Digital Commons Network^™

Aggressive Encounters & White Fragility: Deconstructing The Trope Of The Angry Black Woman, Trina Jones, Kimberly Jade Norwood

Faculty Scholarship

Black women in the United States are the frequent targets of bias-filled interactions in which aggressors: (1) denigrate Black women; and (2) blame those women who elect to challenge the aggressor’s acts and the bias that fuels them. This Article seeks to raise awareness of these “aggressive encounters” and to challenge a prevailing narrative about Black women and anger. It examines the myriad circumstances (both professional and social) in which aggressive encounters occur and the ways in which these encounters expose gender and racial hierarchies. It then explores how the intersectional nature of Black women’s identities triggers a particularized stereotype …

"Cybervandalism" Or "Digital Act Of War?" America's Muddled Approach To Cyber Incidents Will Not Deter More Crises, Charles J. Dunlap Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

If experts say a "malicious [cyber] code"' has "similar effects" to a "physical bomb,"' and that code actually causes "a stunning breach of global internet stability," is it really accurate to call that event merely an instance of a "cyber attack"?

Moreover, can you really expect to deter state and non-state actors from employing such code and similarly hostile cyber methodologies if all they think that they are risking is being labeled as a cyber-vandal subject only to law enforcement measures? Or might they act differently if it were made clear to them that such activity is considered an "armed …

Brief Of Professors At Law And Business Schools As Amicus Curiae In Support Of Respondents, James D. Cox, J. Robert Brown Jr., Lyman Johnson, Lawrence W. Treece, Joan Macleod Heminway

Faculty Scholarship

This Amicus Brief was filed with the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of nearly 50 law and business faculty in the United States and Canada who have a common interest in ensuring a proper interpretation of the statutory securities regulation framework put in place by the U.S. Congress. Specifically, all amici agree that Item 303 of the Securities and Exchange Commission's Regulation S-K creates a duty to disclose for purposes of Rule 10b-5(b) under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.
The Court’s affirmation of a duty to disclose would have little effect on existing practice. Under the current state of …

Signing Statements And Presidentializing Legislative History, John De Figueiredo, Edward H. Stiglitz

Faculty Scholarship

Presidents often attach statements to the bills they sign into law, purporting to celebrate, construe, or object to provisions in the statute. Though long a feature of U.S. lawmaking, the President has avowedly attempted to use these signing statements as tool of strategic influence over judicial decision making since the 1980s — as a way of creating “presidential legislative history” to supplement and, at times, supplant the traditional congressional legislative history conventionally used by the courts to interpret statutes. In this Article, we examine a novel dataset of judicial opinion citations to presidential signing statements to conduct the most comprehensive …

The Fragile Promise Of Open-File Discovery, Ben Grunwald

Faculty Scholarship

Under traditional rules of criminal discovery, defendants are entitled to little prosecutorial evidence and are thus forced to negotiate plea agreements and prepare for trial in the dark. In an effort to expand defendants’ discovery rights, a number of states have recently enacted “open-file” statutes, which require the government to share the fruits of its investigation with the defense. Legal scholars have widely supported these reforms, claiming that they level the playing field and promote judicial efficiency by decreasing trials and speeding up guilty pleas. But these predictions are based largely on intuition and anecdotal data without extended theoretical analysis …

Panel Assignment In The Federal Courts Of Appeals, Marin K. Levy

Faculty Scholarship

It is common knowledge that the federal courts of appeals typically hear cases in panels of three judges and that the composition of the panel can have significant consequences for case outcomes and for legal doctrine more generally. Yet neither legal scholars nor social scientists have focused on the question of how judges are selected for their panels. Instead, a substantial body of scholarship simply assumes that panel assignment is random. This Article provides what, up until this point, has been a missing account of panel assignment. Drawing on a multiyear qualitative study of five circuit courts, including in-depth interviews …

Treaty Exit In The United States: Insights From The United Kingdom Or South Africa?, Curtis A. Bradley, Laurence R. Helfer

Faculty Scholarship

This essay, a contribution to an AJIL Unbound symposium on “Treaty Exit at the Interface of Domestic and International Law,” compares treaty exit in the United States, the United Kingdom, and South Africa. After examining the longstanding practice of unilateral presidential withdrawals from treaties in the United States and the refusal to date of U.S. courts to review the constitutionality of that practice, the essay summarizes recent judicial decisions in the United Kingdom and South Africa holding that parliamentary approval was required before these nations could withdraw from treaties committing them, respectively, to the European Union and the International Criminal …

Three Models Of Adjudicative Representation, Margaret H. Lemos

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Brief Of Amicus Curiae Children’S Law Clinic At Duke Law School Advocates For Children’S Services Of Legal Aid Of North Carolina Public Schools First Nc, Jane R. Wettach, Peggy Nicholson, K. Ricky Watson Jr., Celia Pistolis, Aisha Forte, Jennifer Story, Kevin Zhao

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Social Justice And Silicon Valley: A Perspective On The Apple-Fbi Case And The “Going Dark” Debate, Charles J. Dunlap Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Feminism And Economic Inequality, Katharine T. Bartlett

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Domicile Dismantled, Kerry Abrams, Kathryn Barber

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Cumulative Constitutional Rights, Kerry Abrams, Brandon L. Garrett

Faculty Scholarship

Cumulative constitutional rights are ubiquitous. Plaintiffs litigate multiple constitutional violations, or multiple harms, and judges use multiple constitutional provisions to inform interpretation. Yet judges, litigants, and scholars have often criticized the notion of cumulative rights, including in leading Supreme Court rulings, such as Lawrence v. Texas, Employment Division v. Smith, and Miranda v. Arizona. Recently, the Court attempted to clarify some of this confusion. In its landmark opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges, the Court struck down state bans on same-sex marriage by pointing to several distinct but overlapping protections inherent in the Due Process Clause, including the right to individual …

Family Reunification And The Security State, Kerry Abrams

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Capital Jurors In An Era Of Death Penalty Decline, Brandon L. Garrett, Daniel Krauss, Nicholas Scurich

Faculty Scholarship

The state of public opinion regarding the death penalty has not experienced such flux since the late 1960s. Death sentences and executions have reached their lowest annual numbers since the early 1970s and today, the public appears fairly evenly split in its views on the death penalty. In this Essay, we explore, first, whether these changes in public opinion mean that fewer people will be qualified to serve on death penalty trials as jurors, and second, whether potential jurors are affected by changes in the practice of the death penalty. We conducted surveys of persons reporting for jury duty at …

The Crime Lab In The Age Of The Genetic Panopticon, Brandon L. Garrett

Faculty Scholarship

"Scientific evidence really nails this man to the wall," the Harris County, Texas prosecutor told the jurors in closing statements. At trial, George Rodriguez claimed he was innocent and that he had been working a factory the day of the crime. The prosecutor emphasized, however, that the blood type of swabs taken from the victim showed that Rodriguez did commit the crime and that a hair from the crime scene matched him. But seventeen years later, the same hair was tested again, this time using DNA analysis, and the evidence cleared Rodriguez and ultimately led to the crime crime lab …

Constitutional Reasonableness, Brandon L. Garrett

Faculty Scholarship

The concept of reasonableness pervades constitutional doctrine. The concept has long served to structure common law doctrines from negligence to criminal law, but its rise in constitutional law is more recent and diverse. This Article aims to unpack surprisingly different formulations of what the term reasonable means in constitutional doctrine, which actors it applies to, and how it is used. First, the underlying concept of reasonableness that courts adopt varies, with judges using competing objective, subjective, utility-based or custom-based standards. For some rights, courts incorporate more than one usage at the same time. Second, the objects of the reasonableness standard …

The American Death Penalty Decline, Brandon L. Garrett, Alexander Jakubow, Ankur Desai

Faculty Scholarship

American death sentences have both declined and become concentrated in a small group of counties. In his dissenting opinion in Glossip v. Gross in 2014, Justice Stephen Breyer highlighted how from 2004 to 2006, "just 29 counties (fewer than 1% of counties in the country) accounted for approximately half of all death sentences imposed nationwide." That decline has become more dramatic. In 2015, fifty-one defendants were sentenced to death in thirty-eight counties. In 2016, thirty-one defendants were sentenced to death in twenty-eight counties. In the mid-1990s, by way of contrast, over 300 people were sentenced to death in as many …

The Decline Of The Virginia (And American) Death Penalty, Brandon L. Garrett

Faculty Scholarship

The American death penalty is disappearing. Death sentences and executions have reached the lowest levels seen in three decades. Even the states formerly most aggressive in pursuit of death sentences have seen death sentences steadily decline. Take Virginia, which has the highest rate of executions of any death penalty state, and which has executed the third highest number of prisoners since the 1970s. How times have changed. There has not been a new death sentence in Virginia since 2011. Only seven counties have imposed death sentences in the past decade in Virginia. There are now two or fewer trials a …

The Public Interest In Corporate Settlements, Brandon L. Garrett

Faculty Scholarship

Corporate settlements are proliferating in form and function. They include consent decrees, corporate integrity agreements, deferred prosecution agreements, non-prosecution agreements, leniency agreements, and plea bargains. Enforcers at the federal and state level enter an array of administrative, civil, and criminal resolutions of enforcement actions against companies. The reach of these settlements is global, and corporate fines have reached new records, with penalties in the hundreds of billions of dollars affecting entire industries and economies. These settlements have not been studied together as a subject, perhaps because they span very different fields, from antitrust to banking, environmental law, health law, and …

A Tactical Fourth Amendment, Brandon L. Garrett, Seth Stoughton

Faculty Scholarship

What rules regulate when police can kill? As ongoing public controversy over high-profile police killings drives home, the civil, criminal, and administrative rules governing police use of force all remain deeply contested. Members of the public may assume that police rules and procedures provide detailed direction for when officers can use deadly force. However, many agencies train officers to respond to threats according to a force "continuum" that does not provide hardedged rules for when or how police can use force or deadly force. Nor, as recent cases have illustrated, does a criminal prosecution under state law readily lend itself …

Exemplary Legal Writing 2016: Books Selected By Our Respectable Authorities: Five Recommendations, Femi Cadmus

Faculty Scholarship

A brief review of five recommended exemplary legal books published in 2017.

Benchmark Regulation, Gina-Gail S. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

Benchmarks are metrics that are deeply embedded in the financial markets. They are essential to the efficient functioning of the markets and are used in a wide variety of ways—from pricing oil to setting interest rates for consumer lending to valuing complex financial instruments. In recent years, benchmarks have also been at the epicenter of numerous, multi-year market manipulation scandals. Oil traders, for example, deliberately execute trades to drive benchmarks lower artificially, allowing the traders to capitalize on the manipulated benchmarks. This ensures that later trades relying on the benchmarks will be more profitable than they otherwise would have been. …

Patterns Of Error, Brandon L. Garrett

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Limits Of “Limitations And Exceptions” In Copyright Law, Jerome H. Reichman

Faculty Scholarship

The “designated exceptions” approach in the European Union and elsewhere becomes obsolete when faced with the needs of digital science to scrutinize and analyze all relevant research results pertinent to any scientific inquiry. Even the fair use exception rooted in U.S. law, while more agile on a case by case approach, is challenged by the scientific communities’ need to reproduce and analyze all available material relevant to any given research project and by the ability of automated knowledge discovery tools to do just that. A more promising model for reform is the “some rights reserved” concept of private ordering that …

The Evolution Of Chinese Property Law: Stick By Stick?, Shitong Qiao

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Convicting The Innocent Redux, Brandon L. Garrett

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Constitutional Rights Of Corporations In The United States, Brandon L. Garrett

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Contagion Without Relief: Democratic Experimentalism And Regulating The Use Of Antibiotics In Food-Producing Animals, Emilie Aguirre

Faculty Scholarship

We are progressing toward a post-antibiotic world: Antibiotic drugs that could once treat basic infections are losing their effectiveness at an accelerating rate. If this trend continues, common illnesses will become potentially deadly, and more complex procedures-chemotherapy, surgeries, dialysis-will carry much more significant risk. The modern industrial agricultural system may have contributed significantly to this state of affairs. The vast majority of antibiotics sold in the United States each year an estimated 70 to 80 percent-are for use in animal agriculture. These antibiotics are primarily administered to food-producing animals at routine, low doses as a cheap method of promoting faster …

Functionality Screens, Christopher Buccafusco, Mark A. Lemley

Faculty Scholarship

Among intellectual property (IP) doctrines, only utility patents should protect function. Utility patents offer strong rights that place constraints on competition, but they only arise when inventors can demonstrate substantial novelty after a costly examination. Copyrights, trademarks, and design patents are much easier to obtain than utility patents, and they often last much longer. Accordingly, to prevent claimants from obtaining “backdoor patents,” the other IP doctrines must screen out functionality. As yet, however, courts and scholars have paid little systematic attention to the ways in which these functionality screens operate across and within IP law.

We have four tasks in …