Law Commons^™

Domicile In Multistate Personal Income Tax Residency Matters: Enter The Swamp At Your Own Peril, Scott R. Thomas

Pace Law Review

This Article argues that states should remove the domicile concept from the definition of a resident and rely solely on an objective test or tests. Part I of this Article defines the terms resident and domicile using examples from the laws of Massachusetts, Minnesota, and New York. Part II discusses the problems created for individuals and state taxing authorities in the application of a subjective standard, the burden and standard of proof applied, and the domicile or residency bias of states. Part III describes how Congress defines a resident of the United States and the rationale behind Congress’s movement away …

Humanizing Work Requirements For Safety Net Programs, Mary Leto Pareja

Pace Law Review

This Article explores the political and policy appeal of work requirements for public benefit programs and concludes that inclusion of such requirements can be a reasonable design choice, but not in their current form. This Article’s proposals attempt to humanize these highly controversial work requirements while acknowledging the equity concerns they are designed to address. Drawing on expansive definitions of “work” found in guidance published by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (“CMS”) and in various state waiver applications, this Article proposes that work requirements be approved for Medicaid (as well as other benefit programs) only if they encompass various …

Unreasonable Revelations: God Told Me To Kill, Linda Ross Meyer

Pace Law Review

This Article focuses on one extreme example of the law’s response to unreasonable revelations that is starkly presented in a series of unsettling murders: those involving criminal defendants who claim they committed their crime because God told them to do it—known as “deific decree” cases. This example of the conflict between revelation and reason tests the limits of law’s ability to understand and countenance revelation when the stakes are highest. The deific decree cases also present the hardest epistemological problems, because the defendant claims that the experience of God’s command is self-authenticating—a position fundamentally at odds with both scientific and …

Janus, Union Member Speech, And The Public Employee Speech Doctrine, M. Linton Wright

Pace Law Review

In Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (“AFSCME”), the Supreme Court held that public sector unions can no longer collect fees from nonmembers to fund the costs of representing them in collective bargaining and grievance proceedings. The Court determined that virtually all union speech is political speech and that collection of these fees is impermissible compelled speech under the First Amendment. However, not everything in Janus harms public union interests. The Janus Court’s discussion of Garcetti v. Cabellos and Connick v. Myers actually helps protect union member speech in the context of First Amendment retaliation cases. …

Queer Phenomenology In Law: A Critical Theory Of Orientation, Nick J. Sciullo

Pace Law Review

This Article argues for the application of phenomenology to legal understanding, specifically as a way to think about and through queer people’s interactions with law as well as queer theory in law. There are both pragmatic and theoretical justifications for this project. The pragmatic justifications include the need to better address the legal issues and experiences of queer people, recent political and legal decisions and debates that affect queer people specifically, the need to better provide epistemological resources for queer lawyers, law scholars, law students, and their allies, and the need to better understand how law affects minoritarian populations regardless …

Mediation And Millennials: A Generational Shift In Dispute System Preferences, Shawna Benston, Brian Farkas

Pace Law Review

Millennials have been the subject of intense media scrutiny for more than a decade. Studies have examined their social, financial, technological, and work habits. However, few studies have examined this generation’s attitudes or proclivities towards civil litigation. Such an examination presents two problems: First, the absence of data on litigants’ age makes an empirical study virtually impossible. Second, generalizations about an entire generation are inherently problematic, glossing over countless cultural, economic, familial, and demographic differences. Nevertheless, this Article argues that millennials’ experiences and educations have primed them, at the margins, to avoid litigation more than prior generations. Instead, this generation …

Presidential War Powers And Humanitarian Intervention, Michael J. Sherman

Pace Law Review

Does the fact that Article I, Section 8 of the United States Constitution reserves to Congress the authority to “declare war” mean that the president needs congressional approval before using military force? As this Article discusses, there are a range of answers to this question. The Article examines this debate in the context of humanitarian intervention, i.e. military actions taken, not for purposes of conquest, but instead to stop largescale, serious violations of human rights. If the president wishes to use the military for these purposes, should he have more authority under the Constitution to do so? Less? The same? …

We All Need Somebody To Lean On: Using The Law To Nurture Our Children, Beginning With Third-Party Visitation, John A. Pappalardo, Cassidy Allison, Samantha A. Mumola

Pace Law Review

Perhaps one of the single most important aspects of a healthy childhood is emotional support from healthy caregivers. As it stands, New York’s visitation law prohibits third-party caregivers from stepping in and providing children with this important psychological and emotional need by automatically denying them standing to seek visitation in court. In New York, third-party standing for visitation is denied solely on a procedural basis, irrespective of the child’s personal familial situation, namely whether their parents are completely

unavailable. Specifically, when a child’s parents become unavailable due to death, incarceration or otherwise, and such child becomes a ward of the …

Tax Talk And Reproductive Technology, Bridget J. Crawford

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

The tax system both reacts to and helps create attitudes about the value of certain behaviors and choices. This Article makes three principal claims—one empirical, one normative, and one interpretative. The Article demonstrates through data that a representative sample of fertility clinics in the United States does not make information about the tax consequences of compensated human egg transfers—commonly called egg “donation”—publicly available. In 2015, in a case of first impression, the United States Tax Court decided in Perez v. Commissioner that a compensated egg transferor must report as income any amount she receives for her eggs. Although the Tax …

The New Food Safety, Margot J. Pollans, Emily M. Broad Leib

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

A safe food supply is essential for a healthy society. Our food system is replete with different types of risk, yet food safety is often narrowly understood as encompassing only foodborne illness and other risks related directly to food ingestion. This Article argues for a more comprehensive definition of food safety, one that includes not just acute, ingestion-related risks, but also whole-diet cumulative ingestion risks, and cradle-to-grave risks of food production and disposal. This broader definition, which we call “Food System Safety,” draws under the header of food safety a variety of historically siloed, and under-regulated, food system issues including …

You Don’T Need Lungs To Suffer: Fish Suffering In The Age Of Climate Change With A Call For Regulatory Reform, David N. Cassuto, Amy O'Brien

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Fish are sentient — they feel pain and suffer. Yet, while we see increasing interest in protecting birds and mammals in industries such as farming and research (albeit few laws), no such attention has been paid to the suffering of fish in the fishing industry. Consideration of fish welfare including reducing needless suffering should be a component of fisheries management. This article focuses on fisheries management practices, the effects of anthropogenic climate change on fisheries management practices, and the moral implications of fish sentience on the development and amendment of global fishing practices. Part I examines domestic and international fisheries, …

Judging During Crises: Can Judges Protect The Facts?, Lissa Griffin

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

With the advent of instantaneous information and the trend toward shrinking adherence to the truth, the conversation surrounding the ability of judges to conduct outside research into the matters before them is gaining urgency. In a “post-truth” world, the role that the judiciary plays in our democracy must shift from trier of fact to guardian of factual integrity. And to do this, the professional ethics rules assigned to the judiciary may need re-evaluation.

This Essay argues that the judiciary's ambivalence to its role as fact finder must be overcome, and where appropriate, judges may be empowered to seek out supplemental …

Why Women: Judging Transnational Courts And Tribunals, Bridget J. Crawford, Kathryn M. Stanchi, Linda L. Berger

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Calls for greater representation of women on the bench are not new. Many people share the intuition that having more female judges would make a difference to the decisions that courts might reach or how courts arrive at those decisions. This hunch has only equivocal empirical support, however. Nevertheless legal scholars, consistent with traditional feminist legal methods, persist in asking how many women judges there are and what changes might bring more women to the bench. This essay argues that achieving diversity in international courts and tribunals – indeed on any bench – will not happen simply by having more …

Judging Judges Fifty Years After – Was Judge Julius Hoffman’S Conduct So Different?, Bennett L. Gershman

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

In Chicago, Illinois--and in courtrooms across the United States--judicial misconduct has affected trial outcomes as long as there have been trials. While Judge Julius Hoffman's conduct in the “Chicago Eight” trial is an egregious example of judicial behavior toward criminal defendants, this piece's examination of at least ten different categories of misconduct in dozens of cases makes the argument that misbehavior by judges is less of an exception to the rule of impartiality than the thinking public might know. In considering these brazen examples, practitioners and academics alike can evaluate how to best confront the extent to which conduct like …

Dispute Resolution Themes Abound In “Hamilton: An American Musical”, Jill I. Gross

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Robust dispute resolution themes run through Hamilton: An American Musical, Lin Manuel-Miranda's award-winning Broadway play about the United States' first treasury secretary. Many songs in Hamilton revolve around dispute resolution mechanisms that weave throughout Hamilton's life.

Social Media, Venue And The Right To A Fair Trial, Leslie Y. Garfield Tenzer

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Judicial failure to recognize social media's influence on juror decision making has identifiable constitutional implications. The Sixth Amendment right to a fair trial demands that courts grant a defendant's change of venue motion when media-generated pretrial publicity invades the unbiased sensibility of those who are asked to sit in judgment. Courts limit publicity suitable for granting a defendant's motion to information culled from newspapers, radio, and television reports. Since about 2014, however, a handful of defendants have introduced social media posts to support their claims of unconstitutional bias in the community. Despite defendants' introduction of negative social media in support …

Privacy Law Disparities Between The United States And The European Union, Brandon Deluca

Honors College Theses

Data is the world’s most valuable resource today. In the 21st century, big data has overtaken the world’s commonly known large industries to become one of the most sought after markets, and companies pay to own this data (The Economist, 2017). Advertisements may have been targeted towards demographics such as race or sex in past years. However, in the digital age, the capability exists to push advertisements to the screens of specific users with known interests. This has been made possible, in part, by unregulated data collection practices across the globe, including in the United States and the European Union. …

The Concrete Jungle: Where Dreams Are Made Of . . . And Now Where Children Are Protected, Samantha A. Mumola

Pace Law Review

The tragic and unsettling story of Kalief Browder has notably emerged as a prominent illustration of our criminal justice system’s historical failure to protect our youth. Kalief’s story gained massive media attention with the help of a TIME documentary series featured on Netflix and famous A-listers such as music artist Jay-Z and TV host Rosie O’Donnell. It is hard to ignore the fact that Kalief Browder was cheated by the system; he chose suicide to escape his demons, which developed after undeserved time spent at Riker’s – a place he would have never experienced had he initially been tried as …

The Indecency Of The Communications Decency Act § 230: Unjust Immunity For Monstrous Social Media Platforms, Natalie Annette Pagano

Pace Law Review

The line between First Amendment protection and the innovation of social media platforms is hazy at best. Not only do these platforms increasingly encompass the lives of many individuals, but they provide incredible new opportunities to interact from near and far, through sharing photographs, videos, and memories. The Internet provides countless outlets that are available at the tip of users’ fingers: thriving forums to communicate nearly whenever and wherever desired. Users effortlessly interact on these platforms and are consistently exposed to numerous forms of speech, including messages through posts, chat room discussions, videos, polls, and shared statements. From 2010 to …

Compensation Is All-American: Former College Football Star Chris Spielman’S Case Against His Alma Mater And How It Could Affect The Ncaa’S Amateurism Rules, Jason Mcintyre

Pace Law Review

The lawsuit, Spielman v. IMG College, arose when Ohio State University (“OSU”) entered into a marketing deal through their marketing agency, IMG College (“IMG”), with corporations Honda Motor Co. (“Honda”) and Nike USA Inc. (“Nike”), to hang banners depicting images of former college athletes at school sporting events. Charles “Chris” Spielman, the named Plaintiff and former NCAA football player at OSU, brought this lawsuit because he claims that OSU and IMG unreasonably and illegally restrained trade by denying him the right to profit from his name, image, and likeness.

This case plays a role in the ongoing conversation of whether …

Empiricism And The Misdemeanor Courts: Promoting Wider, Deeper, And Interdisciplinary Study, Alisa Smith

Pace Law Review

Since 1956, there have been three waves of scholarly attention on the misdemeanor courts. Despite this attention, misdemeanor courts remain understudied and overlooked. The object of this paper is to summarize the empirical research conducted over the last sixty years and identify the scholarly work that should be undertaken on the processing of misdemeanor offenders in our courts. Buoyed by the current interest in studying the misdemeanor courts, scholars should widen and deepen their study by replicating the work of others in a variety of jurisdictions, observing court proceedings, interviewing defendants and the courtroom workgroup, and assessing whether constitutional ideals …

How The United States Stopped Being A Pirate Nation And Learned To Love International Copyright, John A. Rothchild

Pace Law Review

From the time of the first federal copyright law in 1790 until enactment of the International Copyright Act in 1891, U.S. copyright law did not apply to works by authors who were not citizens or residents of the United States. U.S. publishers took advantage of this lacuna in the law, and the demand among American readers for books by popular British authors, by reprinting the books of these authors without their authorization and without paying a negotiated royalty to them.

This Article tells the story of how proponents of extending copyright protections to foreign authors—called international copyright—finally succeeded after more …

Rights Of Creditors To Collect Marital Debts After Divorce In Community Property Jurisdictions, James L. Musselman

Pace Law Review

The primary thrust of this Article is to address the post-divorce liability issue outlined in Part III from the perspective of debtor-creditor law. The rules adopted in most of the community property jurisdictions with respect to this issue appear to be primarily focused on the perspective of marital property and family law without regard to general debtor-creditor law principles and policies. For example, basic fraudulent transfer law has been ignored in those jurisdictions and not applied in the usual manner. As a result, the rules developed in those jurisdictions with regard to the post-divorce liability issue are not consistent with …

The Forgotten Unitary Executive Power: The Textualist, Originalist, And Functionalist Opinions Clause, Zachary J. Murray

Pace Law Review

This article will analyze the Opinion Clause’s text, its history and intent, and its potential functions as a power. Part II catalogues much of the prior scholarship on the Opinions Clause, which generally fits into two categories: the anti-unitary approach, which argues that a substantive reading of the Vesting Clause renders the Opinions Clause redundant, and the unitary response, which essentially accepts that redundancy. To some extent, both sides miss the mark. The unitary approach misreads the text, assigning great substantive weight to the descriptive Vesting Clause, while assigning descriptive status to the substantive Opinions Clause. The anti-unitary approach, on …

George Washington’S Attorneys: The Political Selection Of United States Attorneys At The Founding, Scott Ingram

Pace Law Review

This Article examines the relationship between the Nation’s first President and the selection of United States Attorneys. It argues that politics played an important, if not primary, role in the President’s selections. George Washington sought those who would represent the government’s interests, adhere to the government’s policies, and advance Washington’s political goals. His selections also demonstrated Washington’s requirement of loyalty to America. In this respect, the politicization of United States Attorneys occurred at the outset. Part I of this Article defines politicization and identifies its four aspects. Part II describes the United States Attorney position as understood through the 1789 …

Platforms, The First Amendment And Online Speech: Regulating The Filters, Sofia Grafanaki

Pace Law Review

In recent years, online platforms have given rise to multiple discussions about what their role is, what their role should be, and whether they should be regulated. The complex nature of these private entities makes it very challenging to place them in a single descriptive category with existing rules. In today’s information environment, social media platforms have become a platform press by providing hosting as well as navigation and delivery of public expression, much of which is done through machine learning algorithms. This article argues that there is a subset of algorithms that social media platforms use to filter public …

Comrades Or Foes: Did The Russians Break The Law Or New Ground For The First Amendment?, Artem M. Joukov, Samantha M. Caspar

Pace Law Review

This Article discusses the recent decision by the United States Federal Government to indict more than a dozen Russian nationals for conspiracy to defraud the United States of America. The Government accused the Russians of staging protests, distributing false propaganda, and spreading political messages and ideologies online in an effort to affect the outcome of the 2016 Presidential Election. We argue that while the Defendants violated several other laws, the majority of the acts the Government classifies as a conspiracy to defraud the United States should not be considered criminal. Rather, these acts are protected political speech under the First …

Freedom Of Religion And Belief In India And Australia: An Introductory Comparative Assessment Of Two Federal Constitutional Democracies, Paul T. Babie, Arvind P. Bhanu

Pace Law Review

This article considers the freedom of religion and belief (“free exercise”) in two secular federal constitutional democracies: India and Australia. Both constitutional systems emerged from the former British Empire and both continue in membership of the Commonwealth of Nations, which succeeded it. However, the similarities end there, for while both separate church and state, and protect free exercise, they do so in very different ways. On the one hand, the Indian Constitution contains express provisions which comprehensively deal with free exercise. On the other hand, while one finds what might appear a protection for free exercise in the Australian Constitution, …

Bargaining In The (Murky) Shadow Of Arbitration, Jill I. Gross

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Disputing parties who are unable to settle their differences will end up before an adjudicator (typically a judge or jury) who will decide their dispute for them. Dispute resolution scholars have long theorized that disputants bargain in the shadow of this adjudicated outcome, predicting what would happen in court substantively and procedurally, and negotiating based on an assessment of the strength of “bargaining endowments” derived from applicable legal norms. The increasing use of arbitration to resolve commercial disputes in the U.S. means that more and more disputants are negotiating in the shadow of arbitration, not litigation. This Article explores how …

Cashless Societies And The Rise Of The Independent Cryptocurrencies: How Governments Can Use Privacy Laws To Compete With Independent Cryptocurrencies, Matla Garcia Chavolla

Pace International Law Review

Many individuals (including governments) envision living in a future world where physical currency is a thing of the past. Many countries have made great strides in their efforts to go cashless. At the same time, there is increasing awareness among citizens of the decreasing amount of privacy in their lives. The potential hazards cashless societies pose to financial privacy may incentivize citizens to hold some of their money in independent cryptocurrencies. This article argues that in order for governments in cashless societies to keep firm control over their money supply, they should enact stronger privacy law protections for its citizens …