Law Commons^™

Regulating Real-World Surveillance, Margot E. Kaminski

Publications

A number of laws govern information gathering, or surveillance, by private parties in the physical world. But we lack a compelling theory of privacy harm that accounts for the state's interest in enacting these laws. Without a theory of privacy harm, these laws will be enacted piecemeal. Legislators will have a difficult time justifying the laws to constituents; the laws will not be adequately tailored to legislative interest; and courts will find it challenging to weigh privacy harms against other strong values, such as freedom of expression.

This Article identifies the government interest in enacting laws governing surveillance by private …

Quarterback By Committee: A Response In Memory Of Dan Markel, Andrew A. Schwartz

Publications

In Catalyzing Fans, Dan Markel, Michael McCann and Howard Wasserman propose so-called “Fan Action Committees” (“FACs”), whereby fans would crowdfund a sum of money and then spend it to influence the personnel decisions of their favorite teams. This Response — dedicated to the memory of Dan Markel — suggests that an effective FAC could upset a team’s overall hiring and compensation system, thereby risking a downturn in team performance to the detriment of all concerned.

The Digital Shareholder, Andrew A. Schwartz

Publications

Crowdfunding, a new Internet-based securities market, was recently authorized by federal and state law in order to create a vibrant, diverse, and inclusive system of entrepreneurial finance. But will people really send their money to strangers on the Internet in exchange for unregistered securities in speculative startups? Many are doubtful, but this Article looks to first principles and finds reason for optimism.

Well-established theory teaches that all forms of startup finance must confront and overcome three fundamental challenges: uncertainty, information asymmetry, and agency costs. This Article systematically examines this “trio of problems” and potential solutions in the context of crowdfunding. …

They Had Nothing, Charles Wilkinson

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No abstract provided.

Corporate Legacy, Andrew A. Schwartz

Publications

Many public companies have shed takeover defenses in recent years, on the theory that such defenses reduce share price. Yet new data presented here shows that practically all new public companies--those launching their initial public offering (IPO)--go public with powerful takeover defenses in place. This behavior is puzzling because the adoption of takeover defenses presumably lowers the price at which the pre-IPO shareholders can sell their own shares in and after the IPO. Why would founders and early investors engage in this seemingly counterproductive behavior? Building on prior attempts to solve this mystery, this Article claims that IPO firms adopt …

Cyberharassment And Workplace Law, Helen Norton

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No abstract provided.

The Nonfinancial Returns Of Crowdfunding, Andrew A. Schwartz

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Securities crowdfunding — the sale of unregistered securities to the public over the Internet — has come under attack before it has even begun. Legal scholars in particular have expressed concern that investors will lose any money they invest in crowdfunding companies. Even assuming that this may be true from a purely financial perspective, these critics are missing an important point: Crowdfund investors with negative returns will not simply have lost their money, but rather they will have spent it (at least in part) on nonpecuniary benefits, including entertainment, political expression and community building. These nonfinancial returns of crowdfunding are …

Government Speech And Political Courage, Helen Norton

Publications

This short essay addresses Walker v. Texas Div., Sons of Confederate Veterans, Inc., in which a divided Court upheld Texas's rejection of the Sons of Confederate Veterans' request for a specialty license plate that featured the Confederate flag. Although it agrees with the majority that specialty license plates can -- and often do -- reflect the government's own expression that the government should remain free to control without running afoul of the First Amendment, it argues that the Walker Court missed an important opportunity to refine its government speech doctrine. Not only has the Court yet to settle on a …

Cu Law Library Launches New Resource For Historical Colorado Statutory Research, Robert M. Linz

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No abstract provided.

Structuralist Legal Histories, Justin Desautels-Stein

Publications

This is a contribution to a symposium titled "Theorizing Contemporary Legal Thought." The central theme of the piece is the relation between legal structuralism and legal historiography.

Introduction, S. James Anaya

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No abstract provided.

Report Of The Special Rapporteur On The Rights Of Indigenous Peoples On The Situation Of Indigenous Peoples In Canada, S. James Anaya

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No abstract provided.

Countersupermajoritarianism, Frederic Bloom, Nelson Tebbe

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How should the Constitution change? In Originalism and the Good Constitution, John McGinnis and Michael Rappaport argue that it ought to change in only one way: through the formal mechanisms set out in the Constitution’s own Article V. This is so, they claim, because provisions adopted by supermajority vote are more likely to be substantively good. The original Constitution was ratified in just that way, they say, and subsequent changes should be implemented similarly. McGinnis and Rappaport also contend that this substantive goodness is preserved best by a mode of originalist interpretation. In this Review, we press two main arguments. …

Bank Regulation And Securitization: How The Law Improved Transmission Lines Between Real Estate And Banking Crises, Erik F. Gerding

Publications

This essay examines how securitization served as a new coupling rod joining cycles in real estate and banking markets and created a new pathway for financial contagion in the “subprime” financial crisis. Legal changes promoted the growth of securitization and improved this crisis transmission line. The essay examines the history of legislative and regulatory changes that facilitated bank participation in the markets for mortgage-backed securities. The essay then explains how securitization failed to mitigate the credit, liquidity, and interest rate risk associated with real estate when losses in residential markets became correlated nationwide. It then discusses how regulation contributed to …

Private And Public Ordering In Safe Asset Markets, Anna Gelpern, Erik F. Gerding

Publications

An influential literature in economics explores the phenomenon of “safe assets” – when participants across financial markets act “as if” certain debt is risk free – as well as its role in the global financial crisis and its implications for post-crisis reform.

We highlight the role of private ordering in constructing safe assets. Private ordering, including contractual devices and transaction structures, contributes to the creation of these debt contracts, to their collective treatment in financial markets as low risk investments, and to the making of deep and liquid markets in them. These contracts and transaction structures also provide a template …

The More Things Change . . . : Exploring Solutions To Persisting Discrimination In Legal Academia, Melissa Hart

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No abstract provided.

Report Of The Special Rapporteur On The Rights Of Indigenous Peoples On Extractive Industries And Indigenous Peoples, S. James Anaya

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No abstract provided.

Report Of The Special Rapporteur On The Rights Of Indigenous Peoples On The Situation Of Maori People In New Zealand, S. James Anaya

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No abstract provided.

Lawyers And Spoiled Identity, Paul Campos

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No abstract provided.

Anti-Rape Culture, Aya Gruber

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No abstract provided.

The Zombie Lawyer Apocalypse, Peter H. Huang, Corie Rosen Felder

Publications

This Article uses a popular cultural framework to address the near-epidemic levels of depression, decision-making errors, and professional dissatisfaction that studies have documented are prevalent among law students and lawyers today.

Zombies present an apt metaphor for understanding and contextualizing the ills now common in the American legal and legal education systems. To explore that metaphor and its import, this Article will first establish the contours of the zombie literature and will apply that literature to the existing state of legal education and legal practice, ultimately describing a state that we believe can only be termed "the Zombie Lawyer Apocalypse." …

Mental Illness In The Library: Ten Tips To Better Serve Patrons, Nick Harrell, Cindy Guyer

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No abstract provided.

A Provocative Defense, Aya Gruber

Publications

It is common wisdom that the provocation defense is, quite simply, sexist. For decades, there has been a trenchant feminist critique that the doctrine reflects and reinforces masculine norms of violence and shelters brutal domestic killers. The critique is so prominent that it appears alongside the doctrine itself in leading criminal law casebooks. The feminist critique of provocation embodies several claims about provocation's problematically gendered nature, including that the defense is steeped in chauvinist history, treats culpable sexist killers too leniently, discriminates against women, and expresses bad messages. This Article offers a (likely provocative) defense of the provocation doctrine. While …

The Government's Lies And The Constitution, Helen Norton

Publications

Governments lie. They do so for many different reasons to a wide range of audiences on a variety of topics. Although courts and commentators have extensively explored whether and when the First Amendment permits the government to regulate lies told by private speakers, relatively little attention has yet been paid to the constitutional implications of the government's intentional falsehoods. This Article helps fill that gap by exploring when, if ever, the Constitution prohibits our government from lying to us.

The government’s lies can be devastating. This is the case, for example, of its lies told to resist legal and political …

The Stereotyped Offender: Domestic Violence And The Failure Of Intervention, Carolyn B. Ramsey

Publications

Scholars and battered women's advocates now recognize that many facets of the legal response to intimate-partner abuse stereotype victims and harm abuse survivors who do not fit commonly accepted paradigms. However, it is less often acknowledged that the feminist analysis of domestic violence also tends to stereotype offenders and that state action, including court-mandated batterer intervention, is premised on these offender stereotypes. The feminist approach can be faulted for minimizing or denying the role of substance abuse, mental illness, childhood trauma, race, culture, and poverty in intimate-partner abuse. Moreover, those arrested for domestic violence crimes now include heterosexual women, lesbians, …

Introduction To Big Horn General Stream Adjudication Symposium, Charles Wilkinson

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No abstract provided.

Plenary Energy, Carla F. Fredericks

Publications

An incompatible relationship exists between the federal trust responsibility over Indian tribes and tribal sovereignty, the conflicting nature of which has been exacerbated by numerous judicial confirmations of the unbridled congressional plenary power over all tribal affairs. Nowhere is there more conflict between the trust responsibility and sovereignty than within the context of mineral resource development on tribal lands. The evolution of the regulatory framework of Indian mineral development can be viewed as a continuum, with maximum trust obligation and minimum tribal sovereignty on one extreme, and an inversion of these two variables on the other. There currently exists pending …

Cherokee Freedmen And The Color Of Belonging, Lolita Buckner Inniss

Publications

This article addresses the Cherokee tribe and their historic conflict with the descendants of their former black slaves, designated Cherokee Freedmen. This article specifically addresses how historic discussions of black, red and white skin colors, designating the African-ancestored, aboriginal (Native American) and European-ancestored people of the United States, have helped to shape the contours of color-based national belonging among the Cherokee. This article also suggests that Homi K. Bhabha’s notion of postcolonial mimicry offers a potent source for analyzing the Cherokee’s historic use of skin color as a marker of Cherokee membership. The Cherokee past practice of black slavery and …

Did Multicultural America Result From A Mistake? The 1965 Immigration Act And Evidence From Roll Call Votes, Gabriel J. Chin, Douglas M. Spencer

Publications

Between July 1964 and October 1965, Congress enacted the three most important civil rights laws since Reconstruction: The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments of 1965. As we approach the 50th anniversary of these laws, it is clear that all three have fundamentally remade the United States; education, employment, housing, politics, and the population itself have irreversibly changed.

Arguably the least celebrated yet most consequential of these laws was the 1965 Immigration Act, which set the United States on the path to become a "majority minority" nation. In …

Outing Privacy, Scott Skinner-Thompson

Publications

The government regularly outs information concerning people's sexuality, gender identity, and HIV status. Notwithstanding the implications of such outings, the Supreme Court has yet to resolve whether the Constitution contains a right to informational privacy - a right to limit the government's ability to collect and disseminate personal information.

This Article probes informational privacy theory and jurisprudence to better understand the judiciary's reluctance to fully embrace a constitutional right to informational privacy. The Article argues that while existing scholarly theories of informational privacy encourage us to broadly imagine the right and its possibilities, often focusing on informational privacy's ability to …