Digital Commons Network^™

"The Road I Can't Help Travelling": Holmes On Truth And Persuadability, Joseph Blocher

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Sandra Day O’Connor’S "First" Principles: A Constructive Vision For An Angry Nation, Lisa Kern Griffin

Faculty Scholarship

During her 25-year tenure on the Supreme Court, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor cast the decisive votes to resolve the most emotional debates, yet she maintained collegiality among the Justices and retained the public’s high regard. A recent biography by historian and journalist Evan Thomas chronicles her extraordinary personal qualities, remarkable professional journey, and constructive brand of patriotism. This book review essay describes a legacy in three parts: a lived example of how to thrive in the face of challenges, a jurisprudence driven by the courage to make compromises, and a theory about the long game of American democracy. First reintroduces …

The Failed Transparency Regime For Executive Agreements: An Empirical And Normative Analysis, Oona A. Hathaway, Curtis A. Bradley, Jack L. Goldsmith

Faculty Scholarship

The Constitution specifies only one process for making international agreements. Article II states that the President “shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur.” The treaty process has long been on a path to obsolescence, however, with fewer and fewer treaties being made in each presidential administration. Nevertheless, the United States has not stopped making international agreements. Even as Article II treaties have come to a near halt, the United States has concluded hundreds of binding international agreements each year. These agreements, known as …

Genetic Race? Dna Ancestry Tests, Racial Identity, And The Law, Trina Jones, Jessica L. Roberts

Faculty Scholarship

Can genetic tests determine race? Americans are fascinated with DNA ancestry testing services like 23andMe and AncestryDNA. Indeed, in recent years, some people have changed their racial identity based upon DNA ancestry tests and have sought to use test results in lawsuits and for other strategic purposes. Courts may be similarly tempted to use genetic ancestry in determining race. In this Essay, we examine the ways in which DNA ancestry tests may affect contemporary understandings of racial identity. We argue that these tests are poor proxies for race because they fail to reflect the social, cultural, relational, and experiential norms …

Protecting Local News Outlets From Fatal Legal Expenses, Nicole J. Ligon

Faculty Scholarship

As lawsuits targeting the press continue to rise in response to today’s political climate, local news outlets are more likely to find themselves facing unexpected legal expenses. Although the national news media can generally weather the costs of libel lawsuits and subpoena requests, smaller news outlets have gone bankrupt or barely escaped such a fate while paying off legal fees, even when these outlets have ultimately been successful in their legal battles. Because local news outlets serve a critical role in underserved communities and are powerful agents of positive social change, they ought to be protected against fatal legal expenses. …

Tepoel Lecture: Bond Trustees And The Rising Challenge Of Activist Investors, Steven L. Schwarcz

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Misplaced Constitutional Rights, Brandon L. Garrett

Faculty Scholarship

Constitutional rulings risk an unnoticed type of mission creep: misplacement through adoption in settings that they were not designed to regulate. This Article describes how in a set of important areas—and sometimes despite the Supreme Court’s explicit cautionary language—constitutional rules have taken hold outside of the settings that they were primarily designed to regulate, providing unanticipated additions to rules and practice. Constitutional rights and standards are often context limited to particular government actors, procedural settings, or remedies. Based on the text of the Constitution or precedent, some rights apply only during civil cases, while others apply only during criminal cases; …

The Transparency Of Jail Data, William E. Crozier, Brandon L. Garrett, Arvind Krishnamurthy

Faculty Scholarship

Across the country, pretrial policies and practices concerning the use of cash bail are in flux, but it is not readily possible for members of the public to assess whether or how those changes in policy and practice are affecting outcomes. A range of actors affect the jail population, including: law enforcement who make arrest decisions, magistrates and judges who rule at hearings on pretrial conditions and may modify such conditions, prosecutors and defense lawyers who litigate at hearings, pretrial-service providers who assist in evaluation and supervision of persons detained pretrial, and the custodian of the jail who supervises facilities. …

Building A Law-And-Political-Economy Framework: Beyond The Twentieth-Century Synthesis, Jedediah Britton-Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

We live in a time of interrelated crises. Economic inequality and precarity, and crises of democracy, climate change, and more raise significant challenges for legal scholarship and thought. “Neoliberal” premises undergird many fields of law and have helped authorize policies and practices that reaffirm the inequities of the current era. In particular, market efficiency, neutrality, and formal equality have rendered key kinds of power invisible, and generated a skepticism of democratic politics. The result of these presumptions is what we call the “Twentieth-Century Synthesis”: a pervasive view of law that encases “the market” from claims of justice and conceals it …

Misaligned Lawmaking, Timothy Meyer

Faculty Scholarship

This Article makes three contributions. First, it introduces the Misalignment Thesis in the context of U.S. trade policy. The Misalignment Thesis is a descriptive claim about how the structure of a legislative bargain influences the long-term stability and effectiveness of that bargain. Second, the Article introduces the normative corollary to the Misalignment Thesis: if political stability hinges on respecting the legislative bargain, interdependent policies should be subject to renegotiation on the same timeline and implementation on the same terms. In light of this prescription, I offer three concrete proposals for aligning trade liberalization and trade adjustment assistance in order to …

Avoiding Judicial Discipline, Veronica Root Martinez

Faculty Scholarship

Over the past several years, several high-profile complaints have been levied against Article III judges alleging improper conduct. Many of these complaints, however, were dismissed without investigation after the judge in question removed themselves from the jurisdiction of the circuit’s judicial council—oftentimes through retirement and once through elevation to the Supreme Court. When judges—the literal arbiters of justice within American society—are able to elude oversight of their own potential misconduct, it puts the legitimacy of the judiciary and the rule of law in jeopardy.

This Essay argues that it is imperative that mechanisms are adopted that will ensure investigations into …

Tax Law’S Workplace Shift, Shu-Yi Oei, Diane M. Ring

Faculty Scholarship

In December 2017, Congress passed major tax reform. The reform included an important new provision that granted independent contractors and other pass-through taxpayers—but not employees or corporations—a potential tax deduction equal to 20% of their qualified business income. Critics have argued that this new deduction (codified at 26 U.S.C. § 199A) could lead to a widespread shift toward independent contractor jobs as workers seek to reduce taxes paid. This shift could cause workers to lose important employee protections and leave them more economically vulnerable.

This Article examines whether this new tax provision will create a large-scale workplace shift and, if …

Indenture Trustee Duties: The Pre-Default Puzzle, Steven L. Schwarcz

Faculty Scholarship

This Article addresses a topic at the intersection of finance, agency, contract, and trust law: the pre-default duties of an indenture trustee for bondholders. The existing scholarship on indenture trustee duties focuses on the post-default scenario, when the indenture trustee is required to act as a prudent person in like circumstances on behalf of the bondholders. No prior scholarship addresses an indenture trustee’s predefault duties. It is critical to try to define those duties because activist investors in the $42-trillion-plus bond market increasingly are making pre-default demands on indenture trustees, requiring them to know how to respond.

Juvenile Life Without Parole In North Carolina, Ben Finholt, Brandon L. Garrett, Karima Modjadidi, Kristen M. Renberg

Faculty Scholarship

Life without parole (LWOP) is “an especially harsh punishment for a juvenile,” as the U.S. Supreme Court noted in Graham v. Florida. The United States is the only country in the world that imposes juvenile life without parole (JLWOP) sentences. Many of these individuals were sentenced during a surge in LWOP sentencing in the 1990s. In the past decade, following several Supreme Court rulings eliminating mandatory sentences of LWOP for juvenile offenders, such sentencing has declined. This Article aims to empirically assess the rise and then the fall in JLWOP sentencing in a leading sentencing state, North Carolina, to better …

The Importance Of Qualitative Research Approaches To Gig Economy Taxation, Shu-Yi Oei, Diane M. Ring

Faculty Scholarship

As the United States tax system continues to grapple with how to tax workers in the gig economy, it confronts a number of questions about the nature and composition of the sector as well as the tax issues confronted by its participants. Many of these questions have proven difficult to answer due to a lack of adequate information. But the answers are important and will shape how tax and other areas of law (such as employment law, labor law, and antitrust) respond to the gig economy. Thus, the question of how to obtain the data and information necessary to formulate …

Commentary On Meritor Savings Bank, Fsb V. Vinson, Trina Jones

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Rise And Fall Of Transcendent Constitutionalism In The Civil War Era, Cynthia Nicoletti

Faculty Scholarship

In the aftermath of the Civil War, American intellectuals saw the war itself as a force of transcendent lawmaking. They viewed it as a historical catalyst that had forged the United States into a nation. In writing the Fourteenth Amendment, Congress sought to translate the war's nationalistic spirit into text. But in the eyes of many contemporary thinkers, the war's centripetal energy was a doubleedged sword. It could create a nation out of disparate parts, but it was also potentially uncontainable, divorced from the regular lawmaking process and beyond the control of human actors. As a result, many American jurists …

Protecting Homeschoolers: A Proposal To Protect Homeschooled Children In North Carolina From Educational Neglect, Jane R. Wettach

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Fossil Fortunes: Regulating Commercial Paleontology & Incentivizing Fossil Discovery, Ashlee A. Paxton-Turner

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Competing For Votes, Kobi Kastiel, Yaron Nili

Faculty Scholarship

Shareholder voting matters. It can directly shape a corporation’s governance, operational and social policies. But voting by shareholders serves another important function—it produces a marketplace for votes where management and dissidents compete for the votes of the shareholder base. The competition over shareholder votes generates ex ante incentives for management to perform better, to disclose information to shareholders in advance, and to engage with large institutional investors.

Traditional corporate law has looked to a variety of “market forces” as a means of curbing the agency costs of public corporations. Yet, for various reasons, these market forces are, at best, an …

Complete Contracts In Finance, Elisabeth De Fontenay

Faculty Scholarship

Notwithstanding its significant influence in corporate finance, the theory of incomplete contracts is arguably misunderstood by courts enforcing contracts governing corporate transactions. In resolving such disputes, judges implicitly assume that complete contracts are both achievable and desirable when the parties are financially sophisticated, and they systematically assign blame to one of the parties for leaving the contract incomplete. This, in turn, prompts parties to write ever longer and more complex agreements. Such agreements do not necessarily produce more efficient outcomes, however. In fact, they may yield unexpected outcomes or interpretations, which can be enforced opportunistically by one of the parties …

Policing The Schoolhouse, Brandon L. Garrett

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Justice In Forensic Algorithms, Brandon L. Garrett

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Virtual Criminal Courts, Deniz Ariturk, William E. Crozier, Brandon L. Garrett

Faculty Scholarship

Criminal courtrooms are among many workplaces to shut down and adopt virtual operations in response to the coronavirus pandemic. As criminal courts around the United States suspended in-person proceedings, virtual hearings, where parties appear through videoconference or teleconference technology, have allowed courts to remain in session while reducing the danger to public health. Courts at all levels, from small municipal courts to the U.S. Supreme Court, have been hearing arguments remotely. In 38 states, as well as the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, courts have either mandated or encouraged the use of virtual hearings when appropriate. Federal courts …

Undeliverable: Suspended Driver's Licenses And The Problem Of Notice, Brandon L. Garrett, Karima Modjadidi, William Crozier

Faculty Scholarship

In North Carolina, one in seven adult drivers currently has a suspended license for nondriving related reasons. As in many other states, in North Carolina, driver’s licenses are commonly suspended, for reasons unrelated to safety, when a person fails to appear in court in response to notice of a traffic court date or fails to pay traffic fines. Notices of traffic court dates are sent by mail, typically to the address on record at the Department of Motor Vehicles, as are subsequent notices that the consequence for nonappearance will be a driver’s license suspension. To better understand the effects of …

What Explains Taxation By Resource-Rich Rebels? Evidence From The Islamic State In Syria, Mara R. Revkin

Faculty Scholarship

Greed-based theories of civil war predict that rebel groups will only engage in taxation and other state-building activities in areas where they lack exploitable resources. However, this prediction is contradicted by the Islamic State’s pattern of taxation across time and space. A new data set mapping seven types of revenue-extracting policies imposed by the Islamic State, a jihadist rebel group, in the 19 Syrian districts that it governed between 2013 and 2017 indicates that these policies were just as prevalent in resource-rich as in resource-poor districts. I propose a new theory that better explains this pattern—a rebel group’s pattern of …

Foreword: State Enforcement In An Interstate World, Margaret H. Lemos

Faculty Scholarship

“State Enforcement in an Interstate World” is an important topic—fully deserving of all the attention it has received. Past commentators on this topic have generally treated the federal government as a unitary entity. Building on prior work on the subject, this Article explores the polycentric nature of federal regulatory authority and shows how cooperation and rivalry have long been dominant realities of the modern administrative state. The Article discusses how these dynamics complicate analysis of state enforcement in an interstate world and identifies strategies for reducing the frequency and magnitude of the seemingly inevitable conflicts.

Shadow Governance, Yaron Nili, Cathy Hwang

Faculty Scholarship

Corporations have something to say about some of the most important social and economic issues of our time—and one way they say it is through shadow governance. This Article spotlights a group of influential corporate policies comprising what we call “shadow governance.” These non-charter, non-bylaw governance documents express a corporation’s commitment to and process on issues as wide-ranging as campaign finance, environmental sustainability, and sexual harassment, but are largely overlooked by scholars and practitioners alike. This Article addresses that gap, revealing how shadow governance documents influence corporate decision-making and corporate behavior.

This Article makes two contributions to the literature. First, …

Accountability, Secrecy, And Innovation In Ai-Enabled Clinical Decision Software, Arti K. Rai, Isha Sharma, Christina Silcox

Faculty Scholarship

This article employs analytical and empirical tools to dissect the complex relationship between secrecy, accountability, and innovation incentives in clinical decision software enabled by machine learning (ML-CD). Although secrecy can provide incentives for innovation, it can also diminish the ability of third parties to adjudicate risk and benefit responsibly. Our first aim is descriptive. We address how the interrelated regimes of intellectual property law, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulation, and tort liability are currently shaping information flow and innovation incentives. We find that developers regard secrecy over training data and details of the trained model as central to competitive …

Judging Risk, Brandon L. Garrett, John Monahan

Faculty Scholarship

Risk assessment plays an increasingly pervasive role in criminal justice in the United States at all stages of the process, from policing, to pre-trial, sentencing, corrections, and during parole. As efforts to reduce incarceration have led to adoption of risk-assessment tools, critics have begun to ask whether various instruments in use are valid and whether they might reinforce rather than reduce bias in criminal justice outcomes. Such work has neglected how decisionmakers use risk-assessment in practice. In this Article, we examine in detail the judging of risk assessment and we study why decisionmakers so often fail to consistently use such …