Law Commons^™

Are Cryptopunks Copyrightable?, Brian L. Frye

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Larva Labs’s CryptoPunks NFTs are iconic. Created in 2017, they were among the first NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain. Four years later, they are among the most valuable, selling for anywhere from $200,000 to millions of dollars.

The CryptoPunks collection consists of 10,000 NFTs, each of which is associated with a unique CryptoPunks image. Everyone knows who owns each CryptoPunks NFT. The Ethereum blockchain provides indelible proof. But people disagree about who owns - and who should own - the copyright in the CryptoPunks images. Most CryptoPunks NFT owners believe they should own the copyright in the image associated with …

The Costs Of The Punishment Clause, Cortney E. Lollar

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Criminal punishment pursuant to a facially valid conviction in a court of law is an uncontested exception to the Thirteenth Amendment’s prohibition on slavery and involuntary servitude. After all, the Constitutional text reads, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.” And yet, beginning almost immediately after the Thirteenth Amendment was adopted, states regularly employed criminal statutes to limit the movement and behaviors of those previously enslaved and subject them to slavery-type labor camps in conditions that closely mirrored slavery. Because neither the …

State Constitutions And Youth Voting Rights, Joshua A. Douglas

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Young voters suffer the lowest turnout rates in American elections. One study shows that younger voters face numerous barriers when attempting to cast a ballot, such as work responsibilities, not receiving an absentee ballot in time, inability to find or access their polling place, voter ID problems, or other issues. Many state election laws are a labyrinth of rules and regulations that make it more difficult to vote, especially for younger people. As one report notes, “many young voters are new voters who need to register for the first time and who may be unfamiliar with the process. Young people …

Personalizing Prices To Redistribute Wealth In Antitrust And Public Utility Rate Regulation, Ramsi A. Woodcock

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The information age is enabling firms with even small amounts of market power to personalize the prices they charge to each consumer in the market. Left to their own devices, firms will use this new power to increase profits by charging prices personalized to the maximum that each consumer is willing to pay. But government can also use the new power to personalize prices to equalize wealth—by insisting that firms personalize high prices to the rich and low prices to the poor—and most of the legal rules needed to do so are already in place. Both the antitrust laws and …

Cross-Cultural Communication In A Crisis: The Universality Of Visual Narrative In The Covid-19 Pandemic, Michael D. Murray

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

A primary goal of twenty-first century legal works is to communicate the law effectively to diverse audiences. Many of the most needful and most vulnerable audiences for legal information have members who lack basic literacy skills and suffer linguistic and cultural confusion from verbal textual media—namely, the printed word. Yet for centuries, legal rules and government restrictions have been communicated nearly exclusively through the printed word. Recent scholarship in visual legal rhetoric, visual literacy studies, and visual cultural studies is informed by cognitive psychology and neuroscience that all points to a solution: visual communication of the law. Visual communication is …

These Brutal Indignities: The Case For Crimes Against Humanity In Black America, Tiffany D. Atkins

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

There is nothing we can do. Not guilty. No indictment. There is nothing we can do. As cases of violence and police killings of Black Americans continue to rise, "there's nothing we can do" seems like the default response from the American justice system. Despite the evidence, police officers enjoy the protection of qualified immunity to insulate them from the consequences of their deadly actions. Prosecutors, who often work closely with police, decline to press criminal charges, or if charges are raised, they rarely lead to convictions. Instead of protecting its citizens from violence and loss of life, the American …

The Guardians Of The New Internal Revenue Code, Douglas C. Michael

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The proliferation of electronic filing (e-filing) of income tax returns creates new problems and opportunities for the regulation of the tax return preparation industry. Now that e-filing is universal, the rules of the law are, for many taxpayers, the code of the tax software, not in the Internal Revenue Code. The natural consequences of universal e-filing are unremitting complexity in a tax code which is also used to deliver social benefits in the form of tax credits. This, combined with the polit¬ical pariah status of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), makes it imperative that the IRS work with the tax …

Wasting Water: Why The Supreme Court Should Consider Climate Change When Appointing Water Rights Between States, Matthew Hayes

Kentucky Journal of Equine, Agriculture, & Natural Resources Law

No abstract provided.

Putting The Fire Out: An Analytical Analysis Into The Bureau Of Land Management’S New Protest Petition Law, Lyndsey Antos

Kentucky Journal of Equine, Agriculture, & Natural Resources Law

No abstract provided.

The Spirit Of The Law In The Anthropocene: A Massachusetts V. Environmental Protection Agency Casenote, Victoria Depalma

Kentucky Journal of Equine, Agriculture, & Natural Resources Law

No abstract provided.

Fixing The Holes In The Endangered Species Act, Alison Adkins

Kentucky Journal of Equine, Agriculture, & Natural Resources Law

No abstract provided.

Agricultural Best Management Practices And A National Treasure: The Florida Experience, Silvia Alderman

Kentucky Journal of Equine, Agriculture, & Natural Resources Law

No abstract provided.

The Importance Of The Clean Water Act And Current Attacks On Its Layers Of Oversight And Effectiveness Under Sections 401 And 404, C. Scott Kunde

Kentucky Journal of Equine, Agriculture, & Natural Resources Law

No abstract provided.

Attack Of The Invasive Carp: Why Asian Carp Are Devastating To Kentucky And What The Commonwealth Can Do To Fight Against Them, Nick Cacopardo

Kentucky Journal of Equine, Agriculture, & Natural Resources Law

No abstract provided.

Whiskey Business: The Environmental Hazards Of The Bourbon Industry And Proposed Regulatory Solutions, Zachary D. Mills

Kentucky Journal of Equine, Agriculture, & Natural Resources Law

No abstract provided.

Buffering Streams: Incentivizing Riparian Buffers In The Bluegrass, Harrison J.B. Chittenden

Kentucky Journal of Equine, Agriculture, & Natural Resources Law

No abstract provided.

Better Light Than Never: Using An Energy Justice Approach To Close The Solar Racial And Ethnic Gap In Kentucky, Cierra Garcia

Kentucky Journal of Equine, Agriculture, & Natural Resources Law

No abstract provided.

Rethinking Reforestation: Sustainable And Economic Management Of Kentucky’S Forests, Braydan Roark

Kentucky Journal of Equine, Agriculture, & Natural Resources Law

No abstract provided.

Excessive Fee Litigation In Light Of Hughes V. Northwestern University, Kathryn L. Moore

Law Faculty Books and Chapters

On September 11, 2006, Jerry Schlichter, a personal injury lawyer from St. Louis, Missouri, rocked the 401(k) plan market by filing a flurry of lawsuits against major corporations alleging that their 401(k) plans were paying excessive fees for plan administration and asset management that harmed employees in violation of their fiduciary duties under ERISA. Between 2006 and 2007, 31 excessive fee suits were filed by Schlichter and other firms. Following several large settlements, including a $62 million settlement by Lockheed Martin, a second wave of excessive fee litigation began in 2015 with more than 50 suits filed in both 2016 …

Toxic Public Goods, Brian L. Frye

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Everybody loves public goods. After all, they are a perpetual utility machine. Obviously, we want as many of them as possible. But what if the consumption of a public good actually decreases net social welfare? I refer to this kind of public good as a "toxic public good." In this essay, I discuss three kinds of potential toxic public goods: trolling, pornography, and ideology, and I reflect on how we might make the production of toxic public goods more efficient.

The Multi-Level Marketing Pandemic, Christopher G. Bradley, Hannah E. Oates

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Among the societal effects of the COVID-19 pandemic has been a sharp rise in the activities of multi-level marketing companies (MLMs). MLMs are business enterprises in which participants seek not only to sell products to friends, family, and social media contacts, but also to recruit them as MLM participants, with the promise of "building their own business from home."

False promises often pervade MLM sales pitches. Evidence shows that few participants see even a dollar of profit from their MLM work; the vast majority of recruits quickly abandon their MLM dreams and lose their investments. Yet the pitch has become …

The Ties That Bind: The Relationship Between Law Firm Growth And Law Firm Survival, Alan J. Kluegel

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

For the better part of the twentieth century, law firms hired, trained, and grew through a stable and predictable pattern: hire new law school graduates, monitor and evaluate their work, and pick promising attorneys from among their ranks and elevate them to partner. Rinse, lather, repeat. A combination of professional norms and organizational inertia made this approach the dominant method of growth among large corporate law firms until changes in legal market broke down these customary practices, ushering in a new era of lawyer mobility. Now, it has become commonplace for lawyers to leave for greener pastures as more law …

A New Methodology For The Analysis Of Visuals In Legal Works, Michael D. Murray

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The goal of this Article is to introduce a comprehensive methodology for the analysis of visuals used for communication in legal works, by which I mean transactional and litigation documents, legal instruments, primary and secondary sources of law, and legal informational materials. To date, the scholarship on visuals in legal communications has been heavily descriptive, with some forays into the ethical and practical considerations of the use of “visualized” legal works. No one has yet devised a comprehensive analytical methodology that draws upon the disciplines of visual literacy, visual cultural studies, visual rhetoric, and mise en scène analysis to evaluate …

The Mixed Legacy Of The January 6 Investigation For Executive Privilege And Congressional Oversight, Jonathan Shaub

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The attack on the Capitol on January 6 was an unprecedented event in U.S. history. Across a wide swath of constitutional law, January 6 will have significant implications and consequences, most of which are likely not yet known. That is particularly true of constitutional doctrines governing congressional oversight and executive privilege. The select committee established by the House of Representatives to investigate the events on and leading up to January 6 has undertaken a monumental task of investigating, collecting, and reporting the facts surrounding the attack, and the January 6 committee has doggedly pursued an exhaustive investigation in furtherance of …

Conceptualizing Attorney Motivation: A Study Of The Representatives For Parents And Children In The Child Welfare System, Shannon Moody

Theses and Dissertations--Social Work

Background. Attorneys who represent parents and children in dependency, neglect, and abuse (DNA) proceedings are key in influencing the outcomes of the cases they carry. These influences include the length of time a child spends in the custody of the state or the necessity for foster care, visitation with family members, length of time to reunification, and recommended services for the child and parents (Courtney & Hook, 2012; Goldman, 1993; Thornton & Gwin, 2012; Zinn & Peters, 2015). The American Bar Association’s analysis is that there are “four constants: high caseloads, low compensation, inadequate training, and lack of supervision” …

Facultas Marginem: Assessing Disability Data And Public Aau Universities’ Affirmative Action Plans For Systemic Barriers Facing Faculty With Disabilities, Joseph Carlton Barry

Theses and Dissertations--Education Sciences

This dissertation contributes to education equity scholarship produced by academics seeking to develop understandings of disability, Persons with Disabilities (PWD), and how both are situated amongst faculty in institutions of higher education. As such, this dissertation centers on a study of public US universities belonging to the Association of American Universities (AAU). This study looks for institutional level associations between respective rates by which college and university faculty with disabilities (FWD) are employed, certain aspects of disability policy drawn from each institution’s 2020 Affirmative Action Plans (AAP), and various other instances of empirical disability data (EDD).

While this study contributes …

The Language Of Power: An Investigation Of How The Macropolitics Of Education Policy Affects The Micropolitics Of Schooling English Learners, Catherine E. Vannatter

Theses and Dissertations--Education Sciences

The population of English Learners (ELs) continues to increase across the United States, and these students persistently perform below their native English-speaking peers in measures of academic achievement. Federal government leaders passed the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in 2015, which modified how state and local educational agencies identify, instruct, assess, and reclassify ELs and revised what funding EL programming could receive. In this multiphase study, I investigated how the macropolitics of federal and state policy became enacted in the micropolitics of a mid-sized school district in Kentucky. Through an initial phase of document review followed by a mixed methods …

The Real Monopoly Is In The Boardroom, Ramsi Woodcock

Law Faculty Popular Media

We have always thought of the problem of monopoly as a problem of size or of markets. We say that Facebook is a monopoly because it is too big, or because it is in the nature of networked markets to reward scale.

But what if the problem of monopoly were really a problem of firm governance?

We don’t hate monopolies in themselves; we hate them for what they do. They charge us higher prices or deliver us lower-quality products. They pay us less or make our jobs harder.

But what a monopolist does is determined not by its size …

The Assault On Elisha Green, Randolph Paul Runyon

Civil Rights

On June 8, 1883, Rev. Elisha Green was traveling by train from Maysville to Paris, Kentucky. At Millersburg, about forty students from the Millersburg Female College crowded onto the train, accompanied by their music teacher, Frank L. Bristow, and the college president, George T. Gould. Gould grabbed the reverend by the shoulder and ordered him to give up his seat. When Green refused, Bristow and Gould assaulted him until the conductor intervened and ordered the assailants to stop or he would throw them off of the train. Friends advised Green to take legal action, and he did, winning his case …

Article: Anti- Love Jihad Law: An Analysis Of Women’S Religious And Marital Rights, Snehal Sharma

Gender and Women's Studies Faculty Publications

In November 2020, Uttar Pradesh government enacted an ordinance – ‘Prohibition of Unlawful Religious Conversion Ordinance, 2020’. Since the ordinance has made the process of religious conversion and interfaith marriage complicated and prolonged in the state, it is commonly known as ‘anti- love jihad law’. This paper analyses and lays out the potential impact of this ordinance on inter-religious marriages, and how it conflicts with women’s religious, marital, and bodily autonomy. Here the author discusses the procedures of anti-conversion ordinance along with the Special Marriage Act (1954) and personal laws related to marriage to assess their impact on inter-religious couples …