Law Commons^™

Jury Instructions As Constitutional Education, Andrew Guthrie Ferguson

University of Colorado Law Review

Juries are central to the constitutional structure of America. This Article articulates a theory of the jury as a "constitutional teaching moment," establishing a historical and theoretical basis for reclaiming the educative value of jury service. This Article addresses the fundamental question of why, despite an unquestioned acceptance of a constitutional role of the jury, our criminal justice system does not explain this role to jurors on jury duty. This Article seeks to answer the question of how we can educate jurors about the jury's constitutional role, while at the same time exploring the larger theoretical concerns with using the …

The Litigation Financing Industry: Regulation To Protect And Inform Consumers, Martin J. Estevao

University of Colorado Law Review

Litigation financing companies ("LFCs") provide nonrecourse cash advances to plaintiffs in exchange for a portion of their lawsuits' potential future proceeds. While this arrangement allows individuals to continue to litigate without having to accept unjust settlement offers, desperate consumers are often forced to pay inequitable interest rates for the cases they finance. Because there is no absolute obligation to repay the LFC, the industry manages to avoid regulation under state interest rate ceilings for consumer loans. The few existing litigation financing laws do not restrict the interest rates that LFCs may charge, and even if some courts are willing to …

The Rise Of The Transgender Child: Overcoming Societal Stigma, Institutional Discrimination, And Individual Bias To Enact And Enforce Nondiscriminatory Dress Code Policies, Holly V. Franson

University of Colorado Law Review

School districts are often called upon to adapt school policies in response to changing student populations, and transgender students appear to be an emerging student population. Schools should adopt nondiscriminatory and inclusive dress code policies to accommodate transgender students. Recently, awareness and advocacy on behalf of children who can be classified as transgender have increased. Unfortunately, despite this increase in awareness and advocacy, transgender students continue to face unique obstacles in the school environment, including bullying, as a result of being transgender. Because the primary means through which transgender students express their identified genders is through their dress, schools should …

Renewable Energy Through Agency Action, Amy L. Stein

University of Colorado Law Review

Despite the many societal benefits associated with renewable energy, it is used to generate only about 5 percent of our nation's electricity needs. The bulk of governmental efforts to rectify this situation have disproportionately impacted private actors. This Article argues that the federal government should expand its efforts to more fully capture the gains that can be achieved by targeting both private and public actors, particularly federal agencies. Federal agencies have enormous purchasing power that can be channeled toward using electricity and fuels derived from renewable energy. Federal agencies are some of the largest consumers of electricity. Federal agencies manage …

No Seat At The Water Table: Colorado's New Groundwater Basin Statute Leaves Senior Surface Rights In The Lurch, Ari J. Stiller-Shulman

University of Colorado Law Review

Wells that pump water from underground aquifers deplete water flowing in nearby rivers and streams. Colorado farmers in certain parts of the state use wells to pump large quantities of underground water for irrigation. However, other users who had pre-existing surface-water rights on nearby streams have complained that these wells drain the river and injure their prior vested water rights. Normally, surface water users with prior rights can require more junior users to stop appropriating until the senior user has diverted her full right. However, Colorado presumes that wells in certain districts-called designated basins-do not injure nearby surface streams. Still, …

I'Ll Huff And I'Ll Puff And I'Ll Blow Your House Down: The Argument For The Ability To Purchase Your Neighbor's Wind, Emily J. Wasserman

University of Colorado Law Review

Wind power capacity has increased substantially over the past decade. This growth in capacity is partially attributable to the policies that federal and state governments have enacted to help developers overcome the economic barriers to building commercial-scale wind facilities. However, the existing economic policies have a limited ability to continue to incentivize development of new wind power capacity. Therefore, if wind power capacity is going to continue to grow so that wind power eventually supplies enough electricity to meet a significant amount of the United States' energy needs, states need to supplement the economic policies with other, noneconomic policies. Specifically, …

Byron White-Hero And Scholar: Reflections About Punishment, Political Speech, And Public Liability, Justice John Paul Stevens

University of Colorado Law Review

No abstract provided.

Cutting The Cord To Private Cord Blood Banking: Encouraging Compensation For Public Cord Blood Donations After Flynn V. Holder, Seema Mohapatra

University of Colorado Law Review

This Article argues that the Ninth Circuit's recent ruling in Flynn v. Holder, which allowed compensation for peripheral blood stem cells ("PBSCs") obtained via apheresis] under the National Organ Transplant Act ("NOTA'), also opens up the possibility for compensation for umbilical cord blood ("cord blood"). The holding in Flynn applies to cord blood for several reasons. First, Flynn held that bone marrow was subject to NOTA's prohibition on compensation because bone marrow was explicitly mentioned in the statute. In contrast, no mention of cord blood appears in NOTA or its applicable regulations. Also, the procedure to utilize cord blood was …

Death Eligibility In Colorado: Many Are Called, Few Are Chosen, Justin Marceau, Sam Kamin, Wanda Foglia

University of Colorado Law Review

This Article reports the conclusions of an empirical study of every murder conviction in Colorado between January 1, 1999 and December 31, 2010. Our goal was to determine: (1) what percentage of first-degree murderers in Colorado were eligible for the death penalty; and (2) how often the death penalty was sought against these killers. More importantly, our broader purpose was to determine whether Colorado's statutory aggravating factors meaningfully narrow the class of death-eligible offenders as required by the Constitution. We discovered that while the death penalty was an option in over 90% of all first-degree murders, it was sought by …

Misguided Patent Reform: The Questionable Constitutionality Of First-To-File, Andrew L. Sharp

University of Colorado Law Review

American cigarette warning labels are lackluster compared to others around the world. To address this inadequacy, the FDA created nine graphic-image cigarette warning labels that were scheduled to appear on all cigarette packages sold in the US beginning in 2012. However, before they debuted, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals struck the labels down in R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. v. FDA, holding that they constituted compelled commercial speech in violation of the First Amendment. This Note argues that the R.J. Reynolds decision conflicts with the Supreme Court's commercial speech jurisprudence. Historically, the Supreme Court has applied limited First Amendment protection …

State V. Henderson: A Model For Admitting Eyewitness Identification Testimony, Amy D. Trenary

University of Colorado Law Review

Eyewitness identification testimony is notoriously unreliable and has significantly contributed to wrongful convictions. Most courts use the standard set forth by the Supreme Court in Manson v. Brathwaite to assess whether eyewitness identifications are sufficiently reliable to present to the jury. But in the thirty-five years since Manson, an extensive body of research has amassed that calls into question the continuing validity of that standard. Researchers have identified numerous system variables (procedural elements subject to official control) and estimator variables (factors related to the witness, perpetrator, and event) that affect the accuracy of eyewitness identifications. The Manson standard fails to …

The Anonymous Internet, Bryan H. Choi

Publications

This Article argues in favor of regulating online anonymity, not from the standpoint that doing so will prevent harmful abuses or improve security, but instead that refusing to do so will ultimately harm other liberty interests. One principle that has emerged from cyberlaw scholarship is that we should safeguard the Internet’s "generativity"— a key attribute representing the latitude and plasticity with which a technology (like the Internet) can be adapted to perform new, unanticipated uses—because generativity is the root source of the Internet’s unique vitality. Yet, if we want regulators to leave generativity alone, we must offer them another point …

Immigration Federalism: A Reappraisal, Pratheepan Gulasekaram, Karthick Ramakrishnan

Publications

No abstract provided.

Guns And Membership In The American Polity, Pratheepan Gulasekaram

Publications

No abstract provided.

Title Ix’S Protections For Transgender Student Athletes, Scott Skinner-Thompson, Ilona M. Turner

Publications

This article examines legal authority and policy to determine whether transgender students in K-12 schools must be permitted to participate in athletics according to their gender identity, and without any requirement for medical intervention. The articles concludes that such a policy is consistent with legal authority under Title IX and Title VII and, more importantly, best advances the well-being of already vulnerable transgender youth by helping to incorporate and include such students in activities that are critical to physical, social, mental, emotional development, and health.

Part II of this article briefly details the history of Title IX with respect to …

The Corporate Preference For Trade Secret, Andrew A. Schwartz

Publications

Many inventions can be legally protected either by patent or by trade secrecy, and a conventional wisdom exists on how to select between them. This Article adds to that literature by showing that corporations should have an inherent preference for trade secret over patent for reasons relating to their legal form. Among them is the idea that corporations are perpetual entities and therefore perfectly suited to reap the perpetual returns that only a trade secret can offer. The Article also addresses the potential for a conflict between the inherent corporate preference for trade secret and the preferences of corporate managers, …

Panel Discussion Iii: Recognizing And Addressing Immigration Concerns In The Criminal Process, Violeta Chapin, Dan Kesselbrenner, Christina Kleiser

Publications

No abstract provided.

Lawyering For Groups: The Case Of American Indian Tribal Attorneys, Kristen A. Carpenter, Eli Wald

Publications

Lawyering for groups, broadly defined as the legal representation of a client who is not an individual, is a significant and booming phenomenon. Encompassing the representation of governments, corporations, institutions, peoples, classes, communities, and causes, lawyering for groups is what many, if not most, lawyers do. And yet, the dominant theory of law practice--the Standard Conception, with its principles of zealous advocacy, nonaccountability, and professional role-based morality--and the rules of professional conduct that codify it, continue to be premised on the basic antiquated assumption that the paradigmatic client-attorney relationship is between an individual client and an individual attorney. The result …

Water Transfers For A Changing Climate, Mark Squillace

Publications

The prior appropriation doctrine that dominates the water laws of the Western United States was perhaps the inevitable consequence of the need to manage water resources in a region where the demand for water often exceeds the supply. This doctrine has proved surprisingly clumsy at accommodating changing water needs during times of shortage. Economists have long viewed water markets as an attractive solution for reallocating water to meet the demands of an evolving community of water users. But most western states have been skeptical--sometimes even hostile--to proposed changes in historic water use patterns. This reluctance to encourage the transfer of …

Hero For The People, Hero For The Land And Water: Reflections On The Enduring Contributions Of David Getches, Charles Wilkinson

Publications

No abstract provided.

The Exit Myth: Family Law, Gender Roles, And Changing Attitudes Toward Female Victims Of Domestic Violence, Carolyn B. Ramsey

Publications

This Article presents a hypothesis suggesting how and why the criminal justice response to domestic violence changed, over the course of the twentieth century, from sympathy for abused women and a surprising degree of state intervention in intimate relationships to the apathy and discrimination that the battered women' movement exposed. The riddle of declining public sympathy for female victims of intimate-partner violence can only be solved by looking beyond the criminal law to the social and legal changes that created the Exit Myth.

While the situation that gave rise to the battered women's movement in the 1970s is often presumed …

Bad Briefs, Bad Law, Bad Markets: Documenting The Poor Quality Of Plaintiffs' Briefs, Its Impact On The Law, And The Market Failure It Reflects, Scott A. Moss

Publications

For a major field, employment discrimination suffers surprisingly low-quality plaintiffs' lawyering. This Article details a study of several hundred summary judgment briefs, finding as follows: (1) the vast majority of plaintiffs' briefs omit available caselaw rebutting key defense arguments, many falling far below basic professional standards with incoherent writing or no meaningful research; (2) low-quality briefs lose at over double the rate of good briefs; and (3) bad briefs skew caselaw evolution, because even controlling for win-loss rate, bad plaintiffs' briefs far more often yield decisions crediting debatable defenses. These findings are puzzling. In a major legal service market, how …

The U.N. Security Council's Duty To Decide, Anna Spain

Publications

When faced with a global crisis within the scope of its mandate, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC or Council) has no obligation to decide whether or not to take action. This Article argues that it should. The UNSC is the only governing body with the legal authority to authorize binding measures necessary to restore peace and security, yet neither the United Nations Charter nor the UNSC's own rules clarify the extent of its obligations. Unlike courts, the UNSC lacks a procedural rule establishing that it has a duty to decide. Unlike the United States Congress, which accepts its practical …

The Case For Curation: The Relevance Of Digest And Citator Results In Westlaw And Lexis, Susan Nevelow Mart

Publications

Humans and machines are both involved in the creation of legal research resources. For legal information retrieval systems, the human-curated finding aid is being overtaken by the computer algorithm. But human-curated finding aids still exist. One of them is the West Key Number system. The Key Number system’s headnote classification of case law, started back in the nineteenth century, was and is the creation of humans. The retrospective headnote classification of the cases in Lexis’s case databases, started in 1999, was created primarily - although not exclusively - with computer algorithms. So how do these two very different systems deal …

Settler Colonialism And Reclamation: Where American Indian Law And Natural Resources Law Meet, Sarah Krakoff

Publications

Three hours west of Phoenix, Arizona, the Colorado River Indian Tribes (“CRIT”), a federally recognized tribe that includes over 3,700 enrolled members of Mohave, Chemehuevi, Navajo, and Hopi descent, occupies a reservation nearly 300,000 acres in size. The CRIT was one of five tribes to have its water rights confirmed in the landmark case of Arizona v. California, and therefore has senior rights to 719,248 acre-feet of Colorado River water, nearly one-third of Arizona’s allocation. How the CRIT came to be a single federally recognized tribe composed of members from four indigenous peoples located on lands that were a fraction …

Imputation, The Adverse Interest Exception, And The Curious Case Of The Restatement (Third) Of Agency, Mark J. Loewenstein

Publications

The imputation doctrine in the common law of agency provides that knowledge of an agent acquired in the course of the agency relationship is imputed to the principal. An important exception to the imputation doctrine, known as the adverse interest exception, provides that knowledge is not imputed if it is acquired by the agent in a course of conduct that is entirely adverse to the principal. These doctrines play an important role in sorting out liability when senior management of a corporation engages in a financial fraud that harms the company. Typically, new management is brought in and it sues …

Contract As Pattern Language, Erik F. Gerding

Publications

Christopher Alexander’s architectural theory of a "pattern language" influenced the development of object-oriented computer programming. This pattern language framework also explains the design of legal contracts. Moreover, the pattern language rubric explains how legal agreements interlock to create complex transactions and how transactions interconnect to create markets. This pattern language framework helps account for evidence, including from the global financial crisis, of failures in modern contract design.

A pattern represents an encapsulated conceptual solution to a recurring design problem. Patterns save architects and designers from having to reinvent the wheel; they can use solutions that evolved over time to address …

Never Construed To Their Prejudice: In Honor Of David Getches, Richard B. Collins

Publications

This article reviews and analyzes the judicial canons of construction for Native American treaties and statutes. It discusses their theoretical justifications and practical applications. It concludes that the treaty canon has ready support in contract law and the law of treaty interpretation. Justification of the statutory canon is more challenging and could be strengthened by attention to the democratic deficit when Congress imposes laws on Indian country. Applications of the canons have mattered in disputes between Indian nations and private or state interests. They have made much less difference, and have suffered major failings, in disputes with the federal government. …

Considering Class: College Access And Diversity, Matthew N. Gaertner, Melissa Hart

Publications

Each time that the continued legality of race-conscious affirmative action is threatened, colleges and universities must confront the possibility of dramatically changing their admissions policies. Fisher v. University of Texas, which the Supreme Court will hear this year, presents just such a moment. In previous years when affirmative action has been outlawed by ballot initiative in specific states or when the Court has seemed poised to reject it entirely, there have been calls for replacing race-conscious admissions with class-based affirmative action. Supporters of race-conscious affirmative action have typically criticized the class-based alternative as ineffective at maintaining racial diversity. This …

Development And Dissemination Of Clean Cookstoves: A Model Law For Developing Countries, Lakshman Guruswamy

Publications

No abstract provided.