Digital Commons Network^™

Who Tells Your Story: The Legality Of And Shift In Racial Preferences Within Casting Practices, Nicole Ligon

Faculty Scholarship

Expressing racial preferences in casting calls and hiring practices is nothing new. Producers of television shows, movies, and Broadway musicals have regularly and explicitly sought to hire actors and actresses with certain physical characteristics, including race, in casting their productions. And, given that the industry seemingly accepted this standard when it favored white talent, the public heard little about it. To the extent controversy arose, courts quelled concerns in a swift and easy fashion, without consideration of the societal harms or impacts that stereotyped or limited portrayals of minorities in entertainment could have on the public’s perception of people of …

Engineered Credit Default Swaps: Innovative Or Manipulative?, Gina-Gail S. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

Credit default swaps (“CDS”) are, once again, making waves. Maligned for their role in the 2008 financial crisis and condemned by the Vatican, investors are once more utilizing CDS to achieve results of questionable market benefit. A CDS is a financial contract that allows investors to “bet” on whether a borrower will default on its loan. However, rather than waiting to see how their bets pan out, some CDS investors are collaborating with financially distressed borrowers to guarantee the profitability of their CDS positions—“engineering” the CDS’ outcome. Under the CDS contract, these collaborations are not prohibited, yet they have roiled …

State Standing And Cooperative Federalism, Ernest A. Young

Faculty Scholarship

State lawsuits challenging federal policy generally encounter arguments that the states lack standing to sue, either under Article III’s “case or controversy” clause or under various prudential standing doctrines. These arguments have often taken novel forms—such as claims that states’ injuries are “self-inflicted” or offset by other benefits of federal policies—that have few precedents or analogs in the standing jurisprudence governing suits by private individuals. The United States has taken the position, in other words, that states should have special disabilities in filing lawsuits that would not apply to ordinary litigants. Likewise, prominent academics have argued that uniquely narrow standing …

Brief Of Public Law Scholars As Amici Curiae In Support Of Petitioners, Chris Dove, Ernest A. Young

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Conflicted Advice Problem: A Response To Conflicts & Capital Allocation, Gina-Gail S. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Defending Refugees: A Case For Protective Procedural Safeguards In The Persecutor Bar Analysis, Charles Shane Ellison

Faculty Scholarship

For refugees and asylum seekers, application of the so-called persecutor bar is tantamount to a death sentence. However, the Board of Immigration Appeals -- without any real deliberation--has arrived at an interpretation of a generic-relief, burdenshifting regulation to allow for application of the persecutor bar based upon very little evidence. Even mere membership in a group with a poor human rights record has been held sufficient to switch the burden of proof and apply the bar. While the recent holding of Matter of Negusie, 27 I&N Dec. 347 (June 28, 2018) can be read and understood largely as a victory …

Expropriation In The Name Of Rights: Transferable Development Rights (Tdrs), The Bundle Of Sticks And Chinese Politics, Shitong Qiao

Faculty Scholarship

Through an in-depth empirical investigation, this article discloses for the first time how and why land reform programs in the name of empowering and enriching farmers have been serving the purpose of Chinese local governments to compromise the rights revolution in the Chinese national expropriation regime. The concept of “transferable development rights” (TDRs) is simple: development rights from one parcel of land are lifted up and transferred to another. Upon a detailed examination of land tickets in Chongqing and Chengdu, the southwestern Chinese application of TDRs, this article reveals that local governments in both cities have created schemes of land …

Combating Silence In The Profession, Veronica Root Martinez

Faculty Scholarship

Members of the legal profession have recently taken a public stance against a wave of oppressive policies and practices. From helping immigrants stranded in airports to protesting in the face of white nationalists, lawyers are advocating for equality within and throughout American society each and every day. Yet as these lawyers go out into the world on behalf of others, they do so while their very profession continues to struggle with its own discriminatory past.

For decades, the legal profession purposefully excluded women, religious minorities, and people of color from its ranks, while instilling a select group of individuals with …

Legislation And Comment: The Making Of The § 199a Regulations, Shu-Yi Oei, Leigh Osofsky

Faculty Scholarship

In 2017, Congress passed major tax legislation at warp speed. After enactment, it fell to the Treasury Department to write regulations clarifying and implementing the new law. To assure democratic legitimacy in making regulations, administrative law provides that an agency must issue a notice of proposed rulemaking, followed by an opportunity for the public to comment (so-called “notice and comment”). But, after the 2017 tax overhaul, many sophisticated actors did not wait until the issuance of a notice of proposed rulemaking to comment, instead going to the Treasury Department immediately with comments designed to influence the regulations.

In this Article, …

Constituencies And Control In Statutory Drafting: Interviews With Government Tax Counsels, Shu-Yi Oei, Leigh Z. Osofsky

Faculty Scholarship

Tax statutes have long been derided as convoluted and unreadable. But there is little existing research about drafting practices that helps us contextualize such critiques. In this Article, we conduct the first in-depth empirical examination of how tax law drafting and formulation decisions are made. We report findings from interviews with government counsels who participated in the tax legislative process over the past four decades. Our interviews revealed that tax legislation drafting decisions are both targeted to and controlled by experts. Most counsels did not consider statutory formulation or readability important, as long as substantive meaning was accurate. Many held …

Machine Learning At The Patent Office: Lessons For Patents And Administrative Law, Arti K. Rai

Faculty Scholarship

The empirical data indicate that a relatively small increment of additional U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (“Patent Office” or “USPTO”) investment in prior art search at the initial examination stage could be a cost-effective mechanism for improving accuracy in the patent system. This contribution argues that machine learning provides a promising arena for such investment. Notably, the use of machine learning in patent examination does not raise the same potent concerns about individual rights and discrimination that it raises in other areas of administrative and judicial process. To be sure, even an apparently easy case like prior art search at …

Systematic Regulation Of Systemic Risk, Steven L. Schwarcz

Faculty Scholarship

A decade after the financial crisis, regulators worry that the regulation enacted to help stabilize the financial system may be insufficient to prevent another crisis. Examining that regulation with the benefit of hindsight, this Article finds that much has been accomplished but much remains to be done. Most of the existing regulation is ad hoc, providing “tools” rather than a coherent framework. It also is unduly entity-based, largely ignoring markets and other critical elements of the financial system. Furthermore, some of that entity-based regulation is punitive and misguided, responding to the human intuition to assign blame for harm. Financial stability …

Detention As Deterrence, Emily Ryo

Faculty Scholarship

Does immigration detention deter unauthorized migration? This is a pressing question with critical policy implications given that the U.S. government has detained tens of thousands of migrants in reliance on this deterrence rationale. Briefly described, the federal government has argued that “one particular individual may be civilly detained for the sake of sending a message” to others “who may be considering immigration. In recent times, the potential migrants to whom the federal government has sought to send such a message are, by and large, from Mexico and Central America. Emerging empirical research, however, provides little to no evidence that detention …

Presidential Responses To Protest: Lessons Jefferson Davis Never Learned, Ashlee Paxton-Turner

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Beyond The Numbers: Substantive Gender Diversity In Boardrooms, Yaron Nili

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Judging Risk: The Use Of Risk Assessment In Sentencing, Brandon L. Garrett, John Monahan

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Wealth, Equal Protection, And Due Process, Brandon L. Garrett

Faculty Scholarship

Increasingly, constitutional litigation challenging wealth inequality focuses on the intersection of the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses. That intersection—between equality and due process—deserves far more careful exploration. What I call “equal process” claims arise from a line of Supreme Court and lower court cases in which wealth inequality is the central concern. For example, the Supreme Court in Bearden v. Georgia conducted analysis of a claim that criminal defendants were treated differently based on wealth in which due process and equal protection principles converged. That equal process connection is at the forefront of a wave of national litigation concerning …

Introduction To The Symposium On Transnational Futures Of International Labor Law, Adelle Blackett, Laurence R. Helfer

Faculty Scholarship

The centenary of the international organization whose constitution proclaims that social justice is indispensable for universal and lasting peace is too pivotal to go unnoticed. Established during the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, the International Labour Organization (ILO) was once a paradigmatic subject of study by international legal scholars and international relations theorists. A uniquely tripartite institution whose governance structure comprises workers, employers, and governments, the ILO survived the beleaguered League of Nations to become the first United Nations specialized agency in 1946. Its staff narrowly escaped the rise of fascism in Europe and settled into a wartime home at …

Details Of Deformable Part Models For Automatically Georeferencing Historical Map Images, Nicholas Howe, Jerod Weinman, John Gouwar, Aabid Shamji

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

Libraries are digitizing their collections of maps from all eras, generating increasingly large online collections of historical cartographic resources. Aligning such maps to a modern geographic coordinate system greatly increases their utility. This work presents a method for such automatic georeferencing, matching raster image content to GIS vector coordinate data. Given an approximate initial alignment that has already been projected from a spherical geographic coordinate system to a Cartesian map coordinate system, a probabilistic shape-matching scheme determines an optimized match between the GIS contours and ink in the binarized map image. Us- ing an evaluation set of 20 historical maps …

The Ncaa And The Irs: Life At The Intersection Of College Sports And The Federal Income Tax, Richard L. Schmalbeck, Lawrence A. Zelenak

Faculty Scholarship

Few organizational acronyms are more familiar to Americans than those of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Although neither organization is particularly popular, both loom large in American life and popular culture. Because there is a tax aspect to just about everything, it should come as no surprise that the domains of the NCAA and the IRS overlap in a number of ways. For many decades, the strong tendency in those areas has been for college athletics to enjoy unreasonably generous tax treatment-sometimes because of the failure of the IRS to enforce the tax …

Dying Constitutionalism And The Fourteenth Amendment, Ernest A. Young

Faculty Scholarship

The notion of a “living Constitution” often rests on an implicit assumption that important constitutional values will “grow” in such a way as to make the Constitution more attractive over time. But there are no guarantees: What can grow can also wither and die. This essay, presented as the 2018 Robert F. Boden Lecture at Marquette University Law School, marks the sesquicentennial of the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification as a powerful charter of liberty and equality for black Americans. But for much of its early history, the Fourteenth Amendment’s meaning moved in reverse, overwhelmed by the end of Reconstruction, the gradual …

Visiting Judges, Marin K. Levy

Faculty Scholarship

Despite the fact that Article III judges hold particular seats on particular courts, the federal system rests on judicial interchangeability. Hundreds of judges “visit” other courts each year and collectively help decide thousands of appeals. Anyone from a retired Supreme Court Justice to a judge from the U.S. Court of International Trade to a district judge from out of circuit may come and hear cases on a given court of appeals. Although much has been written about the structure of the federal courts and the nature of Article III judgeships, little attention has been paid to the phenomenon of “sitting …

The End Of Intuition-Based High-Crime Areas, Ben Grunwald, Jeffrey Fagan

Faculty Scholarship

In 2000, the Supreme Court held in Illinois v. Wardlow that a suspect’s presence in a “high-crime area” is relevant in determining whether an officer has reasonable suspicion to conduct an investigative stop. Despite the importance of the decision, the Court provided no guidance about what that standard means, and over fifteen years later, we still have no idea how police officers understand and apply it in practice. This Article conducts the first empirical analysis of Wardlow by examining data on over two million investigative stops conducted by the New York Police Department from 2007 to 2012.

Our results suggest …

Grounding Originalism, William Baude, Stephen E. Sachs

Faculty Scholarship

How should we interpret the Constitution? The “positive turn” in legal scholarship treats constitutional interpretation, like the interpretation of statutes or contracts, as governed by legal rules grounded in actual practice. In our legal system, that practice requires a certain form of originalism: our system’s official story is that we follow the law of the Founding, plus all lawful changes made since.

Or so we’ve argued. Yet this answer produces its own set of questions. How can practice solve our problems, when there are so many theories of law, each giving practice a different role? Why look to an official …

Exemplary Legal Writing 2018: Five Recommendations, Femi Cadmus, Casandra Laskowski

Faculty Scholarship

A brief review of five recommended exemplary legal books published in 2018.

Immigration Detainers, Local Discretion, And State Law's Historical Constraints, Kate Evans

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Shadows Of Life: Medicaid's Failure Of Health Care's Moral Test, Barak D. Richman, Kushal T. Kadakia, Shivani A. Shah

Faculty Scholarship

North Carolina Medicaid covers one-fifth of the state’s population and makes up approximately one-third of the budget. Yet the state has experienced increasing costs and worsening health outcomes over the past decade, while socioeconomic disparities persist among communities. In this article, the authors explore the factors that influence these trends and provide a series of policy lessons to inform the state’s current reform efforts following the recent approval of North Carolina’s Section 1115 waiver by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The authors used health, social, and financial data from the state Department of Health and Human Services, the …

Response: Rights As Trumps Of What?, Joseph Blocher

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Analyzing The Trump Administration's International Trade Strategy, Rachel Brewster

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Ilo At 100: Institutional Innovation In An Era Of Populism, Laurence R. Helfer

Faculty Scholarship

The centenary of the International Labor Organization (ILO) provides an opportunity to take stock of the organization’s many achievements. But the centenary also calls for a clear-eyed assessment of the profound challenges that the ILO currently faces – including the growth of the informal and gig economies, digitization and automation, and rising material inequality – and the populist ferment that those trends have helped to engender. This essay, part of a forthcoming AJIL Unbound symposium on "The Transnational Futures of International Labor Law," sketches the ILO’s rich history of legal and policy innovation in response to changes in labor conditions …