Law Commons^™

Recommendations For Online Teaching, St. John's University School Of Law Online & Hybrid Teaching Task Force, Renee Nicole Allen, Jennifer Baum, Catherine Baylin Duryea, Robert Ruescher, Courtney Selby, Eric Shannon, Rachel Smith, Jeff Sovern

Faculty Publications

This is a collection of recommendations drawn from a variety of sources, including our colleagues, students, webinars, books, articles, podcasts, and our own experimentation. It is not our expectation that any individual professor would adopt all of these suggestions and indeed no one of us intends to. Instead, we hope that some of these are helpful to you. Some suggestions deal with the nuts and bolts of teaching online while others with how to accomplish broader goals.

The general recommendations are broadly applicable to all courses taught online, while the individual class-type recommendations are intended to complement and augment the …

Congressional Enforcement Of International Human Rights, Margaret E. Mcguiness

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

On October 2, 2018, Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist based in the United States, walked into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, where he was brutally murdered and dismembered by Saudi government agents. It was a brazen violation of the most fundamental, internationally recognized human rights, carried out by one close US ally in the territory of another close ally. The US intelligence community quickly determined that the Saudi government and its Crown Prince, Mohammed Bin Salman, were responsible for the killing. Members of Congress briefed by the intelligence community accepted that conclusion, and on October 10, 2018, a …

The Traditions Of American Constitutional Law, Marc O. Degirolami

Faculty Publications

This Article identifies a new method of constitutional interpretation: the use of tradition as constitutive of constitutional meaning. It studies what the Supreme Court means by invoking tradition and whether what it means remains constant across the document and over time. Traditionalist interpretation is pervasive, consistent, and recurrent across the Court’s constitutional doctrine. So, too, are criticisms of traditionalist interpretation. There are also more immediate reasons to study the role of tradition in constitutional interpretation. The Court’s two newest members, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, have indicated that tradition informs their understanding of constitutional meaning. The study of traditionalist …

Backdoor Purposivism, Anita S. Krishnakumar

Faculty Publications

It has become standard among statutory interpretation commentators to declare that, “We are all textualists now.” The comment stems from the observation that in the modern, post-Scalia era, all of the Justices on the U.S. Supreme Court pay significant attention to statutory text when construing statutes and, relatedly, that legislative history use by the Court as a whole has declined since its heyday in the 1970s. The account of textualism’s triumph is so prevalent that some scholars have declared purposivism—or at least traditional purposivism—essentially defunct. Two prominent textualist scholars in particular have suggested that there is a “new purposivism” at …

The Power Of A Positive Tweet, Patricia G. Montana

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

I am not naively suggesting that all we need are more positive tweets to solve the inequity problems that still plague many law schools’ treatment and advancement of legal writing faculty. But I do wonder whether more positive tweets from administrators, tenured colleagues, and others can help (and more instantaneously) spread positive feelings, heal past harms, build relationships, forge new connections, and ultimately help create more opportunities for success.

The Facebook Oversight Board: Creating An Independent Institution To Adjudicate Online Free Expression, Kate Klonick

Faculty Publications

For a decade and a half, Facebook has dominated the landscape of digital social networks, becoming one of the most powerful arbiters of online speech. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, over two billion users leverage the platform to post, share, discuss, react to, and access content from all over the globe. Through a system of semipublic rules called “Community Standards,” Facebook has created a body of “laws” and a system of governance that dictate what users may say on the platform. In recent years, as this intricately built system to dispatch the company’s immense private power over …

Convictions As Guilt, Anna Roberts

Faculty Publications

A curious tension exists in scholarly discourse about the criminal legal system. On the one hand, a copious body of work exposes a variety of facets of the system that jeopardize the reliability of convictions. These include factors whose influence is pervasive: the predominance of plea bargaining, for example, and the subordination of the defense. On the other hand, scholars often discuss people who have criminal convictions in a way that appears to assume crime commission. This apparent assumption obscures crucial failings of the system, muddies the role of academia, and, given the unequal distribution of criminal convictions, risks compounding …

First Amendment Traditionalism, Marc O. Degirolami

Faculty Publications

Traditionalist constitutional interpretation takes political and cultural practices of long age and duration as constituting the presumptive meaning of the text. This Essay probes traditionalism's conceptual and normative foundations. It focuses on the Supreme Court's traditionalist interpretation of the First Amendment to understand the distinctive justifications for traditionalism and the relationship between traditionalism and originalism. The first part of the Essay identifies and describes traditionalism in some of the Court's Speech and Religion Clause jurisprudence, highlighting its salience in the Court's recent Establishment Clause doctrine.

Part II develops two justfications for traditionalism: "interpretive" and "democratic-populist." The interpretive justification is that …

Categorical Nonuniformity, Sheldon Evans

Faculty Publications

The categorical approach, which is a method federal courts use to ‘categorize’ which state law criminal convictions can trigger federal sanctions, is one of the most impactful yet misunderstood legal doctrines in criminal and immigration law. For thousands of criminal offenders, the categorical approach determines whether a previous state law conviction—as defined by the legal elements of the crime—sufficiently matches the elements of the federal crime counterpart that justifies imposing harsh federal sentencing enhancements or even deportation for noncitizens. One of the normative goals courts have invoked to uphold this elements-based categorical approach is that it produces nationwide uniformity. Ironically, …

Getting It Right By Writing It Wrong: Embracing Faulty Reasoning As A Teaching Tool, Patricia G. Montana, Elyse Pepper

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

In the early days of legal writing, we use exercises that have clear "right" answers. The rules are very simple and their meaning, even without looking at the cases, is usually clear. So, the "right" answer is often obvious. Indeed, it is intuitive. Though these exercises give students a sense of accomplishment and allow them to track achievement and understand success and failure, in some ways, they reinforce a common problem in first-year law students: their inability to see beyond the surface of a legal rule.

To ensure the "right" answer, students must distill not only a general rule, …

Real Insider Trading, Michael A. Perino

Faculty Publications

In popular rhetoric, insider trading cases are about leveling the playing field between elite market participants and ordinary investors. Academic critiques vary. Some depict an untethered insider trading doctrine that enforcers use to expand their power and enhance their discretion. Others see enforcers beset with agency cost problems who bring predominantly simple, easily resolved cases to create the veneer of vigorous enforcement. The debate has, to this point, been based mostly on anecdote and conjecture rather than empirical evidence. This Article addresses that gap by collecting extensive data on 465 individual defendants in civil, criminal, and administrative actions to assess …

Enabling The Best Interests Factors, Adrián E. Alvarez

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

For over a century, state courts and other child welfare agencies in the United States have been applying the “best interests of the child standard” to all decision-making concerning children. The standard is also enshrined within the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC)—a treaty that every nation in the world has ratified except the United States. Notwithstanding its widespread adoption in family law, the standard is, with only a few exceptions, noticeably missing from American laws and policies pertaining to children in the immigration system.

There is a rich literature arguing that children should enjoy special …

Research Strategies And Organization, Courtney Selby

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

The model for the research process outlined in Chapter 1 assumes a project that is undertaken from scratch, with no prior knowledge of the area of law or essential relevant authorities. Chapter 1 calls this a “fresh search.” However, each research project is by nature unique, and thus requires a distinctive strategy. This chapter explores the ways a judicious researcher can take the essential elements of a fresh search, consider the practical confines of the research environment, develop a strategy for approaching the research process that fits the unique problem, and implement that strategy in a cost-effective and efficient …

Misappropriation-Based Trademark Liability In Comparative Perspective, Jeremy N. Sheff

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

The anti-misappropriation principle, at its core, is that it is wrongful and therefore actionable for a competitor to gain a commercial advantage from the efforts of another, even if that advantage does not directly harm the person whose efforts have been misappropriated. This principle appears to be a deep theoretical commitment of modern intellectual property law. And nowhere in intellectual property law is the anti-misappropriation impulse more directly implicated than in the context of conspicuous consumption.

As I have written about elsewhere, modern consumers engage in conspicuous consumption of branded goods to signal social affiliation and identity, and to …

Ethical Compass: Celebration, Elayne E. Greenberg

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Let’s raise our glasses to toast our esteemed Chief Judge, the Honorable Janet DiFiore, for making Presumptive ADR a central part of the New York Office of Court Administration’s civil case management. In her February 26, 2019 State of the Judiciary Address, Chief Judge Janet DiFiore announced that the New York Office of Court Administration is formally adopting Presumptive ADR. Although all ADR processes such as settlement conferences, negotiations, arbitration and early neutral evaluation may be used to help settle cases, a focus will be on mediation. Presumptive ADR will apply to almost all civil cases filed in New …

Gig Workers As Essential Workers: How To Correct The Gig Economy Beyond The Covid-19 Pandemic, Miriam A. Cherry, Ana Santos Rutschman

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, estimates suggest that approximately forty percent of U.S. workers shifted to working remotely from home. But for many gig workers, who performed grocery shopping for Instacart, delivered food and restaurant meals for DoorDash, or who picked up and delivered packages for Shipt, they were working in person and busier than ever. In fact, many of these gig jobs were considered "essential work," and the rules of state lockdowns across the country classified gig workers as "essential workers."

Paid by the task, and managed by algorithms that can automatically deactivate …

The Right Family, Noa Ben-Asher, Margot J. Pollans

Faculty Publications

The family plays a starring role in American law. Families, the law tells us, are special. They merit many state and federal benefits, including tax deductions, testimonial privileges, untaxed inheritance, and parental presumptions. Over the course of the twentieth century, the Supreme Court expanded individual rights stemming from familial relationships. In this Article, we argue that the concept of family in American law matters just as much when it is ignored as when it is featured. We contrast policies in which the family is the key unit of analysis with others in which it is not. Looking at four seemingly …

Trauma-Centered Social Justice, Noa Ben-Asher

Faculty Publications

This Article identifies a new and growing phenomenon in the American legal system. Many leading agendas for gender, racial, and climate justice are centered on emotional trauma as the primary injury of contemporary social injustices. By focusing on three social justice movements–#BlackLivesMatter; #MeToo, and Climate Justice–the Article offers the first comprehensive diagnosis and assessment of how emotional trauma has become an engine for legal and policy social justice reforms. From a nineteenth century psychoanalytic theory about repressed childhood sexual memories that manifest in female hysteria, through extensive medicalization and classification in the twentieth century, emotional trauma has evolved and expanded …

Sentencing Disparities And The Dangerous Perpetuation Of Racial Bias, Jelani Jefferson Exum

Faculty Publications

This Article addresses the role that racial disparities— specifically sentencing disparities—play in perpetuating the racial bias that increases the daily danger of living as a Black American in the United States. As documented in the news and by sometimes humorous internet memes, White people have called the police many times to report Black people who were simply living as any other American. This trend highlights the manner in which the U.S. criminal justice system’s racial inequities feed into biased beliefs about Black criminality. This Article argues that instead of tackling implicit bias as a means to fight sentencing and other …

The Fine Art Of Rummaging: Successors And The Life Cycle Of Copyright, Eva E. Subotnik

Faculty Publications

This chapter argues that a possible justification for the extension of copyright beyond the death of the author is the key role that copyright successors may serve in the life cycle of artistic works. In particular, with respect to an artist’s unpublished work, a time-sensitive decision must be made about whether or not to keep the physical artifacts associated with copyrights—an obligation that often falls to these successors. Bulky canvases, sketches, negatives, and myriad other items must be sifted through in order to separate the wheat from the chaff. In this way, the post-death cleanup period offers a once-in-a-lifetime event …

A Global System Of Work, A Global System Of Regulation?: Crowdwork And Conflicts Of Law, Miriam A. Cherry

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

The on-demand economy has truly gone global. Consider online platform TaskRabbit, a U.S.-based site for odd jobs. A high number of TaskRabbit’s users were seeking help with the construction of furniture they purchased at IKEA, and skilled carpenters started using the platform to find customers. Corporate management at Swedish company IKEA noticed the trend, and as a result acquired TaskRabbit in 2017. As a result, a Swedish company now owns a platform labor service in the United States and Britain, with plans to expand the TaskRabbit platform to twenty-seven more countries where IKEA currently owns brick and mortar stores. …

Economic Analysis Of Jewish Law, Keith Sharfman

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Like any legal system, Jewish law is amenable to economic analysis, both positive and normative. Economic analysis can help to explain how and why the various rules comprising Jewish law arose and persisted over time. It also can facilitate a direct assessment of Jewish law on the merits. In practice, however, it is a mainly positive economic analysis of Jewish law that scholars have emphasized, while normative analysis has, for the most part, been underemphasized.

Take, for example, the application of law and economics to biblical exegesis. The legal-economic work in this field has been largely descriptive rather than …