Law Commons^™

An Alternative Constitutional Implementation Mechanism? A Case Study Of Kenya’S Commission For The Implementation Of The Constitution., Siyu Li

Indiana Journal of Constitutional Design

This Paper analyzes the independent implementation commission of Kenya and its work in facilitating the implementation process of the 2010 Kenyan Constitution, and further evaluates the effectiveness of such implementation mechanism. The case study of the Kenyan Constitution implementation shows that an independent implementation commission established by the constitution can have substantially positive impact over the implementation process. To design a successful commission, it is crucial to ensure its institutional independence, legal and enforcement power, and collaboration with civil society.

Appraising Policy: A Taxonomy Of Ex Ante Impact Assessments, Aaron Hurd

Indiana Journal of Constitutional Design

In the pursuit of better policy, many nations have turned to Impact Assessments as a potential solution. However, in order to make Impact Assessments as effective and impactful as possible, governments must think critically about which body should write Impact Assessments and what should go into these documents. In this Paper, I survey different Impact Assessment structures and the various government bodies formed to draft or review them. After completing this survey, I conclude that presidential and parliamentary systems should form their Impact Assessment offices differently in order to complement their differing governmental structures. While presidential systems would be best …

Vol. 58, No. 04 (February 3, 2020)

Indiana Law Annotated

No abstract provided.

Analyzing Analytics: Litigation Analytics In Bloomberg Law, Westlaw Edge, And Lexis Advance, Ashley A. Ahlbrand

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

February 2020 Newsletter

Ergo

No abstract provided.

Criv Sheet Summaries: A Review Of Aals Programming, Ashley A. Ahlbrand

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Vol. 58, No. 03 (January 27, 2020)

Indiana Law Annotated

No abstract provided.

Ivf Errors - Is This Only The Tip Of The Iceberg?, Jody L. Madeira, Steven R. Lindheim Md, Mark P. Trolice

Articles by Maurer Faculty

ART errors are fortunately a rare occurrence. but humans are fallible and mistakes are inevitable. As social media sensationalizes these events, we, as infertility specialists, must be vigilant in reviewing existing risk management systems and consider other options to minimize/eliminate these events. ART programs should work to emphasize honesty and transparency to improve quality of care.

Vol. 58, No. 02 (January 20, 2020)

Indiana Law Annotated

No abstract provided.

Vol. 58, No. 01 (January 13, 2020)

Indiana Law Annotated

No abstract provided.

The Liberty To Spy, Asaf Lubin

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Many, if not most, international legal scholars share the ominous contention that espionage, as a legal field, is devoid of meaning. For them, any attempt to extrapolate the lex lata corpus of the International Law of Intelligence (ILI), let alone its lex scripta, would inevitably prove to be a failed attempt, as there is simply nothing to extrapolate. The notion that international law is moot as to the question of if, when, and how intelligence is to be collected, analyzed, and promulgated, has been repeated so many times that it has become the prevailing orthodoxy.

This paper offers a new …

The Categorical Imperative As A Decarceral Agenda, Jessica M. Eaglin

Articles by Maurer Faculty

In his forthcoming book, The Insidious Momentum of Mass Incarceration, Frank Zimring proposes two alternative methods to decarcerate: states can adopt a categorical imperative to reduce prison populations or states can reform the governance of sentencing. This symposium Essay focuses on the first of these options, as proposed in his tentative Chapter Six, wherein Zimring calls for categorically removing drug-addicted offenders from eligibility for prison sanctions and expanding use of jails for categories of offenses or offenders.

These methods, I suggest, exist in tension with numerous popular sentencing reforms being implemented in the states right now. Popular reforms, including the …

Information Matters In Tax Enforcement, Leandra Lederman, Joseph C. Dugan

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Most scholars recognize both that the government needs information about taxpayers’ transactions to determine whether their reporting is honest, and that third third-party reporting helps the government obtain that information. Given governments’ reliance on tax collections, it would be risky to think that information or third third-party reporting is not needed by tax agencies. However, a recent article by Professor Wei Cui asserts that “modern governments can practice ‘taxation without information.’” Professor Cui’s argument rests on two claims: (1) “giving governments effective access to taxpayer information through third parties does not explain the success of modern tax administration” because, he …

Chiafalo: Constitutionalizing Historical Gloss In Law And Democratic Politics, Luis Fuentes-Rohwer, Guy-Uriel Charles

Articles by Maurer Faculty

We make one central point in this Article. Justice Kagan’s opinion in Chiafalo uses historical gloss to entrench a particular and modern view of political participation—which is best reflected by American political practices— by rejecting an alternative and anachronistic view—which is best reflected by the text and structure of the Constitution. Part I argues that Chiafalo is not a textualist opinion because Article II, Section 1 does not support the majority’s conclusion that states have the power to limit elector discretion. The majority’s reasoning to the contrary is not persuasive, even on its own terms. Part II argues that Chiafalo …

Safeguard Or Barrier: An Empirical Examination Of Bar Exam Cut Scores, Victor D. Quintanilla, Sam Erman, Michael B. Frisby

Articles by Maurer Faculty

In 2019, nearly 70,000 people took the bar exam. More than forty percent failed. Given the existing scores required to pass those exams (the “cut score”), nearly 30,000 test-takers otherwise qualified to practice law were lost to the profession. Had the cut score been lower, many would now be lawyers. So it goes every year, with staggering costs. Legal educators devote substantial resources to teaching tens of thousands of people legal skills that never get put to use in law practice. A national crisis in access to justice grows more entrenched. Applicants invest three years and countless thousands of dollars …

Jost Delbrück: A Reflection, Alfred C. Aman

Articles by Maurer Faculty

A profile and tribute to the international legal scholar Jost Delbrück (1935-2020), written by his good friend and colleague Alfred Aman. Delbrück was not only a graduate of the Indiana University School of Law, but was also a Maurer faculty member.

The Need For Thailand To Accede To Conventions On Statelessness, Pattranan Ruamsuk

Maurer Theses and Dissertations

‘Statelessness’ is a global phenomenon that refers to the lack of nationality of an individual. Although the issue of statelessness can be understood as the lack of nationality or the protections based on nationality, the solutions can be complicated because they interfere with the sovereign power of the state. Thailand is home to one of the largest stateless populations in the world. It has been working on solving the problem of statelessness with the help of international organizations, such as the United Nations and the Adventists Development and Relief Agency. However, despite the positive developments in Thailand, there are still …

Understanding Illicit Insemination And Fertility Fraud From Patient Experience To Legal Reform, Jody L. Madeira

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Recently, several cases have been filed in North America and Europe alleging that fertility physicians inseminated former patients with their own sperm only to have this conduct come to light decades later when their unsuspecting adult children use direct-to-consumer genetic tests and learn that they are not biologically related to their fathers and often that they have multiple half-siblings. For instance, Donald Cline of Indianapolis, Indiana, has over sixty doctor-conceived children, with more continuing to come forward. Although these cases induce disgust, it has thus far proven difficult to hold these physicians legally accountable because their conduct falls within gaps …

Touring The Lilly Library, Kimberly Mattioli

Articles by Maurer Faculty

When I began my job in January 2015, I was the first person to be officially designated as the Student Services Librarian at Indiana University Maurer School of Law’s Jerome Hall Law Library. One could argue that almost all the functions of a librarian at an academic law library are indeed “student services,” but I was given the exciting, and at times overwhelming, task of making the students happy on a full-time basis.

What makes students happy? Does anything (short of free food) make law students excited about the law library? I took it as a personal challenge to find …

A Serendipitous Experiment In Percolation Of Intellectual Property Doctrine, Daniel R. Cahoy, Lynda J. Oswald

Indiana Law Journal

This Article fills a gap in the literature by providing novel and unique empirical evidence of the impact of percolated intellectual property doctrine versus the impact of isolated doctrine from a specialized court. It relies on the U.S. Supreme Court’s paired decisions in 2014 in Octane Fitness, LLC v. ICON Health & Fitness, Inc.15 and Highmark, Inc. v. Allcare Health Management Systems, Inc.16 to highlight a natural forum for evaluating the effects of percolation on federal legal doctrine. At issue in those cases was the fee-shifting language of Section 285 of the Patent Act: “The court in exceptional cases may …

Redefining Tribal Sovereignty For The Era Of Fundamental Rights, Michael Doran

Indiana Law Journal

This Article explains a longstanding problem in federal Indian law. For two centuries, the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly acknowledged the retained, inherent sovereignty of American Indian tribes. But more recently, the Court has developed the implicit-divestiture theory to deny tribal governments criminal and civil jurisdiction over nonmembers, even with respect to activities on tribal lands. Legal scholars have puzzled over this move from a territorial-based definition of tribal sovereignty to a membership-based definition; they have variously explained it as the Court’s abandonment of the foundational principles of Indian law, the product of the Court’s indifference or even racist hostility …

The Specific Consumer Expectations Test For Product Defects, Clayton J. Masterman, W. Kip Viscusi

Indiana Law Journal

In this Article, we propose that courts adopt an amended version of the consumer expectations test that we call the “specific consumer expectations test.” The specific consumer expectations test would apply to any product or product component for which consumers have clear, articulable ex ante expectations about the function of the product. Under the specific consumer expectations test, a defendant is liable if consumers expected such a product to reduce a particular risk, and the product in fact increased that risk. Similarly, if a product was intended to convey a particular benefit, but in fact harmed consumers along the same …

A Coffee Break For Bitcoin, Margaret Ryznar

Indiana Law Journal

For many, the appeal of bitcoin is in its detachment from government regulation. However, the Coffee bonding theory, which initially arose in the context of foreign stocks, suggests certain benefits of regulation for bitcoin, including increased legitimacy. By invoking the Coffee bonding theory, this Article offers another perspective on the regulation of bitcoin.

Upskirting, Bitcoin, And Crime, Oh My: Judicial Resistance To Applying Old Laws To New Crimes – What Is A Legislature To Do?, Michael Whiteman

Indiana Law Journal

As technology continues to advance at a break-neck speed, legislatures often find themselves scrambling to write laws to keep up with these advances. Prosecutors are frequently faced with the prospect of charging a defendant with a crime based on an existing law that does not quite fit the circumstances of the defendant’s actions. Judges, cognizant of the fact that legislatures, and not the judiciary, have the primary responsibility for creating crimes, have pushed back. Judges routinely refuse to convict a defendant if the statute does not fairly criminalize the defendant’s actions. To determine if a defendant’s actions fit within a …

January 2020 Newsletter

Ergo

No abstract provided.

Improving Taiwan's Civil Procedure By Citizen Participation: Focusing On Expert Testimony In Public Interest Cases, Yin-Song Hsu

Maurer Theses and Dissertations

“The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.”

United States Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr's famous quotation adequately explains the institutional purpose of citizen participation in important trials. Court decisions require both logical reasoning and a practical adherence to the reality of citizens’ experiences. Currently, the Taiwanese public believes that judicial decisions are often not in line with national perceptions of law. In addition, judges’ limited social experiences often cause the public to distrust their verdicts. The life experiences of citizens can properly fill in the gaps in judicial knowledge and supplement the …

2020 Academy Of Law Alumni Fellows Dinner And Induction Ceremony Program

Academy of Law Alumni Fellows

No abstract provided.

Reevaluating Politicized Identity & Notions Of An American Political Community In The Legal & Political Process, Marvin L. Astrada Jd, Phd

Indiana Journal of Law and Social Equality

No abstract provided.

Revenge Porn And The Aclu’S Inconsistent Approach, Elena Lentz

Indiana Journal of Law and Social Equality

No abstract provided.

There’S Nothing Worse Than Losing To A Girl: An Analysis Of Sex Segregation In American Youth Sports, Julia Konieczny

Indiana Journal of Law and Social Equality

No abstract provided.