Law Commons^™

Administering Section 2 Of The Voting Rights Act After Shelby County, Christopher S. Elmendorf, Douglas M. Spencer

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Until the Supreme Court put an end to it in Shelby County v. Holder, section 5 of the Voting Rights Act was widely regarded as an effective, low-cost tool for blocking potentially discriminatory changes to election laws and administrative practices. The provision the Supreme Court left standing, section 2, is generally seen as expensive, cumbersome, and almost wholly ineffective at blocking changes before they take effect. This Article argues that the courts, in partnership with the Department of Justice, could reform section 2 so that it fills much of the gap left by the Supreme Court's evisceration of section …

Report Of The Special Rapporteur On The Rights Of Indigenous Peoples On The Situation Of Indigenous Peoples In The Republic Of The Congo, S. James Anaya

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No abstract provided.

From Access To Success: Affirmative Action Outcomes In A Class-Based System, Matthew N. Gaertner, Melissa Hart

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Scholarly discussion about affirmative action policy has been dominated in the past ten years by debates over "mismatch theory'"--the claim that race-conscious affirmative action harms those it is intended to help by placing students who receive preferences among academically superior peers in environments where they will be overmatched and unable to compete. Despite serious empirical and theoretical challenges to this claim in academic circles, mismatch has become widely accepted outside those circles, so much so that the theory played prominently in Justice Clarence Thomas's concurring opinion in Fisher v. University of Texas. This Article explores whether mismatch occurs in …

The Law's Clock, Frederic Bloom

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Time is everywhere in law. It shapes doctrines as disparate as ripeness and retroactivity, and it impacts litigants of every status and type--the eager plaintiff who brings her case too early, the death-row inmate who seeks his stay too late. Yet legal time is still scarcely studied, and it remains poorly understood. This Article makes new and better sense of that time. It begins with an original account of time as a tool of institutional power, tracking the relocation of that power from the first western cathedrals to the earliest Supreme Court. It then links time's revealing past to our …

The Risks We Are Willing To Eat: Food Imports And Safety, Alexia Brunet Marks

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Recent efforts to regulate the safety of U.S. food imports have not kept up with the complexity of global trade and the risks that accompany globalization. Congress drafted the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2011 ("FSMA") in response to heightened food safety risks, surging imports, and an outdated food import safety system. While the FSMA provides the Food and Drug Administration ("FDA") additional authority to regulate food facilities, establish standards for safe produce, recall contaminated foods, and oversee imported foods, vulnerabilities still exist.

This article exposes problems with the old system of food import rules and significant challenges facing the …

My Coworker, My Enemy: Solidarity, Workplace Control, And The Class Politics Of Title Vii, Ahmed A. White

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No abstract provided.

Food Policy And Cognitive Bias, Paul F. Campos

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No abstract provided.

Research Strategies Using Headnotes: Citators And Relevance, Susan Nevelow Mart

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No abstract provided.

How To Do Things With Hohfeld, Pierre Schlag

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Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld’s 1913 article, Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning, is widely viewed as brilliant. A thrilling read, it is not. More like chewing on sawdust. The arguments are dense, the examples unfriendly, and the prose turgid.

“How to Do Things With Hohfeld” is an effort to provide an accessible and sawdust-free account of Hohfeld’s article, as well as to show how and why his analysis of “legal relations” (e.g., right/duty, etc.) matters. Perhaps the principal reason is that the analysis furnishes a discriminating platform to discern the economic and political import of legal rules and …

Who Regulates The Robots, Margot Kaminski

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No abstract provided.

Bypassing Federalism And The Administrative Law Of Negawatts, Sharon B. Jacobs

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Presidential unilateralism has become a defining feature of the executive branch. But a related and equally important phenomenon has been largely ignored: federal agency efforts to circumvent statutory federalism boundaries. This move, which the Article calls "bypassing federalism, " involves using existing jurisdictional authority to work defacto, rather than dejure, reallocations of power. The Article explores agency bypassing through the lens of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's ("FERC's") promotion of demand response in electricity markets. Demand response refers to customer sales of negative watts, or "negawatts," back to the electrical grid. FERC, eager to promote demand-side management programs but stymied …

Regulating Real-World Surveillance, Margot E. Kaminski

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A number of laws govern information gathering, or surveillance, by private parties in the physical world. But we lack a compelling theory of privacy harm that accounts for the state's interest in enacting these laws. Without a theory of privacy harm, these laws will be enacted piecemeal. Legislators will have a difficult time justifying the laws to constituents; the laws will not be adequately tailored to legislative interest; and courts will find it challenging to weigh privacy harms against other strong values, such as freedom of expression.

This Article identifies the government interest in enacting laws governing surveillance by private …

Quarterback By Committee: A Response In Memory Of Dan Markel, Andrew A. Schwartz

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In Catalyzing Fans, Dan Markel, Michael McCann and Howard Wasserman propose so-called “Fan Action Committees” (“FACs”), whereby fans would crowdfund a sum of money and then spend it to influence the personnel decisions of their favorite teams. This Response — dedicated to the memory of Dan Markel — suggests that an effective FAC could upset a team’s overall hiring and compensation system, thereby risking a downturn in team performance to the detriment of all concerned.

The Digital Shareholder, Andrew A. Schwartz

Publications

Crowdfunding, a new Internet-based securities market, was recently authorized by federal and state law in order to create a vibrant, diverse, and inclusive system of entrepreneurial finance. But will people really send their money to strangers on the Internet in exchange for unregistered securities in speculative startups? Many are doubtful, but this Article looks to first principles and finds reason for optimism.

Well-established theory teaches that all forms of startup finance must confront and overcome three fundamental challenges: uncertainty, information asymmetry, and agency costs. This Article systematically examines this “trio of problems” and potential solutions in the context of crowdfunding. …

They Had Nothing, Charles Wilkinson

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No abstract provided.

Corporate Legacy, Andrew A. Schwartz

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Many public companies have shed takeover defenses in recent years, on the theory that such defenses reduce share price. Yet new data presented here shows that practically all new public companies--those launching their initial public offering (IPO)--go public with powerful takeover defenses in place. This behavior is puzzling because the adoption of takeover defenses presumably lowers the price at which the pre-IPO shareholders can sell their own shares in and after the IPO. Why would founders and early investors engage in this seemingly counterproductive behavior? Building on prior attempts to solve this mystery, this Article claims that IPO firms adopt …

The Nonfinancial Returns Of Crowdfunding, Andrew A. Schwartz

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Securities crowdfunding — the sale of unregistered securities to the public over the Internet — has come under attack before it has even begun. Legal scholars in particular have expressed concern that investors will lose any money they invest in crowdfunding companies. Even assuming that this may be true from a purely financial perspective, these critics are missing an important point: Crowdfund investors with negative returns will not simply have lost their money, but rather they will have spent it (at least in part) on nonpecuniary benefits, including entertainment, political expression and community building. These nonfinancial returns of crowdfunding are …

Government Speech And Political Courage, Helen Norton

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This short essay addresses Walker v. Texas Div., Sons of Confederate Veterans, Inc., in which a divided Court upheld Texas's rejection of the Sons of Confederate Veterans' request for a specialty license plate that featured the Confederate flag. Although it agrees with the majority that specialty license plates can -- and often do -- reflect the government's own expression that the government should remain free to control without running afoul of the First Amendment, it argues that the Walker Court missed an important opportunity to refine its government speech doctrine. Not only has the Court yet to settle on a …

Cu Law Library Launches New Resource For Historical Colorado Statutory Research, Robert M. Linz

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No abstract provided.

Structuralist Legal Histories, Justin Desautels-Stein

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This is a contribution to a symposium titled "Theorizing Contemporary Legal Thought." The central theme of the piece is the relation between legal structuralism and legal historiography.

Introduction, S. James Anaya

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No abstract provided.

Countersupermajoritarianism, Frederic Bloom, Nelson Tebbe

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How should the Constitution change? In Originalism and the Good Constitution, John McGinnis and Michael Rappaport argue that it ought to change in only one way: through the formal mechanisms set out in the Constitution’s own Article V. This is so, they claim, because provisions adopted by supermajority vote are more likely to be substantively good. The original Constitution was ratified in just that way, they say, and subsequent changes should be implemented similarly. McGinnis and Rappaport also contend that this substantive goodness is preserved best by a mode of originalist interpretation. In this Review, we press two main arguments. …

Private And Public Ordering In Safe Asset Markets, Anna Gelpern, Erik F. Gerding

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An influential literature in economics explores the phenomenon of “safe assets” – when participants across financial markets act “as if” certain debt is risk free – as well as its role in the global financial crisis and its implications for post-crisis reform.

We highlight the role of private ordering in constructing safe assets. Private ordering, including contractual devices and transaction structures, contributes to the creation of these debt contracts, to their collective treatment in financial markets as low risk investments, and to the making of deep and liquid markets in them. These contracts and transaction structures also provide a template …

The More Things Change . . . : Exploring Solutions To Persisting Discrimination In Legal Academia, Melissa Hart

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No abstract provided.

Report Of The Special Rapporteur On The Rights Of Indigenous Peoples On Extractive Industries And Indigenous Peoples, S. James Anaya

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No abstract provided.

Report Of The Special Rapporteur On The Rights Of Indigenous Peoples On The Situation Of Maori People In New Zealand, S. James Anaya

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No abstract provided.

Lawyers And Spoiled Identity, Paul Campos

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No abstract provided.

A Provocative Defense, Aya Gruber

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It is common wisdom that the provocation defense is, quite simply, sexist. For decades, there has been a trenchant feminist critique that the doctrine reflects and reinforces masculine norms of violence and shelters brutal domestic killers. The critique is so prominent that it appears alongside the doctrine itself in leading criminal law casebooks. The feminist critique of provocation embodies several claims about provocation's problematically gendered nature, including that the defense is steeped in chauvinist history, treats culpable sexist killers too leniently, discriminates against women, and expresses bad messages. This Article offers a (likely provocative) defense of the provocation doctrine. While …

Introduction To Big Horn General Stream Adjudication Symposium, Charles Wilkinson

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No abstract provided.

Did Multicultural America Result From A Mistake? The 1965 Immigration Act And Evidence From Roll Call Votes, Gabriel J. Chin, Douglas M. Spencer

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Between July 1964 and October 1965, Congress enacted the three most important civil rights laws since Reconstruction: The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments of 1965. As we approach the 50th anniversary of these laws, it is clear that all three have fundamentally remade the United States; education, employment, housing, politics, and the population itself have irreversibly changed.

Arguably the least celebrated yet most consequential of these laws was the 1965 Immigration Act, which set the United States on the path to become a "majority minority" nation. In …