Law Commons^™

Enhancing Public Engagement On Offshore Wind Energy Using Genius Loci: A Case Study From A Lake Michigan Coastal Community, Erik Edward Nordman, Daniel O'Keefe, Erika Arndt

Erik Edward Nordman

The Klein Water Treatment Facility: Model For The New Superfund Management Strategy – Or- The Importance Of Being In The Wrong Place At The Right Time???, David Brown

David C. Brown

12 pages.

A Better Direction For California's Climate Change Policy, David Gamage, Mark Gergen

Mark P. Gergen

No abstract provided.

Workshop | Body Worn Video Recorders: The Socio-Technical Implications Of Gathering Direct Evidence, Katina Michael, Alexander Hayes

Alexander Hayes Mr.

- From in-car video recording to body-worn video recording

- Exploring available technologies: how do they work, pros and cons

- Storing direct evidence in secure storage: factors to consider

- Citizens “shooting” back with POV tech – what are their rights?

- Crowdsourced sousveillance- harnessing public data for forensic profiling

- Police force policies and practices on the application of new media

Welcome To The Machine: Privacy And Workplace Implications Of Predictive Analytics, Robert Sprague

Robert Sprague

Water-Smart Growth: Integrating Water Management And Land Use Planning, Enjie Li

Enjie Li

Water and urban growth are inextricably interconnected, particularly in arid regions. Urban growth and water management have generated multi-dimensional conflicts. Growing cities that seek to quench their continuously increasing thirst with limited available water resources often have adverse impacts on the environment or region from which the water is drawn. Given that land use planning is an effective tool to control and manage urban growth and it has direct influence on urban water management, a holistic land-water planning approach is needed to cope with rapid growth and water scarcity in the arid western United States. However, this land-water planning approach …

Exorcising The Evil Of Forum-Shopping, Kevin Clermont, Theodore Eisenberg

Kevin M. Clermont

Most of the business of litigation comprises pretrial disputes. A common and important dispute is over where adjudication should take place. Civil litigators deal with nearly as many change-of-venue motions as trials. The battle over venue often constitutes the critical issue in a case. The American way is to provide plaintiffs with a wide choice of venues for suit. But the American way has its drawbacks. To counter these drawbacks, an integral part of our court systems, and in particular the federal court system, is the scheme of transfer of venue "in the interest of justice." However, the leading evaluative …

How Employment-Discrimination Plaintiffs Fare In The Federal Courts Of Appeals, Kevin Clermont, Theodore Eisenberg, Stewart Schwab

Kevin M. Clermont

Employment-discrimination plaintiffs swim against the tide. Compared to the typical plaintiff, they win a lower proportion of cases during pretrial and after trial. Then, many of their successful cases are appealed. On appeal, they have a harder time in upholding their successes, as well in reversing adverse outcome. This tough story does not describe some tiny corner of the litigation world. Employment-discrimination cases constitute an increasing fraction of the federal civil docket, now reigning as the largest single category of cases at nearly 10 percent. In this article, we use official government data to describe the appellate phase of this …

Foreigners' Fate In America's Courts: Empirical Legal Research, Kevin Clermont, Theodore Eisenberg

Kevin M. Clermont

This article revisits the controversy regarding how foreigners fare in U.S. courts. The available data, if taken in a sufficiently big sample from numerous case categories and a range of years, indicate that foreigners have fared better in the federal courts than their domestic counterparts have fared. Thus, the data offer no support for the existence of xenophobic bias in U.S. courts. Nor do they establish xenophilia, of course. What the data do show is that case selection drives the outcomes for foreigners. Foreigners’ aversion to U.S. forums can elevate the foreigners’ success rates, when measured as a percentage of …

Judicial Politics, Death Penalty Appeals, And Case Selection: An Empirical Study, John Blume, Theodore Eisenberg

John H. Blume

Several studies try to explain case outcomes based on the politics of judicial selection methods. Scholars usually hypothesize that judges selected by partisan popular elections are subject to greater political pressure in deciding cases than are other judges. No class of cases seems more amenable to such analysis than death penalty cases. No study, however, accounts both for judicial politics and case selection, the process through which cases are selected for death penalty litigation. Yet, the case selection process cannot be ignored because it yields a set of cases for adjudication that is far from a random selection of cases. …

Sustainable Development, John Dernbach

John C. Dernbach

No abstract provided.

A Better Direction For California's Climate Change Policy, David Gamage, Mark Gergen

David Gamage

No abstract provided.

The Sustainable Relationship: What The United States And The United Kingdom Can Teach Each Other About Climate Change And Sustainable Development At The National Level, John Dernbach, Andrea Ross

John C. Dernbach

No abstract provided.

When Will America, World Make Sustainability A Priority?, John Dernbach

John C. Dernbach

No abstract provided.

Sustaining America, John Dernbach

John C. Dernbach

This essay summarizes U.S. sustainability efforts over the two decades since the U.N. Conference on Environment and Development (or Earth Summit) in 1992. It also summarizes basic findings and recommendations from Acting as if Tomorrow Matters: Accelerating the Transition to Sustainability (Environmental Law Institute 2012). Drawing on the expertise of more than four dozen sustainability practitioners in a variety of fields, the book teases from the limited progress made in the United States over the past two decades the overall patterns for that progress. It also reviews the most significant obstacles to sustainability, again showing patterns in those obstacles across …

2011 Scholars And Artists Bibliography, Mark Tebeau

Mark Tebeau

This bibliography was created for the annual Friends of the Michael Schwartz Library Scholars and Artists Reception, recognizing scholarly and creative achievements of Cleveland State University faculty, staff and emeriti. Mark Tebeau was the guest speaker

Can The Battle Against Climate Change Become An Effective Social Movement?, John Dernbach

John C. Dernbach

No abstract provided.

Federal Energy Efficiency And Conservation Laws, John Dernbach, Marianne Tyrrell

John C. Dernbach

This paper provides an overview of U.S. law and policy concerning energy efficiency and conservation. The United States appears torn between two narratives - one expressing the abundant demonstrated opportunities provided by energy savings and the other based on a fear of deprivation from using less energy. Rather than choosing between the two, U.S. law and policy splits the difference - embracing efficiency and conservation more or less halfheartedly. Energy efficiency and conservation policy thus has a Groundhog Day aspect, in which the same or similar arguments are made year after year, decade after decade, and often (it appears) to …

The Essential And Growing Role Of Legal Education In Achieving Sustainability, John Dernbach

John C. Dernbach

This article suggests that law schools need to play a leading role in the national and global effort to achieve sustainability, including the effort to address climate change. The article first describes the various drivers for sustainability in law schools. Clients are increasingly demanding that their lawyers 'walk the talk,' as many businesses and corporations already are. The universities that provide an institutional home for most law schools are also adopting sustainability policies and practices that influence their law schools. Within the legal profession, the American Bar Association, as well as many state and local bar associations, have adopted a …

Creating The Law Of Environmentally Sustainable Economic Development, John Dernbach

John C. Dernbach

This article argues that a key to sustainability is redirecting the law of economic development. From a historical perspective, sustainable development is an effort to integrate environmental protection and restoration with development. As a result, it is not possible to fully understand sustainable development unless we understand what development means. While that term is reasonably well understood at the international level, our closest analogue in the United States is not development in general but rather economic development. A great many recently enacted laws that move the United States toward sustainability can be understood as economic development laws. By understanding these …

The "Cash For Clunkers" Program: A Sustainability Evaluation, Marianne Tyrrell, John Dernbach

John C. Dernbach

This article describes and evaluates the effectiveness of the Consumer Assistance to Recycle and Save Act of 2009, also known as the “Cash for Clunkers” legislation. Under this law, Congress authorized persons trading in older and less fuel-efficient motor vehicles for newer and more fuel-efficient vehicles to receive a voucher worth up to $4,500 toward the purchase of the new vehicle. The article reviews various studies assessing the effectiveness of this legislation based on economic, social, and environmental criteria. Because these criteria are consistent with the goals of sustainable development, the legislation provides important lessons for future efforts to achieve …

Environmental Laws And Sustainability: An Introduction, John Dernbach, Joel Mintz

John C. Dernbach

In this introduction to the special issue of Sustainability on environmental laws and sustainability, we attempt to synthesize key lessons from the issue’s ten substantive articles. These lessons involve the use of law to achieve integrated decision-making, the use of pre-existing laws to foster sustainability, the centrality of sub-national governments in achieving sustainability, the background law of unsustainable development, the growing importance of climate change, the need to use law to protect and restore ecological integrity, the importance of judicial review and nongovernmental organizations, the need to translate sustainability into specific legal principles, the challenge of creating an appropriate national …

The Protection Of Rights Management Information: Modernization Or Cup Half Full?, Mark Perry

Mark Perry

Many papers in this collection discuss the history and development of Bill C-32, An Act to Amend the Copyright Act, introduced into the Canadian Parliament on 2 June 2010, so that analysis will not be duplicated here. Among the failures of copyright reform has been the lack of addressing the required “balancing” of proprietary rights on the one hand, with user rights and the public domain on the other. Rights Management Information (RMI) can aid in this balancing. The RMI of a work is simply data that provide iden- tification of rights related to that work, either directly or indirectly. …

Ssrn As An Initial Revolution In Academic Knowledge Aggregation And Dissemination, David Bray, Sascha Vitzthum, Benn Konsynski

Sascha Vitzthum

Within this paper we consider our results of using the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) over a period of 18 months to distribute our working papers to the research community. Our experiences have been quite positive, with SSRN serving as a platform both to inform our colleagues about our research as well as inform us about related research (through email and telephoned conversations of colleagues who discovered our paper on SSRN). We then discuss potential future directions for SSRN to consider, and how SSRN might well represent an initial revolution in 21st century academic knowledge aggregation and dissemination. Our paper …

Making The States Full Partners In A National Climate Change Effort: A Necessary Element For Sustainable Economic Development, John Dernbach, Robert Mckinstry, Thomas Peterson

John C. Dernbach

This article explains why states and localities need to be full partners in a national climate change effort based on federal legislation or the existing Clean Air Act. A large share of reductions with the lowest cost and the greatest co-benefits (e.g., job creation, technology development, reduction of other pollutants) are in areas that a federal cap-and-trade program or other purely federal measures will not easily reach. These are also areas where the states have traditionally exercised their powers—including land use, building construction, transportation, and recycling. The economic recovery and expansion will require direct state and local management of climate …

Who Counts Your Votes?, Halina Kaminski, Lila Kari, Mark Perry

Mark Perry

Open and fair elections are paramount to modern democracy. Although some people claim that the penciland- paper systems used in countries such as Canada and UK are still the best method of avoiding vote rigging, recent election problems have sparked great interest in managing the election process through the use of electronic voting systems. It is a goal of this paper to describe a voting system that is secret and secure as well as verifiable and useable over an existing computer network. We have designed and implemented an electronic voting system – Verifiable E-Voting (VEV) – with an underlying protocol …

Agenda For A Sustainable America, John Dernbach

John C. Dernbach

No abstract provided.

An Agenda For Sustainable Communities, John Dernbach

John C. Dernbach

This article summarizes progress toward sustainable communities in the United States since the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (or Earth Summit) in 1992. It shows the significant initiative that many communities have undertaken and identifies existing state and federal laws as impediments to achieving sustainability. This article also makes recommendations for further progress based on what we have already learned about how to achieve sustainable communities. They include not only more and strengthened sustainable community efforts, and broad state and federal legal support, but also deep engagement of all affected citizens. This article is based primarily on three …

Towards Self-Organizing, Smart Business Networks: Let’S Create ‘Life’ From Inert Information, David Bray, Benn Konsynski

David A. Bray

We review three different theories that can inform how researchers can determine the performance of smart business networks, to include: (1) the Theory of Evolution, (2) the Knowledge-Based Theory of the Firm, and (3) research insights into computers and cognition. We suggest that each of these theories demonstrate that to be generally perceived as smart, an organism needs to be self-organizing, communicative, and tool-making. Consequentially, to determine the performance of a smart business network, we suggest that researchers need to determine the degree to which it is self-organizing, communicative, and tool-making. We then relate these findings to the Internet and …

The Role Of Science And Engineering In Water Regulation Over The Past 100 Years, James R. May, Patrick Clary

James R. May

This article explores how scientific and engineering principles are inexorably linked to the regulation of water. Scientists and engineers first discovered the link between disease and water sources in the mid-19th century. Over the years, scientists and engineers have led the way to identifying water quality problems and their causes. These discoveries have directly contributed to the scope of water regulation in the United States and elsewhere. In addition, changes in water quality regulation have dictated the need for increasingly sophisticated water treatment technologies and engineers have been at the forefront of the development of these water control technologies. This …