Law Commons^™

Impact Of The “Nirbhaya” Rape Case: Isolated Phenomenon Or Social Change?, Tina P. Lapsia

Honors Scholar Theses

In December 2012, a twenty-three year old college student, who was given the pseudonym “Nirbhaya” (“fearless”), was fatally gang-raped on a private bus in Delhi, India, galvanizing the country to swiftly adopt new legislative measures and catapulting the issue of violence against women in India into the international spotlight. Although assault and rape cases have made India infamous for its high volume of crimes against women, the reaction to this particular incident was much different from before. This paper investigates whether the governmental and societal responses represent social change, as indicated by changing attitudes towards violence against women in India. …

An Assessment Of Affirmative Action In Business, Jordan A. Kennedy

Honors Scholar Theses

Affirmative action has become an inevitable aspect of the employment hiring process. It has been put into place to assist in eradicating the institutionalized discrimination that inherently exists in such practices. On the surface, affirmative action may appear to be something that is beneficial to both the hiring institution and the individual; it seems to be a win-win situation because the business is creating a more diverse workplace and the individual is getting a job that they desired. However, the way that affirmative action is practiced may prevent its overall effectiveness. For example, there are several fundamental flaws with this …

“Amidst The Chime Of The Razor Wire”: Narrating Poetic Justice In Guantanamo Bay, Kristina H. Reardon

The Quiet Corner Interdisciplinary Journal

The quest of poetic justice carries Marc Falkoff’s 2007 anthology Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak into the court of public (literary) opinion. While the Pentagon asserts that poetry poses special security risks, and related translation issues may obscure the artistry or message of some of the 17 poets’ verse, Falkoff’s volume nevertheless gives prisoners’ voices a forum in which they might be heard. At the nexus of legal and literary scholarship, poetic voice and its expression become a site of deconstructing identity. The Guantanamo poets invite readers to explore the ways that aesthetics form perceptions of their identity as …

Throw Away The Jail Or Throw Away The Key? The Effect Of Punishment On Recidivism And Social Cost, Miguel De Figueiredo

Faculty Articles and Papers

"We jail too many people and it costs too much. Incarceration is not only expensive, it also is prone to ""hardening"" and negative peer learning effectshat may increase recidivism. With local, state, and federal budgets at a breaking point, politicians and regulators are increasingly considering alternative approaches to preventing crime. Yet, they face a problem. Studies show that incapacitation is a successful way of reducing crime, yet most scholars and policymakers think that the only way to incapacitate is to incarcerate. This study demonstrates that this assumption is problematic, arguing that we should understand incapacitation along a continuum, with incarceration …

The Questionable Character Of The Bar's Character And Fitness Inquiry, Leslie Levin, Peter Siegelman

Faculty Articles and Papers

Lawyers who engage in misconduct can do substantial harm. To screen out "unfit" lawyers, bar examining authorities collect detailed personal information from bar applicants. The rationale for this "character and fimess" inquiry is to identify who is likely to become a problematic lawyer. Despite the history of discrimination associated with this inquiry and the highly personal information requested, there has been no rigorous test of whether such predictions are possible. This article examines the information disclosed by 1,343 Connecticut bar applicants and their subsequent disciplinary records. It reveals that while some bar application data are associated with an elevated risk …

Information & Equilibrium In Insurance Markets With Big Data, Peter Siegelman

Faculty Articles and Papers

Asymmetric information makes the behavior of insurance markets very difficult to predict. But this Article argues that the increasing use of Big Data by insurers will not result in forecasts of loss that are so accurate that they eliminate uncertainty, and with it, the possibility of insurance. Big Data techniques might lead to a 'flip" in informational asymmetry, resulting in a situation in which insurers know more about their customers than the latter know about themselves. But the effects of such a development could actually be benign. Finally, the Article considers the potential for Big (or at least, More) Data …

Administering Section 2 Of The Voting Rights Act After Shelby County, Douglas M. Spencer, Christopher S. Elmendorf

Faculty Articles and Papers

Until the Supreme Court put an end to it in Shelby County v. Holder, section 5 of the Voting Rights Act was widely regarded as an effective, low-cost tool for blocking potentially discriminatory changes to election laws and administrative practices. The provision the Supreme Court left standing, section 2, is generally seen as expensive, cumbersome, and almost wholly ineffective at blocking changes before they take effect. This Article argues that the courts, in partnership with the Department of Justice, could reform section 2 so that it fills much of the gap left by the Supreme Court's evisceration of section 5. …

A Personal Report On Methodological Developments In Us Law, Stephen Utz

Faculty Articles and Papers

A survey of contemporary legal research in the United States must to some extent be personal and impressionistic. No one can see the entire landscape or has the expertise to evaluate everything in it. The pitfall of myopia is heightened by the enormous variety of current methods and results, the need to mention and evaluate areas of specialty in which things are going well or poorly, and publication biases that should not influence content but inevitably do. The already huge variety of books, journals, and commercial guides to particular legal subjects has been overshadowed by an uncountable array of electronically …

In The Name Of The Child: Race, Gender, And Economics In Adoptive Couple V. Baby Girl, Bethany Berger

Faculty Articles and Papers

On June 25, 2013, the Supreme Court decided Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl, holding that the Indian Child Welfare Act did not permit the Cherokee father in that case to object to termination of his parental rights. The case is ostensibly about a dispute between prospective adoptive parents and a biological father. This Article demonstrates that it is about a lot more than that. It is a microcosm of anxieties about Indianness, race, and the changing nature of parenthood. While made in the name of the child, moreover, the decision supports practices and policies that do not forward and may …

Safeguarding State Interests In Health Insurance Exchange Establishment, Christine M. Monahan

Connecticut Insurance Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Erie Denied: How Federal Courts Decide Insurance Coverage Cases Differently And What To Do About It, John L. Watkins

Connecticut Insurance Law Journal

No abstract provided.

America’S Growing Problem: How The Patient Protection And Affordable Care Act Failed To Go Far Enough In Addressing The Obesity Epidemic, Ashley A. Noel

Connecticut Insurance Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Even I Can’T Cover Me: Examining The Ncaa’S Effective Prohibition On “Loss Of Value” Insurance For Its Student-Athletes, Michael D. Randall

Connecticut Insurance Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Reference Pricing: A Small And Mighty Solution To Bend The Health Care Cost Curve, Srishti Miglani

Connecticut Insurance Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Everything’S Bigger In Texas: Except The Medmal Settlements, Tom Baker, Eric Hellan, Jonathan Klick

Connecticut Insurance Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Patient Protection And Affordable Care Act: What Does It Really Do?, John G. Day

Connecticut Insurance Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Adoption Disruption Insurance: A Policy That America Is Not Ready To Adopt, Gregory J. Chase

Connecticut Insurance Law Journal

No abstract provided.

An Alternate Theory Of Burwell V. Hobby Lobby, Jessica L. Roberts

Connecticut Insurance Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Muzzling Antitrust: Information Products, Innovation And Free Speech, Hillary Greene

Faculty Articles and Papers

How well does the American legal system balance the diverse values society espouses? Courts must often navigate values that are not consistent, commensurate, or subject to ordinal ranking. This article examines the confluence of incommensurate values within the important context of antitrust challenges to information product redesigns (e.g., Google, Nielsen). The information economy has given rise to the emergence of powerful firms in the business of information products. Some of these firms have had product redesigns challenged as anticompetitive. This article examines two defenses to these challenges. First, the products constitute protected speech and should be immunized entirely from antitrust …

Modernizing The State Corporate Income Tax: Market-Based Apportionment For Content Providers, Richard Pomp

Faculty Articles and Papers

This Issue Paper discusses how technology has overtaken the traditional ways the states tax the income of “content providers” that operate broadcast and cable networks, sell advertising, and produce content such as movies and television programs. This content is licensed at wholesale to distributors and along with the advertising, is watched by customers of these distributors on their televisions, smart phones, tablets, gaming consoles, and computers— either in their homes or on the move.

The so-called “model” for taxing multistate businesses like content providers--the Uniform Division of Income for Tax Purposes Act (UDITPA)--was developed in 1957 and has been adopted …

When Judges Have Reasons Not To Give Reasons - A Comparative Law Approach, Mathilde Cohen

Faculty Articles and Papers

Influential theories of law have celebrated judicial reasongiving as furthering a host of democratic values, including judges' accountability, citizens'participation in adjudication, and a more accurate and transparent decision-making process. This Article has two main purposes. First, it argues that although reasongiving is important, it is often in tension with other values of the judicial process, such as guidance, sincerity, and efficiency. Reason-giving must, therefore, be balanced against these competing values. In other words, judges sometimes have reasons not to give reasons. Second, contrary to common intuition, common law and civil law systems deal with this tension between reasons for and …

Merging Innovation Into Antitrust Agency Enforcement Of The Clayton Act, Hillary Greene

Faculty Articles and Papers

The treatment of innovation within the merger context by U.S. Antitrust Agencies continues to evolve, with regard to both general statements of enforcement policy and specific enforcement decisions. The respective merger guidelines issued by the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission did not consider potential impacts on innovation or research and development until 1982, and then only in passing. By contrast, their joint 2010 Horizontal Merger Guidelines devote an entire section to innovation issues. This Essay examines both the frequency and manner with which the Antitrust Agencies invoke innovation-based concerns within their respective merger challenges from 2004-2014. It …

Four Challenges For Ttip Regulatory Cooperation, Richard Parker

Faculty Articles and Papers

While public debate over trade policy focuses on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement, another mammoth trade agreement is moving forward, more quietly, between two of the three largest economies in the world: The United States (US) and the European Union (EU). The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) aims to create the largest free trade zone in the world, encompassing two huge economies that together comprise nearly half of the world's gross domestic product.

The two sides hope that TTIP will generate more than 200 billion dollars per year in benefits for producers and consumers on both sides of …

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

Faculty Articles and Papers

No abstract provided.

Judicial Treatment Of The Antitrust Treatise, Hillary Greene, D. Daniel Sokol

Faculty Articles and Papers

Herbert Hovenkamp has had a tremendous impact in antitrust scholarship. With over 4000 citations in the WestlawJLR database (most of which are for his antitrust scholarship), Hovenkamp is one of the most cited scholars in legal academia and has been recognized by the legal academy and the bar for his contribution to antitrust.' Hovenkamp's total citations are in part a function of his academic outputs; with 12 books (including monographs, edited books, and case books), plus the two-volume treatise on IP and Antitrust and the 2 i-volume Antitrust Law: An Analysis of Antitrust Principles and Their Application ("Treatise"), Hovenkamp could …

Two Ways To Rewrite The Constitution, Richard Kay

Faculty Articles and Papers

The proposition that the Constitution needs to be rewritten begs a critical question-namely what the Constitution is. If we posit that by Constitution we mean the rules drafted by the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 as amended in accordance with Article V of those rules, the argument that many of those rules are out of date and need to be replaced is a powerful one. This inadequacy appears in the powers they grant, the powers they do not grant, some of the limitations they impose on public decisions, and some limitations they ought to impose but do not. No matter how …

Presuming Damages For Unemployment Distress, Sachin Pandya

Faculty Articles and Papers

A person is illegally fired and, as a result, becomes unemployed for a period of time. If that person wins a lawsuit based on that illegal firing, she can typically recover what she would have earned in wages during that time, as well as reasonable expenses she incurred to search for a new job. Involuntary unemployment, however, also causes people to lose psychological well-being, because they are forced to suffer the experience of being unemployed while they look for a new job. That loss ("unemployment distress") can range in severity from feelings of anxiety and humiliation to severe depression. Accordingly, …

The Psychodynamics Of Sexual Choice, Anne Dailey

Faculty Articles and Papers

The right of sexual autonomy now occupies a central place in the scheme of constitutional liberties. Consensual sexual relations, including fornication, adultery, and sodomy, are understood to lie beyond the reach of law 's regulatory power. Yet as described in this Article, some sexual encounters by their very nature are likely to engage unconscious psychological processes that involve troubling levels of vulnerability and coercion. Drawing on psychoanalysis, this Article proceeds by examining three relationships that raise heightened concerns about unconscious impairments in sexual choice. Part I investigates the way in which adult incest may trigger unconscious feelings of submission on …

Fourth Amendment Fiduciaries, Kiel Brennan-Marquez

Faculty Articles and Papers

Fourth Amendment law is sorely in need of reform. To paraphrase Justice Sotomayor's concurrence in United States v. Jones, the idea that people have no expectation of privacy in information voluntarily shared with third-parties-the foundation of the widely reviled "third-party doctrine "-makes little sense in the digital age.

In truth, however, it is not just the third-party doctrine that needs retooling today. It is the Fourth Amendment's general approach to the problem of "shared information. " Under existing law, if A shares information with B, A runs the risk of "misplaced trust"-the risk that B will disclose the information to …

Le Début De La Désillusion Américaine Envers L’Europe Et Le Droit International, 1914-1946 [The Onset Of American Disillusionment With Europe And International Law: 1914-1946], Mark Weston Janis

Faculty Articles and Papers

Many date the disillusionment of the United States with the international law and organization project to sometime after World War II. Actually, widespread American disillusionment with international law and organization began in 1914 with the outbreak of World War I. Many Americans became convinced that European civilization had failed to emerge from the excesses of state sovereignty and militarism. This essay illustrates the onset of American disillusionment with Europe and with international law and organization between 1914 and 1946.