Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Law Commons™

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

UC Law SF

Discipline
Keyword
Publication Year
Publication
Publication Type

Articles 1531 - 1560 of 8918

Full-Text Articles in Law

Advancing Equal Access To Justice: Barriers, Dilemmas, And Prospects, Tani G. Cantil-Sakauye Hon. Jun 2016

Advancing Equal Access To Justice: Barriers, Dilemmas, And Prospects, Tani G. Cantil-Sakauye Hon.

UC Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Go to article

Lifting The “American Exceptionalism” Curtain: Options And Lessons From Abroad, Earl Johnson Jr. Jun 2016

Lifting The “American Exceptionalism” Curtain: Options And Lessons From Abroad, Earl Johnson Jr.

UC Law Journal

Contrary to its public rhetoric promising “justice for all” and “equal justice under law,” access to civil justice in the United States is “exceptional” only in a negative sense. The Rule of Law Index ranks our nation next to last among the world’s thirty-one “richest” countries. A major reason for this is that most of our fellow industrial democracies have a right to counsel in civil cases and invest from three times to ten times more than the United States on civil legal aid. Beyond these differences, the United States has much to learn from research and other developments in …

Go to article

Bridging The Justice Gap In Family Law: Repurposing Federal Iv-D Funding To Expand Community-Based Legal And Social Services For Parents, Stacy Brustin, Lisa Martin Jun 2016

Bridging The Justice Gap In Family Law: Repurposing Federal Iv-D Funding To Expand Community-Based Legal And Social Services For Parents, Stacy Brustin, Lisa Martin

UC Law Journal

Parents in family court overwhelmingly proceed pro se; however, in child support courtrooms, government attorneys representing the state child support agency frequently play a pivotal role. These attorneys represent the state’s ostensible interests in ensuring that children are financially supported and in preventing welfare dependence; they do not represent individual parents. The outcomes of child support proceedings have profound, long-term constitutional and financial implications for parents, yet litigants rarely understand their rights or the role of the government. Originally, the goal of state child support enforcement efforts was to recapture the costs of welfare expenditures. In 1990, two-thirds of cases …

Go to article

A Comparison Between The American Markets For Medical And Legal Services, Ben Barton Jun 2016

A Comparison Between The American Markets For Medical And Legal Services, Ben Barton

UC Law Journal

America’s access to justice woes are paradoxical. We have more lawyers than every country except India and more lawyers per capita than every country except for Israel. We spend more on law as an absolute amount or as a percentage of GDP than any other country. At the high end, we provide best legal services in the world. And yet we barely provide any legal services to the very poor, and our lawyers cost too much for the working poor or even the middle class. We graduate so many juris doctors that as many as a third fail to find …

Go to article

Litigants Without Lawyers: Measuring Success In Family Court, Marsha M. Mansfield Jun 2016

Litigants Without Lawyers: Measuring Success In Family Court, Marsha M. Mansfield

UC Law Journal

As thousands of litigants access our court systems without lawyers, the debate whether these litigants receive procedural and substantive justice has intensified. Nationwide, eighty percent of those accessing the court system in a family law matter do so without the assistance of a lawyer. As the numbers continue to increase exponentially and access to free or low cost legal services diminishes, courts, lawyers, legal service organizations, and law schools throughout the country continue to experiment with alternates to full-scale representation that can provide self-represented litigants with adequate legal assistance. Although some researchers have analyzed the overall success ratio for cases …

Go to article

Collection Texas-Style: An Analysis Of Consumer Collection Practices In And Out Of The Courts, Mary Spector, Ann Baddour Jun 2016

Collection Texas-Style: An Analysis Of Consumer Collection Practices In And Out Of The Courts, Mary Spector, Ann Baddour

UC Law Journal

As many as forty-four percent of Texans with credit files have nonmortgage debt in collection; this is more than ten percent above the national average. The Authors provide a snapshot of collection practices employed in Texas over a two-year period following the enactment of new court rules governing the litigation of most collection cases. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, they consider data in three general categories: (1) consumer complaints to the state and federal agencies; (2) court outcomes over a two-year period along with related demographic data; and (3) court observations conducted in five counties with a …

Go to article

How To Regulate Legal Services To Promote Access, Innovation, And The Quality Of Lawyering, Gillian K. Hadfield, Deborah L. Rhode Jun 2016

How To Regulate Legal Services To Promote Access, Innovation, And The Quality Of Lawyering, Gillian K. Hadfield, Deborah L. Rhode

UC Law Journal

Scholars and critics have for decades advocated change in the professional regulation of legal services markets in order to solve the ever-widening gap in access to justice. One of the central obstacles to change has been concern about the impact of opening legal markets to new practitioners and business models on central professional values such as competence, loyalty, and independence. This Article argues that good regulatory solutions are available to ensure that more open and flexible professional models—ones that allow the practice of law by alternative providers and business structures—deliver high quality, lower cost, greater innovation, and more access to …

Go to article

From Victims To Litigants, Elizabeth L. Macdowell Jun 2016

From Victims To Litigants, Elizabeth L. Macdowell

UC Law Journal

This Article reports findings from an ethnographic study of self-help programs in two western states. The study investigated how self-help assistance provided by partnerships between courts and nongovernmental organizations implicates advocacy and access to justice for domestic violence survivors. The primary finding is that self-help programs may inadvertently work to curtail, rather than expand, advocacy resources. Furthermore, problems identified with self-help service delivery and negative impacts on advocacy systems may be explained by the structure of work within self-help programs and the nature of partnerships to provide self-help services. The Author uncovers previously unseen impacts of self-help programs on survivors …

Go to article

Can A Little Representation Be A Dangerous Thing?, Colleen F. Shanahan Jun 2016

Can A Little Representation Be A Dangerous Thing?, Colleen F. Shanahan

UC Law Journal

Access to justice interventions that provide a little representation, including nonlawyer representation and various forms of limited legal services, may be valuable solutions for low- and middle-income Americans. However, a thoughtful approach to improving access to justice efforts should recognize that a little representation may have risks. In particular, one potential risk of a little representation is that while it provides assistance with a discrete legal need in a specific moment, the nature of the assistance is incompatible with challenging the law. As a result, individual litigants do not have the benefit of legal challenges in their own cases, and …

Go to article

In Re A-R-C-G-: A Game-Changer For Children Seeking Asylum On The Basis Of Intrafamilial Violence, Sarah M. Winfield May 2016

In Re A-R-C-G-: A Game-Changer For Children Seeking Asylum On The Basis Of Intrafamilial Violence, Sarah M. Winfield

UC Law Journal

After over a decade of advocacy on behalf of women fleeing their home countries because of horrific domestic violence, practitioners and legal scholars obtained a precedential legal victory in August 2014. In In re A-R-C-G-, the Board of Immigration Appeals recognized that domestic violence can constitute persecution within the meaning of the Immigration and Nationality Act, and that nationality, gender, and the inability to leave a marital relationship can form the basis of a proper social group under the Act. Children fleeing intrafamilial violence, however, continue to face an uphill battle in seeking asylum. Widespread disparities in the outcomes of …

Go to article

Coordination Or Consolidation? Accountable Care Organizations And Antitrust Policy Under The Medicare Shared Savings Program, Michael J. Montgomery May 2016

Coordination Or Consolidation? Accountable Care Organizations And Antitrust Policy Under The Medicare Shared Savings Program, Michael J. Montgomery

UC Law Journal

The U.S. health care system is expensive, fragmented, poorly organized, and fails too often to deliver high quality care that is both accessible and cost efficient. In 2014, Americans spent an estimated $3.1 trillion on health care, averaging $9695 per capita and accounting for 17.8% of gross domestic product (“GDP”). Over the course of the next decade, these figures are projected to increase by an average of 5.8% per year, reaching an estimated $5.4 trillion and 19.8% of GDP by 2024. In an effort to curb this unsustainable trend of rising health care costs, Congress enacted the Medicare Shared Savings …

Go to article

Legal Indeterminacy In Insanity Cases: Clarifying Wrongfulness And Applying A Triadic Approach To Forensic Evaluations, Kate E. Bloch May 2016

Legal Indeterminacy In Insanity Cases: Clarifying Wrongfulness And Applying A Triadic Approach To Forensic Evaluations, Kate E. Bloch

UC Law Journal

Insanity law in the United States embodies a convoluted collection of often ill-defined standards. The wrongfulness test, which is used in most U.S. jurisdictions, requires a determination of whether the accused knew or had the substantial capacity to appreciate that the acts were wrong at the time the accused committed them. To assist the trier of fact in making that determination, courts and parties commonly invoke the acumen of forensic experts. But, wrongfulness in insanity law is a word with many possible meanings. In this Article, an academic forensic psychiatrist and a legal scholar propose approaches for effectively navigating this …

Go to article

Does Antidiscrimination Law Influence Religious Behavior? An Empirical Examination, Netta Barak-Corren May 2016

Does Antidiscrimination Law Influence Religious Behavior? An Empirical Examination, Netta Barak-Corren

UC Law Journal

What role should the behavioral reality of conflicts regarding gender, sexuality, and religious convictions play in the theory and doctrine of antidiscrimination law? Although the past several decades have seen broadening tension between traditional beliefs and legal and societal norms—the most recent manifestation being Obergefell v. Hodges—almost no empirical work has been done to elucidate the behavioral reality of conflicts between religion and antidiscrimination law. This Article is the first empirical behavioral study on the decisions made by religious people under norm conflict. Drawing on two decision experiments with over 3500 religious individuals and in-depth interviews with senior religious managers, …

Go to article

Sufficiently Safeguarded?: Competency Evaluations Of Mentally Ill Respondents In Removal Proceedings, Sarah Sherman-Stokes May 2016

Sufficiently Safeguarded?: Competency Evaluations Of Mentally Ill Respondents In Removal Proceedings, Sarah Sherman-Stokes

UC Law Journal

In this Article, I examine the current regime for making mental competency determinations of mentally ill and incompetent noncitizen respondents in immigration court. In its present iteration, mental competency determinations in immigration court are made by immigration judges, most commonly without the benefit of any mental health evaluation or expertise. In reflecting on the protections and processes in place in the criminal justice system, and on interviews with removal defense practitioners at ten different sites across the United States, I conclude that the role of the immigration judge in mental competency determinations must be changed in order to protect the …

Go to article

Understanding Validity In Empirical Legal Research: The Case For Methodological Pluralism In Assessing The Impact Of Science In Court, Teneille R. Brown, James Tabery, Lisa G. Aspinwall May 2016

Understanding Validity In Empirical Legal Research: The Case For Methodological Pluralism In Assessing The Impact Of Science In Court, Teneille R. Brown, James Tabery, Lisa G. Aspinwall

UC Law Journal

What makes a study valid or invalid? In 2013, the Hastings Law Journal published a law review article by law professor Deborah Denno entitled What Real-World Cases Tell Us About Genetic Evidence. This article questioned the validity of an article that we published in Science: The Double Edged-Sword: Does Biomechanism Increase or Decrease Judges’ Sentencing of Psychopaths? Denno’s trenchant critique focused on our use of experimental, rather than archival, methodology, and revealed a misunderstanding of the diverse goals of empirical legal research. One study, which in our case investigated the impact of biological explanations of criminal behavior on sentencing, is …

Go to article

Confronting Williams: The Confrontation Clause And Forensic Witnesses In The Post-Williams Era, Taryn Jones May 2016

Confronting Williams: The Confrontation Clause And Forensic Witnesses In The Post-Williams Era, Taryn Jones

UC Law Journal

In Williams v. Illinois, the division of the U.S. Supreme Court created substantial confusion as to the proper application of the Confrontation Clause to forensic witnesses. In the decision, the Court affirmed the conviction of the defendant, Sandy Williams, because the plurality and Justice Thomas, in his concurrence, determined that the DNA profile produced by an outside laboratory was not testimonial and thus Williams did not have a constitutional right to crossexamine the laboratory analysts. The plurality and the concurrence, however, presented two distinct rationales for deeming the report nontestimonial. The case has consequently left lower courts without firm guidance …

Go to article

Internal Jus Ad Bellum, Eliav Lieblich Apr 2016

Internal Jus Ad Bellum, Eliav Lieblich

UC Law Journal

In 1945, the United Nations Charter famously set out “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” Having in mind traditional interstate wars, the Charter’s Article 2(4) outlawed, for the first time, interstate uses of force. However, nowadays, international wars are relatively rare, while civil wars are both more numerous and increasingly destructive. Still, international law has yet to develop a regime regulating the resort to war (jus ad bellum) within a state, either by governments or opposition groups. Contemporary jus ad bellum, thus, fails to address one of the most atrocious forms of war in the modern international …

Go to article

Talent For Sale: The Need For Enhanced Scrutiny In Judicial Evaluation Of Acqui-Hires, Samantha Nolan Apr 2016

Talent For Sale: The Need For Enhanced Scrutiny In Judicial Evaluation Of Acqui-Hires, Samantha Nolan

UC Law Journal

Large technology corporations are purchasing smaller companies at an increasing rate with one goal in mind—engineers. This practice has recently been given its own name—acqui-hiring. The buying corporation purchases the target, poaches its employees, jettisons its projects, and generally kills the company. Who is injured in this process? Those who were legally supposed to be afforded the highest degree of protection at the target companies—the shareholder investors. This Note examines the practice of acqui-hiring and suggests that courts should analyze these transactions under heightened scrutiny. When addressing a target board’s decision to enter into an acqui-hire, courts can find guidance …

Go to article

The Virtues Of Shareholder Value Driven Activism: Avoiding Governance Pitfalls, Joel Slawotsky Apr 2016

The Virtues Of Shareholder Value Driven Activism: Avoiding Governance Pitfalls, Joel Slawotsky

UC Law Business Journal

No abstract provided.

Go to article

“Intentional Acts Cannot Be Accidents” -- A Critique Of A Legal Error, James E. Scheuermann Apr 2016

“Intentional Acts Cannot Be Accidents” -- A Critique Of A Legal Error, James E. Scheuermann

UC Law Business Journal

No abstract provided.

Go to article

The Incentive Problems With The All-Or-Nothing Crowdfunding Model, Garry A. Gabison Apr 2016

The Incentive Problems With The All-Or-Nothing Crowdfunding Model, Garry A. Gabison

UC Law Business Journal

This paper discusses how the all-or-nothing model can disincentivize crowd investors to perform due diligence over the fraud or failure risks of a crowdfunding campaign. Specifically, the major upside of this model is that a project cannot be funded without a critical mass investing. If enough individuals in this critical mass of crowd investors perform their due diligence to check whether projects will become successful, then the model functions correctly; instead, this paper argues that this model incentivizes the crowd to produce noisy information that cannot be relied upon. In the all-or-nothing model, sequential investments encourage rational investors to not …

Go to article

Series Llcs: Getting Comfortable With Uncertainty, Austin Jones Apr 2016

Series Llcs: Getting Comfortable With Uncertainty, Austin Jones

UC Law Business Journal

No abstract provided.

Go to article

The U.N. Guiding Principles: Beyond Soft Law, Noura Barakat Apr 2016

The U.N. Guiding Principles: Beyond Soft Law, Noura Barakat

UC Law Business Journal

No abstract provided.

Go to article

Will Your Veil Be Pierced? How Strong Is Your Entity’S Liability Shield? -- Piercing The Veil, Alter Ego, And Other Bases For Holding An Owner Liable For Debts Of An Entity, Allen Sparkman Apr 2016

Will Your Veil Be Pierced? How Strong Is Your Entity’S Liability Shield? -- Piercing The Veil, Alter Ego, And Other Bases For Holding An Owner Liable For Debts Of An Entity, Allen Sparkman

UC Law Business Journal

No abstract provided.

Go to article

Weed And Water Law: Regulating Legal Marijuana, Ryan B. Stoa Apr 2016

Weed And Water Law: Regulating Legal Marijuana, Ryan B. Stoa

UC Law Journal

Marijuana is nearing the end of its prohibition in the United States. Arguably the country’s largest cash crop, marijuana is already legal for recreational use in Colorado, Washington, Oregon, Alaska, and Washington, D.C. Between now and election day 2016, an additional fourteen states might place marijuana legalization initiatives on their ballots. In addition, twenty-three states and Washington, D.C. have legalized medical marijuana, with up to seven more states pending legislation. The era of marijuana prohibition is rapidly coming to a close. At the same time, traditional doctrines of water law are struggling to cope with the modern realities of water …

Go to article

Collective Liberty, Josh Blackman Apr 2016

Collective Liberty, Josh Blackman

UC Law Journal

The story of our Constitution is a tale of two liberties: individual freedom and collective freedom. The inherent tension between these two is well known. Judicial protection of individual liberty inhibits the collective from freely arranging society through the democratic process. In contrast, judicial protection of this collective freedom to structure society may infringe on individual liberty, especially for those out of the mainstream. Like a pendulum, over the last century, the rights of free speech and exercise have swung between the individual and the collective, between right and left. This Article traces these arcs from individual liberty to collective …

Go to article

Hedgehogs And Foxes: The Case For The Common Law Judge, Evelyn Keyes Apr 2016

Hedgehogs And Foxes: The Case For The Common Law Judge, Evelyn Keyes

UC Law Journal

With the epigram, “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one great thing,” Ronald Dworkin, America’s foremost contemporary legal philosopher, summarized his lifelong quest for the objectively true laws necessary to a just democratic society and for perfectionist judges of single-minded integrity—hedgehogs—to recognize and implement them through the moral reading of the Constitution. I make the contrary case for the common law judge—the fox who sees many things. I argue that common law judges—foxes—are essential to preserve, protect, and defend the dynamic empirical American ideal—that of a just, self-governing constitutional society of laws made by the people to …

Go to article

Smoke And Mirrors: How Current Firearm Relinquishment Laws Fail To Protect Domestic Violence Victims, Laura Lee Gildengorin Apr 2016

Smoke And Mirrors: How Current Firearm Relinquishment Laws Fail To Protect Domestic Violence Victims, Laura Lee Gildengorin

UC Law Journal

In 2011, two-thirds of murdered women died at the hands of a current or former intimate partner who used a firearm. Thus, it is imperative to remove guns from the control of domestic violence offenders. With increased media coverage, domestic violence is at the forefront of the minds of many, but this growing awareness is not a new phenomenon. The federal government recognized the terrors of domestic offenders and firearms in two amendments to the Gun Control Act in 1994 and 1996, respectively. In this Note, I examine the federal and state approaches of gun relinquishment laws pertaining to domestic …

Go to article

Subverting Workers’ Rights: Class Action Waivers And The Arbitral Threat To The Nlra, Nicole Wredberg Apr 2016

Subverting Workers’ Rights: Class Action Waivers And The Arbitral Threat To The Nlra, Nicole Wredberg

UC Law Journal

The National Labor Relations Act (“NRLA”) was born out of the industrial strife of the Great Depression and provides for employee collective rights in order to prevent the potentially devastating economic consequences of an unstable working environment. The rights provided by the NLRA generally encompass the right to employee collective activity, including collective legal activity and unionizing, which seeks to better working conditions. These substantive rights cannot be waived through any employment agreement, but the Supreme Court has never decided the precise issue of whether pursuing a class action is a substantive right under the NLRA as a protected employee …

Go to article

California Constitutional Law: The Right To An Adequate Education, Anne D. Gordon Feb 2016

California Constitutional Law: The Right To An Adequate Education, Anne D. Gordon

UC Law Journal

Plaintiffs’ victory in Vergara v. State, a case about teacher evaluation and employment regulations, has thrust the issue of educational adequacy into the spotlight in California. Campaign for Quality Education v. State, a case based on the California Constitution’s education clause, has been fully briefed before the California Supreme Court and is waiting to be set for argument. These cases require California courts to again look to the constitution to determine what the right to education means. Although the California Supreme Court found this right fundamental over forty years ago, no supreme court decision has yet articulated whether this right …

Go to article

First Prev Next Last