Law Commons^™

Cybermedicine: The Benefits And Risks Of Purchasing Drugs Over The Internet, David Mills

Journal of Technology Law & Policy

In today's rapidly changing world of e-commerce, almost anything can be bought over the Internet and delivered right to your front door. Virtually every day there is news of yet another company selling some type of product online. Included in this barrage of products is prescription medication. Not only is it possible to order prescription medication over the Internet, in some cases it is not necessary to be examined, or even to consult with a physician. ~ To some, this new type of "cybermedicine" is an affront to traditional medicine, as well as potentially dangerous to consumers. In addition, the …

Other Markets, Other Costs: Modernizing Antitrust, Jeffrey L. Harrison

UF Law Faculty Publications

Today’s antitrust law is characterized by stagnation and indeterminacy. The failure is so thorough that it is not clear that U.S. competition law actually leads to any outcomes that are defendable except at the most superficial level. Moreover, when enforcement does result in a desirable outcome, it not clear that it is the best outcome. The principal reason for this state of affairs is that antitrust scholars and courts cling to misguided goals and theories that have not evolved despite an avalanche of information now available that can modernize the discipline.

This Article has two main sections that necessarily overlap. …

Moving Forward By Looking Back: The Retroactive Application Of Obergefell, Lee-Ford Tritt

UF Law Faculty Publications

The recent Supreme Court decision of Obergefell v. Hodges has forever altered American jurisprudence. Not only did this decision make same-sex marriage legal in all fifty states, but it also required states to recognize same-sex marriages from other states in accordance with the 14th Amendment. The Court’s holding in Obergefell raises a fundamental question with serious legal and financial significance: when exactly do these once unrecognized marriages legally begin? And to what extent must courts apply Obergefell retroactively? The stakes are high and substantive financial effects are pending on the answer to this question — for, with marriage, comes wide-ranging …

Because, The Internet: The Limits Of Online Campaign Finance Disclosure, Vitaliy Kats

Florida Law Review

During the 2011–2012 election cycle, Shaun McCutcheon contributed $33,088 to sixteen different candidates for federal office. McCutcheon’s donations complied with the base limits the Federal Election Commission (FEC) set for contributions to individual candidates.McCutcheon wanted to contribute more but was barred by the FEC’s aggregate limit on contributions.In June of 2012, McCutcheon and the Republication National Committee (RNC) filed a complaint before a three-judge panel of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. McCutcheon and the RNC claimed that the aggregate limits on contributions to candidates and political committees were unconstitutional under the First Amendment.The three-judge panel granted …

Class Actions Removability And The Changing Business Of The Supreme Court: Dart Cherokee Basin Operating Co. V. Owens, Stephen Carr

Florida Law Review

Problems of appellate jurisdiction are, by their nature, mainly pragmatic problems. The U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeals are forced to balance the need to provide timely, effective appellate review of district court decisions against the understandable desire for judicial economy.In addition to this inherent tension between fairness and economy, the law is constantly evolving, causing caseloads to wax and wane, and continuously forcing the circuit courts to react by expanding and contracting their rules of appellate jurisdiction. The U.S. Code generally limits appellate review to “final decisions,”and the U.S. Supreme Court has usually instructed the circuit courts to take a …

Intervention In The Tax Court And The Appellate Review Of Tax Court Procedural Decisions, Cole Barnett, Christopher Weeg

Florida Law Review

The Tax Court is an Article I court. It resolves more than 95% of all tax-related litigation—actually nearly 97% of the total federal tax docket in 2012. Despite this substantial role in federal litigation, scholars and courts have generally put aside the issue of what standard is appropriate when a U.S. federal court of appeals reviews Tax Court procedural questions. Section 7482 of the Internal Revenue Code (I.R.C.) grants jurisdiction to the courts of appeals to review Tax Court decisions “in the same manner and to the same extent as decisions of the district courts in civil actions tried without …

Docs V. Glocks: Speech, Guns, Discrimination, And Privacy – Is Anyone Winning?, Marla Spector Bowman

Florida Law Review

Americans discuss some of the most intimate details of their lives within the small confines of their neighborhood doctor's office. Many Americans, however, may be taken aback if their physician asked them whether they owned a firearm during a routine physical examination. Although most Americans might not consider firearms education to be their physician's primary purpose, a significant number of doctors in Florida, and throughout the medical community, consider promoting firearms safety a part of practicing preventative medicine.

When a group of Florida legislators saw this behavior as a threat to the Second Amendment, gun owner access to healthcare, and …

Single-Family Zoning, Intimate Association, And The Right To Choose Household Companions, Rigel C. Oliveri

Florida Law Review

Many local governments use single-family zoning ordinances to restrict occupancy in residential areas to households whose members are all related to one another by blood, marriage, or adoption. The Supreme Court upheld such ordinances in the 1974 case of Belle Terre v. Boraas, and they have been used to prevent all sorts of groups from living together-from unmarried couples who are raising children to college students. This Article contends that Belle Terre is wholly incompatible with the Court's modern jurisprudence on privacy and the right of intimate association. The case appears to have survived this long because of a reflexive …

Bargaining In The Shadow Of Big Data, Dru Stevenson, Nicholas J. Wagoner

Florida Law Review

Attorney bargaining has traditionally taken place in the shadow of trial as litigants adjust tactics-and their inclination to negotiate a settlement-based on their forecast of the outcome of a trial and its associated costs. Lawyers bargaining on the verge of trial have traditionally relied on their intuition, knowledge of precedent, and previous interactions with the presiding judge and opposing counsel to forecast trial outcomes and litigation costs. Today, however, technology that leverages legal data is moving the practice of law into the shadow of the trends and patterns apparent in aggregated litigation data. This Article describes the tools that facilitate …

Recent Development: Craigslist And The Cfaa: The Untold Story, Clark S. Splichal

Florida Law Review

There is one area in which Craigslist Inc. appears particularly invested these days: its legal bills. Notoriously cutthroat, this online classified marketplace has steadfastly clung to its bare-boned business blueprint while resisting any form of growth or innovation over the years. Craigslist has not, however, shied away from taking on its would-be competitors in court, oftentimes those attempting only to “add[] a layer of value” to the Craigslist formula. Not surprisingly, Craigslist’s arsenal of litigation weapons has become quite vast in recent years: claims arising under the Copyright Act, the Lanham Act, and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), …

Hands Up, Don't Shoot: Police Misconduct And The Need For Body Cameras, Iesha S. Nunes

Florida Law Review

The 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri is probably the most notable of the many recent cases in the media involving police officers' use of excessive force. After Officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Brown, varying accounts of what transpired between the two men surfaced. Officer Wilson claimed he was defending himself against Brown when he fired the fatal shots; however, other witnesses claimed Brown had his hands raised above his head in a position of surrender when Officer Wilson killed him. This case highlights the need for police officers to wear body cameras because the extremely different …

Big Data Blacklisting, Margaret Hu

Florida Law Review

“Big data blacklisting” is the process of categorizing individuals as administratively “guilty until proven innocent” by virtue of suspicious digital data and database screening results. Database screening and digital watchlisting systems are increasingly used to determine who can work, vote, fly, etc. In a big data world, through the deployment of these big data tools, both substantive and procedural due process protections may be threatened in new and nearly invisible ways. Substantive due process rights safeguard fundamental liberty interests. Procedural due process rights prevent arbitrary deprivations by the government of constitutionally protected interests. This Article frames the increasing digital mediation …

Incentivizing Corporate America To Eradicate Transnational Bribery Worldwide: Federal Transparency And Voluntary Disclosure Under The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, Peter R. Reilly, Peter R. Reilly

Florida Law Review

In 1977, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) discovered that hundreds of U.S. companies had spent hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes to improve business overseas. In response, Congress passed the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), thereby making it illegal to bribe foreign officials to obtain a business advantage. A major tension has emerged between the federal agencies charged with enforcing the FCPA (i.e., the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and the SEC), and the corporate entities trying to stay within the legal and regulatory bounds of the statute. Specifically, while the government appears to be trying to …

Clean Energy Federalism, Felix Mormann, Felix Mormann

Florida Law Review

Legal scholarship tends to approach the law and policy of clean energy from an environmental law perspective. As hydraulic fracturing, renewable energy integration, nuclear reactor (re)licensing, transport biofuel mandates, and other energy issues have pushed to the forefront of the environmental law debate, clean energy law has begun to emancipate itself. The emerging literature on clean energy federalism is a symptom of this emancipation. This Article adds to that literature by offering two case studies, a novel model for policy integration, and theoretical insights to elucidate the relationship between environmental federalism and clean energy federalism.

Renewable portfolio standards and feed-in …

The Surprising History Of The Preponderance Standard Of Civil Proof, John Leubsdorf

Florida Law Review

Although much has been written on the history of the requirement of proof of crimes beyond a reasonable doubt, this is the first study to probe the history of its civil counterpart, proof by a preponderance of the evidence. It turns out that the criminal standard did not diverge from a preexisting civil standard, but vice versa. Only in the late eighteenth century, after lawyers and judges began speaking of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, did references to the preponderance standard begin to appear. Moreover, U.S. judges did not start to instruct juries about the preponderance standard until the mid-nineteenth …

Internet Payment Blockades, Annemarie Bridy

Florida Law Review

Internet payment blockades are an attempt to enforce intellectual property rights by “following the money” that flows to online merchants who profit from piracy and counterfeiting. Where corporate copyright and trademark owners failed in the legislature and the judiciary to create binding public law requiring payment processors like MasterCard and Visa to act as intellectual property enforcers, “non-regulatory” intervention from the executive branch secured their cooperation as a matter of private ordering. The resulting voluntary best practices agreement prescribes a notice-and-termination protocol that extends the reach of U.S. intellectual property law into cyberspace, to merchants operating “foreign infringing sites.” It …

Because, The Internet: The Limits Of Online Campaign Finance Disclosure, Vitaliy Kats

Florida Law Review

During the 2011–2012 election cycle, Shaun McCutcheon contributed $33,088 to sixteen different candidates for federal office. McCutcheon’s donations complied with the base limits the Federal Election Commission (FEC) set for contributions to individual candidates.McCutcheon wanted to contribute more but was barred by the FEC’s aggregate limit on contributions.In June of 2012, McCutcheon and the Republication National Committee (RNC) filed a complaint before a three-judge panel of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. McCutcheon and the RNC claimed that the aggregate limits on contributions to candidates and political committees were unconstitutional under the First Amendment.The three-judge panel granted …

Class Actions Removability And The Changing Business Of The Supreme Court: Dart Cherokee Basin Operating Co. V. Owens, Stephen Carr

Florida Law Review

Problems of appellate jurisdiction are, by their nature, mainly pragmatic problems. The U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeals are forced to balance the need to provide timely, effective appellate review of district court decisions against the understandable desire for judicial economy.In addition to this inherent tension between fairness and economy, the law is constantly evolving, causing caseloads to wax and wane, and continuously forcing the circuit courts to react by expanding and contracting their rules of appellate jurisdiction. The U.S. Code generally limits appellate review to “final decisions,”and the U.S. Supreme Court has usually instructed the circuit courts to take a …

Intervention In The Tax Court And The Appellate Review Of Tax Court Procedural Decisions, Cole Barnett, Christopher Weeg

Florida Law Review

The Tax Court is an Article I court. It resolves more than 95% of all tax-related litigation—actually nearly 97% of the total federal tax docket in 2012. Despite this substantial role in federal litigation, scholars and courts have generally put aside the issue of what standard is appropriate when a U.S. federal court of appeals reviews Tax Court procedural questions. Section 7482 of the Internal Revenue Code (I.R.C.) grants jurisdiction to the courts of appeals to review Tax Court decisions “in the same manner and to the same extent as decisions of the district courts in civil actions tried without …

Docs V. Glocks: Speech, Guns, Discrimination, And Privacy – Is Anyone Winning?, Marla Spector Bowman

Florida Law Review

Americans discuss some of the most intimate details of their lives within the small confines of their neighborhood doctor's office. Many Americans, however, may be taken aback if their physician asked them whether they owned a firearm during a routine physical examination. Although most Americans might not consider firearms education to be their physician's primary purpose, a significant number of doctors in Florida, and throughout the medical community, consider promoting firearms safety a part of practicing preventative medicine.

When a group of Florida legislators saw this behavior as a threat to the Second Amendment, gun owner access to healthcare, and …

Bargaining In The Shadow Of Big Data, Dru Stevenson, Nicholas J. Wagoner

Florida Law Review

Attorney bargaining has traditionally taken place in the shadow of trial as litigants adjust tactics-and their inclination to negotiate a settlement-based on their forecast of the outcome of a trial and its associated costs. Lawyers bargaining on the verge of trial have traditionally relied on their intuition, knowledge of precedent, and previous interactions with the presiding judge and opposing counsel to forecast trial outcomes and litigation costs. Today, however, technology that leverages legal data is moving the practice of law into the shadow of the trends and patterns apparent in aggregated litigation data. This Article describes the tools that facilitate …

Student Loans And Surmountable Access-To-Justice Barriers, Jason Iuliano

Florida Law Review

Findings and conclusions from the 2012 American Bankruptcy Law Journal Study and Response to Professor Rafael I. Pardo’s latest piece, The Undue Hardship Thicket: On Access to Justice, Procedural Noncompliance, and Pollutive Litigation in Bankruptcy.

Takings And Extortion, Daniel P. Selmi

Florida Law Review

The Supreme Court has repeatedly employed an extortion narrative in deciding when governmental actions imposing exactions on development projects constitute takings under the Fifth Amendment. In that narrative, local officials act in ever-present bad faith by misusing their regulatory powers to coerce concessions by developers seeking land use approvals. While the extortion narrative has received little attention, it operates as an explanatory device for understanding the Court’s takings jurisprudence in the exactions field. The narrative has justified the expansion of exactions takings law beyond real property, substantially altered the deference normally accorded by the Court to local government actions, and …

Toward Consistent Fiduciary Duties For Publicly Traded Entities, Sandra K. Miller, Karie Davis-Nozemack

Florida Law Review

After the 2008 recession, it is difficult to imagine that the public is investing billions of dollars in publicly traded entities with little regulation of board conflicts and no fiduciary duty protections. Yet, that is precisely the case for more than $284 billion of investments. Investors have flocked to publicly traded limited partnerships (LPs) and limited liability companies (LLCs), collectively known as master limited partnerships (MLPs), because many are high-performing energy companies with a tax preference. MLP market capitalization, while only $14 billion in 2000, topped $284 billion as of February 2016, and more initial public offerings are on the …

Disaggregating "Immigration Law", Mathew J. Lindsay

Florida Law Review

Courts and scholars have long noted the constitutional exceptionalism of the federal immigration power, decried the injustice it produces, and appealed for greater constitutional protection for noncitizens. This Article builds on this robust literature while focusing on a particularly critical conceptual and doctrinal obstacle to legal reform—the notion that laws governing the rights of noncitizens to enter and remain within the United States comprise a distinct body of “immigration laws” presumed to be part and parcel of foreign affairs and national security.

This Article argues that the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent immigration jurisprudence suggests a willingness to temper, and perhaps …

The President And Immigration Federalism, Pratheepan Gulasekaram, S. Karthick Ramakrishnan

Florida Law Review

This Article lays out a systematic, conceptual framework to better understand the relationship between federal executive action and state- level legislation in immigration. Prior immigration law scholarship has focused on structural power questions between the U.S. federal government—as a unitary entity—and the states, while newer scholarship has examined separation of powers concerns between the President and Congress. This Article builds on both of these traditions, focusing on the intersectional relationship between the federal Executive and subfederal lawmaking, which is an important yet overlooked dynamic in the resurgence of immigration federalism. First, this Article explains the relationship between presidential action and …

The Will As An Implied Unilateral Arbitration Contract, E. Gary Spitko

Florida Law Review

A consensus has begun to develop in the case law, the academic commentary, and the statutory reform movement that a testator’s provision in her will mandating arbitration of any challenge to the will should not be enforceable against a beneficiary who has not agreed to the arbitration provision, at least where the will contestant, by his contest, seeks to increase his inheritance outside the will. Grounding this consensus is the widespread understanding that a will is not a contract. This Article seeks to challenge both the understanding that a will is not a contract and the opposition to enforcement of …

The Second Amendment Right To Be Negligent, Andrew Jay Mcclurg

Florida Law Review

Only two constitutional rights—the First and Second Amendments—have a realistic capacity, through judicial interpretation or legislative action or inaction, to confer a “right to be negligent” on private citizens; that is, a right to engage in objectively unreasonable risk-creating conduct without legal consequences. In the First Amendment context, for example, the Supreme Court, in New York Times v. Sullivan and its progeny, expressly embraced a right to be negligent in defaming public officials and public figures to protect speech. This Article asserts that through both common and statutory law, the United States has enshrined a de facto Second Amendment right …

Don't Ground Me Bro!: Private Ownership Of Airspace And How It Invalidates The Faa's Blanket Prohibition On Low Altitude Commercial Drone Operations, Pierce Giboney

Florida Law Review

In years past, society has typically associated the word “drone” with the War on Terror and far-off battlefields. With the advent of the smart phone revolution, however, the once prohibitive costs of the technology have decreased to a level the general public can afford. As a consequence, a rising number of entrepreneurs associate the word “drone” with opportunity—a means of reaching a new commercial frontier, provided they can get off the ground.

Purportedly due to the lack of a regulatory framework governing the new technology, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has essentially prohibited the use of drones at any altitude …

A World Wide Web Of Unwanted Children: The Practice, The Problem, And The Solution To Private Re-Homing, Megan Testerman

Florida Law Review

A deplorable practice has emerged in the world of adoption. Adoptive families are now using the Internet to give their unwanted adopted children over to complete strangers, some of whom are traffickers, pedophiles, child pornographers, or worse. This practice is known as private rehoming. Through the use of online message boards and a simple notarized power of attorney document, adoptive parents are circumventing the adoption system—including its home study and background check requirements for prospective parents—and placing children in great danger. Because only a handful of states have enacted legislation directly targeting private re-homing and because no such legislation exists …