Digital Commons Network^™

Bargaining For Abolition, Zohra Ahmed

Scholarly Works

What if instead of seeing criminal court as an institution driven by the operation of rules, we saw it as a workplace where people labor to criminalize those with the misfortune to be prosecuted? I offer three different ways to think about labor in criminal court: (1) labor as a source of sociological value, (2) labor as an input that generates certain measurable outcomes, and (3) labor as a vehicle to advance abolitionist reforms. First, through their quotidian activities, criminal courts’ workers enact a practical philosophy that communicates lessons about who and how we value each other. Drawing on ethnographic …

Lessons From A Pandemic: Recommendations From The Georgia Tpo Forum For Strengthening Protections Against Domestic Violence, Christine M. Scartz, Sarah White, Jaime Boorman

Scholarly Works

A civil protective order in Georgia is commonly called a temporary protective order, or TPO. The Georgia TPO Forum (the Forum) is a collaborative effort among practitioners who are deeply passionate about ending domestic violence and minimizing its effects on victims.1 The Forum is made up of advocates and attorneys who work every day with people who need protection from violence. Members provide each other not only with suggestions and solutions to problems, but also a listening ear in a profession where another tragic case is always on its way. The Forum is also uniquely positioned to offer recommendations about …

Protecting The Public Domain And The Right To Use Copyrighted Works: Four Decades Of The Eleventh Circuit’S Copyright Law Jurisprudence, David E. Shipley

Scholarly Works

This article is about the importance of the copyright law jurisprudence from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. This appellate court turns 40 in 2021, and it has rendered many influential copyright law decisions in the last four decades. Its body of work is impressive. This article discusses the court’s important decisions in the following areas: the originality standard; the application of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Feist decision to compilations, directories, computer software, architectural works, and other creative works like movies, photographs, and characters; copyright protection for unfixed works; the scope of the government edicts doctrine; and, …

Popular Enforcement Of Controversial Legislation, Randy Beck

Scholarly Works

Texas opted for popular enforcement of Senate Bill 8 (S.B. 8), prohibiting abortion once a fetal heartbeat can be detected. In an effort to prevent pre-enforcement judicial review, the legislature precluded enforcement of the statute by government officials. Instead, any member of the public may sue for statutory damages of at least $10,000 from any person who (1) performs an abortion violating the statute, (2) knowingly aids or abets such an abortion, or (3) “intends” to perform or aid and abet such an abortion.

The cause of action authorized by S.B. 8 is a “popular action,” a once common method …

Rate Base The Charge Space: The Law Of Utility Ev Infrastructure Investment, Adam D. Orford

Scholarly Works

To fight climate change and support the transition to a zero-emissions transportation sector, the U.S. is setting out to build a huge fleet of electric vehicle (EV) charging stations. But EV charging equipment is expensive, and how to pay for it is not straightforward. This Article explores the emerging law and policy of using the bill payments of millions of electric utility customers to solve the problem. State utility regulators, in obscure technical proceedings, have begun directing billions of ratepayer dollars toward EV chargers. Is this an unfair and risky social spending experiment, as its opponents argue? Or is it …

The Right To Counsel In A Neoliberal Age, Zohra Ahmed

Scholarly Works

Legal scholarship tends to obscure how changes in criminal process relate to broader changes in society at large. This article offers a modest corrective to this tendency. By studying the Supreme Court’s right to counsel jurisprudence, as it has developed since the mid-70s, I show the pervasive impact of the concurrent rise of neoliberalism on relationships between defendants and their attorneys. Since 1975, the Court has emphasized two concerns in its rulings regarding the right to counsel: choice and autonomy. These, of course, are nominally good things for defendants to have. But by paying close attention to how the Court …

Collected Wisdom On Selecting Leaders And Managing Mdls, Elizabeth Chamblee Burch, Stephen Bough

Scholarly Works

Today, nearly one out of every two new suits filed in federal civil court is part of a multidistrict litigation (MDL). Initially designed to organize antitrust cases against electrical equipment manufacturers, MDL’s adaptability and minimal requirements made it the preferred approach for coordinating pretrial process for all manner of cases, from securities, employment, intellectual property, and antitrust to sales practices, common disasters, and products liability. Yet, the simplicity of MDL’s technical requirements—that cases are pending in different districts and share a common factual question—belie the complexity of the proceedings themselves. Governed principally by insiders’ unwritten but longstanding norms, both newly-appointed …

Perceptions Of Justice In Multidistrict Litigation: Voices From The Crowd, Elizabeth Chamblee Burch, Margaret S. Williams

Scholarly Works

With all eyes on criminal justice reform, multidistrict litigation (MDL) has quietly reshaped civil justice, undermining fundamental tenets of due process, procedural justice, attorney ethics, and tort law along the way. In 2020, the MDL caseload tripled that of the federal criminal caseload, one out of every two cases filed in federal civil court was an MDL case, and 97% of those were products liability like opioids, talc, and Roundup.

Ordinarily, civil procedure puts tort plaintiffs in the driver’s seat, allowing them to choose who and where to sue, and what claims to bring. Procedural justice tells courts to ensure …

Introducing Students To Ethics And Professionalism Challenges In Virtual Communication, Carol Morgan, Katherine M. Koops, James E. Moliterno, Carol Newman

Scholarly Works

As the practice of law, and the conduct of business generally, focuses increasingly on virtual communication, the ethics and professionalism challenges inherent in email, videoconference, text, and telephone communication continue to evolve. These challenges are particularly prevalent in transactional practice, which involves frequent communication with a variety of parties through a variety of communication channels. Exposing law students to these challenges through exercises and simulations contributes to the continued development of their professional identity as lawyers.

This article presents a variety of exercises that introduce students to client confidentiality, inadvertent disclosure, and other ethical issues that often arise in the …

Remarks, Andrea L. Dennis

Scholarly Works

Over the course of one week, the Michigan Journal of Law Reform presented its annual Symposium, this year titled Reimagining Police Surveillance: Protecting Activism and Ending Technologies of Oppression. During this week, the Journal explored complicated questions surrounding the expansion of police surveillance technologies, including how police and federal agencies utilize their extensive resources to identify and surveil public protest, the ways in which technology employed by police is often flawed and disparately impacts people of color, and potential reforms of police surveillance technology. Before delving into these complicated questions, I presented remarks on the history of police surveillance in …

International Environmental Law At Its Semicentennial: The Stockholm Legacy, Melissa J. Durkee

Scholarly Works

The 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment produced the Stockholm Declaration, an environmental manifesto that forcefully declared a human right to environmental health and birthed the field of modern international environmental law. The historic event powerfully “dramatized . . . the unity and fragility of the biosphere,” sparking a remarkable period of international legal innovation and cooperation on environmental protection in the decades to come.

The Stockholm Declaration can be rightly celebrated for putting environmental issues on the international legal agenda and driving the development of environmental law at the domestic level around the world. At the same …

Panel Three: How Should Spacs Be Treated Going Forward (Ipos, Mergers, Or Distinctly Different?), Usha Rodrigues, Gregg A. Noel, Rick Flemming, Michael Stegemoller

Scholarly Works

From the Symposium: Here to Stay: Wrestling with the Future of the Quickly Maturing SPAC Market

Panel addressing and examining the policy concerns around special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs).

Recovering Contingency Within American Antimonopoly And Democracy, Laura Phillips-Sawyer

Scholarly Works

*This is the fourth post in a symposium on William Novak’s New Democracy: The Creation of the Modern American State. For other posts in the series, click here.

In his chapter on antitrust law and the American antimonopoly tradition, the penultimate substantive chapter of the book, Novak covers much familiar ground. Yet, he is not focused on the conventional areas of debate in antitrust history, which have included recovering the congressional intent behind the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, recreating the economic logic of early antitrust jurisprudence, or surveying the doctrinal shift from “literalism” to the rule of …

Uzuegbunam V. Preczewski, Nominal Damages, And The Roberts Stratagem, Michael Wells

Scholarly Works

In Uzuegbunam v. Preczewski the Supreme Court held for the first time that federal-court jurisdiction exists over a § 1983 case that presents only a claim for nominal damages. As a result, such claims remain subject to adjudication even when the plaintiff’s request for prospective relief, targeting an allegedly unlawful practice, has been mooted by the government’s discontinuance of the thus-challenged behavior. In dissent, Chief Justice Roberts maintained that the majority’s ruling clashed with Article III’s “personal stake” requirement and also unwisely permitted plaintiffs to sidestep controlling jurisdictional rules by adding a meaningless claim for nominal damages to a complaint …

Journeys Through Space And Time While Reading International Law And The Politics Of History, Found On A Palimpsest, Translated For You, The Reader, Harlan G. Cohen

Scholarly Works

I was invited to a symposium on Anne Orford’s book, International Law and the Politics of History. On my way there, my mind wandered, and I found myself lost in a forest of half-remembered stories and unfinished thoughts. Searching for a way out, this is what I discovered.

Righting A Reproductive Wrong: A Statutory Tort Solution To Misrepresentation By Reproductive Tissue Providers, Yaniv Heled, Hillel Y. Levin, Timothy D. Lytton, Liza Vertinsky

Scholarly Works

Fraud, misrepresentation, and other unfair trade practices plague the market for human reproductive tissue. The sale of sperm, eggs, and embryos is virtually unregulated in almost all states, and courts have been inhospitable to victims. As a result, children are born with genetic disorders that impose extreme financial and personal hardship. Proposals for direct government oversight have, for the most part, failed to gain traction, and litigation has yielded inadequate remedies.

This Article assesses these problems and proposes model legislation that would eliminate doctrinal obstacles to holding unscrupulous reproductive tissue providers liable. By making it easier for parents to bring …

Environmental Law, Eleventh Circuit Survey, Travis M. Trimble

Scholarly Works

In 2021, the United States District Court for the Southern District of Alabama, in an issue of first impression, concluded that the United States is not a "person" under the contribution provision of the Oil Pollution Act (OPA),2 and therefore the provision did not waive the sovereign immunity of the United States. For this and other reasons a plaintiff could not recover in contribution from the United States for the plaintiffs costs of cleaning up an oil spill, even where the plaintiff alleged the spill was the result of the sole negligence of the United States. The United States District …

Race-Ing Antitrust, Bennett Capers, Greg Day

Scholarly Works

Antitrust law has a race problem. To spot an antitrust violation, courts inquire into whether an act has degraded consumer welfare. Since anticompetitive practices are often assumed to enhance consumer welfare, antitrust offenses are rarely found. Key to this framework is that antitrust treats all consumers monolithically; that consumers are differently situated, especially along lines of race, simply is ignored.

We argue that antitrust law must disaggregate the term “consumer” to include those who disproportionately suffer from anticompetitive practices via a community welfare standard. As a starting point, we demonstrate that anticompetitive conduct has specifically been used as a tool …

Csec Treatment Courts: An Opportunity For Positive, Trauma-Informed, And Therapeutic Systems Responses In Family And Juvenile Courts, Emma Hetherington, Allison Dunnigan, Hannah Elias Sbaity

Scholarly Works

In an effort to improve outcomes for CSEC (commercial and sexual exploitation of children) youth and to facilitate accurate identification of survivors through the implementation of multidisciplinary, survivor-focused responses, jurisdictions have increasingly looked towards treatment courts to serve as a model for prevention, intervention, diversion, and treatment. Juvenile and family courts are uniquely positioned to intervene in cases involving CSEC. Several jurisdictions have already created treatment courts to specifically address the needs of survivors and those at risk of CSEC, particularly those who are involved in the child welfare or juvenile justice systems. The goal of treatment courts for survivors …

Tributes To Family Law Scholars Who Helped Us Find Our Path, Thomas Oldham, Paul M. Kurtz

Scholarly Works

At some point after the virus struck, I had the idea that it would be appropriate and interesting to ask a number of experienced family law teachers to write a tribute about a more senior family law scholar whose work inspired them when they were beginning their careers. I mentioned this idea to some other long-term members of the professoriate, and they agreed that this could be a good project. So I reached out to some colleagues and asked them to participate. Many agreed to join the team. Some suggested other potential contributors, and some of these suggested faculty members …

Clean Air Act Section 115: Is The Ipcc A 'Duly Constituted International Agency'?, Adam D. Orford

Scholarly Works

Does EPA’s receipt of the Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) trigger the agency’s duties under Clean Air Act § 115? The law requires EPA to take action to prevent or eliminate air pollution endangering the public health or welfare of foreign nationals under certain circumstances. If triggered, the argument goes, the law could justify, or compel, EPA’s imposition of nationwide greenhouse gas regulation to combat climate change. One way to justify this, or compel it, is to trigger EPA’s duties “upon receipt of reports, surveys or studies from any duly constituted international agency.” This article …

Artificially Intelligent Boards And The Future Of Delaware Corporate Law, Christopher Bruner

Scholarly Works

This article argues that the prospects for Artificial Intelligence (AI) to impact corporate law are at once over- and under-stated, focusing on the law of Delaware – the predominant jurisdiction of incorporation for US public companies. Claims that AI systems might displace human directors not only exaggerate AI’s foreseeable technological potential, but ignore doctrinal and institutional impediments intrinsic to Delaware’s competitive model – notably, heavy reliance on nuanced applications of the fiduciary duty of loyalty by a true court of equity. At the same time, however, there are discrete AI applications that might not merely be accommodated by Delaware corporate …

In And Out: Leishmania Metastasis By Hijacking Lymphatic System And Migrating Immune Cells, Baijayanti Jha, Marta Reverte, Catherine Ronet, Florence Prevel, Florence D Morgenthaler, Chantal Desponds, Lon-Fye Lye, Katherine L Owens, Leonardo Scarpellino, Lalit Kumar Dubey, Amélie Sabine, Tatiana V Petrova, Sanjiv A Luther, Stephen M Beverley, Nicolas Fasel

2020-Current year OA Pubs

The lymphatic system plays a crucial role in mounting immune response against intracellular pathogens, and recent studies have documented its role in facilitating tumor dissemination linked largely with cancer cells. However, in mucocutaneous leishmaniasis (MCL) caused by

Why Conflict Between International Economic And Rights-Based Governance Is Inevitable, Desiree Leclercq

Scholarly Works

International organizations mandated to govern social rights are colliding with international organizations mandated to govern economic development. While disagreeing with the nature of fragmentation and conflict across international organizations, legal and social science scholars offer various proposals to unify global governance. Those proposals assume that unification will come naturally. That assumption is wrong.
/="/">
/="/">The distinct legal instruments that govern and control international organizations render conflict inevitable and unification improbable. By closely examining the pandemic-related activities carried out by the International Labor Organization, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund in the same 41 countries, the implications of …

The Informed Jury, Daniel Epps, William Ortman

Scholarly Works

The right to a criminal jury trial is a constitutional disappointment. Cases almost never make it to a jury because of plea bargaining. In the few cases that do, the jury is relegated to a narrow factfinding role that denies it normative voice or the ability to serve as a meaningful check on excessive punishment.

One simple change could situate the jury where it belongs, at the center of the criminal process. The most important thing juries do in criminal cases is authorize state punishment. But today, when a jury returns a guilty verdict, it authorizes punishment without any idea …

Shadow Contracts, Jessica S. Jeffers, Anne M. Tucker

Scholarly Works

This project explores side letters in private market funds. Side letters, separate agreements between a fund and an investor, act as an invisible amendment to the main contract. This article introduces a new use case for side letters: impact invest- ments, where funds target social, as well as financial returns. Using a hand-col- lected data set, we examine the scope and role of side letters in this growing space. Side letters as "shadow contracts" demonstrate the Easterbrook/Fischel theories in action, namely that parties "write their own tickets," tailoring agreement terms to their specific needs within the framework of corporate governance …

Prepaid Death, Victoria J. Haneman

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Fluorescence Imaging Of Beta Cell Primary Cilia, Zipeng A Li, Jung Hoon Cho, Louis G Woodhams, Jing W Hughes

2020-Current year OA Pubs

Primary cilia are slender cell-surface organelles that project into the intercellular space. In pancreatic beta cells, primary cilia coordinate a variety of cell responses including GPCR signaling, calcium influx, and insulin secretion, along with likely many underappreciated roles in islet development and differentiation. To study cilia function in islet biology, direct visualization of primary cilia by microscopic methods is often a necessary first step. Ciliary abundance, distribution, and morphology are heterogeneous among islet cells and are best visualized by fluorescence microscopy, the tools for which are readily accessible to most researchers. Here we present a collection of fluorescence imaging methods …

Title Page, South Dakota Law Review

South Dakota Law Review

No abstract provided.

Table Of Contents, South Dakota Law Review

South Dakota Law Review

No abstract provided.