Law Commons^™

Social Issues In The Spotlight: The Increasing Need To Improve Publicly-Held Companies’ Csr And Esg Disclosures, Thomas Lee Hazen

Faculty Publications

There is ever-increasing investor interest in corporate social responsibility (CSR) generally, and environmental social governance (ESG) in particular. Investors’ desires have triggered increased corporate ESG disclosures to indicate companies’ commitment to socially responsible behavior. As pressure for ESG-related disclosures continues to rise, there is increasing pressure on the SEC to support and mandate enhanced ESG disclosures.

Notwithstanding many calls for mandatory ESG disclosures, the SEC has not implemented such a requirement. Instead, ESG disclosures are voluntary. Voluntary ESG disclosures are common, but to a large extent are marred by a lack of standardization in ESG data methodology. The increasing investor …

Standing And Contracts, F. Andrew Hessick

Faculty Publications

In Spokeo v. Robbins, the Supreme Court held that, to establish Article III standing to bring suit in federal court, a plaintiff cannot simply allege the violation of a legal right. Instead, the plaintiff must allege an injury in fact. Although it addressed standing to bring suit for statutory violations, Spokeo raises serious questions about limits on the ability to bring breach of contract actions in federal court. After all, contracts simply create legal rights. Under Spokeo’s logic, the breach of contractual rights should not support standing; instead, standing exists only if the breach results in factual harm. …

Interpreting Injunctions, F. Andrew Hessick, Michael Morley

Faculty Publications

Injunctions are powerful remedies. They can force a person to act or refrain from acting, dictate policies that the government must adopt, or even refashion public institutions. Violations of an injunction can result in contempt.

Despite the importance of injunctions, courts have applied an astonishingly wide range of contradictory approaches to interpreting them. They have likewise disagreed over whether appellate courts should defer to trial courts’ interpretations or instead review those interpretations de novo. Virtually no scholarship has been written on these topics.

This Article proposes that courts apply a modified textualist approach to injunctions. Under this scheme, courts would …

Nondelegation And Criminal Law, Carissa Byrne Hessick, F. Andrew Hessick

Faculty Publications

Although the Constitution confers the legislative power on Congress, Congress does not make most laws. Instead, Congress delegates the power to make laws to administrative agencies. The Supreme Court has adopted a permissive stance towards these delegations, placing essentially no limits on Congress’s ability to delegate lawmaking power to agencies.

In its recent decision, Gundy v. United States, the Court relied on this unrestrictive doctrine to uphold a statute delegating the power to write criminal laws. In doing so, the Court did not address whether greater restrictions should apply to delegations involving criminal law. Instead, it applied the same …

Shocking Business Bankruptcy Law, Melissa B. Jacoby

Faculty Publications

The intersection of major crises and financial distress generates no shortage of stock stories. This Essay offers one more: how shocks can be used opportunistically in big Chapter 11 cases to unravel bankruptcy law, and to shift the system further away from the objective of responding to overindebtedness.

Jailhouse Immigration Screening, Eisha Jain

Faculty Publications

Within the past decade, U.S. interior immigration enforcement has shifted away from the street and into the jailhouse. The rationale behind jailhouse screening is to target enforcement efforts on those who fall within federal removal priorities. This Article shows how a program undertaken with the stated aim of targeting immigration enforcement has had precisely the opposite effect: it has massively expanded the reach of immigration enforcement and created extended carceral treatment within the criminal justice system based on suspected immigration status. This approach, in turn, leads to removals that lack adequate process, are inaccurate, or that reflect underlying racial biases …

The Mark Of Policing: Race And Criminal Records, Eisha Jain

Faculty Publications

This Essay argues that racial reckoning in policing should include a racial reckoning in the use of criminal records. Arrests alone—regardless of whether they result in convictions—create criminal records. Yet because the literature on criminal records most often focuses on prisoner reentry and on the consequences of criminal conviction, it is easy to overlook the connections between policing decisions and collateral consequences. This Essay employs the sociological framework of marking to show how criminal records entrench racial inequality stemming from policing. The marking framework recognizes that the government creates a negative credential every time it creates a record of arrest …

Barring Married Same-Sex Couples From Joint Adoption: Comparative Perspectives And The Case Of Taiwan, Holning S. Lau

Faculty Publications

Taiwan is the first country in Asia to legalize same-sex marriage, but it forbids married same-sex couples from jointly adopting children. This article examines this restriction through the lens of comparative law, which brings into focus two main insights. First, we see that, out of all countries that have legalized same-sex marriage, Taiwan is one of only two that bar married same-sex couples from joint adoption. As this article will explain, the fact that Taiwan’s policy is so anomalous should spur skepticism of the policy’s appropriateness. Second, judicial opinions from around the world contain persuasive reasoning that further calls into …

There Was Nothing “Neutral” About Executive Order 9066, Eric L. Muller

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Taxing Nudges, Kathleen Delaney Thomas

Faculty Publications

Governments are increasingly turning to behavioral economics to inform policy design in areas like health care, the environment, and financial decision-making. Research shows that small behavioral interventions, referred to as “nudges,” often produce significant responses at a low cost. The theory behind nudges is that, rather than mandating certain behaviors or providing costly economic subsidies, modest initiatives may “nudge” individuals to choose desirable outcomes by appealing to their behavioral preferences. For example, automatically enrolling workers into savings plans as a default, rather than requiring them to actively sign up, has dramatically increased enrollment in such plans. Similarly, allowing individuals to …

Disbanding Police Agencies, Anthony O'Rourke, Rick Su, Guyora Binder

Faculty Publications

Since the killing of George Floyd, a national consensus has emerged that reforms are needed to prevent discriminatory and violent policing. Calls to defund and abolish the police have provoked pushback, but several cities are considering disbanding or reducing their police forces. This Essay assesses disbanding as a reform strategy from a democratic and institutionalist perspective. Should localities disband their police forces? One reason to do so is that discriminatory police departments are often too insulated from democratic oversight to be reformed. But can localities succeed in disbanding and replacing their forces with something better? Unfortunately, the structural entrenchment of …

Monopolizing Whiteness, Erika K. Wilson

Faculty Publications

In racially diverse metropolitan areas throughout the country, school district boundary lines create impermeable borders, separating affluent and predominantly white school districts from low-income, predominantly nonwhite school districts. The existence of predominantly white and affluent school districts in racially diverse metropolitan areas has material consequences and symbolic meaning. Materially, such districts receive greater educational inputs such as higher per-pupil spending, higher teacher quality, and newer facilities than their neighboring more racially diverse districts. Symbolically, owing to the material and status-based value attached to whiteness, the districts are also viewed as elite, which creates a magnetic effect that draws white affluent …

The Surprising Significance Of De Minimis Tax Rules, Leigh Z. Osofsky, Kathleen Delaney Thomas

Faculty Publications

De minimis tax rules — rules that eliminate tax burdens for low-income taxpayers or low-dollar transactions — abound in the tax law. Despite the prevalence of such rules, legal scholarship has treated them as — well — de minimis, or as mere rounding errors that do not merit sustained attention. This perspective is understandable. If de minimis rules address insignificant taxpayers or tax liabilities, aren’t the rules themselves likely to be insignificant? Recent tax law developments have revealed that this conception of de minimis tax rules is deeply misguided. Major allocations of tax law liability, as well as accompanying questions …

Piercing The (Sovereign) Veil, W. Mark C. Weidemaier

Faculty Publications

Sovereign nations own more than ten percent of the world's largest firms and use these ownership stakes to pursue economic, social, and political objectives unrelated to profit maximization. Sovereign nations also have unique powers and attributes that ordinary owners lack. Sovereigns do not need an owner's control rights to direct entity behavior; they have the power to regulate. Sovereigns do not need an owner's economic rights to extract value; they have the power to tax. And sovereigns do not need to hide behind the principle of limited liability, which protects owners of limited liability entities; they have sovereign immunity in …

The Final Act -- Deportation By Ice Air, Deborah M. Weissman, Angelina Godoy, Havan Clark

Faculty Publications

Deportation is a legal concept about which much has been written. But it is more complicated. For noncitizens, forced expulsion is a lived experience occurring in time and space — an act against the body, mostly black and brown bodies. In this Article, we part ways with the well-established narratives of deportation and the punishment/non-punishment paradigm to conceive of deportation not only as a legal concept, but as a physical act — the final act — that is, the culmination of the immigration enforcement dragnet. The physical removal of persons from the United States requires a complex system comprised of …

Gender Violence, The Carceral State, And The Politics Of Solidarity, Deborah M. Weissman

Faculty Publications

Part I of this Article examines gender violence committed by the State. It does so within the context of recent initiatives to address abusive police practices to demonstrate that issues of gender violence have been omitted from reform efforts. To that end, it provides a critical review of anti-carceral campaigns, including recent challenges to “stop-andfrisk” practices. Litigation addressing abusive police conduct has failed to identify stop-and-frisk as a particular form of gender violence. Similarly, community campaigns to oversee police body-worn camera policies have overlooked the differential ways in which survivors of gender violence are impacted by these police devices. This …

Occupational Hazard: A Critique Of California Elections Code § 13107(A)(3), Peter Nemerovski

Faculty Publications

This Article argues that California’s occupational designation option should be abolished, having outlived whatever usefulness it may have had in 1931. Today, it is a source of headaches for elections officials across the state. It often leads to litigation over whether a candidate’s chosen designation is inaccurate or might mislead voters. It is inconsistently enforced. It is frequently used by candidates not to provide voters with helpful information but to gain an electoral advantage over their opponents. The time has come for California to join the forty-nine states that do not automatically allow candidates to include their occupations on the …

Law In The Shadows Of Confederate Monuments, Deborah R. Gerhardt

Faculty Publications

Hundreds of Confederate monuments stand across the United States. In recent years, leading historians have come forward to clarify that these statues were erected not just as memorials but to express white supremacist intimidation in times of racially oppressive conduct. As public support for antiracist action grows, many communities are inclined to remove public symbols that cause emotional harm, create constant security risks and dishonor the values of equality and unity. Finding a lawful path to removal is not always clear and easy. The political power brokers who choose whether monuments will stay or go often do not walk daily …

Electoral Change And Progressive Prosecutors, Ronald F. Wright, Jeffrey L. Yates, Carissa Byrne Hessick

Faculty Publications

While it is clear that a debate is happening about new approaches to the prosecutor's work, it is less clear how deep the changes go. Given the large number of prosecutor offices in the United States, it is possible that much of the change that the media documents is limited to only a few offices; it is also possible that newsworthy stories of recent prosecutor campaign debates are merely the most visible layer of a change that goes deeper. Do the media accounts focus on vivid but exceptional election campaigns, or do news stories over the' last decade reflect a …

Special Interests In Prosecutor Elections, Carissa Byrne Hessick, Nathan Pinnell

Faculty Publications

While much has been written about money in politics generally, little attention has been paid to money in prosecutor elections specifically. This Symposium Article aims to identify the special interests at play in prosecutor elections. Using an original nationwide dataset of campaign contributions in prosecutor elections, it also seeks to provide insight into the extent of special interests' financial power in those elections.

In accomplishing these two tasks, this Article grapples with the incongruence between ordinary theories of special interests and the office of prosecutor. Most theories have been developed to describe and explain how special interests seek to influence …

Is The Word “Consumer” Biasing Trademark Law?, Dustin Marlan

Faculty Publications

Our trademark law uses the term “consumer” constantly, reflexively, and unconsciously to label the subject of its purpose—the purchasing public. According to the U.S. Supreme Court, trademark law has “a specialized mission: to help consumers identify goods and services they wish to purchase, as well as those they want to avoid.” As one leading commentator puts it, “trademarks are a property of consumers’ minds,” and “the consumer, we are led to believe, is the measure of all things in trademark law.”

Much criticism has been rightly levied against trademark law’s treatment of the consumer as passive, ignorant, and gullible. For …

Power Sector Carbon Reduction: An Evaluation Of Policies For North, Kate Konschnik, Martin Ross, Jonas J. Monast, Jennifer Weiss, Gennelle Wilson

Faculty Publications

The North Carolina power sector is poised for transition. Economics have driven big changes on the grid, making cleaner options for electricity generation cost competitive with traditional resources. North Carolina clean energy policies have further enabled the shift into renewable resources. Building on this momentum, Duke Energy Corporation and our state’s rural electric cooperatives have set ambitious climate goals, including “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050.

Well-designed policies can accelerate pollution reduction, make change more affordable for state residents and business, and stimulate job growth. For this reason, the North Carolina Clean Energy Plan (CEP)—developed pursuant to Governor Cooper’s Executive …

Reading Magna Carta: Textualist Or Originalist?, John V. Orth

Faculty Publications

Debates concerning the proper method for reading legal texts did not begin in the modern era. In fact, they have been going on in our legal tradition for hundreds of years. One of the oldest, and most consequential, debates concerns the meaning of Magna Carta, the “big charter,” reluctantly granted by King John in 1215 in response to the demands of his rebellious barons. Many of its provisions, called chapters, resolved disputes that quickly became dated – very dated.

Although Magna Carta has by now receded too far into the past for us to be confident of its exact meaning, …

Front Matter, North Carolina Journal Of Law And Technology

North Carolina Journal of Law & Technology

No abstract provided.

A New Governance Approach To Regulating Human Genome Editing, John M. Conley, Arlene M. Davis, Gail E. Henderson, Eric T. Juengst, Karen M. Meagher, Rebecca L. Walker, Margaret Waltz, Jean Cadigan

North Carolina Journal of Law & Technology

No abstract provided.

Representation For Removal? The Cherokee's Claim To A Congressional Delegate Assessed Under The Canons Of Construction, Patrick A. Wolf

North Carolina Law Review

No abstract provided.

Judges Breaking The Law: An Empirical Study Of Financially Interested Judges Deciding Cases, Benjamin B. Johnson, John Newby Parton

North Carolina Law Review

No abstract provided.

Contents, North Carolina Law Review

North Carolina Law Review

No abstract provided.

Reverse Legal Transplants, Sital Kalantry

North Carolina Law Review

No abstract provided.

Eager To Follow: Methodological Precedent In Statutory Interpretation, Aaron-Andrew P. Bruhl

North Carolina Law Review

No abstract provided.