Law Commons^™

Turner In The Trenches: A Study Of How Turner V. Rogers Affected Child Support Contempt Proceedings, Elizabeth Patterson

Faculty Publications

In its 2011 ruling in Turner v. Rogers, the Supreme Court held that a nonpaying child support obligor may not be incarcerated in a civil contempt proceeding if he did not have the ability to pay the ordered support or the purge necessary to regain his freedom. The Turner case arose in South Carolina, a state in which civil contempt proceedings are a routine part of the child support enforcement process. The author observed child support contempt proceedings in South Carolina both before and after the Turner decision to assess the extent to which indigent obligors were being held in …

Terry V. Ohio And The (Un)Forgettable Frisk, Seth W. Stoughton

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Congressional Control Of Tax Rulemaking, Clint Wallace

Faculty Publications

The notice and comment process is often touted as a mechanism for establishing political accountability, and providing a check on agency decision-making. Based on a survey of three years of recently proposed tax regulations, this Article shows that many notice-and-comment processes for tax regulations have been ineffective for these purposes. Fully one-third of the time, no one participated. The few participants there are have been heavily weighted towards private interests, which commented on approximately two-thirds of all proposed regulations from 2013 through 2015. In contrast, public interest groups commented on less than 24% of proposed regulations. If the notice and …

Endrew F.'S Unintended Consequences, Claire Raj, Emily Suski

Faculty Publications

More than thirty years ago, the Supreme Court held that students with disabilities have a substantive right to a “free appropriate public education,” or “FAPE,” under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). At that time, however, it declined to set a standard for evaluating that right. This year, the Court re-visited the issue in Endrew F. ex rel. Joseph F. v. Douglas County School District and finally and unanimously set that standard. The Court determined that a child’s individualized education program (IEP), the document that sets out a child’s special education services, must be “reasonably calculated to enable a …

Abandoning The Federal Role In Education, Derek Black

Faculty Publications

In December 2015, Congress passed the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which redefined the role of the federal government in education. The ESSA attempted to appease popular sentiment against the No Child Left Behind Act’s (NCLB) overreliance on standardized testing and punitive sanctions. But in overturning those aspects of the NCLB, Congress failed to devise a system that was any better. Congress simply stripped the federal government of regulatory power and vastly expanded state discretion. For the first time in fifty years, the federal government lacks the ability to prompt improvements in student achievement and to demand equal resources for …

Removal Of Women And African-Americans In Jury Selection In South Carolina Capital Cases, 1997- 2012, Ann M. Eisenberg

Faculty Publications

The Supreme Court’s May 2016 decision in Foster v. Chatman involved smoking-gun evidence that the State of Georgia discriminated against African-Americans in jury selection during Foster’s 1987 capital trial. Foster was decided on the thirtieth anniversary of Batson v. Kentucky, the first in the line of cases to prohibit striking prospective jurors on the basis of their race or gender. But the evidence of discrimination for Batson challenges is rarely so obvious and available as it was in Foster.

Where litigants have struggled to produce evidence of discrimination in individual cases, empirical studies have been able to assess jury selection …

Assessing The Viability Of Race-Neutral Alternatives In Law School Admissions, Eboni S. Nelson

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Grid Modernization And Energy Poverty, Shelley Welton

Faculty Publications

Grid modernization holds the alluring promise of rationalizing electricity pricing, saving consumers money, and improving environmental quality all at the same time. Yet, we have seen only limited and patchwork regulatory initiatives towards significant grid modernization in the United States. Outside of a few leading states, state energy regulators appear loath to embrace fullthroated versions of the project. This article argues that the underdiscussed problem of energy poverty in the United States is a critical contributing factor in the gap between grid modernization’s possibilities and our regulatory reality. Only by explicitly understanding how the issues of grid modernization and energy …

Zika And The Failure To Act Under The Police Power, Jacqueline Fox

Faculty Publications

Zika is a mosquito-borne and sexually transmitted disease that is a dangerous threat to pregnant women, causing catastrophic birth defects in a large percentage of fetuses when their mothers become infected while pregnant. It raises numerous issues related to abortion, birth control, poverty, and women’s control over their procreative choices. While the United States received ample warning from January 2016 onward that it was at risk of local transmission of this virus and public health officials at all levels generally behaved properly, the state and federal legislative responses in the summer of 2016 were entirely inadequate. For example, no state …

If Its Walks Like Systematic Exclusion And Quacks Like Systematic Exclusion: Follow-Up On Removal Of Women And African-Americans In Jury Selection In South Carolina Capital Cases, 1997-2014, Ann M. Eisenberg, Amelia Courtney Hritz, Caisa Elizabeth Royer, John H. Blume

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Blurred Blue Line: Reform In An Era Of Public & Private Policing, Seth W. Stoughton

Faculty Publications

In April 2017, the Alabama Senate voted to authorize the formation of a new police department. Like other officers in the state, officers at the new agency would have to be certified by the Alabama Peace Officers Standards and Training Commission. These new officers would be “charged with all of the duties and invested with all of the powers of law enforcement officers.” Unlike most officers in Alabama, though, the officers at the new agency would not be city, county, or state employees. Instead, they would be working for the Briarwood Presbyterian Church, which Senate Bill 193 authorized to “appoint …

A First Amendment Deference Approach For Reforming Anti-Bullying Laws, Emily Suski

Faculty Publications

This Article examines the anti-bullying laws and their response to the problem of bullying in light of both the nature of the problem itself, the interventions the laws call for, and the laws’ First Amendment implications. Bullying has many varied, negative consequences, some tragic, and is widespread. Yet, the anti-bullying laws disproportionately focus schools’ responses to bullying on school exclusion, meaning suspending, expelling or otherwise excluding students who bully from school. This is so even though social science literature has found school exclusion ineffective and sometimes counterproductive as a method for addressing bullying. What is more, because much of bullying …

Public Energy, Shelley Welton

Faculty Publications

Many scholars and policy makers celebrate cities as loci for addressing climate change. In addition to being significant sources of carbon pollution, cities prove to be dynamic sites of experimentation and ambition on climate policy. However, as U.S. cities set climate change goals far above those of their federal and state counterparts, they are butting up against the limits of their existing legal authority, most notably with regard to control over energy supplies. In response, many U.S. cities are exercising their legal rights to reclaim public ownership or control over private electric utilities as a method of achieving their climate …

The Elephant In The Room Or The Elephant In The Mousehole? The Legal Risks (And Promise) Of Climate Policy Under §115 Of The Clean Air Act, Nathan Richardson

Faculty Publications

Climate policy in the United States is near an inflection point. With Congress uninterested in new legislation, focus at the federal level for most of the last decade has been on the Clean Air Act, but whether regulation under that old statute can successfully address carbon emissions remains unclear. Under President Obama, the EPA has focused on two core programs-vehicle emissions standards and the Clean Power Plan, aimed at fossil fuel power plants. But with the latter of these programs under legal challenge, and both falling short of the flexible, economy-wide policy many believe is necessay, academic and policy attention …

A Tactical Fourth Amendment, Brandon L. Garrett, Seth W. Stoughton

Faculty Publications

What rules regulate when police can kill? As ongoing public controversy over high-profile police killings drives home, the civil, criminal, and administrative rules governing police use of force all remain deeply contested. Members of the public may assume that police rules and procedures provide detailed direction for when officers can use deadly force. However, many agencies train officers to respond to threats according to a force “continuum” that does not provide hardedged rules for when or how police can use force or deadly force. Nor, as recent cases have illustrated, does a criminal prosecution under state law readily lend itself …

Free Speech And Terrorist Speech: An Essay On Dangerous Ideas, Thomas P. Crocker

Faculty Publications

Response to Alexander Tsesis, Terrorist Speech on Social Media, 70 Vand. L. Rev. 651 (2017).

Alienation And Reconciliation In Social-Ecological Systems, Ann M. Eisenberg

Faculty Publications

After rancher Ammon Bundy’s forceful occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge to protest federal “tyranny” in 2016, mainstream commentary dismissed Bundy and his supporters as crackpots. But the dismissal of the occupation as errant overlooked this event’s significance. This conflict: 1) involved a clash over scarce natural resources, of the type that will likely gain more frequency and intensity in the face of climate change; and 2) highlighted the popular idea that the federal government and federal environmental regulations are the enemy of the (white, rural, male) worker. This thread of antienvironmental, anti-federal alienation among many working people has …

Tax And Social Context: Legal Fictions And Tax, Tessa R. Davis

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Discrimination In The Copyright Clause, Ned Snow

Faculty Publications

ABSTRACT Does Congress have power to deny copyright protection for specific content? The Copyright Clause grants Congress power to “promote the Progress of Science” by legislating copyright laws. Certainly some content may reasonably be viewed as failing to promote the progress of science. Violent video games or pornography, for instance, may reasonably be viewed as not promoting progress in science, even though they receive protection as free speech under the First Amendment. So even if the Free Speech Clause bars Congress from banning content, does the Copyright Clause provide Congress a permissible means to discourage production of that content? This …

Traditional Problems: Gay Marriage And The Backlash Against Indian Sovereignty, Marcia A. Yablon-Zug

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Tax-Immigration Nexus, Tessa R. Davis

Faculty Publications

Tax and immigration law have a shared interest in defining community. In order to implement a tax, we must know who belongs to the taxable community. At the same time, immigration law must define and administer the requirements for membership in the national community. Despite the differing objectives of tax and immigration law—raising revenue and deciding who may enter, remain, and become a citizen in the United States, respectively—both of these regimes uses a concept of citizenship to define their respective communities. Starting from this common thread of the relevance of citizenship to both immigration and tax law, this Article …

The Strange Life Of Stanley V. Illinois: A Case Study In Parent Representation And Law Reform, Josh Gupta-Kagan

Faculty Publications

This Article helps describe the growth of parent representation through an analysis of Stanley v. Illinois—the foundational Supreme Court case that established parental fitness as the constitutional lynchpin of any child protection case. The Article begins with Stanley’s trial court litigation, which illustrates the importance of vigorous parental representation and an effort by the court to prevent Stanley from obtaining an attorney. It proceeds to analyze how family courts applied it (or not) in the years following the Supreme Court’s decision and what factors have led to a recent resurgence of Stanley’s fitness focus.

Despite Stanley’s requirement that states prove …

The School To Prison Pipeline's Legal Architecture: Lessons From The Spring Valley Incident And Its Aftermath, Josh Gupta-Kagan

Faculty Publications

This Article examines the 2015 Spring Valley High School incident – the high-profile arrest of a Columbia, South Carolina high school student for “disturbing schools” in which a school resource officer threw her out of her desk – to identify and illustrate the core elements of the school-to-prison pipeline’s legal architecture, and to evaluate legal reforms in response to growing concern over the pipeline.

The Spring Valley incident illustrates, first, how broad criminal laws transform school discipline incidents into law enforcement matters. Second, it illustrates how legal instruments that should limit the role of police officers assigned to schools (school …

Do Sagebrush Rebels Have A Colorable Claim? The Space Between Parochialism And Exclusion In Federal Lands Management, Ann M. Eisenberg

Faculty Publications

This Article asks whether the troubling nature of the Sagebrush Rebellion and similar movements (e.g., their violence, antienvironmentalism, and racist overtones) has made us overly dismissive of a kernel of truth in their complaints. Commentators often acknowledge that federal lands management may be “unfair” to local communities, but the ethical and legal characteristics of the unfairness concern remain under-explored. Although the Sagebrush Rebellion and federal lands communities are far from synonymous, substantial overlap between the complaints and demands of Sagebrush Rebels and the complaints and demands of many regional local (and state) governments suggests that to explore the one necessitates …

How Government Can Promote Automated Driving, Bryant Walker Smith

Faculty Publications

This Article presents steps that governments can take now to encourage the development, deployment, and use of automated road vehicles. After providing technical and legal context, it describes key administrative, legal, and community strategies to promote automated driving. It concludes by urging policymakers to facilitate automated driving in part by expecting more from today’s drivers and vehicles.

Averting Educational Crisis: Funding Cuts, Teacher Shortages, And The Dwindling Commitment To Public Education, Derek Black

Faculty Publications

Recent data shows that two-thirds of states are funding education at lower levels than in 2008. Some states are 20% or more below levels of just a few years earlier. The effect on schools has been devastating. States are only exacerbating the problem by reducing teachers’ rights and benefits. These attacks, combined with funding decreases, have scared many prospective teachers away from the profession. The net result is an extreme shortage of teachers nationwide. When the school year began in 2015, a large number of public schools opened without enough certified teachers to fill classrooms, relying instead on substitutes and …

The Trolley And The Pinto: Cost-Benefit Analysis In Automated Driving And Other Cyber-Physical Systems, Bryant Walker Smith

Faculty Publications

Automated driving has attracted substantial public and scholarly attention. This brief Article describes how that attention has brought new fame to a classic philosophical thought experiment (the “trolley problem”), critiques how this thought experiment has been applied in that context, proposes a more practical extension of that experiment based on risk rather than harm, notes that this extension may still involve programming value judgments, argues with reference to the Ford Pinto debacle that these judgments could inflame juries or the public at large, and emphasizes the need for appropriately focused public discussion of these issues. The Article may be especially …

Clean Electrification, Shelley Welton

Faculty Publications

To combat climate change, many leading states have adopted the aim of creating a “participatory” grid. In this new model, electricity is priced based on time of consumption and carbon content, and consumers are encouraged to adjust their behavior and adopt new technologies to maintain affordable electricity. Although a more participatory grid is an important component of lowering greenhouse gas emissions, it also raises a new problem of clean energy justice: utilities and consumer advocates claim that such policies unjustly benefit the rich at the expense of the poor, given the type of consumer best able to participate in the …

Tailoring Class Actions To The On-Demand Economy, Joseph Seiner

Faculty Publications

In O’Connor v. Uber Technologies, Inc., a federal district court permitted a class action case to proceed on the question of whether 160,000 drivers were misclassified by their employer as independent contractors rather than employees. The case has garnered widespread interest, making headlines across the country. Yet, it represents only one of many class action cases currently pending against technology companies in the modern economy. Indeed, similar systemic claims have already been brought against Yelp, GrubHub, Handy, CrowdFlower, Amazon, and many others.

The courts have struggled in their efforts to address the proper scope of class cases brought against corporations …

Enhancing Innovation In The Ugandan Agri-Food Sector: Progress, Constraints, And Possibilities, Travis Lybbert, Kritika Saxena, Julius Ecuru, Dick Kawooya, Sacha Wunsch-Vincent

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.