Law Commons^™

Model Law On Lighting For Developing Countries, Lakshman Guruswamy, Audrey M. Huang, Mahir Haque, Ugyen Tshering

Publications

No abstract provided.

Anti-Rape Culture, Aya Gruber

Publications

This essay, written for the Kansas Law Review Symposium on Campus Sexual Assault, critically analyzes “anti-rape culture” ― a set of empirical claims about rape’s prevalence, causes, and effects and a set of normative ideas about sex, gender, and institutional authority ― which has heralded a new era of discipline, in all senses of the word, on college campuses. In the past few years, publicity about the campus rape crisis has created widespread anxiety, despite the fact that incidents of sexual assault have generally declined and one-in-four-type statistics have been around for decades. The recent surge of interest is due …

Introduction To Model Laws On Lighting, Lakshman Guruswamy

Publications

No abstract provided.

Truth And Lies In The Workplace: Employer Speech And The First Amendment, Helen Norton

Publications

Employers' lies, misrepresentations, and nondisclosures about workers' legal rights and other working conditions can skew and sometimes even coerce workers' important life decisions as well as frustrate key workplace protections. Federal, state, and local governments have long sought to address these substantial harms by prohibiting employers from misrepresenting workers' rights or other working conditions as well as by requiring employers to disclose truthful information about these matters.

These governmental efforts, however, are now increasingly vulnerable to constitutional attack in light of the recent antiregulatory turn in First Amendment law, in which corporate and other commercial entities seek -- with growing …

Technological Opacity, Predictability, And Self-Driving Cars, Harry Surden, Mary-Anne Williams

Publications

Autonomous or “self-driving” cars are vehicles that drive themselves without human supervision or input. Because of safety benefits that they are expected to bring, autonomous vehicles are likely to become more common. Notably, for the first time, people will share a physical environment with computer-controlled machines that can both direct their own activities and that have considerable range of movement. This represents a distinct change from our current context. Today people share physical spaces either with machines that have free range of movement, but are controlled by people (e.g. automobiles) or with machines that are controlled by computers, but highly …

Financing Corporate Elections, Andrew A. Schwartz

Publications

Elections for corporate directorships have become more competitive and expensive in recent years, raising important questions of corporate campaign finance, such as whether an insurgent campaign must disclose the source of its funding and whether a director is permitted to receive third-party compensation during her term in office (known as a "golden leash"). These present novel and unanswered issues of corporate law, but many analogous issues have been resolved in the political sphere using the First Amendment and a well-developed line of Supreme Court case law beginning with Buckley v. Valeo and continuing through Citizens United and other key precedents. …

Managing Unconventional Oil And Gas Development As If Communities Mattered, Mark Squillace

Publications

The advent of horizontal oil and gas drilling into relatively impermeable shale rock, and the companion technological breakthrough of high-pressure, multi-stage fracking that frees hydrocarbons along the substantial length of these horizontal wells, has fundamentally altered the oil and gas industry. The Energy Information Administration has gone so far as to predict that North America could become a net energy exporter as early as 2019, largely as a result of the explosive growth of this “unconventional” oil and gas development. Despite its promise, managing unconventional oil and gas development has proved challenging, and many of the communities that find themselves …

Rape Law Revisited, Aya Gruber

Publications

This essay introduces the Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law Symposium, “Rape Law Revisited” (Vol. 13(2)). The Symposium features articles by Deborah Tuerkheimer, Kimberly Ferzan, David Bryden and Erica Madore, Bennett Capers, and Erin Collins. The symposium provides fresh perspectives on the issues surrounding sexual assault law and policy in today’s environment. The introduction notes that the current rape reform redux is not just a rehashing of old arguments, but boasts many new features. Today’s rape activism occurs in a moment when feminist ideas about coerced sex no longer exist at the margins — they govern and enjoy cultural acceptance, …

From The Editor, Susan Nevelow Mart

Publications

No abstract provided.

Facilitating Competition By Remedial Regulation, Kristelia A. García

Publications

In music licensing, powerful music publishers have begun—for the first time ever— to withdraw their digital copyrights from the collectives that license those rights, in order to negotiate considerably higher rates in private deals. At the beginning of the year, two of these publishers commanded a private royalty rate nearly twice that of the going collective rate. This result could be seen as a coup for the free market: Constrained by consent decrees and conflicting interests, collectives are simply not able to establish and enforce a true market rate in the new, digital age. This could also be seen as …

Environmental Law, Big Data, And The Torrent Of Singularities, William Boyd

Publications

How will big data impact environmental law in the near future? This Essay imagines one possible future for environmental law in 2030 that focuses on the implications of big data for the protection of public health from risks associated with pollution and industrial chemicals. It assumes the perspective of an historian looking back from the end of the twenty-first century at the evolution of environmental law during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The premise of the Essay is that big data will drive a major shift in the underlying knowledge practices of environmental law (along with other areas …

How Presidents Interpret The Constitution, Harold H. Bruff

Publications

No abstract provided.

Values And Assumptions In Criminal Adjudication, Benjamin Levin

Publications

This Response to Andrew Manuel Crespo's Systemic Facts: Toward Institutional Awareness in Criminal Courts proceeds in two Parts. In Part I, I argue that Crespo presents a compelling case for the importance of systemic factfinding to the task of criminal court judges. If, as a range of scholars has argued, criminal courts are increasingly serving a quasi-administrative function, then shouldn’t they at least be administrating accurately? Systemic Facts provides a novel account of how — with comparatively little institutional reform — courts might begin to serve as more effective administrators. However, in Part II, I also argue that Crespo’s account …

What Predicts Law Student Success? A Longitudinal Study Correlating Law Student Applicant Data And Law School Outcomes, Alexia Brunet Marks, Scott A. Moss

Publications

Despite the rise of “big data” empiricism, law school admission remains heavily impressionistic; admission decisions rely on anecdotes about recent students, idiosyncratic preferences for certain majors or jobs, or mainly the Law School Admission Test (LSAT). Yet no predictors are well-validated and studies of the LSAT or other factors fail to control for other factors. The lack of evidence for what actually predicts law school success is especially surprising since, after the 2010s downturn, law schools now compete for fewer applicants. We fill this gap with a two-school, 1,400-student, 2005--2011 longitudinal study. We coded nondigitized applicant data and used multivariate …

Prior Consistent Statements: The Dangers Of Misinterpreting Recently Amended Federal Rule Of Evidence 801(D)(1)(B), Laird C. Kirkpatrick, Christopher B. Mueller

Publications

A recent amendment to Federal Rule of Evidence 801(d)(1)(B) expands the situations in which prior consistent statements by testifying witnesses can be used as substantive evidence, and not merely as rehabilitating evidence. In this piece, the Authors argue that the revised rule may mislead judges and lawyers to conclude that prior consistent statements are always usable as substantive evidence when offered to rehabilitate a witness. Nothing could be further from the truth. The intent, although hard to discern on the face of the revised rule, is only to allow substantive use of consistent statements that are otherwise admissible to rehabilitate …

Accidents Of Federalism: Ratemaking And Policy Innovation In Public Utility Law, William Boyd, Ann E. Carlson

Publications

Decarbonizing the electric power sector will be central to any serious effort to fight climate change. Many observers have suggested that the congressional failure to enact a uniform system of electricity regulation could stifle the transition to a low-carbon electricity grid. This Article contends that the critique is overstated. In fact, innovation is occurring across different aspects of the electricity system and across different types of states in ways one would not expect to see under a single, national approach. As the Article demonstrates, this innovation stems in part from Congress’s failure to enact a single, national approach to electricity …

Siri-Ously? Free Speech Rights And Artificial Intelligence, Toni M. Massaro, Helen Norton

Publications

Computers with communicative artificial intelligence (AI) are pushing First Amendment theory and doctrine in profound and novel ways. They are becoming increasingly self-directed and corporal in ways that may one day make it difficult to call the communication ours versus theirs. This, in turn, invites questions about whether the First Amendment ever will (or ever should) cover AI speech or speakers even absent a locatable and accountable human creator. In this Article, we explain why current free speech theory and doctrine pose surprisingly few barriers to this counterintuitive result; their elasticity suggests that speaker humanness no longer may be …

Criminal Labor Law, Benjamin Levin

Publications

This Article examines a recent rise in civil suits brought against unions under criminal statutes. By looking at the long history of criminal regulation of labor, the Article argues that these suits represent an attack on the theoretical underpinnings of post-New Deal U.S. labor law and an attempt to revive a nineteenth century conception of unions as extortionate criminal conspiracies. The Article further argues that this criminal turn is reflective of a broader contemporary preference for finding criminal solutions to social and economic problems. In a moment of political gridlock, parties seeking regulation increasingly do so via criminal statute. In …

Colorado Rule Of Evidence 502: Preserving Privilege And Work Product Protection In Discovery, Christopher B. Mueller, Ronald J. Hedges, Lino S. Lipinsky

Publications

No abstract provided.

Tax Planning And Policy Drift, Sloan G. Speck

Publications

This Article proposes a framework for analyzing how private-sector legal interpretations influence public policy. Political scientists and legal scholars use the terms “bureaucratic drift” and “legislative drift” to describe how administrative agencies and future legislative coalitions affect public policy enacted by Congress. This Article identifies a third category of policy drift: “planning drift.” Planning drift describes deviations from an enacting legislature’s policy preferences that result from private experts’ interpretations of existing law. After Congress enacts a statute, the first people to interpret and apply the new legislation generally are not regulators or judges, but instead are private experts, such as …

A Context For Legal History, Or, This Is Not Your Father’S Contextualism, Justin Deystone

Publications

This short essay attempts a systematic rehearsal of the structuralist approach to legal historiography.

Investment Accelerators, Brad Bernthal

Publications

This Article documents and explains the legal and extralegal dimensions of Investment Accelerator (IA) systems. Accelerators are a new class of institution that supports entrepreneurs and early stage startups. Investment Accelerators take an ownership stake in companies that participate in an intensive, time-limited program. Interviews reveal the surprising extent to which parties in many Investment Accelerators exchange economic value in the absence of formal agreement. Startups share proprietary information with highly accomplished mentors who, in turn, contribute their time and connections without direct compensation. This under-contracted and informal arrangement raises concerns about opportunism. Data from an original investigation presents a …

Meta-Mindfulness: A New Hope, Peter H. Huang

Publications

This Essay starts by tracing its humble origins to an earlier, related and unique law review article, namely, Tiger Cub Strikes Back: Memoirs of an Ex-Child Prodigy About Legal Education and Parenting. This Essay describes various professional responses to Tiger Cub Strikes Back, provides an update of some developments in research about parenting and legal education since Tiger Cub Strikes Back, and recounts a few personal stories about mindfulness and related to being an ex-child prodigy. This Essay then analyzes meta-mindfulness, defined as mindfulness about mindfulness. This Essay discusses how mindfulness about mindfulness can help facilitate the …

Love, Anger, And Lawyering, Deborah J. Cantrell

Publications

This essay explores how mindfulness practices helped one lawyer, now legal scholar, explore the roles of love and anger in lawyering.

Classification Standards For Health Information: Ethical And Practical Approaches, Craig Konnoth

Publications

Secondary health information research requires vast quantities of data in order to make clinical and health delivery breakthroughs. Restrictive policies that limit the use of such information threaten to stymie this research. While the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) for the new Common Rule permits patients to provide broad consent for the use of their information for research, that policy offers insufficient flexibility. This Article suggests a flexible consenting system that allows patients to consent to a range of privacy risks. The details of the system will be fleshed out in future work.

Saving The Public Interest Class Action By Unpacking Theory And Doctrinal Functionality, Suzette M. Malveaux

Publications

No abstract provided.

From Apology To Utopia's Point Of Attack, Justin Deystone

Publications

This contribution to the Symposium celebrating the Twenty-fifth Anniversary of Martti Koskenniemi's From Apology to Utopia explores the relevance of the book for contemporary theorists of the international world. In doing so, the article puts Koskenniemi's classic in a contest with John Yoo's recent book, Point of Attack. The purpose in doing so is three-fold. First, it is to illustrate the contemporary use of Koskenniemi's structuralist method. Second, it is to show how the use of the method, with its attendant reliance on modes of legal thought, might give pause to international thinkers seeking to reinvigorate particular structures of …

In The Shadows Of Sunlight: The Effects Of Transparency On State Political Campaigns, Abby K. Wood, Douglas M. Spencer

Publications

In recent years, the courts have invalidated a variety of campaign finance laws while simultaneously upholding disclosure requirements. Courts view disclosure as a less-restrictive means to root out corruption while critics claim that disclosure chills speech and deters political participation. Using individual-level contribution data from state elections between 2000 and 2008, we find that the speech-chilling effects of disclosure are negligible. On average, less than one donor per candidate is likely to stop contributing when the public visibility of campaign contributions increases. Moreover, we do not observe heterogeneous effects for small donors or ideological outliers despite an assumption in First …

Comments On Public Lands: Title Transfer Proposals, Chuck Howe

Challenging Federal Ownership and Management: Public Lands and Public Benefits (October 11-13)

3 pages.

Amicus (Fall 2015), University Of Colorado Law School

Amicus

Issue at a glance:

• Illustrates Colorado Law's commitment to engaged faculty scholarship
• Describes cutting-edge faculty research and upcoming lectures
• Honors three of Colorado Law's most esteemed faculty
• Features law students' success in entrepreneurial competition
• Highlights the student-driven University of Colorado Law Review
• Delivers advice for current students from alumni
• Recognizes loyal donors
• Celebrates milestones and successes of Colorado Law alumni