Law Commons^™

The Road To Free-Market Family Policy, Maxine Eichner

Faculty Publications

This essay investigates and ultimately rejects the claim that the United States’ comparatively heavily reliance on markets over government to provide the resources that families need is a natural outgrowth of the country’s longstanding veneration of capitalism. In tracing the nation’s economic ideology over time, it demonstrates that, at least until the end of the twentieth century, the constant in US history has not been the expectation of a free-market economy, but rather a commitment to ensuring that the economy, however structured, will enable families to thrive. The dramatic recent shift in economic ideology, when the prevailing commitment to government …

Separation Of Powers Versus Checks And Balances In The Criminal Justice System: A Response To Professor Epps, Carissa Byrne Hessick

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The End Of School Policing, Barbara A. Fedders

Faculty Publications

Police officers have become permanent fixtures in public schools. The sharp increase in the number of school police officers over the last twenty years has generated a substantial body of critical legal scholarship. Critics question whether police make students safer. They argue that any safety benefits must be weighed against the significant role the police play in perpetuating a school-to-prison pipeline that funnels Black and Brown students and students with disabilities out of schools and into courts, jails, and prisons. In suggesting remedies for this problem, commentators have proposed several regulatory fixes. These include changes to the standards for evaluating …

War Powers Abrogation, Jeffrey M. Hirsch

Faculty Publications

The United States’ peacetime security is based entirely on its all-volunteer armed forces. These volunteers, split equally between full- and part-time servicemembers, risk not only their health and safety, but also their economic stability when they are called away from home for training or active duty. Servicemembers’ duties also interfere with the demands of employers, creditors, and government agencies—which can result in job losses, financial difficulties, and other costs. As a result, the federal government has long used its constitutional war powers to enact legislation protecting servicemembers from many of these hardships. These statutes provide employment leave and antidiscrimination protection, …

Ratemaking As Climate Adaptation Governance, Jonas J. Monast

Faculty Publications

Electric utilities are directly affected by, and in some cases are a source of, many pressing climate adaptation challenges: wildfires, vulnerable infrastructure, extreme storms, and drought. The state Public Utilities Commission (PUC) is one of the most consequential government agencies guiding the electricity sector’s response to climate change. Rate-regulated utilities may not charge ratepayers for new capital investments without PUC approval. When PUCs decide which costs are eligible for rate recovery, they also define which risks utilities seek to manage and which hedging strategies they use to do so. This Article argues that the foundational principles of ratemaking allow the …

You Can Call Me Al: Regulating How Candidates' Names Appear On Ballots, Peter Nemerovski

Faculty Publications

In electoral politics, names matter. Studies and anecdotal evidence show that candidates whose names suggest a certain ethnic heritage— for example, an Irish-sounding surname in Chicago, or a Hispanic name in South Florida—outperform candidates without such names, and that “American-sounding” names and names with positive connotations can give candidates a leg up. Therefore, candidates for public office often seek to run under the name they regard as most electorally advantageous. Election boards, secretaries of state, and ultimately courts are often called upon to decide whether a particular candidate can run for office under a particular name.

This Article looks at …

An Empirical Study Of Gender And Race In Trademark Prosecution, William Michael Schuster, Miriam Marcowitz-Bitton, Deborah R. Gerhardt

Faculty Publications

This Article is the first to empirically examine the extent to which women and minorities succeed in prosecuting trademark applications before the United States Patent and Trademark Office (“USPTO”). Trademark registration is an important measure of entrepreneurial activity and progress in business, education, and the arts. To explore how women and minorities are succeeding in this domain, we compared 1.2 million trademark applications over thirty years with demographic information on race and gender.

We analyze whether trademark prosecution reflects systematic underrepresentation of women and minorities similar to those reported in patent and copyright prosecution. We found that trademark data showed …

Social Issues In The Spotlight: The Increasing Need To Improve Publicly-Held Companies’ Csr And Esg Disclosures, Thomas Lee Hazen

Faculty Publications

There is ever-increasing investor interest in corporate social responsibility (CSR) generally, and environmental social governance (ESG) in particular. Investors’ desires have triggered increased corporate ESG disclosures to indicate companies’ commitment to socially responsible behavior. As pressure for ESG-related disclosures continues to rise, there is increasing pressure on the SEC to support and mandate enhanced ESG disclosures.

Notwithstanding many calls for mandatory ESG disclosures, the SEC has not implemented such a requirement. Instead, ESG disclosures are voluntary. Voluntary ESG disclosures are common, but to a large extent are marred by a lack of standardization in ESG data methodology. The increasing investor …

Standing And Contracts, F. Andrew Hessick

Faculty Publications

In Spokeo v. Robbins, the Supreme Court held that, to establish Article III standing to bring suit in federal court, a plaintiff cannot simply allege the violation of a legal right. Instead, the plaintiff must allege an injury in fact. Although it addressed standing to bring suit for statutory violations, Spokeo raises serious questions about limits on the ability to bring breach of contract actions in federal court. After all, contracts simply create legal rights. Under Spokeo’s logic, the breach of contractual rights should not support standing; instead, standing exists only if the breach results in factual harm. …

Corporate And Securities Law Impact On Social Responsibility And Corporate Purpose, Thomas Lee Hazen

Faculty Publications

The role of social responsibility in corporate governance has been the subject of debate for nearly ninety years. That debate has been reframed over the decades. Several recent events have resulted in increased focus on corporate so-cial responsibility, especially with respect to publicly held corporations. This Ar-ticle explores the law’s two different paths for impacting social responsibility. The current iteration of the corporate responsibility movement has implications for both state law chartering of corporations and federal securities regulation. This Article analyzes the ways in which stated purpose clauses in a corporation’s articles of incorporation may be useful in addressing social …

Interpreting Injunctions, F. Andrew Hessick, Michael Morley

Faculty Publications

Injunctions are powerful remedies. They can force a person to act or refrain from acting, dictate policies that the government must adopt, or even refashion public institutions. Violations of an injunction can result in contempt.

Despite the importance of injunctions, courts have applied an astonishingly wide range of contradictory approaches to interpreting them. They have likewise disagreed over whether appellate courts should defer to trial courts’ interpretations or instead review those interpretations de novo. Virtually no scholarship has been written on these topics.

This Article proposes that courts apply a modified textualist approach to injunctions. Under this scheme, courts would …

Nondelegation And Criminal Law, Carissa Byrne Hessick, F. Andrew Hessick

Faculty Publications

Although the Constitution confers the legislative power on Congress, Congress does not make most laws. Instead, Congress delegates the power to make laws to administrative agencies. The Supreme Court has adopted a permissive stance towards these delegations, placing essentially no limits on Congress’s ability to delegate lawmaking power to agencies.

In its recent decision, Gundy v. United States, the Court relied on this unrestrictive doctrine to uphold a statute delegating the power to write criminal laws. In doing so, the Court did not address whether greater restrictions should apply to delegations involving criminal law. Instead, it applied the same …

Shocking Business Bankruptcy Law, Melissa B. Jacoby

Faculty Publications

The intersection of major crises and financial distress generates no shortage of stock stories. This Essay offers one more: how shocks can be used opportunistically in big Chapter 11 cases to unravel bankruptcy law, and to shift the system further away from the objective of responding to overindebtedness.

The Mark Of Policing: Race And Criminal Records, Eisha Jain

Faculty Publications

This Essay argues that racial reckoning in policing should include a racial reckoning in the use of criminal records. Arrests alone—regardless of whether they result in convictions—create criminal records. Yet because the literature on criminal records most often focuses on prisoner reentry and on the consequences of criminal conviction, it is easy to overlook the connections between policing decisions and collateral consequences. This Essay employs the sociological framework of marking to show how criminal records entrench racial inequality stemming from policing. The marking framework recognizes that the government creates a negative credential every time it creates a record of arrest …

Jailhouse Immigration Screening, Eisha Jain

Faculty Publications

Within the past decade, U.S. interior immigration enforcement has shifted away from the street and into the jailhouse. The rationale behind jailhouse screening is to target enforcement efforts on those who fall within federal removal priorities. This Article shows how a program undertaken with the stated aim of targeting immigration enforcement has had precisely the opposite effect: it has massively expanded the reach of immigration enforcement and created extended carceral treatment within the criminal justice system based on suspected immigration status. This approach, in turn, leads to removals that lack adequate process, are inaccurate, or that reflect underlying racial biases …

Barring Married Same-Sex Couples From Joint Adoption: Comparative Perspectives And The Case Of Taiwan, Holning S. Lau

Faculty Publications

Taiwan is the first country in Asia to legalize same-sex marriage, but it forbids married same-sex couples from jointly adopting children. This article examines this restriction through the lens of comparative law, which brings into focus two main insights. First, we see that, out of all countries that have legalized same-sex marriage, Taiwan is one of only two that bar married same-sex couples from joint adoption. As this article will explain, the fact that Taiwan’s policy is so anomalous should spur skepticism of the policy’s appropriateness. Second, judicial opinions from around the world contain persuasive reasoning that further calls into …

Disbanding Police Agencies, Anthony O'Rourke, Rick Su, Guyora Binder

Faculty Publications

Since the killing of George Floyd, a national consensus has emerged that reforms are needed to prevent discriminatory and violent policing. Calls to defund and abolish the police have provoked pushback, but several cities are considering disbanding or reducing their police forces. This Essay assesses disbanding as a reform strategy from a democratic and institutionalist perspective. Should localities disband their police forces? One reason to do so is that discriminatory police departments are often too insulated from democratic oversight to be reformed. But can localities succeed in disbanding and replacing their forces with something better? Unfortunately, the structural entrenchment of …

Taxing Nudges, Kathleen Delaney Thomas

Faculty Publications

Governments are increasingly turning to behavioral economics to inform policy design in areas like health care, the environment, and financial decision-making. Research shows that small behavioral interventions, referred to as “nudges,” often produce significant responses at a low cost. The theory behind nudges is that, rather than mandating certain behaviors or providing costly economic subsidies, modest initiatives may “nudge” individuals to choose desirable outcomes by appealing to their behavioral preferences. For example, automatically enrolling workers into savings plans as a default, rather than requiring them to actively sign up, has dramatically increased enrollment in such plans. Similarly, allowing individuals to …

The Surprising Significance Of De Minimis Tax Rules, Leigh Z. Osofsky, Kathleen Delaney Thomas

Faculty Publications

De minimis tax rules — rules that eliminate tax burdens for low-income taxpayers or low-dollar transactions — abound in the tax law. Despite the prevalence of such rules, legal scholarship has treated them as — well — de minimis, or as mere rounding errors that do not merit sustained attention. This perspective is understandable. If de minimis rules address insignificant taxpayers or tax liabilities, aren’t the rules themselves likely to be insignificant? Recent tax law developments have revealed that this conception of de minimis tax rules is deeply misguided. Major allocations of tax law liability, as well as accompanying questions …

Piercing The (Sovereign) Veil, W. Mark C. Weidemaier

Faculty Publications

Sovereign nations own more than ten percent of the world's largest firms and use these ownership stakes to pursue economic, social, and political objectives unrelated to profit maximization. Sovereign nations also have unique powers and attributes that ordinary owners lack. Sovereigns do not need an owner's control rights to direct entity behavior; they have the power to regulate. Sovereigns do not need an owner's economic rights to extract value; they have the power to tax. And sovereigns do not need to hide behind the principle of limited liability, which protects owners of limited liability entities; they have sovereign immunity in …

The Final Act -- Deportation By Ice Air, Deborah M. Weissman, Angelina Godoy, Havan Clark

Faculty Publications

Deportation is a legal concept about which much has been written. But it is more complicated. For noncitizens, forced expulsion is a lived experience occurring in time and space — an act against the body, mostly black and brown bodies. In this Article, we part ways with the well-established narratives of deportation and the punishment/non-punishment paradigm to conceive of deportation not only as a legal concept, but as a physical act — the final act — that is, the culmination of the immigration enforcement dragnet. The physical removal of persons from the United States requires a complex system comprised of …

Gender Violence, The Carceral State, And The Politics Of Solidarity, Deborah M. Weissman

Faculty Publications

Part I of this Article examines gender violence committed by the State. It does so within the context of recent initiatives to address abusive police practices to demonstrate that issues of gender violence have been omitted from reform efforts. To that end, it provides a critical review of anti-carceral campaigns, including recent challenges to “stop-andfrisk” practices. Litigation addressing abusive police conduct has failed to identify stop-and-frisk as a particular form of gender violence. Similarly, community campaigns to oversee police body-worn camera policies have overlooked the differential ways in which survivors of gender violence are impacted by these police devices. This …

Electoral Change And Progressive Prosecutors, Ronald F. Wright, Jeffrey L. Yates, Carissa Byrne Hessick

Faculty Publications

While it is clear that a debate is happening about new approaches to the prosecutor's work, it is less clear how deep the changes go. Given the large number of prosecutor offices in the United States, it is possible that much of the change that the media documents is limited to only a few offices; it is also possible that newsworthy stories of recent prosecutor campaign debates are merely the most visible layer of a change that goes deeper. Do the media accounts focus on vivid but exceptional election campaigns, or do news stories over the' last decade reflect a …

Reading Magna Carta: Textualist Or Originalist?, John V. Orth

Faculty Publications

Debates concerning the proper method for reading legal texts did not begin in the modern era. In fact, they have been going on in our legal tradition for hundreds of years. One of the oldest, and most consequential, debates concerns the meaning of Magna Carta, the “big charter,” reluctantly granted by King John in 1215 in response to the demands of his rebellious barons. Many of its provisions, called chapters, resolved disputes that quickly became dated – very dated.

Although Magna Carta has by now receded too far into the past for us to be confident of its exact meaning, …

Power Sector Carbon Reduction: An Evaluation Of Policies For North, Kate Konschnik, Martin Ross, Jonas J. Monast, Jennifer Weiss, Gennelle Wilson

Faculty Publications

The North Carolina power sector is poised for transition. Economics have driven big changes on the grid, making cleaner options for electricity generation cost competitive with traditional resources. North Carolina clean energy policies have further enabled the shift into renewable resources. Building on this momentum, Duke Energy Corporation and our state’s rural electric cooperatives have set ambitious climate goals, including “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050.

Well-designed policies can accelerate pollution reduction, make change more affordable for state residents and business, and stimulate job growth. For this reason, the North Carolina Clean Energy Plan (CEP)—developed pursuant to Governor Cooper’s Executive …