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Full-Text Articles in Law

Drugged, Carl E. Schneider Jul 2006

Drugged, Carl E. Schneider

Articles

The Supreme Court's recent decision in Gonzales v. Oregon, like its decision last year in Gonzales v. Raich (the "medical marijuana" case), again raises questions about the bioethical consequences of the Controlled Substances Act. When, in 1970, Congress passed that act, it placed problematic drugs in one of five "schedules," and it authorized the U.S. attorney general to add or subtract drugs from the schedules. Drugs in schedule II have both a medical use and a high potential for abuse. Doctors may prescribe such drugs if they "obtain from the Attorney General a registration issued in accordance with the …


After Autonomy, Carl E. Schneider Apr 2006

After Autonomy, Carl E. Schneider

Articles

Bioethicists today are like Bolsheviks on the death of Lenin. They have, rather to their surprise, won the day. Their principle of autonomy is dogma. Their era of charismatic leadership is over. Their work of Weberian rationalization, of institutionalizing principle and party, has begun. The liturgy is reverently recited, but the vitality of Lenin's "What Is To Be Done?" has yielded to the vacuity of Stalin's "The Foundations of Leninism." Effort once lavished on expounding ideology is now devoted to establishing associations, organizing degree programs, installing bioethicist commissars in every hospital, and staffing IRB soviets. Not-so-secret police prowl the libraries …


Michigan's First Woman Lawyer: Sarah Killgore Wertman, Margaret A. Leary Mar 2006

Michigan's First Woman Lawyer: Sarah Killgore Wertman, Margaret A. Leary

Articles

Sarah Killgore Wertman was the first woman in the country to both graduate from law school and be admitted to the bar. Thus, she was Michigan's first woman lawyer in two senses: She was the first woman to graduate from the University of Michigan Law School, and the first woman admitted to the Michigan bar. Others preceded her in entering law school, graduating from law school, or being admitted to the bar, but she was the first to accomplish all three. Her story illustrates much about the early days of women in legal education and the practice of law, a …


Life's Golden Tree: Empirical Scholarship And American Law, Carl E. Schneider, Lee E. Teitelbaum Feb 2006

Life's Golden Tree: Empirical Scholarship And American Law, Carl E. Schneider, Lee E. Teitelbaum

Articles

What follows is a simplified introduction to legal argument. It is concerned with the scheme of argument and with certain primary definitions and assumptions commonly used in legal opinions and analysis. This discussion is not exhaustive of all the forms of legal argument nor of the techniques of argument you will see and use this year. It is merely an attempt to introduce some commonly used tools in legal argument. It starts, as do most of your first-year courses, with the techniques of the common-law method and then proceeds to build statutory, regulatory, and constitutional sources of law into the …


Addressing Putative Fathers In Child Protection Proceedings: Is 'John Doe' Still Alive?, Frank E. Vandervort, W. Lansat Jan 2006

Addressing Putative Fathers In Child Protection Proceedings: Is 'John Doe' Still Alive?, Frank E. Vandervort, W. Lansat

Articles

In practice, it seems, KH is not widely understood. Child protection petitions for temporary custody continue to name multiple men as the "father" of a child when there is a legal father. Some courts insist on terminating the parental rights of "John Doe" when no man has established paternity. After KH, are such actions necessary? Are they permissible?


Grados De Libertad: Democracia Y Antidemocracia En Cuby Y Luisiana, 1898-1900, Rebecca J. Scott Jan 2006

Grados De Libertad: Democracia Y Antidemocracia En Cuby Y Luisiana, 1898-1900, Rebecca J. Scott

Articles

This comparative study between the quest for political racial inclusivity in 1890s Louisiana and the fight against state-sanctioned racialized violence in Cuba in the early 1900s exposes similarities, tensions, and differences between the two systems. The article traces the evolving contests for citizenship and suffrage in each climate at the end of the 19th century and into the beginning of the twentieth, juxtaposing the expression of race, suffrage, and citizenship in the constitution and political climate of each locale. In 1898, the new Louisiana state constitution disenfranchised African-Americans, while in 1900 Cuba was positioning itself for a grant of universal …


A Tribute To Lewis H. Larue, James Boyd White Jan 2006

A Tribute To Lewis H. Larue, James Boyd White

Articles

Lash has been a good friend for many years, and it is a pleasure to have this opportunity to reflect about him. I well remember our first meeting, in the late 1970s. He had been to a meeting in Wisconsin-the first meeting of the Critical Legal Studies Conference, as I remember-and stopped to spend the night in Chicago on the way home. We had corresponded a couple of times, but never met, and what a pleasure it was to meet him: full of intelligence, openness, and laughter, with a moral center and a deep sense of human limitation. We talked …


Land Feuds And Their Solutions: Finding International Law Beyond The Tribunal Chamber, Steven R. Ratner Jan 2006

Land Feuds And Their Solutions: Finding International Law Beyond The Tribunal Chamber, Steven R. Ratner

Articles

The resolution of conflicting claims to land has long stood at the heart of the project of international law. Indeed, the encounter between the order envisaged by advocates of the law of nations and what Georges Scelle called the" obsession with territory" has been a defining struggle for our field, demonstrating to some its promise and to others its futility. Much, perhaps even most, legal scholarship on this subject over the last century has focused on adjudication by ad hoc tribunals or standing courts, in which jurists have derived and invoked hallowed principles that enabled them to draw lines-across mountains, …


What We Know, And What We Should Know About American Trial Trends, Margo Schlanger Jan 2006

What We Know, And What We Should Know About American Trial Trends, Margo Schlanger

Articles

More than a few people noticed that the American court system was seeing ever fewer trials before Marc Galanter named the phenomenon.' But until Galanter mobilized lawyers2 and scholars to look systematically at the issue, inquiry was both piecemeal and sparse. Over the past three years, in contrast, Galanter's research 3 and his idea entrepreneurship, crystallized in the "Vanishing Trial" label, has spawned if not a huge literature at least a substantial one. We have now gotten the benefit of sustained scholarly inquiry by researchers of many stripes. Their work has been largely, though not entirely, empirical, and so we …


Two Distinct Roles/Bright Line Test, Donald N. Duquette Jan 2006

Two Distinct Roles/Bright Line Test, Donald N. Duquette

Articles

It is a mistake to try to develop a single lawyer role for children in child welfare cases which tries to accommodate their developing capacities from infants to articulate teens. The older child needs a traditional attorney; the youngest child, incapable of directing counsel, needs a substitute to define and advocate for his or her best interests. We should adopt different standards for the different advocate roles. Trying to define a single lawyer role for children of all ages and all capacities is an impossible task. A better approach towards recognizing and accommodating the child's developing cognitive abilities and judgment …


The False Panacea Of Offshore Deterrence, James C. Hathaway Jan 2006

The False Panacea Of Offshore Deterrence, James C. Hathaway

Articles

Governments take often shockingly blunt action to deter refugees and other migrants found on the high seas, in their island territories and in overseas enclaves. There is a pervasive belief that when deterrence is conducted at arms-length from the homeland it is either legitimate or, at the very least, immune from legal accountability.


Hipaa-Cracy, Carl E. Schneider Jan 2006

Hipaa-Cracy, Carl E. Schneider

Articles

The Department of Health and Human Services has recently been exercising its authority under the (wittily named) "administrative simplification" part of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act to regulate the confidentiality of medical records. I love the goal; I loathe the means. The benefits are obscure; the costs are onerous. Putatively, the regulations protect my autonomy; practically, they ensnarl me in red tape and hijack my money for services I dislike. HIPAA (a misnomer-HIPAA is the statute, not the regulations) is too lengthy, labile, complex, confused, unfinished, and unclear to be summarized intelligibly or reliably. (Brevis esse laboro, …


Comparative Fiscal Federalism: What Can The U.S. Supreme Court And The European Court Of Justice Learn From Each Other's Tax Jurisprudence?, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah Jan 2006

Comparative Fiscal Federalism: What Can The U.S. Supreme Court And The European Court Of Justice Learn From Each Other's Tax Jurisprudence?, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

In October 2005, a group of distinguished tax experts from the European Union and the United States, who had never met before, convened at the University of Michigan Law School for a conference on "Comparative Fiscal Federalism: Comparing the U.S. Supreme Court and European Court of Justice Tax Jurisprudence." The purpose of the conference was to shed comparative light on the very different approaches taken by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) and the U.S. Supreme Court to the question of fiscal federalism. The conference was sponsored by the U-M Law School, U-M's European Union Center, and Harvard Law School's …


People, Times, Law School Leadership Join To Launch South Africa Program, David L. Chambers Jan 2006

People, Times, Law School Leadership Join To Launch South Africa Program, David L. Chambers

Articles

Professor Emeritus David Chambers launched Michigan Law’s South Africa externship program 10 years ago just as that country was emerging from apartheid and beginning to function under its new constitution, adopted in 1996. Here Chambers recalls how the externship program began. Now the Wade H. McCree Jr. Collegiate Professor Emeritus of Law, Chambers directed the program until his retirement from active teaching in 2003.


China's Acquisitions Abroad - Global Ambitions, Domestic Effects, Nicholas C. Howson Jan 2006

China's Acquisitions Abroad - Global Ambitions, Domestic Effects, Nicholas C. Howson

Articles

In the past year or so, the world has observed with seeming trepidation what appears to be a new phenomenon-China's "stepping out" into the world economy. The move, labeled the "Going Out Strategy" by Chinese policy makers, sees China acting in the world not just as a trader of commodities and raw materials, or the provider of inexpensively-produced consumer goods for every corner of the globe, but as a driven and sophisticated acquirer of foreign assets and the equity interests in the legal entities that control such assets. The New Yorker magazine, ever topical and appropriately humorous, highlighted this attention …


From Laredo To Fort Worth: Race, Politics And The Texas Redistricting Case, Ellen D. Katz Jan 2006

From Laredo To Fort Worth: Race, Politics And The Texas Redistricting Case, Ellen D. Katz

Articles

LULAC v. Perry held that Texas violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act when it displaced nearly 100,000 Latino residents from a congressional district in Laredo to protect the Republican incumbent they refused to support. At the same time, the Justices let stand the dismantling of a so-called “coalition” district in Fort Worth where African-American voters comprising a minority of the district’s population allegedly enjoyed effective control in deciding the district’s representative. Only Justice Kennedy supported the outcome in both Laredo and Fort Worth. His opinion marks the first time that he, or indeed a majority of the Justices, …


Is The Report Of Lazarus's Death Premature? A Reply To Cameron And Postlewaite, Douglas A. Kahn Jan 2006

Is The Report Of Lazarus's Death Premature? A Reply To Cameron And Postlewaite, Douglas A. Kahn

Articles

Over a year ago, Ms. Faith Cuenin and I wrote an article in this Review (which I hereafter refer to as the "2004 Article") about the tax treatment of guaranteed payments under section 707(c) that are made in kind.' We concluded that a partnership does not recognize gain or loss on the making of a guaranteed payment with appreciated or depreciated property. We also concluded that the partner's basis in the property received will equal its fair market value at the time of payment, and that the payment does not affect the partner's outside basis in his partnership interest except …


Maiming The Cubs, James J. White Jan 2006

Maiming The Cubs, James J. White

Articles

In the last twenty years much has been written about the deleterious effect that law school has on the mental well-being of law students.' Many have called for "humanizing" law school. In support of their case, the advocates of humanizing cite numerous anecdotes, much scholarly writing in the psychology literature, and even a few rigorous studies of law students. A principal voice is that of Professor Krieger who has done the most careful and elaborate study, a study of students at two law schools.1 You should understand that Professor Krieger and his cohorts do not merely claim that we make …


Offshore Outsourcing And Worker Rights, Theodore J. St. Antoine Jan 2006

Offshore Outsourcing And Worker Rights, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Articles

For the workers in the Rust Belt of the United States, concentrated in Southern New England, Western New York State, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois, it doesn't make much difference whether their jobs are outsourced or lost to North Carolina or Mexico or China. In any event the sources of income that have existed for generations are gone and the economic and psychic pains are much the same. Nonetheless, for purposes of national policy it plainly matters whether the work is moving to another part of the country or is leaving the United States entirely. I am going to …


Abuse Prevention 2005, James J. White Jan 2006

Abuse Prevention 2005, James J. White

Articles

Today I do not debate the empirical question (what is the cause of the increase in bankruptcy filings?) nor do I address the buried moral question (who deserves the protection of bankruptcy law?). Rather, I speculate about the consequences of 2005 amendments to the Bankruptcy Code and about the reasons it will achieve or fail to achieve the goals of its sponsors. Along the way I hope to learn something about how law changes, or fails to change behavior.


The Report Of The President's Advisory Panel On Federal Tax Reform: A Critical Assessment And A Proposal, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah Jan 2006

The Report Of The President's Advisory Panel On Federal Tax Reform: A Critical Assessment And A Proposal, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

ON November 1, 2005, The President's Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform ("Panel") submitted its report ("Report") to the Secretary of the Treasury.1 At 272 pages, this is the most important and wide-ranging plan to reform the United States federal tax system since Blueprints for Basic Tax Reform (1977).2 While prospects for immediate action appear dim, the Report will no doubt be the basis of discussion of federal tax reform for a long time to come.


Refugees' Human Rights And The Challenge Of Political Will, James C. Hathaway Jan 2006

Refugees' Human Rights And The Challenge Of Political Will, James C. Hathaway

Articles

Governments in all parts of the world are withdrawing in practice from meeting the legal duty to provide refugees with the protection they require. While states continue to proclaim a willingness to assist refugees as a matter of political discretion or humanitarian goodwill, many appear committed to a pattern of defensive strategies designed to avoid international legal responsibility toward involuntary migrants. Some see this shift away from a legal paradigm of refugee protection as a source of enhanced operational flexibility in the face of changed political circumstances. For refugees themselves, however, the increasingly marginal relevance of international refugee law has …


Souter Passant, Scalia Rampant: Combat In The Marsh, Samuel R. Gross Jan 2006

Souter Passant, Scalia Rampant: Combat In The Marsh, Samuel R. Gross

Articles

Kansas law provides that unless a capital sentencing jury concludes that the mitigating factors that apply to the defendant’s crime outweigh the aggravating factors, it must sentence the defendant to death. The Kansas Supreme Court held that this law violates the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments because it “impermissibly mandates the death penalty when the jury finds that the mitigating and aggravating circumstances are in equipoise.” On June 26, in Kansas v. Marsh, the Supreme Court reversed in a 5 to 4 opinion by Justice Thomas.


Boilerplate And Economic Power In Auto Manufacturing Contracts, Omri Ben-Shahar, James J. White Jan 2006

Boilerplate And Economic Power In Auto Manufacturing Contracts, Omri Ben-Shahar, James J. White

Articles

This Article is structured as follows. Part I compares the terms and conditions in the purchase orders of the Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) and highlights important differences in the substance of these boilerplate provisions. It argues that these differences cannot be easily reconciled with the prediction that sophisticated parties draft the most efficient boilerplate terms. Part II examines how these forms are drafted, how their terms are negotiated, and how the OEMs guard their terms from erosion. It provides some insight on how tailoring occurs and how the internal organization of a party to a deal affects the terms that …


Foreword [To Boilerplate: Foundations Of Market Contracts Symposium], Omri Ben-Shahar Jan 2006

Foreword [To Boilerplate: Foundations Of Market Contracts Symposium], Omri Ben-Shahar

Articles

It is tempting to open this symposium with yet another "boilerplate" salute to the challenge that standard-form contracts pose for contract law doctrine. You may have seen many tributes to this fundamental problem. If I were to offer my own variation on this familiar introduction, I would have perhaps tried to come up with an original spin to induce you to read forward another paragraph or two. I would probably have talked about a major divide within contract law between the "law of negotiations" and "product regulation." The former is the body of doctrines that determine the legal consequences of …


On The Stickiness Of Default Rules, Omri Ben-Shahar, John A. E. Pottow Jan 2006

On The Stickiness Of Default Rules, Omri Ben-Shahar, John A. E. Pottow

Articles

It was once perceived, and still is commonly taught, that default rules in contract law must mimic efficient arrangements. Otherwise, these rules impose needless transaction costs upon parties who seek to opt out of them to reach more efficient positions. In settings where these costs are high, parties might find themselves "stuck" in a default, unable to reach the outcome that they prefer. The strong version of this account-that the only factor that can make an inefficient default rule stick is the direct cost of drafting a tailored provision-has been gradually reappraised. It is by now recognized that factors beyond …


Second Best Damage Action Deterrence, Margo Schlanger Jan 2006

Second Best Damage Action Deterrence, Margo Schlanger

Articles

Potential defendants faced with the prospect of tort or tort-like damage actions can reduce their liability exposure in a number of ways. Prior scholarship has dwelled primarily on the possibility that they may respond to the threat of liability by augmenting the amount of care they take.1 Defendants (I limit myself to defendants for simplicity) will increase their expenditures on care, so the theory goes, when those expenditures yield sufficient liability-reducing dividends; more care decreases liability exposure by simultaneously making it less likely that the actors will be found to have behaved tortiously in the event of an accident and …


Taxation And Multinational Activity: New Evidence, New Interpretations, Mihir A. Desai, C. Fritz Foley, James R. Hines Jr. Jan 2006

Taxation And Multinational Activity: New Evidence, New Interpretations, Mihir A. Desai, C. Fritz Foley, James R. Hines Jr.

Articles

In the midst of rapid integration and globalization, multinational firms still face tax systems that differ among countries, and these differences have the potential to affect major investment and financing decisions. This research covers a wide range of topics, including the impact of indirect taxes as well as of corporate income taxes, the sensitivity of financing decisions to tax rates, the effects of taxes on repatriation policies, the demand for, and impact of, tax havens, and the use of indirect ownership as a means of avoiding taxes. The behavior of US multinational firms as revealed by the evidence collected by …


But I Didn't Do Anything Wrong: Revisiting The Rights Of Non-Offending Parents In Child Protection Proceedings, Vivek Sankaran Jan 2006

But I Didn't Do Anything Wrong: Revisiting The Rights Of Non-Offending Parents In Child Protection Proceedings, Vivek Sankaran

Articles

Steven, a minor living with his mother, enjoyed a nurturing relationship with his father, Mark. He saw his father every weekend and looked forward to their time together. Mark looked for ways in which to stay involved in his child's life. Two days ago, the Department of Human Services (DHS) removed Steven from his mother's custody because, unbeknown to Mark, Stevens mother was selling drugs in the home. At the time of removal, the police did not inquire about the whereabouts of Stevens father; DHS immediately placed Steven in a foster home.


The Three Goals Of Taxation, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah Jan 2006

The Three Goals Of Taxation, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

The current debate in the United States about whether the income tax should be replaced with a consumption tax has been waged on the traditional grounds for evaluating tax policy: efficiency, equity, and administrability. For example, Joseph Bankman and David Weisbach recently argued for the superiority of an ideal consumption tax over an ideal income tax on three grounds: First, that the consumption tax is more efficient because it does not discriminate between current and future consumption,' while both income and consumption taxes have identical effect on work effort. Second, that the consumption tax is at least as good at …