards, State Policies, And Case Studies From The Western Grid, Adam D. Orford

Faculty Scholarship

With climate change a present reality, governments are confronting the need to adapt their regulatory planning processes to withstand new and uncertain climate risks. This Article provides three new resources to support this essential work. First, it develops a new standard for assessing the quality of climate adaptation decisionmaking, focusing on defining the problem, quantifying adaptation benefits, and evaluating equitable distribution of risk. Second, it reviews California’s climate adaptation policy development efforts between 1988 and 2018—from the state’s early efforts to study the problem, to later attempts at statewide strategic planning, until more recent work to integrate adaptation into existing …

Interpreting Contracts In A Regulatory State, Aditi Bagchi

Faculty Scholarship

Some scholars would limit courts to the text of written agreements when interpreting contracts on the theory that parties meant what they said, and said what they meant. Other scholars would have courts take into account the factual context surrounding contract formation. Both sides of this debate assume that contract interpretation is largely limited to reconstructing contracting parties’ intentions.

This assumption is mistaken. Since the overturning of Lochner v New York, contracting parties no longer have exclusive authority over contracts. State authority to regulate contract came at the expense of unbridled private authority. A more limited conception of contracting …

The New Tax Legislative And Regulatory Process, Rebecca Kysar

Faculty Scholarship

This paper compares the enactment and implementation process for the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) to prior tax reform acts, as well as situates it within other developments in the legislative process more generally. It details how the 2017 enactment process solidifies reconciliation as the primary vehicle for the enactment of major tax measures, a trend nearly two decades in the making. The ambitious scope of the TCJA, as well as the rushed and partisan reconciliation process by which it was enacted, has led to ambiguities and instability in the legislation. These features have, in turn, posed an …

Special Education Disparities Are Social Determinants Of Health: A Role For Medical-Legal Partnerships, Karen Bonuck, Leah Hill

Faculty Scholarship

Problem: Education is a key social determinant of health. The federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) purportedly affords children the right to a free and appropriate education. Yet, racial, ethnic, and economic disparities exist regarding appropriate identification and classification of children with needs for special education, and access to services.

Purpose: This article first highlights gaps and disparities in special educational services, and their structural linkage to poverty. The second section describe the first years of a medical–legal collaboration between a University Center of Excellence in Developmental Disabilities (UCEDD) and Fordham University, focused on special education.

Key Points: The …

Cross-Age Peer Mentoring In A Low-Income Rural Community: A 20-Year Retrospective On A School-Community Partnership, Donna M. San Antonio Dr.

Faculty Scholarship

Cross-age peer mentoring programs are not always effective, and some researchers have questioned the effectiveness of this model. In this article, we use evaluation data to describe a project that has been going for twenty years. The project enrolls high school students as mentors to struggling elementary school students. The article reviews the current literature and details the perceptions of mentors and mentees regarding relational and academic benefits and disappointments. Both mentors and mentees report that the project gave them purpose, motivation, and a sense of belonging in the school and community. They also describe frustrations and regrets. Some findings …

Video Advance Directives: Growth And Benefits Of Audiovisual Recording, Thaddeus Pope

Faculty Scholarship

The key question in Cruzan v. Director, Missouri Department of Health was one of substantiation and evidence: how can the incapacitated patient’s surrogate decision maker prove that the health care decisions she makes on the patient’s behalf are the same health care decisions that the patient would have made for herself? Answering this question, the Court observed that an advance directive would constitute adequate proof because an advance directive constitutes clear and convincing evidence of a patient’s wishes.

Today, clinicians and policymakers no longer focus on the constitutional question of how much evidence state law may require from a patient’s …

Using Dispute Resolution Skills To Heal A Community, Sharon Press

Faculty Scholarship

On July 6, 2016, Philando Castile, an African-American male, wasshot and killed by a police officer during a traffic stop in Falcon Heights, Minnesota. In the aftermath of this shooting, there were several challenging meetings of the City Council where protestors demanded answers. In response,the Mayor of Falcon Heights reached out to dispute resolution professionals to help him design a two-track process which included a Task Force to propose policy changes to the City Council and a Community Conversations series to provide an opportunity for healing.

In this article, I will describe the process design for the community conversations, the …

Three Conceptions Of Corporate Crime (And One Avenue For Reform), Miriam H. Baer

Faculty Scholarship

One of corporate criminal law’s most enduring mysteries is the persistence of the deferred prosecution agreement (DPA), the means by which federal prosecutors often dispose of corporate prosecutions. This extra-judicial settlement device attracts near-universal criticism. Progressives complain that DPA settlements are too weak and allow corporate managers to treat enforcement as just another cost of doing business. Good-government advocates worry that the process that generates these agreements is often too opaque. And corporate defenders claim that they impose unnecessary and inefficient costs on legitimate operations. Despite these criticisms, DPAs have remained one of the federal prosecutor’s key tools for addressing …

Reconsidering Confidential Settlements In The #Metoo Era, Minna J. Kotkin

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Hendiadys In The Language Of The Law: What Part Of "And" Don't You Understand?, Elizabeth Fajans, Mary R. Falk

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Proceduralist Inversion–A Response To Skeel, Edward Janger, Adam J. Levitin

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Information Shortfalls Of Prosecuting Irresponsible Executives, Miriam H. Baer

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Buyer Beware: Variation And Opacity In Esg And Esg Index Funds, Dana Brakman Reiser, Anne Tucker

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Contributions Of William Funk To American Constitutional Law Scholarship, William Araiza

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.