Law Commons^™

All Your Data Are Belong To Us: Consumer Data Breach Rights And Remedies In An Electronic Exchange Economy, Michael D. Simpson

University of Colorado Law Review

Consumers navigating the United States' modern electronic exchange economy are uniquely vulnerable to injury from data breaches. Hackers run data breach operations on an industrial scale, with a worldwide underground economy supporting the processing and exploitation of stolen information. Economic damages from data breaches exceed millions of dollars annually in direct and indirect costs for consumers and businesses alike. While existing common law, statutory law, and regulatory law offer consumers affected by a data breach some degree of protection, that protection is largely inadequate in the face of the threat posed by consumer data breaches. This Comment argues that consumers …

Master Limited Partnerships : A Pipeline To Renewable Energy Development, E. Cabell Massey

University of Colorado Law Review

Master Limited Partnerships (MLPs) are partnership entities that can be publicly traded on a national stock exchange if they meet certain criteria in the Internal Revenue Code. These criteria include a qualifying income test where most of the partnership's income must be derived from nonrenewable natural resources. These partnerships have become very popular since their creation in the 1980s and have allowed for cast amounts of capital to be spent on infrastructure for non-renewable natural resource extraction and transportation in the United States. First, this Comment explores the history of the MLP and how MLPs currently are structured. Second, this …

"State Inaction," Equal Protection, And Religious Resistance To Lgbt Rights, James M. Oleske, Jr.

University of Colorado Law Review

Now that the Supreme Court has held that states must recognize same-sex marriages, a new issue looms on the horizon: Must states also protect against sexual-orientation discrimination in the private marketplace? This Article contends that the answer under the Equal Protection Clause is "yes" for the forty-five-plus states that protect against marketplace discrimination on the basis of race, religion, national origin, and sex.

In the course of reaching that conclusion, this Article offers much-needed clarification of the Court's unsettled "state inaction" doctrine. Under that doctrine, a state's failure to act may be immunized from challenge on the ground that the …

Intellectual Property Law Hybridization, Clark D. Asay

University of Colorado Law Review

Traditionally, patent and copyright laws have been viewed as separate bodies of law with distinct utilitarian goals. Conventional wisdom holds that patent law aims to incentivize the production of inventive ideas, while copyright focuses on protecting the original expression of ideas, but not the underlying ideas themselves. This customary divide between copyright and patent laws finds some support in the distinction between "authors" and "inventors," as well as that between "writings" and "discoveries," in the U.S. Constitution's Intellectual Property Clause. And Congress, courts, and scholars have largely perpetuated the divide in separately enacting, interpreting, and analyzing copyright and patent laws …

You Can't Choose Your Family, But You Should Choose Your Co-Tenants: Reforming The Upc To Benefit The Modest- Means Family Cabin Owner, Lisa C. Willcox

University of Colorado Law Review

No abstract provided.

Sharing Property, Kellen Zale

University of Colorado Law Review

The sharing economy-the rapidly evolving sector of peer-topeer transactions epitomized by Airbnb and Uber-is the subject of heated debate about whether it is so novel that no laws apply, or whether the sharing economy should be subject to the same regulations as its analog counterparts. The debate has proved frustrating and controversial in large part because we lack a doctrinally cohesive and normatively satisfying way of talking about the underlying activities taking place in the sharing economy. In part, this is because property-sharing activities-renting your car out to a tourist for a day, paying to spend the weekend in a …

The Presidential Statutory Stretch And The Rule Of Law, Peter M. Shane

University of Colorado Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Guardian Ad Litem As The Child's Privilege Holder, Starla Doyal

University of Colorado Law Review

Children in therapy have a strong interest in maintaining the confidentiality of communications with their therapists. Without the assurance of confidential communications, children may not be as open with their therapists, which can make therapy less effective. Although children have privilege rights to their psychotherapist-patient communications just as adults do, their parents generally hold and exercise that privilege. Many courts have recognized that a parent should not hold a child's privilege when the parent and child have divergent interests. This raises the question of who should hold the privilege in the parent's place. In L.A.N. v. L.M.B., the Colorado Supreme …

Distributed Reliability, Amy L. Stein

University of Colorado Law Review

For the past century, electric utilities and grid operators have both owned and operated resources to maintain the reliability of the grid. This reliability has been controlled through investments in generation, transmission, and distribution assets. Today, a growing number of previously passive customers are much more involved in generating their own electricity. But this customer involvement does not stop with generation. Customers are also contributing energy storage and demand response (DR) to the grid, reliability resources that are an essential component of supporting intermittent, renewable energy. This Article draws upon economic analyses of industrial organization and principal agent theory to …

Racial Emotions And The Feeling Of Equality, Janine Young Kim

University of Colorado Law Review

This Article examines two distinct but related questions regarding race and emotions. The first raises the possibility that there are certain emotions that are so closely tied to racial experiences that they can be said to demonstrate and typify an emotional dimension to the construct of race. The second asks how such quintessentially racial emotions can be analyzed and evaluated, employing three theories of emotion that have developed in various disciplines within the humanities and social sciences. These theories reveal that racial emotions are not idiosyncratic and elusive, but instead relate to reason and values, to social membership and hierarchy, …

The President's Faithful Execution Duty, Harold H. Bruff

University of Colorado Law Review

No abstract provided.

Dear Irs, It Is Time To Enforce The Campaigning Prohibition. Even Against Churches, Samuel D. Brunson

University of Colorado Law Review

In 1954, Congress prohibited tax-exempt public charities, including churches, from endorsing or opposing candidates for office. To the extent a tax-exempt public charity violated this prohibition, it would no longer qualify as tax-exempt, and the IRS was to revoke its exemption.

While simple in theory, in practice, the IRS rarely penalizes churches that violate the campaigning prohibition and virtually never revokes a church's tax exemption. And, because no taxpayer has standing to challenge the IRS's inaction, the IRS has no external imperative to revoke the exemptions of churches that do campaign on behalf of or against candidates for office.

This …

Finding Safe Harbor: Eliminating The Gap In Colorado's Human Trafficking Laws, Jessica A. Pingleton

University of Colorado Law Review

In March 2014, the Colorado Court of Appeals acquitted Dallas Cardenas of all human trafficking charges. The court determined that under the 2014 version of Colorado's human trafficking statute, a defendant who sold the sexual services of a minor, as opposed to selling a minor for sex, did not commit the crime of human trafficking. Following the Cardenas decision, the state legislature passed House Bill 1273, which broadened the language of the statute and eliminated all possible affirmative defenses, including minor consent. Under the new law, a defendant can no longer argue that a minor consented to commercial sex. However, …

Little Sisters Of The Poor Home For The Aged V. Sebelius: Ramifications For Church Plans And Religious Nonprofits, Samantha T. Ford

University of Colorado Law Review

The mandate for certain employers to provide contraceptive care as part of their employees' benefit plans established by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) and pertinent regulations has been controversial and highly litigated since its passage in 2010. One party to this litigation, the Little Sisters of the Poor, finds the contraceptive care mandate to be in conflict with their fundamental religious beliefs. The Little Sisters also find PPACA's exceptions to the contraceptive care mandate for religious nonprofits to be inadequate in preventing the government from requiring the Little Sisters to violate their beliefs. Currently, the Little Sisters …

Person, State, Or Not: The Place Of Business Corporations In Our Constitutional Order, Daniel J.H. Greenwood

University of Colorado Law Review

Business corporations are critical institutions in our democratic republican, market-based, economic order. The United States Constitution, however, is completely silent as to their status in our system. The Supreme Court has filled this silence by repeatedly granting corporations rights against the citizenry and its elected representatives.

Instead, we ought to view business corporations, like municipal corporations, as governance structures created by We the People to promote our general Welfare. On this social contract view, corporations should have the constitutional rights specified in the text: none. Instead, we should be debating which rights of citizens against governmental agencies should also apply …

Restore The Republic: The Incompatibility Between The Taxpayer's Bill Of Rights And The Guarantee Clause, Joshua Pens

University of Colorado Law Review

No abstract provided.

Viewing The Supreme Court's Exactions Cases Through The Prism Of Anti-Evasion, Michael B. Kent Jr.

University of Colorado Law Review

This Article considers the U.S. Supreme Court's 2013 decision in Koontz v. St. Johns River Water Management District, which extended the application of the Court's framework for evaluating the constitutionality of land use exactions (known as the Nollan/Dolan test). The majority of the Court relied heavily on the unconstitutional conditions doctrine, explaining that this doctrine formed the basis not only for the Nollan/Dolan framework but also for the extension of that framework to Koontz's new factual setting. Four members of the Court dissented. Although the dissenting justices seemingly agreed with several of the majority's propositions, they vigorously opposed the manner …

Legal Adaptive Capacity : How Program Goals And Processes Shape Federal Land Adaption To Climate Change, Alejandro E. Camacho, Robert L. Glicksman

University of Colorado Law Review

The degree to which statutory goals are pliable is likely to significantly affect the ability of an agency with regulatory or management responsibilities to achieve those objectives in the face of novel challenges or changing circumstances. This Article explores this dynamic by comparing the degree of 'ive" provided by the goals of the regimes governing management of the five types of federal public lands in responding to the challenges posed by climate change. A comparative analysis of federal land adaptation to climate change demonstrates that a management regime's legal adaptive capacity is influenced not only by procedural flexibility, but also …

To Have Our Water And Use It Too : Why Colorado Water Law Needs A Public Interest Standard, Larry Myers

University of Colorado Law Review

This Comment proposes constitutional and statutory amendments that would allow water courts to consider the public interest in water allocations. It offers a model public interest standard and argues that this public interest standard is an economic necessity given the shifting contributions of water-reliant industries and the nature of their water needs. Assuming the purpose of Colorado water law is to promote growth and the economic health of the state, then Colorado must adjust the guiding laws to reflect the current economic reality. Where facilitating economic growth formerly required consumptive diversions from streams to subsidize homesteads, ranches, and mines, now …

Reclaiming The Right Of Beneficial Use, Abby Harder

University of Colorado Law Review

Under the doctrine of prior appropriation, those that divert and apply water resources to a beneficial use gain a future right of use. Further, individuals may contract with the federal Bureau of Reclamation (BOR) for the delivery of federal project water. Under either method, individuals are required to use their water appropriation for a beneficial purpose to acquire and maintain their rights of use. What constitutes a beneficial purpose or a beneficial use of water resources has traditionally been defined by state law. Following some states’ legalization of marijuana, the BOR announced a new policy with regard to water use, …

Executive Power Under The Constitution: A Presidential And Parliamentary System Compared, Gabrielle Appleby, Adam Webster

University of Colorado Law Review

No abstract provided.

Presidential Constitutional Interpretation, Signing Statements, Executive Power, And Zivotofsky, Henry L. Chambers, Jr

University of Colorado Law Review

No abstract provided.