Law Commons^™

Volume 105, Number 1 (Spring 2021)

Judicature

No abstract provided.

The Youngstown Canon: Vetoed Bills And The Separation Of Powers, Kristen E. Eichensehr

Duke Law Journal

As presidents make ever more expansive claims of executive power, Congress’s ability and willingness to counter the executive is often limited. That makes all the more significant instances when Congress does overcome structural and political challenges to pass legislation to rein in the president. But thanks to the Supreme Court’s invalidation of legislative vetoes in INS v. Chadha , such congressional actions are necessarily subject to presidential veto. President Donald Trump, for example, vetoed joint resolutions aimed at restraining executive action relating to the border wall and war powers. Although vetoed bills are not binding law, this Article argues that …

Criminalizing Coercive Control Within The Limits Of Due Process, Erin Sheley

Duke Law Journal

The sociological literature on domestic abuse shows that it is more complex than a series of physical assaults. Abusers use “coercive control” to subjugate their partners through a web of threats, humiliation, isolation, and demands. The presence of coercive control is highly predictive of future physical violence and is, in and of itself, also a violation of the victim’s liberty and dignity. In response to these new understandings the United Kingdom has recently criminalized nonviolent coercive control, making it illegal to, on two or more occasions, cause “serious alarm or distress” to an intimate partner that has a “substantial effect” …

The Splinternet, Mark A. Lemley

Duke Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Time To Reload: The Harms Of The Federal Felon-In-Possession Ban In A Post-Heller Worl, Zach Sherwood

Duke Law Journal

Federal law permanently prohibits anyone who has been convicted of a felony from possessing a firearm. Keeping lethal weapons out of the hands of those who pose a risk to public safety is no doubt a worthy policy goal. But the federal felon-in-possession ban is blunt, punitive, and supremely damaging to the ex-felons who fall within its ambit. The statute’s sweeping scope ensures that any ex-felon who possesses any firearm for any length of time for any reason can be swiftly and harshly punished. And it indiscriminately targets conduct that is often neither harmful nor criminal.

The felon-in-possession ban gained …

The Constitution And The Campaign Trail: When Political Action Becomes State Action, Lauren N. Smith

Duke Law Journal

Constitutional law often splits society into two realms: public and private. A person’s constitutional rights and obligations depend on her classification into one of these realms. Almost all constitutional rights are only protected against encroachment by the state, and thus whether an action constitutes private or state action is incredibly significant. However, the body of law that governs this determination—the state action doctrine—is notoriously muddled.

The longstanding assumption is that political candidates and their campaigns are private actors, though the Court has on occasion, such as in the “white primary” cases, held that action by political parties constitutes state action. …

Journal Staff

Duke Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Consumers Beware: How Are Your Favorite "Free" Investment Apps Regulated?, Siqi Wang

Duke Law & Technology Review

The proliferation of free or low-cost investment apps has disrupted the financial industry in recent years. Major brokerage firms have been pressured to go to zero fees due to intense competition from their fintech counterparts. While these apps have extended their products and services to those underserved by traditional brokers, some of their practices raise consumer protection concerns. Namely, the practice of “payment for order flow,” which helps fintech startups sustain a zero-commission model, could lead to subordinating customers’ best interest to market makers who acquire their retail orders from these fintech startups. Further, “cash management accounts,” newly popular among …

Cyber And Tria: Expanding The Definition Of An "Act Of Terrorism" To Include Cyber Attacks, Nehal Patel

Duke Law & Technology Review

The 9/11 terrorist attacks brought on financial losses that caused insurers and Congress to reevaluate how the United States approaches terrorism risk coverage. Congress quelled concerns of insurers evading coverage of future terrorist attacks by enacting the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act in 2002. This Note considers the difficulties presented by the out-of-date language employed by Congress in 2002 and proposes amendments so that the Act more clearly covers acts of cyberterrorism, which are ever-growing in their destructive potential.

Ripple Effects: How In Re Ripple Labs Inc. Litigation Could Signal The Beginning Of The End Of The Payment Platform, Lindsay Martin

Duke Law & Technology Review

Ripple Labs provides an international payment network that allows financial institutions to transfer money more cheaply and quickly than traditional international payments. Ripple’s native digital currency, XRP, supports global payments by acting as intermediate currency between different currencies, eliminating correspondent bank’s need to hold deposits in foreign currencies. In an ongoing class action lawsuit, XRP purchasers claim that the digital asset qualifies as a security under federal securities laws and that Ripple illegally offered and sold XRP as an unregistered security. Given Ripple’s rising prominence as a tool for financial institutions, this pending case will impact cryptocurrency markets and international …

Retheorizing Precedent, Randy J. Kozel

Duke Law Journal

Does the doctrine of stare decisis support judicial attempts to retheorize dubious precedents by putting them on firmer footing? If it does, can retheorization provide a means for Chevron to endure as a staple of administrative law notwithstanding serious challenges to its established rationale?

Re-Reading Chevron, Thomas W. Merrill

Duke Law Journal

Though increasingly disfavored by the Supreme Court, Chevron remains central to administrative law doctrine. This Article suggests a way for the Court to reformulate the Chevron doctrine without overruling the Chevron decision. Through careful attention to the language of Chevron itself, the Court can honor the decision’s underlying value of harnessing comparative institutional advantage in judicial review, while setting aside a highly selective reading that unduly narrows judicial review. This re-reading would put the Chevron doctrine—and with it, an entire branch of administrative law—on firmer footing.

Chevronizing Around Cost-Benefit Analysis, Jonathan S. Masur

Duke Law Journal

The Trump administration’s efforts to weaken regulations were in tension with cost-benefit analysis, which in many cases supported those regulations or otherwise failed to support the administration’s deregulatory objectives. Rather than attempting to justify its actions as a matter of policy preferences, the administration responded on multiple occasions by using Chevron to interpret statutes so as to evade cost-benefit analysis. The statutory interpretation route, which we call “Chevronizing” around cost-benefit analysis, created novel challenges for courts, as it pitted traditional Chevron deference against a trend in favor of requiring agencies to regulate based on cost-benefit analysis as a matter of …

Narrowing Chevron’S Domain, Kristin E. Hickman, Aaron L. Nielson

Duke Law Journal

Chevron deference has become increasingly controversial. Some Justices on the Supreme Court have stated that they would overrule Chevron, and others have urged that it be curtailed. If Chevron were merely modified rather than overturned, it is unclear what that modified Chevron would look like. This Article argues that the time has come to narrow Chevron’s domain by limiting Chevron deference to interpretations announced in rulemaking and not those announced in adjudication.

Under the classic formulation of Chevron, a court should defer to an agency’s reasonable interpretation of ambiguous statutory language. This formulation is grounded in the …

The Future Of Chevron Deference, Kristin E. Hickman, Aaron L. Nielson

Duke Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Congress’S Domain: Appropriations, Time, And Chevron, Matthew B. Lawrence, Eric A. Posner

Duke Law Journal

Annual appropriations and permanent appropriations play contradictory roles in the separation of powers. Annual appropriations preserve agencies’ need for congressionally provided funding and enforce a domain of congressional influence over agency action in which the House and the Senate each enforce written unicameral commands through the threat of reduced appropriations in the next annual cycle. Permanent appropriations permit agencies to fund their programs without ongoing congressional support, circumscribing and diluting Congress’s domain.

The unanswered question of Chevron deference for appropriations demonstrates the importance of the distinction between annual appropriations and permanent appropriations. Uncritical application of governing deference tests that emphasize …

The Case Against Chevron Deference In Immigration Adjudication, Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia, Christopher J. Walker

Duke Law Journal

The Duke Law Journal’s fifty-first annual administrative law symposium examines the future of Chevron deference—the command that a reviewing court defer to an agency’s reasonable interpretation of an ambiguous statute the agency administers. In the lead article, Professors Kristin Hickman and Aaron Nielson argue that the Supreme Court should narrow Chevron ’s domain to exclude interpretations made via administrative adjudication. Building on their framing, this Article presents an in-depth case study of immigration adjudication and argues that this case against Chevron has perhaps its greatest force when it comes to immigration. That is because much of Chevron ’s theory …

Journal Staff

Duke Law Journal

No abstract provided.

California V. Texas: The Denouement Of The Affordable Care Act's Legal Challenges?, Rachel Sereix

Duke Journal of Constitutional Law & Public Policy Sidebar

In February of 2018, Texas and nineteen other states filed suit against the federal government seeking to have the entire ACA struck down. In the consolidated case California v. Texas, the Court is considering four questions: First, whether Texas and the individual plaintiffs have standing to challenge the individual mandate; Second, whether the Tax Cut and Jobs Act renders the individual mandate unconstitutional; Third, whether the rest of the ACA can stand even if the mandate is unconstitutional; Finally, if the entire ACA is found invalid, whether the Act should be unenforceable nationwide or whether it should only be unenforceable …

Ford Motor Company V. Montana Eighth Judicial District Court: Redefining The Nexus Requirement For Specific Jurisdiction, Brittany Day

Duke Journal of Constitutional Law & Public Policy Sidebar

No abstract provided.

Disagreement About Chevron: Is Administrative Law The "Law Of Public Administration", Elizabeth Fisher, Sidney Shapiro

Duke Law Journal Online

No abstract provided.

The Combination Of Chevron And Political Polarity Has Awful Effects, Richard J. Pierce

Duke Law Journal Online

No abstract provided.

Gender-Blind: International Human Rights On Abortion Through Irish Eyes, Christine A. Ryan

Duke Law SJD Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Protecting Financial Stability: Lessons From The Covid-19 Pandemic, Howell E. Jackson, Steven L. Schwarcz

Faculty Scholarship

The COVID-19 pandemic has produced a public health debacle of the first order. But the virus has also propagated the kind of exogenous shock that can precipitate-and to a certain degree did precipitate-a systemic event for our financial system. This still not fully resolved systemic shock comes a little more than a decade after the last financial crisis. In the intervening years, much has been written about the global financial crisis of 2008 and its systemic dimensions. Considerable scholarly attention has focused on first devising and then critiquing the macroprudential reforms that ensued, both in the Dodd-Frank Act and the …

Life Without Parole Sentencing In North Carolina, Brandon L. Garrett, Travis M. Seale-Carlisle, Karima Modjadidi, Kristen M. Renberg

Faculty Scholarship

What explains the puzzle of life without parole (LWOP) sentencing in the United States? In the past two decades, LWOP sentences have reached record highs, with over 50,000 prisoners serving LWOP. Yet during this same period, homicide rates have steadily declined. The U.S. Supreme Court has limited the use of juvenile LWOP in Eighth Amendment rulings. Further, death sentences have steeply declined, reaching record lows. Although research has examined drivers of incarceration patterns for certain sentences, there has been little research on LWOP imposition. To shed light on what might explain the sudden rise of LWOP, we examine characteristics of …

Clearing Opacity Through Machine Learning, Arti K. Rai, W. Nicholson Price Ii

Faculty Scholarship

Artificial intelligence and machine learning represent powerful tools in many fields, ranging from criminal justice to human biology to climate change. Part of the power of these tools arises from their ability to make predictions and glean useful information about complex real-world systems without the need to understand the workings of those systems.

But these machine-learning tools are often as opaque as the underlying systems, whether because they are complex, nonintuitive, deliberately kept secret, or a synergistic combination of those three factors. A burgeoning literature addresses challenges arising from the opacity of machine-learning systems. This literature has largely focused on …

Second Amendment Animus, Jacob D. Charles

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court’s animus doctrine has proven surprisingly adaptive. The Court has employed the doctrine not just in the typical equal protection context from which it arose, but also to claims that religious conduct or beliefs are the target of legislative hostility. Animus law and scholarship are flourishing after several invocations of the doctrine in the high Court’s recent Terms. Coinciding with these developments, gun-rights advocates and other supporters have increasingly railed against the hostility with which they believe government officials are treating the Second Amendment. This Essay connects these developments, mapping three types of gun-supporter claims that sound in …

Unpacking Third-Party Standing, Curtis A. Bradley, Ernest A. Young

Faculty Scholarship

Third-party standing is relevant to a wide range of constitutional and statutory cases. The Supreme Court has said that, to assert such standing, a litigant must ordinarily have a close relationship with the right holder and the right holder must face obstacles to suing on their own behalf. Yet the Court does not seem to apply that test consistently, and commentators have long critiqued the third-party standing doctrine as incoherent. This Article argues that much of the doctrine’s perceived incoherence stems from the Supreme Court’s attempt to capture, in a single principle, disparate scenarios raising distinct problems of both theory …

Children In Custody: A Study Of Detained Migrant Children In The United States,, Emily Ryo, Reed Humphrey

Faculty Scholarship

Every year, tens of thousands of migrant children are taken into custody by U.S. immigration authorities. Many of these children are unaccompanied by parents or relatives when they arrive at the U.S. border. Others who are accompanied by parents or relatives are rendered unaccompanied when U.S. immigration authorities separate them upon apprehension. Together, these minors are called unaccompanied alien children (UACs) and transferred to the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), unless and until their immigration cases are resolved or until the children can be placed with a sponsor in the United States pending the adjudication of their …

Social Corporate Governance, Jeremy Mcclane, Yaron Nili

Faculty Scholarship

Corporate directors, like most people, are social creatures, and their social networks affect their decisions. But directors’ social networks remain both understudied and under-theorized by scholars and inconsistently addressed by courts. This Article comprehensively examines the importance of director networks to corporate governance for the first time. Using qualitative and quantitative data, the Article uncovers the importance of director networks to corporate governance and the implications that network theory poses for the study of corporate law. In doing so, the Article tackles an understudied corner of corporate decision-making at a critical time, when directors have an outsized influence over their …