Law Commons^™

The Unreasonableness Of Reasonable: Rethinking The Reasonable Investor Standard, Alexandra Li

Northwestern University Law Review

This Note explores the “reasonable investor” standard in light of recent developments in pandemic-era securities litigation. Scholars have long criticized the reasonable investor standard for determining materiality. Given the dramatic backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, the limitations of the standard are becoming ever more evident. This Note provides a brief history of the development of the current standard and highlights some of its problems through two recent COVID-19 securities fraud cases. This Note argues that the reasonable investor standard is no longer sufficient to protect investors. Through examining tort law and First Amendment jurisprudence, this Note differentiates between the “reasonable” …

Employer Tuition Assistance: Current Approaches And The Application Of The Implied Covenant Of Good Faith And Fair Dealing, Jordan T. Krieger

Northwestern University Law Review

American corporations are increasingly expanding tuition reimbursement programs, potentially improving access to higher education for American workers. Yet, despite their increasing availability, only 2% of employees, as a percentage of those interested in pursuing further education, are utilizing these reimbursement programs. For those employees who do make use of these reimbursement programs, they may face unexpected challenges to accessing judicial remedies if a dispute arises.

This Note takes an interdisciplinary approach to first explore employee risks and employer incentives under tuition reimbursement programs. On the employee side, a worker risks premature termination by expressing an interest in tuition reimbursement because …

Legally Alone: The Redeemability Of Guardianship And Recommendations Toward Equitable Access, Patrick Hecker

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

American adult guardianship needs reform. Thankfully, there is a small but dedicated reform movement that sheds helpful light on problems of underfunding, inattention, and abuse. While the movement’s efforts are needed, this Note argues it is a mistake to focus solely on the ways the guardianship system is sometimes harmful to people who already have access to guardianship. Few reformers consider the needs of people who would benefit from a guardian but do not have anyone to petition the court on their behalf.

This Note first argues that guardianship, despite its detractors, is redeemable. It can be part of a …

The Limits Of Wrongfulness: What Exactly Is Prohibited By Hobbs Act Extortion?, Duncan Weinstein

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

The Hobbs Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1951, prohibits, in interstate commerce, “the obtaining of property from another, with his consent, induced by wrongful use of actual or threatened force, violence, or fear.” This Note addresses what makes an act “wrongful.” First, this Note reviews the academic literature on what makes extortion morally and legally wrong and the Hobbs Act’s legislative history. Then, it argues that there are four distinct types of threats under the Hobbs Act: violent threats, litigation threats, reputational threats, and economic threats. Each of these threats are judged by distinct standards for wrongfulness, with two circuit splits …

Put Your Money Where Their Mouths Are: A Case For State-Based Investment In Anti-Shaming Policies For School Lunch Programs, Shayna Roth

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

Despite its goals for feeding hungry students, the federal government’s National School Lunch Program falls short due to a lack of guidance and resources. One consequence of these circumstances is shaming practices where schools use fear, punishment, and socioeconomic segregation tactics to mitigate meal price deficits. The federal government and several state governments attempt, and sometimes succeed, to enact legislation to improve school lunch programs, but efforts are few and far between. This Note draws on effective state laws to advocate for increased legislative action on school meals across all states, specifically addressing and prohibiting shaming practices. Eliminating this barrier …

About-Face: How Facebook’S Restrictions On User Posts Could Violate Antitrust Law, Efrem Berk

Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property

This Note examines whether Facebook’s restrictions on its users’ posts are subject to Sherman Act § 2. This Note looks at the economic activity generated by social media activity and argues that posts are commerce. While this piece finds that current antitrust jurisprudence likely favors Facebook, an alternative approach sought by some antitrust scholars could influence judges to preclude the platform’s restrictions.

Video Games And The First Amendment, Eli Pales

Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property

The video game industry is massive, with an annual revenue of $180 billion worldwide; $60 billion of that in America alone. For context, the industry’s size is greater than that of the movie, book, and music industries combined. Yet, despite this market dominance, the video game industry is relatively new. Only in the 2011 decision of Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association did the Supreme Court extend First Amendment protection to games. Still, the Court failed to define the scope of the game medium. As understood by an average person, a video game could be something as simple as Pac-Man or …

Human Rights, Trans Rights, Prisoners’ Rights: An International Comparison, Tom Butcher

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

In this Note, I conduct an international comparison of the state of trans prisoners’ rights to explore how different national legal contexts impact the likelihood of achieving further liberation through appeals to human rights ideals. I examine the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, India, Argentina, and Costa Rica and show the degree to which a human rights framework has been successful thus far in advancing trans prisoners’ rights. My analysis also indicates that the degree to which a human rights framework is likely to be successful in the future varies greatly between countries. In countries that are hesitant …

Healthcare Inequities In The United States And Beyond Are Taking Black Women’S Lives, Alichia Mcintosh

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

Black women have been dying at devastating rates due to health complications at the hands of the United States’ healthcare and legal systems. This Note explores these distressing rates and how they compare to White women while analyzing the fatalities and diagnoses among several health complications and diseases. These fatalities persist due to the United States’ history of racism—such as the institution of slavery and over 100 years of Black bodies experiencing Jim Crow laws—and the socioeconomic disadvantages Black women disproportionally face. This Note emphasizes that these disparities continue because the United States has failed to implement treaties—which it is …

#Metoo’S Landmark, Yet Flawed, Impact On Dispute Resolution: The Ending Forced Arbitration Of Sexual Assault And Sexual Harassment Act Of 2021, Imre S. Szalai

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

On March 3, 2022, President Joe Biden signed the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act of 2021 (the Amendment) into law. This Amendment is the most significant change in the last several decades to the Federal Arbitration Act (the FAA), the main federal law governing arbitration since 1925. This landmark Amendment is also the most important federal legislation to arise thus far from the #MeToo movement. The Amendment invalidates predispute arbitration agreements in cases involving sexual harassment or sexual assault, thereby allowing survivors to proceed with their claims in public court with more robust procedural protections. …

The Power Of Local: Nearby Innovators Dominate Patented Technology Development, Richard Gruner

Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property

Advances by nearby innovators – close enough to interact in person – play key roles in patented technology development. Patents frequently cite nearby innovations, identifying these local innovations as the background for further patented inventions. Such citations reveal narrow geographic areas with intensely active innovation communities advancing similar projects and technologies. Local innovators – working within a commutable distance of 40 miles or less of each other – accounted for 25 percent of all patent citations between 2010 and 2019 and about 21 percent of citations by disinterested patent examiners reviewing patent applications. These percentages of citations to local advances …

Quantum Copyright Law: Schrödinger’S Cat, Banksy’S Shredder, And Art On The Edge, Richard Chused

Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property

An object has been assembled by artists I know that presents a fascinating set of conundrums about the relationships between quantum physics, shredders, random surprises, the value of art, and copyright law. Seems fantastical, right? And so it is. The object of concern is a metal box a little under four feet tall, about eighteen inches deep, and a bit less than three feet wide. The box is welded together along all twelve of its edges. It has an opening across one side. And there is a small control panel on top.

Before the box was welded shut, a set …

Law Informs Code: A Legal Informatics Approach To Aligning Artificial Intelligence With Humans, John J. Nay

Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property

Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities are rapidly advancing. Highly capable AI could cause radically different futures depending on how it is developed and deployed. We are unable to specify human goals and societal values in a way that reliably directs AI behavior. Specifying the desirability (value) of AI taking a particular action in a particular state of the world is unwieldy beyond a very limited set of state-action-values. The purpose of machine learning is to train on a subset of states and have the resulting agent generalize an ability to choose high value actions in unencountered circumstances. Inevitably, the function ascribing …

Curiosities Of Standing In Trade Secret Law, Charles T. Graves

Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property

Standing under the Uniform Trade Secrets Act – the right to pursue a misappropriation claim – is a vexing question when compared to patent, copyright, and trademark law. Instead of requiring ownership or license rights as a condition to sue, courts often find that mere possession of an asserted trade secret suffices for standing, even when the provenance of the information is murky. In some cases, courts even allow trade secret plaintiffs to claim intellectual property rights in the preferences and desires expressed to them by their customers in lawsuits designed to stop former employees from doing business with those …

The Evidentiary Implications Of Interpreting Black-Box Algorithms, Varun Bhatnagar

Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property

Biased black-box algorithms have drawn increasing levels of scrutiny from the public. This is especially true for those black-box algorithms with the potential to negatively affect protected or vulnerable populations.1 One type of these black-box algorithms, a neural network, is both opaque and capable of high accuracy. However, neural networks do not provide insights into the relative importance, underlying relationships, structures of the predictors or covariates with the modelled outcomes.2 There are methods to combat a neural network’s lack of transparency: globally or locally interpretable post-hoc explanatory models.3 However, the threat of such measures usually does not bar an actor …

A Loaded God Complex: The Unconstitutionality Of The Executive Branch’S Unilaterally Withholding Zero-Days, Brendan Gilligan

Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property

No abstract provided.

Compulsory Licensing: A Potential Solution To The Antitrust Dilemma Of Technology Standards Setting, Shen Peng

Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property

The Constitution grants patent owners exclusive rights over their inventions to “promote the Progress of Science.”1 This clause was drafted based on the belief that monetary incentives granted to the first inventor, such as the proceeds from selling and licensing the invention, will foster new ideas and accelerate innovation to the benefit of the public welfare. However, when the first inventor is the sole benefactor of the rewards from the innovation, subsequent innovation may be stifled.

For instance, the first person to invent the idea of a mobile phone but lacking the right to use the underlying technologies essential to …

Managing Misinformation On Social Media: Targeted Newsfeed Interventions And Freedom Of Thought, Richard Mackenzie-Gray Scott

Northwestern Journal of Human Rights

Whether it is being told a particular politician consumes children, or drinking cow urine will cure your disease, or that Jimi Hendrix is alive and well living the good life in Drumnadrochit, misinformation affects societies in myriad ways. Its spread online via social media platforms raises questions concerning how it can be addressed. This article engages with a related problem: Can the use of targeted behavioral interventions on social media newsfeeds to reduce the spread of misinformation be reconciled with the human right to freedom of thought?

Why Criminal Defendants Cooperate: The Defense Attorney's Perspective, Jessica A. Roth, Anna D. Vaynman, Steven D. Penrod

Northwestern University Law Review

Cooperation is at the heart of most complex federal criminal cases, with profound ramifications for who can be brought to justice and for the fate of those who decide to cooperate. But despite the significance of cooperation, scholars have yet to explore exactly how individuals confronted with the decision whether to pursue cooperation with prosecutors make that choice. This Article—the first empirical study of the defense experience of cooperation—begins to address that gap. The Article reports the results of a survey completed by 146 criminal defense attorneys in three federal districts: the Southern District of New York, the Eastern District …

Obey Or Abey: An Empirical Examination Of Abeyance Agreements In Public School Discipline, Rachael K. Cox

Northwestern University Law Review

“Exclusionary discipline” is widely understood to mean the typical responses to student misbehavior in public schools: suspension and expulsion. But sometimes their lesser-known counterpart, the abeyance agreement, swoops in before the suspension or expulsion is effectuated and gives the student a “second chance” to avoid such exclusionary discipline—provided the student complies with the terms of the agreement. It sounds simple, but the reality is far more complicated. Without a clearly defined, regulated, and tracked practice, abeyance agreements are an off-record discipline device used at the sole discretion of public school district administrators. Joining a landscape of urgent concerns over the …

The Architecture Of Discretion: Implications Of The Structure Of Sanctions For Racial Disparities, Severity, And Net Widening, Ryan T. Sakoda

Northwestern University Law Review

About four million people are serving a term of probation, parole, or post-release supervision in the United States. Due to the extensive use of incarceration as a punishment for conditions violations, these community supervision programs are a major factor contributing to mass incarceration and, as this Article shows, can play a significant role in exacerbating racial disparities in the criminal legal system.

In recent years, jurisdictions throughout the United States have made reforms to their community supervision programs. A major trend in community supervision reform is the integration of new sanctioning structures, such as “swift and certain” sanctions, for conditions …

The Failure Of Judicial Recusal And Disclosure Rules: Evidence From A Field Experiment, Dane Thorley

Northwestern University Law Review

U.S. courts rely predominately on judicial self-recusal and in-court disclosure to address judicial conflicts of interest and maintain a critical perception of impartiality. But these approaches fail to account for the legal, institutional, and social dynamics that surround the relationship between judges, attorneys, and the adjudicative process. In reality, judges rarely use their discretion to disclose conflicts or recuse themselves, and attorneys do not ask them to do so. If we understand both the legal and extralegal incentives at play in these decisions, none of these outcomes should be surprising. The shortcomings of recusal and disclosure rules are particularly salient …

The Rise And Fall Of Section 502b, John Ramming Chappell

Northwestern Journal of Human Rights

The first major foreign policy legislation of the human rights revolution of the 1970s,1 Section 502B of the Foreign Assistance Act (FAA) is a latent oversight tool that Congress could use to promote human rights in U.S. security assistance. Section 502B may be the most potent provision of law regarding human rights and security assistance that has never been used. The provision prohibits U.S. security assistance to governments that engage in a consistent pattern of gross violations of human rights, requires the State Department to report on human rights issues, and provides Congress with a mechanism to enforce the statute’s …

A Chinese Law Wedge Into The Hong Kong Common Law System: A Legal Appraisal Of The Hong Kong National Security Law, Han Zhu

Northwestern Journal of Human Rights

This paper is the first to comprehensively analyze the key legal controversies surrounding the Hong Kong National Security Law (NSL) and its implementation. Based on doctrinal analysis, case studies, and the most up-to-date statistics, this study centers on three categories of legal disputes: (1) the constitutionality and legality of the NSL; (2) the disputed content of the NSL; and (3) the legislative procedural issues involving the NSL. The study shows that the enactment of the NSL is not only an unprecedented crisis facing the “one country, two systems” framework, but also marks a culmination of the intersection and conflict between …

Consequences And The Supreme Court, Aaron Tang

Northwestern University Law Review

May the Supreme Court consider consequences when it decides the hard cases that divide us? The conventional wisdom is that it may not. Scholars have argued, for example, that consequentialism is a paradigmatic “anti-modal” form of reasoning at the Court. And the Court itself has declared that “consequences cannot change our understanding of the law.”

This Article presents evidence of a possible shift in the standard account. Although many kinds of consequentialist arguments remain forbidden, such as naked judicial efforts to maximize social utility, a particular form of consequentialism is now surprisingly common when the Supreme Court confronts hard cases. …

The Immigration Shadow Docket, Faiza W. Sayed

Northwestern University Law Review

Each year, the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA)—the Justice Department’s appellate immigration agency that reviews decisions of immigration judges and decides the fate of thousands of noncitizens—issues about thirty published, precedential decisions. At present, these are the only decisions out of approximately 30,000 each year, that are readily available to the public and provide detailed reasoning for their conclusions. This is because most of the BIA’s decision-making happens on what this Article terms the “immigration shadow docket”—the tens of thousands of other decisions the BIA issues each year that are unpublished and nonprecedential. These shadow docket decisions are generally authored …

The Misunderstood History Of Textualism, Tara Leigh Grove

Northwestern University Law Review

This Article challenges widespread assumptions about the history of textualism. Jurists and scholars have sought for decades to distinguish “modern textualism” from the so-called “plain meaning school” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—an approach that both textualists and non-textualists alike have long viewed as improperly “literal” and “wooden.” This Article shows that this conventional historical account is incorrect. Based on a study of statutory cases from 1789 to 1945 that use the term “plain meaning” or similar terms, this Article reveals that, under the actual plain meaning approach, the Supreme Court did not ignore context but looked to …

Defining Interim Storage Of Nuclear Waste, Max Johnson

Northwestern University Law Review

Nuclear power may be humanity’s best hope to curb climate-altering greenhouse gas emissions. But public fear of its dangers, including the toxicity of nuclear waste, undermines its expansion. To provide for more effective waste disposal, in 2021 and 2022 the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) recommended licensing two privately-owned nuclear waste storage facilities—called Consolidated Interim Storage Facilities (CISFs)—to be built in New Mexico and in Texas. Both states vehemently oppose the construction and operation of these facilities: legislators in both states have proposed state laws opposing them, and both states have sued the NRC challenging the legality of the facilities’ licensure. …

The Counterdemocratic Difficulty, Aziz Z. Huq

Northwestern University Law Review

Since the 2020 elections, debate about the Supreme Court’s relationship with the mechanisms of national democracy has intensified. One important thread of that debate focuses critically on the possibility of a judicial decision flipping a presidential election or thwarting the will of national majorities respecting progressive legislation, and pushes concerns about the Court’s effect on national democracy. A narrow focus on specific interventions, however, does not exhaust the subtle and consequential ways in which the Court influences whether and how the American democratic system thrives or fails. A narrow focus is partial because it construes democracy as merely the aggregation …

White-Collar Crime, Sentencing Gender Disparities Post-Booker, And Implications For Criminal Sentencing, Sarah Turner

JCLC Online

“White-collar crime” is an amorphous term that has yet to be conclusively defined since its first use in 1939. This category of criminal activity results in what can be characterized as either economic harm or an impediment to the government’s ability to run successfully while minimizing conflicts of interest. Sentencing of white-collar crimes came into question in the late twentieth century due to a perception that white-collar offenders were receiving much lower sentences than offenders committing more traditional crimes. Additionally, the relationship between sentencing outcomes and status characteristics like race, age, citizen status, and gender were cause for concern. Different …