Law Commons^™

Against The ‘Safety Net’, Matthew Lawrence

Matthew B. Lawrence

Civil Rights And Shareholder Activism: Sec V. Medical Committee For Human Rights, Sarah C. Haan

Sarah Haan

This article builds upon the author's remarks at the 2018-2019 Lara D. Gass Annual Symposium: Civil Rights and Shareholder Activism at Washington and Lee University School of Law, February 15, 2019.

What does “corporate democracy” mean? How far does federal law go to guarantee public company investors a say in a firm’s policies on important social, environmental, or political issues? In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court appeared ready to start sketching the contours of corporate democracy—and then, at the last minute, it pulled back. This Article tells the story of Securities and Exchange Commission v. Medical Committee for Human Rights …

The Effect Of Context On Practice, Susan D. Carle

Susan D. Carle

Book review of Lynn Mather, Craig A. McEwan & Richard J. Maiman's Divorce Lawyers at Work: Varieties of Professionalism in Practice

No Place For Children: Addressing Urban Blight And Its Impact On Children Through Child Protection Law, Domestic Relations Law, And "Adult-Only" Residential Zoning, James G. Dwyer

James G. Dwyer

No abstract provided.

Public Reason As A Public Good, Aaron-Andrew P. Bruhl

Aaron-Andrew P. Bruhl

No abstract provided.

Historic Partition Law Reform: A Game Changer For Heirs’ Property Owners, Thomas W. Mitchell

Thomas W. Mitchell

Over the course of several decades, many disadvantaged families who owned property under the tenancy-in-common form of ownership—property these families often referred to as heirs’ property—have had their property forcibly sold as a result of court-ordered partition sales. For several decades, repeated efforts to reform State partition laws produced little to no reform despite clear evidence that these laws unjustly harmed many families. This paper addresses the remarkable success of a model State statute named the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act (UPHPA), which has been enacted into law in several States since 2011, including in five southern States. The …

Mandatory Legal Malpractice Insurance: Exposing Lawyers' Blind Spots, Susan S. Fortney

Susan S. Fortney

The legal landscape for lawyers’ professional liability in the United States is changing. In 2018, Idaho implemented a new rule requiring that lawyers carry legal malpractice insurance. The adoption of the Idaho rule was the first move in forty years by a state to require legal malpractice insurance since Oregon mandated lawyer participation in a malpractice insurance regime. Over the last two years, a few states have considered whether their jurisdictions should join Oregon and Idaho in requiring malpractice insurance for lawyers in private practice. To help inform the discussion, the article examines different positions taken in the debate on …

A Tort In Search Of A Remedy: Prying Open The Courthouse Doors For Legal Malpractice Victims, Susan S. Fortney

Susan S. Fortney

Using this broad connotation of justice, this Article questions whether many victims of legal malpractice are denied access to justice. In writing about the regulatory function of legal malpractice as a tort, Professor John Leubsdorf argues that legal malpractice relates to three important functions of the law of lawyering: “[D]elineating the duties of lawyers, creating appropriate incentives and disincentives for lawyers in their dealings with clients and others, and providing access to remedies for those injured by improper lawyer behavior.” Arguably, persons injured by lawyer misconduct are denied access to justice if our civil liability system does not provide them …

A Tort In Search Of A Remedy: Prying Open The Courthouse Doors For Legal Malpractice Victims, Susan S. Fortney

Susan S. Fortney

Using this broad connotation of justice, this Article questions whether many victims of legal malpractice are denied access to justice. In writing about the regulatory function of legal malpractice as a tort, Professor John Leubsdorf argues that legal malpractice relates to three important functions of the law of lawyering: “[D]elineating the duties of lawyers, creating appropriate incentives and disincentives for lawyers in their dealings with clients and others, and providing access to remedies for those injured by improper lawyer behavior.” Arguably, persons injured by lawyer misconduct are denied access to justice if our civil liability system does not provide them …

In The Wake Of Thoreau: Four Morden Legal Philosophers And The Theory Of Nonviolent Civil Disobedience, Stephen R. Alton

Stephen Alton

This Article opens with a discussion of Thoreau's philosophy of civil disobedience and then examines the ideas of four modem legal philosophers, Joseph Raz, Kent Greenawalt, John Rawls, and Ronald Dworkin, on the subject. Next, the Article compares the respective thinking of all five men regarding the circumstances that would justify the use of civil disobedience. To facilitate the comparison as well as to make it more relevant to the reader, the Article examines five related contemporary illustrations involving situations in which the use of civil disobedience might arguably be morally justified. This Article concludes with some general thoughts on …

Heller, Mcdonald, And Murder: Testing The More Guns = More Murder Thesis, Don B. Kates, Carlisle Moody

Carlisle Moody

No abstract provided.

Sane Gun Policy From Texas? A Blueprint For Balanced State Campus Carry Laws, Aric Short

Aric Short

merican universities are caught in the crosshairs of one of the most polarizing and contentious gun policy debates: whether to allow concealed carry on campus. Ten states have implemented "campus carry" in some form; sixteen new states considered passage last year; and a growing wave of momentum is building in favor of additional adoptions. Despite this push towards campus carry, most states adopting the policy fail to strike an effective balance between the competing rights and interests involved. When states give universities the option to opt out of the law, for example, they almost always do. Other states impose a …

De-Essentializing Appalachia: Transformative Socio-Legal Change Requires Unmasking Regional Myths, Nicholas F. Stump, Anne Marie Lofaso

Nicholas Stump

No abstract provided.

Politics, Identity, And Class Certification On The U.S. Courts Of Appeals, Stephen B. Burbank, Sean Farhang

Sean Farhang

This article draws on novel data and presents the results of the first empirical analysis of how potentially salient characteristics of Court of Appeals judges influence precedential lawmaking on class certification under Rule 23. We find that the partisan composition of the panel (measured by the party of the appointing president) has a very strong association with certification outcomes, with all-Democratic panels having more than double the certification rate of all-Republican panels in precedential cases. We also find that the presence of one African American on a panel, and the presence of two females (but not one), is associated with …

Book Review (Reviewing Louis Fisher's Congress: Protecting Individual Rights), Adeen Postar

Adeen Postar

Fisher is currently the Scholar in Residence at the Constitution Project, and is well known for his many years as Senior Specialist on Separation of Powers at the Congressional Research Service and as Specialist in Constitutional Law at the Law Library of Congress. He has extensive experience testifying before Congress on topics that include Congress and the constitution, war powers, executive power and privilege, and several aspects of the federal budget and its processes. He has written numerous books on these topics, including (to name only a few) The President and Congress: Power and Policy (1972); Defending Congress and the …

Money Norms, Julia Y. Lee

Julia Lee

Money norms present a fundamental contradiction. Norms embody the social sphere, a system of internalized values, unwritten rules, and shared expectations that informally govern human behavior. Money, on the other hand, evokes the economic sphere of markets, prices, and incentives. Existing legal scholarship keeps the two spheres distinct. Money is assumed to operate as a medium of exchange or as a tool for altering the payoffs of different actions. When used to make good behavior less costly and undesirable behavior more costly, money functions to incentivize, sanction, and deter. Although a rich literature on the expressive function of law exists, …

Abortion Access In An Era Of Constitutional Infidelity, Khiara Bridges

Khiara M Bridges

Abner Greene’s Against Obligation and Louis Michael Seidman’s On Constitutional Disobedience offer provocative, subversive, and frequently convincing arguments against wholesale fidelity to the Constitution. Greene makes the case that individuals, at times, have no duty to obey the Constitution as it has been interpreted and articulates a methodology for how the government should accommodate these legitimate acts of disobedience. Seidman, however, makes the case that we should abandon the “pernicious myth” that we are obligated to obey the Constitution at all. He argues that if the fiction of constitutional obedience was jettisoned altogether, the national discourse about the issues that …

Life In The Balance: Judicial Review Of Abortion Regulations, Khiara Bridges

Khiara M Bridges

Since the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade, scholars have been preoccupied with the test that ought to be applied to abortion regulations. Debate has swirled around the question of whether laws that burden the abortion right should be reviewed with strict scrutiny, rational basis review, or some other multi-factor or categorical test and at what point during pregnancy these tests are appropriate. Moreover, since Planned Parenthood v. Casey, in which the Court replaced Roe’s trimester framework with the undue burden standard, commentators have questioned the propriety of this new test. This Article argues that the most important change …

Silencing The Guns In Haiti, Elizabeth Mensch

Elizabeth Mensch

Book review of Irwin Stotzky's Silencing the Guns in Haiti: The Promise of Deliberative Democracy

The Public-Private Distinction In American Law And Life, Alan Freeman, Elizabeth Mensch

Elizabeth Mensch

No abstract provided.

Solidarity Economy Lawyering, Renee Hatcher

Renee Hatcher

This essay explores lawyering in the solidarity economy movement as an emergent approach to progressive transactional lawyering. The solidarity economy movement is a set of value-driven theories and practices that seeks to transform the global economy into a just economy that centers the needs of people and the planet. While the solidarity economy movement has been established for several decades in other parts of the world, the solidarity economy movement in the United States emerged in 2007. Over the last decade the movement has grown and gained significant momentum, with the rise of solidarity economy organizations and initiatives, as well …

Interrogation Parity, Stephen Rushin, Kate Levine

Stephen Rushin

This Article addresses the special interrogation protections afforded exclusively to the police when they are questioned about misconduct. In approximately twenty states, police officers suspected of misconduct are shielded by statutory Law Enforcement Officer Bills of Rights. These statutes frequently limit the tactics investigators can use during interrogations of police officers. Many of these provisions limit the manner and length of questioning, ban the use of threats or promises, require the recording of interrogations, and guarantee officers a reprieve from questioning to tend to personal necessities. These protections, which are available to police but not to ordinary criminal suspects, create …

Would Hamsterdam Work - Drug Depenalization In The Wire And In Real Life, John Bronsteen

John Bronsteen

The television show The Wire depicts a plan called “Hamsterdam” in which police let people sell drugs in isolated places, and only those places, without fear of arrest. Based on limited but decent empirical evidence, we can make educated guesses about what would happen if that were tried in real life. Indeed, Swiss police tried something remarkably similar in the 1980s. More generally, the results of various forms of drug legalization, depenalization, and decriminalization in Europe--such as in Portugal, which has transferred the state's method of dealing with drug use (including heroin and cocaine) from the criminal justice system to …

Citizen Chávez: The State, Social Movements, And Publics, Anthony Peter Spanakos

Anthony Spanakos

Scholars are divided over whether the emancipatory politics promised by new social movements can be attained within civil society or whether seizure of the state apparatus is necessary. The Bolivarian Revolution led by President Hugo Chávez presents a crucial case for examining this question. Chávez’s use of the state apparatus has been fundamental in broadening the concept of citizenship, but this extension of citizenship has occurred alongside the deliberate exclusion of others. This has not only limited its appeal as a citizenship project but created counterpublics that challenge the functioning of the government and its very legitimacy. Analysis of Bolivarianism …

Backlash Against International Courts In West, East And Southern Africa: Causes And Consequences, Karen J. Alter, James T. Gathii, Laurence R. Helfer

James T Gathii

This paper discusses three credible attempts by African governments to restrict the jurisdiction of three similarly-situated sub-regional courts in response to politically controversial rulings. In West Africa, when the ECOWAS Court upheld allegations of torture by opposition journalists in the Gambia, that country’s political leaders sought to restrict the Court’s power to review human rights complaints. The other member states ultimately defeated the Gambia’s proposal. In East Africa, Kenya failed in its efforts to eliminate the EACJ and to remove some of its judges after a decision challenging an election to a sub-regional legislature. However, the member states agreed to …

Founding Worker Cooperatives: Social Movement Theory And The Law, Ariana R. Levinson

Ariana R. Levinson

No abstract provided.

In The Right Direction, Family Diversity In The Inter-American System Of Human Rights, Macarena Sáez

Macarena Saez

It All Started With Columbo: Teaching Law With Popular Culture, Christine Corcos

Christine A. Corcos

No abstract provided.

Racial Indirection, Yuvraj Joshi

Yuvraj Joshi

The Legacy Of Civil Rights And The Opportunity For Transactional Law Clinics, Lynnise E. Pantin

Lynnise E. Pantin

At the end of the historic march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously paraphrased abolitionist and Unitarian minister Theodore Parker stating, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” The implication of the phrase is that the social justice goals of the Civil Rights Movement would eventually be achieved. His prayer was that servants of justice would be rewarded in due time. In other words, that the goals of the Civil Rights Movement would be achievable at some point in the future. President Obama resurrected the phrase throughout …