Law Commons^™

Black Liberty In Emergency, Norrinda Brown

Northwestern University Law Review

COVID-19 pandemic orders were weaponized by state and local governments in Black neighborhoods, often through violent acts of the police. This revealed an intersection of three centuries-old patterns— criminalizing Black movement, quarantining racial minorities in public health crises, and segregation. The geographic borders of the most restrictive pandemic order enforcement were nearly identical to the borders of highly segregated, historically Black neighborhoods.

The right to free movement is fundamental and, as a rule, cannot be impeded by the state. But the jurisprudence around state power in public health emergencies, deriving from the 1905 case Jacobson v. Massachusetts, has practically resulted …

Racism As A Threat To Financial Stability, Cary Martin Shelby

Northwestern University Law Review

This Article draws from several theoretical frameworks such as critical race theory, law and economics, and rule of law conceptions to argue that the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) should formally recognize racism as a threat to financial stability due to its interconnectedness with recent and projected systemic disruptions. This Article begins by first introducing a novel model created by the author through which to dissect this claim. This “Systemic Disruption Model” provides a theoretical depiction of how racism drives every phase along the life-cycle continuum of a systemic disruption.

First, with respect to the Model’s “Introduction” phase, this Article …

Enforcing Equity, Daiquiri J. Steele

Northwestern University Law Review

Federal administrative agencies that enforce workplace laws have dual responsibilities: (1) to prevent or remedy noncompliance with the underlying workplace law and (2) to prevent or remedy noncompliance with the law’s antiretaliation provisions. Disparities based on race, sex, and their intersection exist with respect to both of these types of employer noncompliance, as female workers and workers of color experience more violations of the substantive provisions and the retaliation provisions of these laws. While effective enforcement is vital to preserving workplace regulation as a whole, there is also an equity component to enforcement. Because workplace law violations disproportionately harm women …

Financial Inclusion, Cryptocurrency, And Afrofuturism, Lynnise Phillips Pantin

Northwestern University Law Review

As a community, Black people consistently face barriers to full participation in traditional financial markets. The decentralized nature of the cryptocurrency market is attractive to a community that has been historically and systematically excluded from the traditional financial markets by both private and public actors. As new entrants to any type of financial market, Black people have increasingly embraced blockchain technology and cryptocurrency as a path towards the wealth-building opportunities and financial freedom they have been denied in traditional markets. This Article analyzes whether the technology’s decentralized system will lead to financial inclusion or increased financial exclusion. Without reconciling the …

Climate Change, Corruption, And Colonialism: Solving The Conundrum With Regional Courts, Taylor Nchako

Northwestern University Law Review

It is no secret that climate change is the most pressing issue of our times. Global South countries, especially those in Africa, face challenges mitigating the worst impacts of climate change, adapting technological solutions, and continuing to develop their nation’s infrastructure and industry. Cameroon provides an archetypal example of the challenges many African countries face. Plagued by an economy that both exacerbates climate change and stands to collapse from it, Cameroon struggles with corruption that has roots in colonialism and neocolonialism. This corruption taints not only the forestry service and the executive branch, but the judiciary as well, leaving Cameroon’s …

Anti-Woke Capitalism, The First Amendment, And The Decline Of Libertarianism, Amanda Shanor, Sarah E. Light

Northwestern University Law Review

Firms across the globe, including financial institutions like banks, asset managers, and pension fund managers, are adopting strategies to account for the risks they face from climate change. These strategies include declining to invest in certain emissions-intensive projects or advising firms in their portfolios to report or reduce climate impacts and risks. These forms of private environmental governance can be characterized as one aspect of the “E” within a broader management strategy of “ESG,” or the management of environmental, social, and governance factors. Regulators in the United States and other countries are beginning to mandate that firms take some of …

Private Patrolling At The Boundaries Of Public Duty, Kathleen M. Naccarato

Northwestern University Law Review

In the shadow of contemporary debates over police functions, funding, and accountability, a new form of preventative policing has proliferated. Improvement districts, most commonly associated with downtown revitalization efforts, increasingly served a new purpose—crime control. Communities dissatisfied with public police services have found that they may leverage improvement district tax revenues to hire off-duty police officers to patrol their neighborhoods. This trend has not been without controversy. Critics have contended that these semiprivate, semipublic police patrols create a two-tier system of public safety, allowing wealthy residents to privately purchase powers that belong to the public as a whole.

This Note …

Fiduciaries In Priest's Clothing: Clergy Sexual Abuse And Fiduciary Duty, Sebastian Richardson

Northwestern University Law Review

This Note argues that clergypersons who offer religious guidance are fiduciaries in some limited circumstances and therefore liable for sexual contact that occurs between them and congregants. This Note will argue that clergypersons are most properly deemed fiduciaries through a fact-based definitional approach. As such, this Note departs from previous arguments that clergypersons are fiduciaries because they provide services analogous to secular counselors. Prospective fiduciary relationships involving clergy should be analyzed using a distinct conceptual account of fiduciary relationships rather than an analogical analysis based on apparent similarities between a clergyperson and other fiduciaries. Such an approach is preferable to …

Toward A Multilevel Sociology Of Fraud, Brooke Harrington, Camilo Arturo Leslie

Northwestern University Law Review

This Essay applies a distinctively sociological multilevel analysis to fraud to provide novel insights and recommendations on an old problem. Rather than treating fraud as a problem of “criminogenic environments” or of individual psychologies and motivations, this multilevel analysis investigates the ways in which individuals (the micro level) interact with organizations (the meso level) and institutional systems (the macro level) to produce fraud. We illustrate these interactions and the insight that an interactive analysis can provide by using ethnographic data from an in-depth case study of the R. Allen Stanford offshore financial fraud. The case, which occurred in the Caribbean …

America's Anti-Fraud Ecosystem And The Problem Of Social Trust: Perspectives From Legal Practitioners, Edward J. Balleisen

Northwestern University Law Review

This contribution revives an autobiographical genre present in law reviews roughly a half-century ago, in which seasoned legal practitioners offered perspective on vital issues. Here, a senior deputy attorney general, a former federal prosecutor, a corporate defense attorney, and a legal aid lawyer each draw on their career experience to explore what they see as significant problems related to the law of consumer and investor fraud and the nature of consumer and investor trust. Their reflections emphasize the significance of law in action—how key actors seek to deploy legal mechanisms related to fraud and adjust their strategies in light of …

Health Care Fraud And The Erosion Of Trust, Katrice Bridges Copeland

Northwestern University Law Review

In health care, trust is a foundational concept. Patients must trust that their medical practitioners are competent to treat them. The trustworthiness of medical practitioners encourages patients to disclose intimate facts about their medical issues. Further, patients must trust health care providers to demonstrate impartial concern for the patients’ well-being, also known as fidelity. In providing care, the needs of the patients, rather than financial incentives, must drive medical practitioners. Without this trust, patients may not cooperate with diagnosis and treatment. In addition to trusting providers, care outcomes are better if patients trust the health care system as a whole. …

Fraud In A Land Of Plenty, Jonathan R. Macey

Northwestern University Law Review

This Essay discusses the regulation of fraud in a developed economy and offers some explanations for why fraud appears to be on the increase. Ironically, regulation designed to combat fraud can actually increase fraud by attracting economic activity to fraud-ridden industries. In other words, regulation can create problems of its own by fostering the false perception that fraud is being addressed even when it is not. This analysis is relevant in the context of the current surge in sentiment to regulate cryptocurrencies in the wake of the FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried debacle. Such regulation threatens to attract more resources to …

Square-Peg Frauds, Miriam H. Baer

Northwestern University Law Review

The square-peg fraud is a kind of case that until very recently enjoyed the widespread support of prosecutors, jurists, and the general public. Rather than punishing a scheme that rids a victim of her money or property, the square-peg prosecution has long focused on deprivations of intangible property. For years, enforcement actors have employed this concept to pursue innumerable varieties of corruption.

Nowhere has the square peg been more essential than in the government’s prosecution of higher education scandals. From the Varsity Blues parents who wrongfully secured elite college slots for their children, to the business school dean who shaped …

Consumer Fraud, Home Financing, And The Erosion Of Trust, Linda E. Fisher

Northwestern University Law Review

Consumer fraud is a civil violation of a remedial statute not requiring specific intent to deceive. Most consumer fraud statutes define violations as unconscionable, misleading, or deceptive practices irrespective of intent, in derogation of the principle of caveat emptor. They do not apply to business-to-business transactions. Trust plays a central role in business-to-consumer transactions. Because consumers are individuals, there is often an inherent inequality in consumer transactions. Sophisticated marketing techniques—especially target marketing that follows potential customers all over the internet—hound consumers’ online lives and manipulate purchasing decisions. The increasing monetization of almost everything exacerbates these effects. This transactionalism itself erodes …

The Persistent Limits Of Fraud Prevention In Historical Perspective, Emily Kadens

Northwestern University Law Review

Fraud has been ubiquitous throughout history, and so have the methods of fraud prevention. History demonstrates that no anti-fraud measures have fully succeeded in eliminating deceptive market behavior. Instead, this Essay uses evidence from premodern England to argue that societies and individual contracting parties balance tolerating a certain amount of fraud against the costs of fraud prevention.

Gender And Deception: Moral Perceptions And Legal Responses, Gregory Klass, Tess Wilkinson-Ryan

Northwestern University Law Review

Decades of social science research has shown that the identity of the parties in a legal action can affect case outcomes. Parties’ race, gender, class, and age all affect decisions of prosecutors, judges, juries, and other actors in a criminal prosecution or civil litigation. Less studied has been how identity might affect other forms of legal regulation. This Essay begins to explore perceptions of deceptive behavior—i.e., how wrongful it is, and the extent to which it should be regulated or punished—and the relationship of those perceptions to the gender of the actors. We hypothesize that ordinary people tend to perceive …

Pathology Logics, S. Lisa Washington

Northwestern University Law Review

Every year, thousands of marginalized parents become ensnared in the family regulation system, an apparatus more commonly referred to as the child welfare system. In prior work, I examined how the coercion of domestic violence survivors in the family regulation system perpetuates harmful knowledge production and serves to legitimize family regulation intervention. This Article focuses on another logic deeply embedded in the family regulation system: the pathologizing of impoverished and racialized groups. Scholars have discussed the pathologizing of marginalized groups to describe a host of different phenomena. In this Article, “pathology logic” refers to a logic that produces notions of …

Put Your Money Where Their Mouths Are: A Case For State-Based Investment In Anti-Shaming Policies For School Lunch Programs, Shayna Roth

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

Despite its goals for feeding hungry students, the federal government’s National School Lunch Program falls short due to a lack of guidance and resources. One consequence of these circumstances is shaming practices where schools use fear, punishment, and socioeconomic segregation tactics to mitigate meal price deficits. The federal government and several state governments attempt, and sometimes succeed, to enact legislation to improve school lunch programs, but efforts are few and far between. This Note draws on effective state laws to advocate for increased legislative action on school meals across all states, specifically addressing and prohibiting shaming practices. Eliminating this barrier …