Law Commons^™

Crypto In Real Estate Finance, R. Wilson Freyermuth, Christopher K. Odinet, Andrea Tosato

Faculty Publications

Blockchain and cryptocurrencies have ushered in a digital gold rush. But all that glitters is not gold. The latest fad is the use of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to purchase and finance real estate. Typically, crypto real estate transactions begin with the transfer of title for a residential property into a dedicated business entity, such as a limited liability company. Thereafter, an NFT is ‘minted’ and used to represent the ownership interest in that entity. The real property is then marketed online specifying that, to acquire it, one simply purchases the relevant NFT via a blockchain transfer. Crucially, buyers are expected …

U.S. Law And Discrimination In Health Care, Kimani Paul-Emile

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

A Mathematical Model Of Juvenile Delinquency In The New York State, Oluwasegun Micheal Ibrahim

Articles

This report presents a mathematical model of juvenile delinquency in the New York State. In particular, we develop a juvenile delinquency system of non-linear differential equations using the mathematical epidemiology framework. In constructing this model, we assume that juvenile delinquency can be studied as a socially infectious disease. The stability of the juvenile delinquency-free equilibrium of the model is examined using the standard non-linear dynamical systems theory technique. We carried out a data fitting based on real-life data from the New York State Criminal Justice Services. The research result reveals that the formulated model conforms with the available data and …

Reasonably Accommodating Employment Discrimination Law, William Corbett

Journal Articles

The law of accommodations within employment discrimination law evolved significantly in 2023. The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA) was enacted by Congress and signed by President Biden in 2022, and it became effective on June 27, 2023. The Act creates a statutory duty for covered employers to make reasonable accommodations for pregnancy, childbirth, and related medical conditions. Two days after the effective date of the PWFA, the Supreme Court rendered a decision in Groff v. DeJoy in which the Court clarified the meaning of the “undue hardship” limitation on the duty of employers under Title VII to reasonably accommodate religious …

Sales Free And Clear Of An Intellectual Property Licensee's Interests In Bankruptcy -- Looking To In Re Tempnology For Guidance, Summer Chandler

Journal Articles

Uncertainty surrounds many issues that exist at the intersection of bankruptcy law and intellectual property law. Section 363(f) of the Bankruptcy Code permits the debtor to sell assets free of a third party’s interest in such assets, provided one or more preconditions is satisfied. When a debtor rejects a license agreement pertaining to the debtor’s intellectual property, however, § 365(n) of the Bankruptcy Code allows the licensee to choose to retain its rights to use the intellectual property that was the subject of the rejected license agreement. One unsettled question is whether a debtor may sell intellectual property pursuant to …

The Case In Favor Of Waivable Employee Rights: A Contrarian View, William Corbett

Journal Articles

Most employee rights in U.S. labor and employment law are nonwaivable. Waivable employee rights exist most prominently in the law regarding noncompetes and mandatory arbitration agreements. In recent years, there has been substantial backlash against perceived employer confiscation of workers’ rights in these two areas. On January 5, 2023, the Federal Trade Commission issued a proposed rule prohibiting employers from entering into noncompete agreements with workers. In 2022, President Biden signed the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act of 2021. Clearly, the federal government has become concerned with employers’ opportunistic confiscation of employees’ waivable rights and …

Parens Patriae After The Pandemic, Meredith Johnson Harbach

Law Faculty Publications

The COVID-19 pandemic prompted extraordinary state action to protect American children. Acting in its longstanding role as parens patriae, the state stepped in to protect children and their families from the ravages of the pandemic as well as from the dramatic upheaval it precipitated. This Article will evaluate the state’s pandemic response vis-à-vis children and their families, mining the experience for lessons learned and possible ways forward. Specifically, this project will argue that the state’s pandemic response represented a departure from the state’s conventional approach to parens patriae. Conventional practice prior to the pandemic was characterized by a state model …

The Language Of Record: Finding And Remedying Prejudicial Violations Of Limited English Proficient Individuals’ Due Process Rights In Immigration Proceedings, Anna C. Everett

Connecticut Law Review

In immigration court proceedings, court interpreters interpret only those statements made directly to and by the limited English proficient (“LEP”) party. Thus, LEP individuals can only understand what is being spoken to them, not what is being asserted about them. In asylum interviews, applicants must provide their own interpreter, and failure to do so may result in an applicant-caused delay and, ultimately, a denial of work authorization. In immigration proceedings, the LEP party’s livelihood, family unity, and freedom from persecution and death are at stake. The message that the U.S. legal system makes clear is that it does not value …

Burdens Of Proof In Establishing Negligence: A Comparative Law And Economics Analysis, Francesco Parisi, Giampaolo Frezza

Articles

Inherent in any judicial system is the need to allocate the burden of proof on one party. Within the realm of negligence torts, that burden is traditionally placed on the plaintiff, meaning that the plaintiff must bring forth sufficient evidence to establish negligence by the defendant. In effect, this is a legal presumption of non-negligence in favor of the defendant. In some jurisdictions for specific torts, defendants are, instead, presumed negligent, therefore requiring defendants to come forth with sufficient evidence to prove their due diligence. In this paper, we discuss the legal origins and effects of these differences in a …

The Business Of Securities Class Action Lawyering, Jessica M. Erickson, Stephen J. Choi, Adam C. Pritchard

Law Faculty Publications

Plaintiffs’ lawyers in the United States play a key role in combating corporate fraud. Shareholders who lose money as a result of fraud can file securities class actions to recover their losses, but most shareholders do not have enough money at stake to justify overseeing the cases filed on their behalf. As a result, plaintiffs’ lawyers control these cases, deciding which cases to file and how to litigate them. Recognizing the agency costs inherent in this model, the legal system relies on lead plaintiffs and judges to monitor these lawyers and protect the best interests of absent class members. Yet …

Liability Or No Liability? Promoting Safety By Shifting Accident Losses Onto Third Parties, Francesco Parisi

Articles

In a recent article, Guerra et al. considered the problem of liability for accidents caused by the activity of robots, proposing a novel liability regime, which they referred to as ‘manufacturer’s residual liability.’ Under this regime, injurers (robot operators) and victims are liable for accidents due to their negligence (hence, they are incentivised to act diligently), and third-party robot manufacturers bear all remaining accident losses, even when the accident is not caused by a defect or malfunction of the robot. In this article, I explore the possibility of extending this framework of liability to other tort scenarios. I refer to …

The Virtuous Executive, Alan Rozenshtein

Articles

As currently conceived, executive power law and scholarship detach the identity of the President from the powers and duties of the presidency. Whether an official was properly dismissed without cause, whether a pardon was validly issued, whether a foreign policy debacle rose to the level of an impeachable offense—the answers to all these questions are not supposed to depend on the President’s personal characteristics.

This Article argues that this veil of ignorance is incompatible with a correct understanding of Article II. To properly empower good Presidents and constrain bad ones, constitutional actors must take into account the President’s personal characteristics. …

The Fraternity Of Legal Style, Alexa Z. Chew

Faculty Publications

This article reports the findings of an empirical study of writing experts mentioned in popular legal style books. The study shows that these experts are overwhelmingly men. This study complements the many other studies showing that gender and racial bias exists throughout the legal profession, but it focuses on one area that has not yet been examined: bias in books that give writing advice to lawyers. I call these books “legal style books.” The area of legal writing advice books is admittedly niche. However, it is worth studying because writing is central to lawyering.

Reimagining Langdell's Legacy: Puncturing The Equilibrium In Law School Pedagogy, Laura A. Webb

Law Faculty Publications

For more than 150 years, legal education has largely followed the course charted by Christopher Columbus Langdell when he became dean of Harvard Law School in 1870. Langdell’s innovations included the case method, high-stakes summative assessments, and preferences for faculty members with experience in “learning law” rather than practicing it. His proposals were innovative and responsive to challenges in legal education at the time, but this Article argues that taking Langdell’s approach to reform—including a willingness toimplement radical changes in the face of institutional shortcomings—requires reimagining his methods for the benefit of today’s students. We identify key deficiencies of the …

“The Glorious Liberty Of The Children Of God”: Toward A Christian Defense Of Human Rights, John Witte Jr.

Faculty Articles

It will come as a surprise to some human rights lawyers to learn that Christianity was a deep and enduring source of human rights and liberties in the Western legal tradition. Our elementary textbooks have long taught us that the history of human rights began in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Human rights, many of us were taught, were products of the Western Enlightenment—creations of Grotius and Pufendorf, Locke and Rousseau, Montesquieu and Voltaire, Hume and Smith, Jefferson and Madison. Rights were the mighty new weapons forged by American and French revolutionaries who fought in the name of political …

Why School Choice Is Necessary For Religious Liberty And Freedom Of Belief, Richard F. Duncan

Nebraska College of Law: Faculty Publications

The government school monopoly for funding K–12 education creates a coercive system that commandeers a captive audience of impressionable children for inculcation in secular ideas, beliefs, and values concerning matters of truth, moral character, culture, and the good life. The brutal bargain imposed on parents by this monopoly requires them to choose between the single largest benefit most families receive from state and local governments and educating their children in a curriculum that is consistent with the preferred educative speech of the parents. To choose the latter is to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of dollars of tax-funded support for K–12 …

A Ticking Time Bomb- The Ncaa And Sports Gambling, Ryan Hillermeier

Student Works

No abstract provided.

Prosecuting An Existential Threat To Democracy: Domestic Terrorism And The January 6 Insurrection, Nathan D. Verrilli

Student Works

No abstract provided.

Failure To Accommodate Claim: Opening The Floodgates In The Era Of Covid-19 In Light Of The Exby-Stolley “Circuit Split”, Meghan Currie

Student Works

No abstract provided.

Intellectual Property And The Politics Of Public Good In Covid-19: Framing Law, Institutions, And Ideas During Trips Waiver Negotiations At The Wto, Sara E. Fischer, Lucia Vitale, Akinyi Lisa Agutu, Matthew M. Kavanagh

O'Neill Institute Papers

Context: To facilitate the manufacturing of COVID-19 medical products, in October 2020, India and South Africa proposed a waiver of certain WTO intellectual property (IP) provisions. After 18 months, a narrow agreement that did little for vaccine access passed the ministerial, despite the pandemic’s impact on global trade, which the WTO is mandated to safeguard.

Methods: The authors conducted a content analysis of WTO legal texts, key actor statements, media reporting, and the WTO’s procedural framework to explore legal, institutional, and ideational explanations for the delay.

Findings: IP waivers are neither legally complex nor unprecedented within WTO …

Oops!...They’Re Violated Again: How Section 230 Of The Communications Decency Act Fails To Protect Women In Media, Nicole Flynn

Student Works

No abstract provided.

Betting On The Future- How To Keep Nba Games Legitimate, Thomas Stewart

Student Works

No abstract provided.

Ignoring Coppa: An Industry Standard, Dercem Kaya

Student Works

No abstract provided.

Changemakers: From The Classroom To The Courtroom: Miguel Garcia, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Changemakers: 'Hard Work, Determination, And Dedication': Arya Omshehe, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Digital Nudges: Contours And Challenges, Avishalom Tor

Book Chapters

Digital nudges—that is, significantly behavioral interventions that use software and its user-interface design elements—are an increasingly pervasive feature of online environments that shapes behavior both online (e.g., changing online privacy settings) and offline (e.g., taking a flu vaccine due to a text message reminder). Although digital nudges share many characteristics of their offline counterparts, they merit particular attention and analysis for two important reasons: First, the growing ubiquity of digital nudges makes encountering them nearly unavoidable in daily life, thereby bringing into sharper relief the promise and perils of nudges more generally. Second, the potentially greater potency of digital—compared to …

Who Watches The Watchmen? Using The Law Governing Lawyers To Identify The Applicant Duty Gap And Hold Bar Examiner Gatekeepers Accountable, Ashley M. London

Law Faculty Publications

The legal profession holds lawyers to high standards in their personal and professional lives and expects aspiring members to follow the ethical rules with scrupulous precision and candor. Yet the profession, and those monitoring admission to the profession, afford no protections or recourse to this class of young professionals during that critical period between graduation and successful bar passage.

Without reform, this previously unacknowledged duty gap will continue to demoralize and potentially harm future lawyers and reflect negatively on the profession as a whole. Supervising bodies, discussed within, treat applicants as if they have already committed an ethical breach. Indeed, …

Confirm Julie Rikelman For The First Circuit, Carl Tobias

Law Faculty Publications

Now that the United States Senate has reconvened after pauses for holidays, the upper chamber must expeditiously appoint designee Julie Rikelman to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, which is the smallest, albeit critical, appellate court. The nominee, whom President Joe Biden tapped during late July 2022, would supply remarkable experiential, gender, and ideological diversity gleaned from pursuing much cutting-edge reproductive freedom litigation, which included arguing Dobbs before the Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade. The nominee has definitely excelled in law’s highest echelon over twenty-plus years, most recently as the U.S. Litigation Director in the …

Edward Barradall's Reports Of Cases In The General Court Of Virginia (1733-1741), William Hamilton Bryson

Law Faculty Publications

Edward Barradall was born in London, the son of Henry Barradall and Catherine Blumfield Barradall. He was baptized on 17 October 1703 in the parish church of St. Paul's, Covent Garden. Both of his brothers and two of his sisters came to Virginia in the 1730s. Edward Barradall was in Virginia by February 1731. From at least then until about 1733, he practiced law in the county courts of Caroline County and the Northern Neck. His law reports begin in 1733, and so it is to be presumed that that is the year he moved his practice from the county …

Alexander Forrester's Chancery Reports, William Hamilton Bryson

Law Faculty Publications

This is a new edition of Alexander Forrester's Chancery reports. It is based upon the best manuscript copy that has survived, Lincoln's Inn MSS. Misc. 52 and Misc. 54, and the first printed edition. The edition that was first published in 1741 included only the cases from 1732 to 1739. Compared to the copy in Lincoln's Inn, they are not much different in quality from each other. The cases in the 1741 edition are the basis for this edition as far as they go. The learned apparatus of the third edition by John Griffith Williams (d. 1799) has not been …