Law Commons^™

For The Right Reasons: The Rules Of The Game For Institutionalists, Rick Joslyn

Connecticut Law Review

The United States judiciary demonstrates better than any other constitutional institution the inherent fragility of American democracy. There is a reasonable debate to be had over when and exactly how the Supreme Court squandered the precious legitimacy on which its very existence rests. Yet, today, observers must confront with renewed urgency the impact crater of discontent that has been driven into the institution. The Court has been weaponized, politicized, and villainized; it has been lionized for its institutional heft. But increasingly loud voices have called for foundational reforms. There is a scramble for solutions to check the Court’s newly-emboldened right-wing …

What’S (Race In) The Law Got To Do With It: Incorporating Race In Legal Curriculum, Sonia M. Gipson Rankin

Connecticut Law Review

Gen Z is defined as including persons born after 1996 and, in 2018, the first Gen Z would have been twenty-two years old, the historically traditional age that many complete undergraduate studies and enter law school. With Gen Z entering law schools, the legal academy has been wholeheartedly preparing for the arrival of the first truly digital native generation in a myriad of ways. However, law training has been slow to progress in addressing the unspoken complexities of context and unconscious bias in the classroom with this population. Today’s Gen Z students were predominately raised in de facto segregated schools …

Existence As A Threat, Alena M. Allen

Connecticut Law Review

There is an ongoing debate in the legal academy about how and whether to integrate race into curricula. For people of color, race impacts their day-to-day lives in ways large and small. In the law school setting, the experience of students of color is often a fraught one. For many students of color, navigating law school is akin to walking a tight rope. This Essay attempts to highlight the myriad challenges facing students of color, and it offers some thoughts about how to create a more inclusive environment

The Long Shadow: The Tulsa Race Massacre A Century Later, An Interview With Scott Ellsworth, Scott Ellsworth, Abby Booth, Joan Bosma

Connecticut Law Review

Connecticut Law Review’s 2021 Symposium, titled “History and the Tulsa Race Massacre: What’s (the Law) Got to Do With It?” explored the legal and historical relevance of the Massacre. Following the Symposium, Connecticut Law Review Symposium Editors, Abby Booth and Joan Bosma, interviewed Professor Scott Ellsworth, a historian and leading scholar on the Massacre and a panelist at the Symposium. Professor Ellsworth provides a summary of the Massacre—including the events before and after the Massacre—and discusses the overwhelming lack of recognition that the Massacre has received in the last century.

Firearms And Protest: Lessons From The Black Tradition Of Arms, Nicholas J. Johnson

Connecticut Law Review

Kenosha was no aberration. Our history is filled with episodes of righteous protest boiling over into violence. Where violence is imminent, our traditions and laws allow innocents to use corresponding violence in self-defense. This arrangement is imperfect and demands hard thinking about how to refine and possibly improve it. One source of lessons toward this end is the experience of Black freedom fighters who navigated turmoil that dwarfs our current troubles. The principles that guided their struggle help frame a sphere of legitimate gun use during periods of civil unrest. These principles emerge from a considered philosophy and practice of …

Trading Places Or Changing Spaces? At The Crossroads Of Defining And Redressing Segregation, Melvin J. Kelley Iv

Connecticut Law Review

Segregation rates have remained stagnant in many regions of the United States since the passage of the federal Fair Housing Act (FHA) in 1968 and experts expect them to increase in large metropolitan areas. Consequently, poor Blacks will be subjected to the extreme deprivation of group life chances that characterize racially and economically segregated environments. The global pandemic has only further exacerbated these dire circumstances. While severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) may not discriminate, housing, healthcare, criminal, and economic policies have, rendering impoverished communities of color particularly vulnerable to the ravages of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).

The …

The Tulsa Race Massacre Of 1921: A Lesson In The Law Of Trespass, Kara W. Swanson

Connecticut Law Review

The Connecticut Law Review Symposium poses the question: “History and the Tulsa Race Massacre: What’s the Law Got to Do With It?” In one sense, the answer to the question is easy. Since 1921, Black Tulsans have been looking to law and lawyers to address the harms inflicted during the Tulsa Race Massacre, albeit with little success. I was asked to consider, however, the startling lack of recognition of the Massacre—that is, the seemingly impossible feat of forgetting the racially motivated wholesale destruction of a community. In this Essay, I focus on one space of non-recognition, law schools, and on …

Forgotten Immigrant Voices: West Indian Immigrant Experiences And Attitudes Towards Contemporary Immigration, Danielle Cross

Honors Scholar Theses

Scholarly work and media coverage both point to the negative effect that the rhetoric and policy of former US President Donald Trump had on the lived experience and wellbeing of immigrant groups explicitly targeted by it (i.e., the “Trump effect”). Typically, the focus has been on Muslim and Latino immigrants as well as those less-explicitly targeted but still affected by Trump-era policies, such as temporary workers. This thesis explores whether Black immigrants from the English-speaking Caribbean, a group notably missing from the literature of “Trump effects” on immigrant experiences, experienced similar attitudinal or practical effects as a result of contemporary …

Inadequate Healthcare, Inadequate Recovery: Exploring The Challenges Of Compensating Pregnant Inmates Deprived Of Adequate Healthcare At State Prisons, Katherine Mckeon

Connecticut Law Review

Prenatal healthcare services available to pregnant inmates in state prisons are wholly inadequate. Despite the glaring shortcomings of state prisons’ healthcare services, there has still only been limited attention paid to rectifying the problem. This lack of attention is problematic for many reasons, but especially because the number of women in prisons has increased in recent decades and inmates who are pregnant when they arrive to prison face conditions that risk extreme health condition.

Not only are pregnant inmates subjected to inadequate healthcare services, but they also have very few legal remedies available to them when they have been deprived …

Evaluating The Constitutionality Of Marital Status Classifications In The Regulation Of Posthumous Reproduction And Postmortem Sperm Retrieval, Alison Jane Walker

Connecticut Law Review

In Eisenstadt v. Baird, the Supreme Court held that a state law prohibiting the provision of contraceptives to unmarried persons violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s rational basis test because of the disparate treatment it afforded to married and unmarried individuals. Eisenstadt stands for an individual’s right to make their own procreative decisions, free from governmental intrusions which impose arbitrary classifications on privacy and freedom. This Note focuses on posthumous reproduction and, more specifically, postmortem sperm retrieval: the process of using a deceased male’s frozen sperm after his death to produce his biological children at the request of his spouse or intimate …

Ovarian Tissue Cryopreservation: A Window Into The Reproductive Justice Concerns Underlying Assisted Reproductive Technologies, Caitlyn Pesavento

Connecticut Law Review

More regulatory framework is needed for assisted reproductive technologies. Taken together, the high costs of fertility treatment, lack of widespread insurance coverage, and social perceptions of motherhood make it nearly impossible for women from traditionally marginalized backgrounds to collectively overcome barriers of access to fertility treatments. Viewing the ovarian tissue cryopreservation procedure through a reproductive justice framework illustrates an inherent dichotomy between increasing availability and increasing access to assisted reproductive technologies. This Comment explores the current regulation—or lack thereof—of assisted reproductive technologies; advocates for the regulation of ovarian tissue cryopreservation by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration; scrutinizes the failings …

As Seen On Screen: American Ambivalence Shown Through Death Penalty And Vigilante Films, Lisette Donewald

Honors Scholar Theses

The United States is one of the last western nations still practicing capital punishment. A history of and commitment to vigilantism and its ideals offers an explanation of America’s retention of capital punishment. Employing scholarship on law and popular culture and vigilantism, this thesis finds that pro-death penalty frames are prevalent in vigilante films while anti-death penalty frames are prevalent in films that focus specifically upon capital punishment. Since the 1960’s however, there has been a gradual shift towards anti-death penalty frames and away from pro-death penalty frames as well as changes in the themes presented in the two genres …

Brains Without Money: Poverty As Disabling, Emily R.D. Murphy

Connecticut Law Review

The United States has long treated poverty and disability as separate legal and social categories, a division grounded in widespread assumptions about the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor. In the case of disability, individuals generally are not thought to be morally responsible for their disadvantage, whereas in the case of poverty, individuals are assumed to be at fault for their disadvantage and are therefore less deserving of aid. This Article argues that recent advances in brain and behavioral science undermine the factual basis for those assumptions. Poverty inhibits brain development during childhood and, later in life, adversely affects cognitive capacities that …

Overseeing Oversight, Michael Karanicolas, Margaret B. Kwoka

Connecticut Law Review

Accountability is at the core of democratic governance. In the United States, the administrative state is formally situated within the executive branch, but the unelected nature of agency officials, combined with the vast power they wield, has long been cause for concern. A crucial tool for establishing accountability within this so-called “Fourth Branch” is the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which provides ordinary members of the public with a mechanism for direct oversight of how administrative agencies function. Similar right-to-information laws have been implemented in over one hundred countries. However, in contrast to most of its international counterparts, the FOIA …

A Sixth Amendment Inclusionary Rule For Fourth Amendment Violations, Scott W. Howe

Connecticut Law Review

Early in the tenure of Chief Justice Roberts, a five-Justice majority of the Supreme Court signaled that it was ready to consider eliminating the exclusionary rule as a remedy for Fourth Amendment violations. The central concern was that, even after decades of limiting the rule through new exceptions, it purportedly lacked utility in balancing protections against the competing dangers of crime and police abuse, the only rationale on which it has been grounded in the modern era. That existential reappraisal never openly occurred, and the exclusionary rule, in further reduced form, still survives. Yet, given the Court’s recent conservative shift, …

Pricing Plastics Pollution: Lessons From Three Decades Of Climate Policy, Jonas J. Monast, John Virdin

Connecticut Law Review

Plastic is now the most widely used human-made substance on the planet, and plastics pollution impacts marine and coastal ecosystems, local economies, and human health. Local and national governments are increasingly responding by banning plastic bags and other specific plastic products, taxing the use of certain plastics, and improving waste management and recycling. These are important steps, but alone they will not result in a meaningful reduction in cumulative plastics pollution or encourage development of sufficient alternatives to plastic. Additional policy measures are necessary.

This Article argues that climate change and plastic pollution share numerous similarities, and these similarities allow …

Unsettled Law: Social-Movement Conflict, Stare Decisis, And Roe V. Wade, Mary Ziegler

Connecticut Law Review

With President Donald Trump’s third Supreme Court nomination, the reexamination of Roe v. Wade has become a probability. An increasingly conservative Court will almost certainly not embrace the idea of abortion rights. Instead, the fate of abortion rights will likely turn on the meaning of stare decisis, a doctrine requiring the Court to pay some deference to its past decisions. Stare decisis has recently played a starring role in abortion jurisprudence. In his controlling concurrence in June Medical Services L.L.C. v. Russo, Chief Justice Roberts invoked stare decisis while gutting the substantive rule written into the precedent to which he …

Risk And Rights In Transatlantic Data Transfers: Eu Privacy Law, U.S. Surveillance, And The Search For Common Ground, Ira Rubinstein, Peter Margulies

Connecticut Law Review

Privacy advocates rightly view the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) decision in Data Protection Commissioner v. Facebook Ireland Ltd. and Maximilian Schrems (Schrems II) as a landmark. But, one stakeholder’s landmark is another’s headache. The CJEU’s decision invalidated the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield agreement governing transatlantic transfers of personal data. Citing U.S. surveillance, the CJEU found that data transfers lacked adequate privacy protections under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The Schrems II decision thus clouded the future of data transfers that help drive the global economy. This Article offers a hybrid approach to safeguard privacy rights …

Is Bitcoin Prudent? Is Art Diversified? Offering Alternative Investments To 401(K) Participants, Edward A. Zelinsky

Connecticut Law Review

Whether 401(k) plans’ investment menus should feature “alternative” investments is a fact-driven inquiry applying ERISA’s fiduciary standards of prudence, loyalty, and diversification. Central to this fact-driven inquiry is whether the alternative investment class in question is broadly accepted by investors in general and by professional defined benefit trustees in particular. A similarly salient concern when making this inquiry is the financial unsophistication of many, perhaps most, 401(k) participants. Accounting for these considerations, this Article concludes that REITs, private equity funds, and hedge funds can, with limits, today be offered as investment choices to 401(k) participants, but that cryptocurrencies (including Bitcoin), …

Judicial Consensus: Why The Supreme Court Should Decide Its Cases Unanimously, David Orentlicher

Connecticut Law Review

Like Congress and other deliberative bodies, the Supreme Court decides its cases by majority vote. If at least five of the nine Justices come to an agreement, their view prevails. But why is that the case? Majority voting for the Court is not spelled out in the Constitution, a federal statute, or Supreme Court rules.

Nor it is obvious that the Court should decide by a majority vote. When the public votes on a ballot measure, it typically makes sense to follow the majority. The general will of the electorate ought to govern. But judicial decisions are not supposed to …

What’S In A Form? Employment Background Checks Under The Fair Credit Reporting Act, Emily Scace

Connecticut Law Review

For employers, background checks, credit checks, and similar measures are a prudent step to guard against negligent hiring claims and other potential losses that can result from poor hiring decisions. But these practices necessarily require employees to relinquish some of their interests in privacy and may also introduce bias into the hiring process. The Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), which applies to many of these employment screening measures, requires employers to follow certain procedural requirements that seek to ensure that employees and applicants understand the scope of the information that will be sought in a background or credit check, provide …

Re-Evaluating Turnover/Gross Receipts Taxes: Their Myths And Their Realities, Richard Pomp

Faculty Articles and Papers

Turnover taxes have a storied history dating back to ancient Athens, and are starting to make a comeback in the States. A gross receipts or turnover tax is levied every time a good or service “turns over,” that is, transferred from one entity to another for consideration. The resulting gross receipt is subject to tax. The tax base is “turnover” and the measure of the tax is “gross receipts.”

A turnover tax applies to both services and tangible items ranging from sales of business inputs to sales to end users alike; in essence it taxes business activity, whereas a retail …

"This Is Not Normal": The Role Of Lawyer Organizations In Protecting Constitutional Norms And Values, Leslie C. Levin

Faculty Articles and Papers

Lawyer organizations in the United States perform a range of functions. Some are essentially social clubs that provide networking opportunities for lawyers. Others help their members stay up to date on changes in the law and provide other educational and material benefits.1 Through these efforts, lawyer organizations often serve as a site where lawyers learn the norms and values of the legal profession. Some lawyer organizations also perform more outward facing functions, working through lobbying and litigation to maintain lawyers’ status and protect their economic interests. Others pursue even broader goals, working to enhance the functioning of the courts, provide …

Aggregate Stare Decisis, Kiel Brennan-Marquez

Faculty Articles and Papers

The fate of stare decisis hangs in the wind. Different factions of the Supreme Court are now engaged in open debate echoing decades of scholarship-about the doctrine's role in our constitutional system. Broadly speaking, two camps have emerged. The first embraces the orthodox view that stare decisis should reflect "neutral principles" that run orthogonal to a case's merits; otherwise, it will be incapable of keeping the law stable over time. The second argues that insulating stare decisis from the underlying merits has always been a conceptual mistake. Instead, the doctrine should focus more explicitly on the merits by diagnosing the …

Race To Property: Racial Distortions Of Property Law, 1634 To Today, Bethany Berger

Faculty Articles and Papers

Race shaped property law for everyone in the United States, and we are all the poorer for it. This transformation began in the colonial era, when demands for Indian land annexation and a slave-based economy created new legal innovations in recording, foreclosure, and commodification of property. It continued in the antebellum era, when these same processes elevated nationalized property transactions over other rights; and gained new tactics after the end of slavery through the early twentieth century, when the pursuit of racial hierarchy expanded private owners' rights to exclude and tied occupation of physical space to status. The influence of …

The Transnational Effects Of Anti-Corruption Prosecutions By The Us And How They Influence Societies, Based On The Examples Of The Fcpa Enforcement In Ukraine And Russia, Anastasiia Imedidze

Dissertations and Honors Papers

After the Enron case and PATRIOT Act of 2001, enforcement of the FCPA by the Department of Justice and Securities and Exchange Commission around the world was increased. The role of compliance function in the US companies was seriously reconsidered which has led to non-obligatory but very desired development of robust compliance systems inside organizations.

In this paper, I will briefly discuss the FCPA basics, the necessity of compliance programs inside organizations and will look through statistics that companies are willing to adopt these programs, the US legislation regarding compliance programs in the organizations. Then, I will deepen into two …

Turnover Taxes: Their Origin, Fall From Grace, And Resurrection, Richard Pomp

Faculty Articles and Papers

The turnover tax, a hallmark of developing nations and even once blamed for Spain’s decline, has made a comeback in the states, starting with Ohio.

A turnover tax is a gross receipts tax that is applied every time a good or service “turns over,” that is, every time the good or service transfers from one entity to another for consideration. The tax base is therefore turnover, and the measure of the tax is gross receipts.

In this article, Professor Richard Pomp examines the turnover tax’s deep roots dating back to ancient Athens, and tracks its course from the time the …

Resisting The Siren Song Of Gross Receipts Taxes: From The Middle Ages To Maryland’S Tax On Digital Advertising-Abstract, Richard Pomp

Faculty Articles and Papers

A turnover tax, more commonly known as a gross receipts tax, has a long and sordid history. The tax has ancient roots, first appearing when economies were primitive and underdeveloped, with few alternatives for raising revenue. A turnover tax makes no pretense of taxing profits, income, consumption, wealth, or other bases that have come to be accepted as legitimate around the world. Instead, it taxes business activity, and is fundamentally different in concept, and inferior to, either a well-designed retail sales tax or a value-added tax.

Economists throughout the ages have nearly universally condemned turnover taxes; some even blame the …

Eliding Original Understanding In Cedar Point Nursery V. Hassid, Bethany Berger

Faculty Articles and Papers

Cedar Point Nursey v. Hassid is a triumph of the conservative majority of the Supreme Court. In holding that temporary entries to land are takings without regard to duration, impact, or the public interest, the Court fulfilled the decades-long ambitions of anti-regulatory advocates of private property. Progressive and conservative scholars agree that the decision runs roughshod over precedent. This essay focuses on a less obvious aspect of Cedar Point: its flagrant departure from original understanding. American law at the time of the founding recognized a robust right to enter private property. Trespass law did not even reach entries unless they …

Rhode Was Right (About Character And Fitness), Leslie C. Levin

Faculty Articles and Papers

Almost 40 years ago, Deborah Rhode chronicled numerous problems with the legal profession’s character and fitness inquiry in her seminal article, Moral Character as a Professional Credential. This essay, which is dedicated to her memory, assesses the current state of that inquiry. The essay notes a few areas of improvement in some jurisdictions, but finds the character and fitness inquiry remains problematic. Some jurisdictions continue to operate without published standards and most character and fitness committees—and even the courts— do not publish information about their decisions. It is still the case, as Rhode noted, that there is little evidence that …