Law Commons^™

Not My Problem? Landlord Liability For Tenant-On-Tenant Harassment, Aric Short

UC Law Journal

Tenant-on-tenant harassment because of a victim’s race, gender, or other protected status, is a severe and increasingly widespread problem often targeting vulnerable tenants. The creation of a hostile housing environment violates the federal Fair Housing Act (FHA), and victims may recover from their abusers, whether they are landlords or fellow tenants. But plaintiffs in two recent FHA lawsuits sought recovery from their landlords for something different: their landlords’ failure to intervene in and stop harassment committed by other tenants. These suits raise novel and important questions about the scope of the FHA, but the two courts disagreed about how the …

Introduction: Students’ Solutions To A Super Wicked Problem, David Takacs

UC Law Journal

No abstract provided.

All I Want For Christmas Is A Carbon Sink, Tori Timmons

UC Law Journal

Anthropogenic climate change is among the gravest problems humanity faces. Nonetheless, global greenhouse gas emissions are not slowing, and the complete elimination of greenhouse gas emissions is not currently foreseeable. American culture and industries rely on activities and technologies that overuse greenhouse-gas-emitting fuel. Despite ever-increasing awareness and concern, many Americans feel apathetic and discouraged regarding behavioral changes for the benefit of the environment, even those who acknowledge the existence and exigency of climate change. In order to make a real impact, and nullify any barriers to action, climate change-focused laws must encompass everyday behaviors. Enter the American Christmas tree market. …

The Water Is Coming: How Policies For Internally Displaced Persons Can Shape The U.S. Response To Sea Level Rise And The Redistribution Of The American Population, Kelly Carson

UC Law Journal

Roughly forty percent of the United States population lives in an area threatened to be underwater by 2100 due to climate change. There are little to no infrastructural and policy frameworks to handle this problem. This Note explores existing U.S. frameworks for disaster response—namely, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the Small Business Administration (SBA), and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)—as well as early-stage initiatives to relocate entire communities within the United States. It then examines domestic and international policies for handling internally displaced persons (IDPs), including the United Nations Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, the U.S. …

Climate Change Regulation, Preemption, And The Dormant Commerce Clause, Tyler Runsten

UC Law Journal

As climate change regulation from the federal level becomes increasingly unlikely, states and local governments emerge as the last stand against climate change in the United States. This tension ushers in questions of separation of powers and federalism, with which the courts have wrestled since the country’s founding. The doctrine of preemption is one of the federal government’s strongest tools to limit states’ authority to regulate climate change. Preemption challenges have been increasing lately and have largely succeeded under judicial deference to the executive branch. However, recent changes to the Supreme Court signal that the Court may be less willing …

Health Care Civil Rights Under Medicare For All, Valarie K. Blake

UC Law Journal

The passage of Medicare for All would go a long way toward curing the inequality that plagues our health care system along racial, sex, age, health status, disability, and socioeconomic lines. Yet, while laudably creating a universal right to access to health care, Medicare for All may inadvertently dampen civil rights protections that are necessary to ensure equality in health care delivery, an outcome its creators and supporters surely would not intend.

Federal money is typically requisite for civil rights enforcement. Title VI, Title IX, and the Age Discrimination Act of 1975 all apply to recipients of federal financial assistance. …

Contaminated Relationships In The Opioid Crisis, Elissa Philip Gentry, Benjamin J. Mcmichael

UC Law Journal

Unlike past public health crises, the opioid crisis arose from within the healthcare system itself. Entities within that system, particularly opioid manufacturers, may bear some liability in sparking and perpetuating the current crisis. Unsurprisingly, the allegations underlying the thousands of claims filed in connection with the opioid crisis differ substantially. However, almost all of those claims rely, to some degree, on the strength of the relationship between opioid manufacturers and the healthcare providers who prescribed their products. This Article argues that the underlying relationship is the heart of the crisis and that this problematic relationship is by no means a …

The Affordable Housing Crisis: Tiny Homes & Single-Family Zoning, Lauren Trambley

UC Law Journal

Although California was by no means an affordable state to reside in prior to 2008, Californians are still experiencing the reverberating effects of the collapse of the housing market in its present affordable housing crisis. As a result of the spike in home foreclosures following the 2008 collapse, the rental market remains “tight” with low vacancies, while housing development has only slowly increased. Combined with stagnant wages, rising housing costs, and growing demand, California has failed to address its shortage of not only housing, but affordable housing. Recent state action demonstrates the desire to increase housing density. But by focusing …

Masthead

UC Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Anti-Gmo And Vaccine-Autism Public Policy Campaigns In The Court Of Public Opinion, Robert C. Bird

UC Law Journal

Science skepticism is on the rise worldwide, and it has a pernicious influence on science and science-based public policy. This Article explores two of the most controversial science-based public policy issues: whether genetically modified foods are inherently unsafe and whether vaccines cause autism spectrum disorder. After evaluating the scientific credibility and discursive power of these claims, this Article analyzes how changes in public opinion can shift public policy away from anti-scientific practices. Legal scholarship can play a substantial role because, if accessibly written, it has the potential to be timely, persuasive, and comprehensible by a broad audience. Other stakeholders also …

America’S Unforgiving Forgiveness Program: Problems And Solutions For Public Service Loan Forgiveness, Robert Wu

UC Law Journal

In the first three years of Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF), over 227,000 borrowers applied for relief. The U.S. Department of Education granted relief to less than 3800 borrowers, denying forgiveness to roughly 98% of the program’s applicants. This astronomically high rejection rate raises questions of responsibility for the program’s initial failure. Many have blamed the Trump Administration for using its political influence to manufacture an unforgiving result. However, a purely political explanation for the program’s failure provides an incomplete illustration of the reasons underlying PSLF’s demise. This Note examines the numerous pitfalls that resulted in PSLF’s unforgiving forgiveness rate. …

The Opioid Doctors: Is Losing Your License A Sufficient Penalty For Dealing Drugs?, Adam M. Gershowitz

UC Law Journal

Imagine that a medical board revokes a doctor’s license both because he has been peddling thousands of pills of opioids and also because he was caught with a few grams of cocaine. The doctor is a family physician, not a pain management specialist. Yet, during a one-year period he wrote more than 4,000 prescriptions for opioids—roughly eighteen scripts per day. Patients came from multiple states and from hundreds of miles away to get oxycodone prescriptions. And the doctor prescribed large quantities of opioids—up to 240 pills per month—to patients with no record of previously needing narcotic painkillers. Both federal and …

Nonmarket Criminal Justice Fees, Ariel Jurow Kleiman

UC Law Journal

The public finance literature tells us that user fees will introduce market-like efficiency to public good provision. Meanwhile, criminal justice scholars note that criminal justice fees have run amok, causing crippling debt, undermining reentry efforts, and raising civil rights and constitutional concerns. This Article reconciles these seemingly opposed perspectives, arguing that criminal justice fees have become harmful precisely because they deviate from the traditional market-like environment that the public finance literature envisions. This nonmarket structure occurs for two reasons. First, criminal justice agencies are monopolistic providers of mandatory services, and second, criminal defendants cannot or do not consider the fee …

Big Tech’S Buying Spree And The Failed Ideology Of Competition Law, Mark Glick, Catherine Ruetschlin, Darren Bush

UC Law Journal

Big Tech is on a buying spree. Companies like Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon are gobbling up smaller companies at an unprecedented pace. But the law of competition isn’t ready for Big Tech’s endless appetite. Today’s antitrust law is controlled by the Chicago School of Law and Economics. The Chicago School’s ideological frame is toothless when a dominant firm purchases a startup that could be a future competitor. Under the “potential competition” doctrine, the Chicago School is impotent to face the anti-competitive thread of Big Tech.

This Article shows how the Chicago School of law and economics hobbles antitrust law …

Innovation And Own Prior Art, Amy R. Motomura

UC Law Journal

This Article analyzes a conflict between innovation and the patent system: innovation is a dynamic, iterative process, but a patent reflects only a single snapshot in time. Despite extensive scholarly and judicial discussion of when an invention is ready for patenting, there is rarely a perfect time to file a patent application. Instead of filing a single perfect application, companies and others engaged in innovation typically build a portfolio of patents by filing a series of applications over the course of research and development. Yet this is an imperfect strategy because each patent application sets up a potential barrier for …

“You Have To Understand”: The Saga Of Longfin Corp. Reveals The Danger Of Trading Halts Imposed By Self-Regulating Exchanges, Thomas Davis

UC Law Journal

Late 2017 marked, perhaps, the peak of Bitcoin frenzy. A number of specious, if not outright fraudulent issuers took advantage of this craze by publicly listing their stock while touting some connection to blockchain technology. One of these issuers, Longfin Corp., exploded to a $6 billion market cap despite being little more than an empty shell promoted by alleged fraudsters. Short sellers who investigated Longfin were seemingly correct about the company being worthless, but a lengthy trading halt instituted by Nasdaq caused many of these short sellers to suffer considerable losses instead of cashing out on what would otherwise be …

Have You Updated Your Toaster? Transatlantic Approaches To Governing The Internet Of Everything, Scott J. Shackelford, Scott O. Bradner

UC Law Journal

As Internet-connected devices become ubiquitous, it remains an open question whether security— or privacy—can or will scale, or whether a combination of perverse incentives, new problems, and new impacts of old problems like “technical debt” amassing from products being rushed to market before being fully vetted, will derail progress and exacerbate cyber insecurity. This Article investigates contemporary approaches to Internet of Things (IoT) governance through an in- depth comparative case study focusing on the European Union (EU) and the United States. Particular attention is paid to the impact on IoT security of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the …

Reconsidering Dual Agency Conflicts In Residential Real Estate, Samuel Bayer

UC Law Journal

California has long permitted dual agency representation in residential real estate transactions, and consumers have long maligned the practice as presenting an unavoidable conflict of interest.¹ However, dual agency provides benefit to consumers in some situations, and those benefits are often overlooked by those who seek to prevent it altogether. Recent statutory changes in California and other states have attempted to resolve dual agency conflicts of interest while allowing the practice to continue (at least in some form). However, these attempts have largely failed to quell consumer frustrations due to a few fundamental miscommunications between consumers and legislators. By clarifying …

Masthead

UC Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Counting Carbon: Forward-Looking Analysis Of Decarbonization, Ryan Thomas Trahan

UC Law Environmental Journal

Policy analysis primarily looks backward to solve problems of individual and public choice. Analysts often seek to derive and draw marginal curves from existing data to extrapolate observed relationships into the future. Indeed, the White House Council on Environmental Quality recently issued a proposed rule that would, among other things, codify the concepts underlying these tools for environmental matters, i.e., requiring the considered effects of a proposed action to be “reasonably foreseeable” and meet a “reasonably close causal relationship.” That proposal expresses a perspective with a long tradition, yet it presents a curious circumstance. Although marginal and statistical regression tools …

Tobacco And The Small Screen: Why The Tvomb Should Restructure The Parental Guidelines, Courtney Leavitt

UC Law SF Communications and Entertainment Journal

This article summarizes the creation and workings of the TV Parental Guidelines and the Oversight Monitoring Board, potential First Amendment issues of a required rating system, and possible solutions to the problems of the current rating system. The TV Parental Guidelines and the Oversight Monitoring Board were created to fulfill requirements of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The TV Parental Guidelines are meant to empower parents to control the content viewed by their children with useful ratings. However, the accuracy of ratings and understanding of the system are limited. Further, the complaint process is complex, with little authority to enforce …

Editor’S Foreword, Ava Agree

Hastings Journal of Crime and Punishment

No abstract provided.

Defunding Prosecutors And Reinvesting In Communities: The Case For Reducing The Power And Budgets Of Prosecutors To Help End Mass Incarceration, Udi Ofer

Hastings Journal of Crime and Punishment

No abstract provided.

Creative Differences: Indigenous Artists And The Law At 20th Century Nation-Building Exhibitions, Lucas Lixinski, Stephen Young

UC Law SF International Law Review

Indigenous peoples in major common law jurisdictions (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States) have had a fraught relationship with the state’s legal system. However, while denying Indigenous individuals and peoples the same rights as white settlers, each of these states used Indigenous art to create a distinctive national-state identity. We analyze four major exhibitions, one from each of these countries to de-naturalize legal institutions responsible for the oppression of Indigenous people. This agenda-setting, comparative legal analysis yields valuable insights for the regulation of the contemporary Indigenous art market, and to understand how culture makes legal personality.

Protecting Cultural Heritage By Recourse To International Environmental Law: Chinese Stances On Faultless State Liability, Riccardo Vecellio Segate

UC Law Environmental Journal

Several international policy documents define the environment as made of “natural heritage” and “cultural heritage” together, along the lines of concepts such as “biosphere” or “ecosystem” which have been introduced relatively recently to define the complexity of humanenvironment interactions. Nevertheless, distinguishing natural heritage from the cultural one helps analyse situations where damage inflicted to the former negatively impacts the latter. In fact, cultural heritage sits under siege worldwide due to polluting activities and environmental degradation, which are causing irreparable damage to—or even the disappearance of— valuable expressions of civilisations’ legacy. Most damages are transboundary, thereby calling into question bilateral forms …

Combating Fake News With “Reasonable Standards”, Tawanna D. Lee

UC Law SF Communications and Entertainment Journal

Fake news is an intractable concern around the globe, sowing division and distrust in institutions, and undermining election integrity. This Article analyzes the spectrum of private and public regulation of “fake news” from comparative law and normative perspectives. In the United States, combating fake news shares surprising bipartisan support in an ever-divided political landscape. While several proposals have emerged that would strip Internet media companies of the liability shield for third-party content, it is unlikely that they would survive the seemingly insurmountable First Amendment scrutiny. This Article argues for a different tact—an amendment to the Communications Decency Act that addresses …

A Post For Change: Social Media And The Unethical Dissemination Of Nonconsensual Pornography, Cecilia Grimaldi

UC Law SF Communications and Entertainment Journal

No abstract provided.

A Right Of Ethical Consideration For Non-Human Animals, Michael Ray Harris

UC Law Environmental Journal

No abstract provided.

A Forgotten History: How The Asian American Workforce Cultivated Monterey County’S Agricultural Industry, Despite National Anti-Asian Rhetoric, Dominique Marangoni-Simonsen

UC Law Environmental Journal

This paper analyzes the implementation of exclusionary citizenship laws against Chinese and Japanese immigrants from 1880 to 1940. It further analyzes the application of these exclusionary mechanisms to the Asian immigrant populations in Monterey County, California. It identifies how the agricultural industry in Monterey County by-passed these exclusion laws as a result of the favored labor force of Japanese immigrants. The paper compares the acceptance of Japanese laborers to the decimation of the Chinese fishing industry in the county, which caused the eradication of Chinese culture. Finally, the paper analyzes the retroactive effects of these laws to the current Feast …

Enabling Instream Rights In The Mill Creek Zanja, Tyler Fields

UC Law Environmental Journal

The Mill Creek Zanja is a 200-year-old, twelve-mile canal cut from the banks of a nearby stream. The Zanja was built originally as an irrigation canal to serve agriculture and industry in what is now Redlands, California located just outside Los Angeles. Since the Zanja’s construction in the early 19th century, the “rights” to the waters of the Zanja have been intensely litigated, highly sought after, and heavily debated. Today, the Zanja flow is around 40,000 to 50,000 acre feet per year. The water is used primarily by the City of Redlands for drinking water and by Crafton Water Company …