Law Commons^™

How Federal Mortgage Programs Affect Homeownership Outcomes Of Low-Income Households, Lawanda Alexia Brown

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Numerous laws and policies have been enacted to aid economic recovery and housing growth after the 2008 housing

crisis in the United States; however, concern remains that low-income families interested in homeownership are in poor

housing situations due to inadequate access to federal homeownership policies and program information. The purpose of

this quantitative study was to analyze the relationship between the variables of income, race, and access to federal

mortgage program policy information and dependent variable HEC on homeownership outcomes for aggregate years

2007 to 2018. Using a quasi-experimental design, the chi-square test of independence was used to test N …

Canadian Policymaker Experiences On Reducing Syndemic Stigma For Hiv And Substance Use Disorder, Nickolas James Cherwinski

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

People living with HIV (PLWH) and substance use disorder (SUD) experience highly stigmatized lives fraught by influences such as criminal law and stigmatizing public policies. Despite free access to antiretroviral therapy (ART) and mental health services for all Canadian citizens, suboptimal adherence to ART and administratively cumbersome mental health interventions still exist. Many researchers have found the health services for both HIV and SUD to be dynamic, costly, and difficult to maintain; as such, the purpose of this study was to explore the knowledge gap related to the policy implications of syndemic stigma experienced by PLWH and SUD in Canada. …

African American Male Ex-Felons' Perspectives Regarding Felon Disenfranchisement, Tymesha Alegra Whitehead

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The tradition of disenfranchising those convicted in the United States of felony crimes has profound historical racial roots that have persisted for decades in the United States. The persistent practice of felon disenfranchisement in the 21st century challenges the essence of democracy, with over six million people disenfranchised. The need for major reform efforts to restore voting rights to ex-felons has been exposed due to this issue. The literature revealed no studies have been undertaken regarding this phenomenon in terms of those directly affected by it. Therefore, the purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study was to understand the effect of …

America’S Presidential Crisis Of Legitimacy: How The Electoral College Became Obsolete And How We Can Fix It, Julia Rose Foodman

Scripps Senior Theses

The goal of this thesis is to critique the current American Presidential electoral system, the Electoral College, and to show what an alternative could potentially mean for the American people. This paper seeks to answer the following questions: What are the main arguments for the Electoral College, why are they troubling, and how can we mend American Presidential elections for the greater purposes of political equality, democracy, and freedom? To do so, core arguments made by conservative pundits in favor of the Electoral College are outlined in order to bring attention to their logical, political, and moral inconsistencies. The inequalities …

Non-Governmental Organisations' Impact On Educational Policy In Rural Ghana, Sarah Ayikai Okine

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Abstract Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have become an increasingly important factor in education globally. The social structure in developing countries such as Ghana has created a need for government to work with NGOs in the educational system to reach out to children and provide quality basic, primary education, especially in rural communities. However, there are still challenges in the discharge of their duties due to challenges in collaboration with all stakeholders. This case study addressed the perception of stakeholders regarding NGOs’ influence on Ghana’s educational system to better understand the influence and impact of NGOs on education in Ghana’s rural communities. …

Corruption In Togo's Land Registration And Its Impact On Real Estate Development, Gbati Kakaye

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Abstract:Researchers have asserted that following malaria and AIDS, land-related conflict, exacerbated by rampant real estate corruption, is the third-largest problem and leading cause of death in Togo. The current study provided a means of gaining better understanding of the impact of corruption on real estate development in Togo by addressing the following research questions: How is corruption manifested in Togo’s land registration process and how has corruption in land registration process impacted real estate development? Theoretically, the study was underpinned by the cultural and neo-institutional economics framework. Data were collected through individual interviews and a focus group discussion with 15 …

Fair Play: Notes On The Algorithmic Soccer Referee, Michael J. Madison

Articles

The soccer referee stands in for a judge. Soccer’s Video Assistant Referee (“VAR”) system stands in for algorithms that augment human deciders. Fair play stands in for justice. They are combined and set in a polycentric system of governance, with implications for designing, administering, and assessing human-machine combinations.

Pandemic Surveillance Discrimination, Christian Sundquist

Articles

The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the abiding tension between surveillance and privacy. Public health epidemiology has long utilized a variety of surveillance methods—such as contact tracing, quarantines, and mandatory reporting laws—to control the spread of disease during past epidemics and pandemics. Officials have typically justified the resulting intrusions on privacy as necessary for the greater public good by helping to stave off larger health crisis. The nature and scope of public health surveillance in the battle against COVID-19, however, has significantly changed with the advent of new technologies. Digital surveillance tools, often embedded in wearable technology, have greatly increased …

Rethinking Grid Governance For The Climate Change Era, Shelley Welton

All Faculty Scholarship

The electricity sector is often appropriately called the linchpin of efforts to respond to climate change. Over the next few decades, the U.S. electricity sector will need to double in size to accommodate electric vehicles, at the same time that it transforms to run entirely on clean energy. To drive this transformation, states are increasingly adopting 100% clean energy targets. But fossil fuel corporations are pushing back, seeking to maintain their structural domination of the U.S. energy sector. This article calls attention to one central but under-scrutinized way that these companies impede the clean energy transition: Incumbent fossil fuel companies …

The Bounds Of Energy Law, Shelley Welton

All Faculty Scholarship

U.S. energy law was born of fossil fuels. Consequently, our energy law has long centered on the material and legal puzzles that bringing fossil fuels to market presents. Eliminating these same carbon-producing energy sources, however, has emerged as perhaps the most pressing material transformation needed in the twenty-first century—and one that energy law scholarship has rightfully embraced. Yet in our admirable quest to aid in this transformation, energy law scholars are largely writing into the field bequeathed to us, proposing changes that tweak, but do not fundamentally challenge, last century’s tools for managing the extraction, transport, and delivery of fossil …

The History And Revival Of The Corporate Purpose Clause, Elizabeth Pollman

All Faculty Scholarship

The corporate purpose debate is experiencing a renaissance. The contours of the modern debate are relatively well developed and typically focus on whether corporations should pursue shareholder value maximization or broader social aims. A related subject that has received much less scholarly attention, however, is the formal legal mechanism by which a corporation expresses its purpose—the purpose clause of the corporate charter. This Article examines corporate purpose through the evolution of corporate charters. Starting with historic examples ranging from the Dutch East India Company to early American corporations and their modern 21st century parallels, the discussion illuminates how corporate purpose …

Prosecuting Civil Asset Forfeiture On Contingency Fees: Looking For Profit In All The Wrong Places, Louis S. Rulli

All Faculty Scholarship

Civil asset forfeiture has strayed far from its intended purpose. Designed to give law enforcement powerful tools to combat maritime offenses and criminal enterprises, forfeiture laws are now used to prey upon innocent motorists and lawful homeowners who are never charged with crimes. Their only sins are that they are carrying legal tender while driving on busy highways or providing shelter in their homes to adult children and grandchildren who allegedly sold small amounts of low-level drugs. Civil forfeiture abuses are commonplace throughout the country with some police even armed with legal waivers for property owners to sign on the …

Neither “Post-War” Nor Post-Pregnancy Paranoia: How America’S War On Drugs Continues To Perpetuate Disparate Incarceration Outcomes For Pregnant, Substance-Involved Offenders, Becca S. Zimmerman

Pitzer Senior Theses

This thesis investigates the unique interactions between pregnancy, substance involvement, and race as they relate to the War on Drugs and the hyper-incarceration of women. Using ordinary least square regression analyses and data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ 2016 Survey of Prison Inmates, I examine if (and how) pregnancy status, drug use, race, and their interactions influence two length of incarceration outcomes: sentence length and amount of time spent in jail between arrest and imprisonment. The results collectively indicate that pregnancy decreases length of incarceration outcomes for those offenders who are not substance-involved but not evenhandedly -- benefitting white …

The Strategically Broken System: A Grounded Theory Study Of The Clinical Implications Of Immigration Law, Policy, And Practice, Kelle Agassiz

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

The majority of clinicians do not receive education pertaining to the legal aspects of immigration in their curriculum, training, or continuing education. In addition, the process of navigating the immigration system has been exacerbated in recent years due to rapid policy changes under the Trump administration, which has contributed to a hostile political climate, particularly for immigrants from Central America and Mexico. Using a classic grounded theory research approach, this study explored the relationship between the psychological implications of immigration and the legal challenges that immigrants face today, with a specific focus on immigration from Central America and Mexico. Through …

Enforcing Higher Standards For Flood Hazard Mitigation In Vermont, Tamsin Flanders

Masters Theses

The state of Vermont faces increasing risk of costly damage from catastrophic flooding events as climate change increases the frequency of heavy rains and cumulative precipitation. In addition to increasing flood inundation risk, extreme precipitation events are leading to high rates damage from fluvial erosion—erosion caused by the force of floodwater and the materials it carries. As in all U.S. states, flood hazard governance in Vermont is shared by multiple levels of government and involves a complex compliance model that relies on local governments to regulate private property owners to achieve community, state, or federal goals.

To encourage municipalities to …

The Torch (December 2020), Crtp

Torch: The Civil Rights Team Project Newsletter

Civic and Community Engagement | Civil Rights and Discrimination | Education | Gender and Sexuality | Inequality and Stratification | Politics and Social Change | Public Policy | Race and Ethnicity

A Mixed-Methods Analysis Of Biofuels, Teresa Cristina Garcia

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Brazil has the largest sugarcane acreage in the world (FAOSTAT, 2020) and is the world leader in the production of sugarcane-based ethanol (Sousa Junior et al., 2017). Due to the technical experience in the production of biofuels and the availability of sugarcane straw and bagasse, the country has a great potential to commercially produce second-generation ethanol (E2G) (Nyko et. al., 2010). In 2017, Brazil enacted a new National Biofuels Policy, called RenovaBio, to expand the production and use of biofuels in the country. This dissertation combines three essays that explore biofuels law and policy with a special focus on Brazil. …

A Letter To The United States Government On Wealth And Income Inequality, Matthieu Maier

English Department: Research for Change - Wicked Problems in Our World

The United States of America is the world’s hotspot when it comes to income and wealth inequality. The wealthiest Americans are accumulating more and more wealth everyday while most Americans, who fall somewhere around middle-class, remain struggling and stagnant. The United States’ unchecked and deregulated system of capitalism is the root cause of our country’s inequities along with our government’s refusal to set aside self-interests and biases in order to combat these issues. From the inequality caused by rouged American systems larger issues are created that lead to complications in health, wages, standard of living, and race relations within our …

Understanding Myanmar’S Buddhist Extremists: Some Preliminary Musings, Kumar Ramakrishna

New England Journal of Public Policy

This article examines Buddhist extremism in Myanmar. It argues that Buddhist extremism—like other types of religious extremism—is an acute form of fundamentalism. The article begins with a survey of how extremism is usually understood in the theoretical literature, showing that its religious variant is best conceived of as an acute form of fundamentalism. It then fine tunes this understanding, arguing that religious extremism is a fundamentalist belief system that justifies structural violence against relevant out-groups. The article outlines seven core characteristics of the religious extremist culled from the various theoretical approaches to extremism. It employs these seven characteristics to examine …

Seventeen Pieces: Displacement, Misplacement, And Conservation, Yasmin Merali, Kevork Mourad, Manas Ghanem

New England Journal of Public Policy

This article explores the systemic importance of art in the conservation of images, historical reference, and cultural meaning as displaced victims of humanitarian crises make the transition from the land of their birth to a new country with a different history and cultural landscape. In presenting the work of Kevork Mourad, an artist of Armenian descent displaced from Syria, we show the essential, layered interplay of visceral, lived individual experiences and the historic collective memory of real and imagined pasts that survive the destruction of physical artifacts.

The Rich, Lucas A. Santos

English Department: Research for Change - Wicked Problems in Our World

The rise of the super rich dramatically rose in the 1980’s. The once dominant oil and gas sector was taken over by finance and technology overall. We are able to see a rise of these super rich, or the one percent, and even how quickly they were able to recover from the 2008 Recession. Now, the one percent are making continuous substantial gains in a current world, where a pandemic has struck and many are struggling. I talk about the use of public policy in order to regain this economic gap between the one percent and the rest of the …

The Role Of The Opioid Crisis In Elder Abuse, Kimberly I. Snow Mhsa, Jennifer Pratt, Stuart Bratesman Mpp

Disability & Aging

As the opioid crisis has deepened over the past twenty years, its effect on individuals and families, including older adults, has grown. To find out how the opioid crisis might be impacting elder abuse, neglect, and exploitation in Maine, we conducted a mixed methods analysis of 2015-2018 Maine Adult Protective Services (APS) investigations to determine: 1) Did opioid-related investigations increase over time? 2) Do investigations involving opioid misuse or abuse differ from investigations that don’t involve opioids? 3) What themes or features of cases involving opioid misuse or abuse by clients and/or perpetrators emerge from the data?

Key Findings: The …

Whitman And The Fiduciary Relationship Conundrum, Lisa Fairfax

All Faculty Scholarship

While the law on insider trading has been convoluted and, in Judge Jed S. Rakoff’s words, “topsy turvy,” the law on insider trading is supposedly clear on at least one point: insider trading liability is premised upon a fiduciary relationship. Thus, all three seminal U.S. Supreme Court cases articulating the necessary elements for demonstrating any form of insider trading liability under § 10(b) and Rule 10b-5 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 made crystal clear that a fiduciary relationship represented the lynchpin for such liability.

Alas, insider trading law is not clear about the source from which the fiduciary …

Local Elected Officials’ Receptivity To Refugee Resettlement In The United States, Robert Shaffer, Lauren E. Pinson, Jonathan A. Chu, Beth A. Simmons

All Faculty Scholarship

Local leaders possess significant and growing authority over refugee resettlement, yet we know little about their attitudes toward refugees. In this article, we use a conjoint experiment to evaluate how the attributes of hypothetical refugee groups influence local policymaker receptivity toward refugee resettlement. We sample from a novel, national panel of current local elected officials, who represent a broad range of urban and rural communities across the United States. We find that many local officials favor refugee resettlement regardless of refugee attributes. However, officials are most receptive to refugees whom they perceive as a strong economic and social fit within …

Policing In A Democratic Constitution, Michael Wasco

Indiana Journal of Constitutional Design

Most constitutions contain provisions relating to or impacting policing. Separate from the armed forces and intelligence services, the police are the state’s internal security apparatus, and codifying issues related to policing within a constitution can ensure efficient service delivery and human rights protections.

Originating from the Libyan constitution making process, this paper provides a taxonomy of options for constitution drafters and scholars. More so than other issues, such as separation of powers or human rights protections generally, policing sections are very country specific. While not advocating for specific best practices, the work gives ample justifications for certain policing principles and …

The European Central Bank's Securities Markets Programme (Ecb Gfc), Ariel Smith

Journal of Financial Crises

The Eurozone struggled during the escalation of the sovereign debt crisis in 2010. In order to aid malfunctioning securities markets, restore liquidity, and enable proper functioning of the monetary policy transmission mechanism, the European Central Bank (ECB) instituted the Securities Markets Programme (SMP) on May 9, 2010. This program enabled Eurosystem central banks to purchase securities from entities in Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Italy, and Spain. The program ended on September 6, 2012, and evaluations of its effectiveness are mixed.

The Commercial Paper Funding Facility (U.S. Gfc), Rosalind Z. Wiggins

Journal of Financial Crises

In mid-September 2008, prime money market mutual funds (MMMFs) began experiencing run-like redemption requests sparked by one fund that had “broken the buck” because of large exposure to Lehman Brothers commercial paper (CP). As a result, MMMFs, which are significant investors in CP, became reluctant to hold CP. Within a week, outstanding CP had been reduced by roughly $300 billion. The CP market experienced severe shortening of maturities and increased rates, making it difficult for issuers to place new paper. When government efforts to assist the MMMFs did not resolve the stresses in the CP market, the Federal Reserve announced, …

Market Liquidity Programs: Gfc And Before, June Rhee, Greg Feldberg, Ariel Smith, Andrew Metrick

Journal of Financial Crises

The virulence of the Global Financial Crisis of 2007–09 (GFC) was explained in large part by the increased reliance of the global financial system on market-based funding and the lack of preexisting tools to address a disruption in that type of system. This paper surveys market liquidity programs (MLPs), which we define as government interventions in which the key motivation is to stabilize liquidity in a specific wholesale funding market that is under stress. Most of the MLPs surveyed in this paper were launched during and after the GFC, but two pre-GFC MLPs are included. A subsequent survey on MLPs …

The First Amendment And The Right(S) Of Publicity, Jennifer E. Rothman, Robert C. Post

All Faculty Scholarship

The right of publicity protects persons against unauthorized uses of their identity, most typically their names, images, or voices. The right is in obvious tension with freedom of speech. Yet courts seeking to reconcile the right with the First Amendment have to date produced only a notoriously confused muddle of inconsistent constitutional doctrine. In this Article, we suggest a way out of the maze. We propose a relatively straightforward framework for analyzing how the right of publicity should be squared with First Amendment principles.

At the root of contemporary constitutional confusion lies a failure to articulate the precise state interests …

Environmental Soft Law As A Governance Strategy, Cary Coglianese

All Faculty Scholarship

Soft law governance relies on nongovernmental institutions that establish and implement voluntary standards. Compared with traditional hard law solutions to societal and economic problems, soft law alternatives promise to be more politically feasible to establish and then easier to adapt in the face of changing circumstances. They may also seem more likely to be flexible in what they demand of targeted businesses and other entities. But can soft law actually work to solve major problems? This Article considers the value of soft law governance through the lens of three major voluntary, nongovernmental initiatives that address environmental concerns: (1) ISO 14001 …