Law Commons^™

Revisiting The Disability Integration Presumption, Chris Yarrell

Cardozo Law Review de•novo

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act’s (IDEA) predecessor established a legal presumption in favor of educating all students with disabilities in an integrated, “least restrictive environment” (LRE) to the “maximum extent appropriate.” Yet, the precise meaning of this statutory presumption remains unsettled, which has led to mounting special education disputes in federal court. This Article addresses a less developed area of IDEA litigation: namely, how federal courts should interpret this statutory presumption in light of the disproportionate placement of students with the most significant cognitive disabilities in separate settings.

Whether students with the most significant cognitive disabilities sacrifice their right …

Remotely Relevant: Addressing Employment-Based Immigration Worksite Location Requirements In The Remote Workspace, Rachel Refkin

Cardozo Law Review de•novo

The worksite location requirements for the PERM process for immigrant visas and LCAs for specialty occupation nonimmigrant visas have lost their relevance during the revolution of the white-collar remote workspace within the United States under current DOL guidelines. Although on its face foreign nationals working outside the office appears to be a novel legal issue, remote work within the United States has been an insurmountable hurdle in the immigration space since telework gained popularity in the late twentieth century. It is possible to apply for both kinds of visas for telework, but adherence to the Farmer Memo appears to be …

Zoned In: How Residence Restrictions Lead To The Indefinite And Unconstitutional Detention Of New Yorkers Convicted Of Sex Crimes, Rebecca Tunis

Cardozo Law Review de•novo

Despite the New York Court of Appeals majority holding in People ex rel. Johnson, New York’s policy of detaining individuals beyond their maximum sentence because they are unable to procure SARA-compliant housing is plainly unconstitutional. The policy violates sex offenders’ fundamental right to be released from prison after serving their sentence. Further, the policy fails to meet even the most relaxed form of judicial review because the state has not shown that it benefits public safety. Indeed, there is virtually no evidence proving that this policy serves to protect the public at all, and a growing body of research shows …

A Means To An End: A Way To Curb Bias-Based Policing In New York City, Garanique N. Williams

Cardozo Law Review de•novo

Conversations about destructive policing, violence, and questionable law enforcement practices have been a focus in social media in recent years. However, housing status is often a neglected, yet important, protected category that should be considered in conversations about the impact race, class, socioeconomic status, and other factors have on policing. This Note argues that since the NYPD has found alternate, less invasive means of accomplishing their objectives, NYPD officers who operate in Police Service Areas located on NYCHA property, are in violation of New York City Administrative Code Section 14-151 for targeting NYCHA residents, based on housing status, and therefore …

Digital Purgatory And The Rights Of The Dead: Protecting Against Digital Disinterment In The Age Of Artificial Intelligence, Greyson Cohen

Cardozo Law Review de•novo

This Note will attempt to show that the existing patchwork of rights of publicity statutes and case law are inadequate to protect citizens from online harms in the age of synthetic media. Particularly, this Note will focus on postmortem right of publicity interests and protections because a robust market for the likenesses of deceased personalities exists and will likely grow in the age of synthetic media.

Part I will explain how synthetic media may contribute to an increase in the harms associated with rights of publicity violations, particularly after death. Part II will begin by outlining the legal landscape of …

On The Lawfulness Of Awards To Class Representatives, Benjamin Gould

Cardozo Law Review de•novo

When class actions are settled or the class prevails on the merits, successful class representatives are often net losers: their individual recovery does not cover the opportunity costs and other losses they have incurred in representing the class. For that reason among others, they frequently receive an award on top of their relief as class members. The federal courts of appeals had unanimously approved these awards until recently, when the Eleventh Circuit relied on two nineteenth-century cases to hold that they are always unlawful. That decision is now the subject of a cert petition. The Eleventh Circuit got it wrong. …

Staying In The Takings Lane: The Compensation Issue In Cedar Point Nursery, Mark Kelman

Cardozo Law Review de•novo

The Supreme Court held in Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid that a California regulation mandating that union organizers have occasional access to privately owned farms was a per se taking because it stripped the farm owners of the right to exclude. The decision almost certainly departed from prior law, and I briefly review some of the critiques of the majority opinion. But my focus is on questions that arise if one accepts the Court’s conclusion that the regulation is indeed a taking: First, I briefly discuss whether we should permit the taking so long as the owners are compensated or …

Standardizing State Vote-By-Mail Deadlines In Federal Elections, Jason Nagel

Cardozo Law Review de•novo

The litigation over the vote-by-mail process during the 2020 general election revealed that absentee ballot voting disputes should not be left entirely to the courts. Rather, this Note argues that Congress should utilize its constitutional Elections Clause power to standardize federal vote-by-mail processes, and proposes specific elements that Congress should include in such legislation.

Textualism, Dynamism, And The Meaning Of "Sex", Bill Watson

Cardozo Law Review de•novo

A recent Article by Professors William N. Eskridge, Brian G. Slocum, and Stefan Th. Gries critically examines textualism, both in general and as applied in Bostock v. Clayton County. This Essay makes three points in reply. First, the authors criticize strawman versions of textualism that no mainstream legal interpreter claims to hold. Second, the authors’ examples of “societal dynamism” do not put any pressure on textualism properly understood. And third, the authors’ corpus-linguistics analysis of the word “sex” is, from a textualist perspective, irrelevant to the issue in Bostock.

Something For Nothing: Untangling A Knot Of Section 230 Solutions, Nicholas Bradley

Cardozo Law Review de•novo

Social media platforms have become the dominant public forum of the modern age but there is a big problem: they are privately owned and can moderate content however they like. This right is protected both by the First Amendment and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the latter of which creates immunity from suit for platforms that exercise their right to moderate content by removing—or not removing—objectionable content. Politicians on both sides of the aisle have complained that platforms are abusing this immunity and, while they have put forward a wide variety of legislative solutions, none of them have …

Repairing Our System Of Constitutional Accountability: Reflections On The 150th Anniversary Of Section 1983, David H. Gans

Cardozo Law Review de•novo

Section 1983 is a landmark statute that provides the foundation for holding state and local governments and their agents accountable when they violate constitutional rights. Unfortunately, rather than enforce the statute’s text and ensure the accountability that its drafters passed it to achieve, the Supreme Court has created four interlocking doctrines that squelch its promise of accountability: qualified immunity, absolute immunity, strict limits on local governmental liability, and the exclusion of states from Section 1983. This Article, written to mark the 150th anniversary of Section 1983, does a deep dive into the text and history of Section 1983 and recovers …

Hippa, Matthew T. Bodie

Cardozo Law Review de•novo

"HIPPA" does not exist. The real acronym for the 1996 Health Information Portability and Accountability Act is HIPAA—“privacy” is not even in the title. But many have invoked "HIPPA" in seeking to keep their personal health decisions private and autonomous. No doubt a complicated statutory and regulatory regime, HIPAA's scope is much narrower than the average person understands, applying mainly to health care providers and insurers. But its complexity does not explain the widespread and erroneous expectation that federal law will shield those who want to keep their health information, like vaccination status, to themselves. Asserting a right to confidentiality …

The Criminal Legal System Doesn’T Care About Your Mental Illness, Fredrick E. Vars

Cardozo Law Review de•novo

Why would a beloved small-town doctor with no history of violence suddenly strangle his father to death? The Other Dr. Gilmer is a gripping account of the search for an answer to this question. It turns out the doctor has a rare neurological disorder that likely caused the killing. If only the diagnosis had come before trial, the author believes, the doctor would not have been convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life without parole. That belief is appealing, but naïve. Jails and prisons are full of people with mental illness. Misdiagnosis is not the reason. A close examination …

Innate Property: The Danger Of Incongruency Between Law And The Biological And Behavioral Roots Of Property And Possessiveness, Aaron Schwabach

Cardozo Law Review de•novo

Property law is, in some areas, dangerously out of step with property expectations. Property—the idea that a place, object, or idea can belong to a person—is at the root of the world’s economies and thus also at the root of much of its laws. Property is neither solely a creature of positive law, nor of some abstract natural law with a moral underpinning, but rather may be biologically determined, much as Noam Chomsky proposed for languages in Aspects of the Theory of Syntax.1 The idea that ownership is at least behaviorally, and perhaps to some extent instinctively, determined has been …

A Taxing Mistake, Jeffrey H. Kahn

Cardozo Law Review de•novo

Citibank made front page news for reasons it would rather have avoided when it mistakenly transferred $900 million of its own money to creditors of Revlon. When Citibank discovered the error the next day, it asked (initially politely then less so) for the creditors to return the mistaken payment. Several creditors refused and Citibank was forced to initiate litigation to attempt to get the money returned. This litigation is ongoing, but the first round of the battle was won by the lenders when a federal district court ruled that they had a legal right to retain Citibank’s mistaken payment under …

A Tale Of Two Interoperabilities; Or, How Google V. Oracle Could Become Social Media Legislation, Charles Duan

Cardozo Law Review de•novo

The Supreme Court's recent decision in Google v. Oracle shares a perhaps unexpected connection with recent legislative proposals to enhance social media competition. At first glance they are seemingly unrelated: the former deals with copyright protection in certain portions of software code, while the latter relates to interconnection between dominant online platforms and their competitors. Yet they are closely intertwined, such that a competitive platform environment cannot be fully achieved without addressing lingering questions in Google. As a result, lawmakers ought to be motivated to address software copyrights and related matters as part of their efforts to improve competition among …

The Unconstitutionality Of State Bans On Marriage Between First Cousins, Rachel Frommer

Cardozo Law Review de•novo

A majority of jurisdictions in the United States severely limit or prohibit the right of first cousins to marry, cohabit, or have intercourse. Yet, unlike regulation of other relationships within close degrees of consanguinity, for instance between parents and children or siblings, these statutes are relatively recent additions to the marriage regulation landscape. These bans are unsupported by the commonly-cited concerns of harmful genetic or societal consequences. First cousin-marriages are, instead, popular and permitted in much of the world—as they once were in the United States. This Article demonstrates that the prohibitions against first-cousin marriages directly contravene right-to-marry jurisprudence and …

Covid-19 And Digital Contact Tracing: Regulating The Future Of Public Health Surveillance, Divya Ramjee, Pollyanna Sanderson, Imran Malek

Cardozo Law Review de•novo

Digital surveillance tools are at the forefront of potential public health response strategies for the COVID-19 pandemic. The United States is in desperate need of a national-level contact tracing and exposure notification strategy to supplement traditional public health response efforts. This article addresses data privacy and security concerns, as well as epidemiological considerations, when developing digital contact tracing and exposure notification tools. It is both feasible and prudent that the United States establish a federal network for public health surveillance aided by digital tools, especially considering that waves of COVID-19 are expected to continue well into 2021 and while the …

W(H)Ither Judgment, Elias Leake Quinn

Cardozo Law Review de•novo

Textualists complain that loose rules of statutory interpretation inject uncertainty and inconsistency into judicial resolutions of statutory ambiguity. But by employing an incomplete theory of meaning, pure textualists fail to shore up their decisions. And by disparaging the judgement necessary to navigate complex questions of meaning, they erode trust in the judicial process—the very foundation of the rule of law.

Congress And Universal Injunctions, Howard M. Wasserman

Cardozo Law Review de•novo

As the judicial and scholarly debate rages over the power of federal courts to issue universal or non-particularized injunctions, this paper explores the role of Congress in ending this controversy. It considers the details, wisdom, and efficacy of five legislative proposals to eliminate or limit universal/non-particularized injunctions; it concludes that one approach resolves the problem—a flat and unequivocal prohibition on injunctions that protect anyone other than the plaintiffs.

Survey Says?: U.S. Cities Double Down On Civilian Oversight Of Police Despite Challenges And Controversy, Sharon R. Fairley

Cardozo Law Review de•novo

The emergence of police accountability as an issue of concern in communities across the nation has led to a watershed era in the evolution of accountability systems involving civilian oversight of municipal police agencies. This Article reports on a survey of the civilian oversight entities in the one hundred most populous U.S. cities and draws on recent trends it identifies to illuminate the challenges inherent in civilian oversight of police. This Article is intended to serve as a resource for civilian oversight professionals as well as local government and community leaders who are advocating for new or revised oversight systems.

Easy As Abc: Why The Abc Test Should Be Adopted As The Sole Test Of Employee–Independent Contractor Status, Eric Markovits

Cardozo Law Review de•novo

This Note examines the features and history of the three most commonly used tests for employee classification before advocating that the ABC test be more broadly adopted going forward.

Lights, Camera, State Action: Manhattan Community Access Corp. V. Halleck, Graham L. Fisher

Cardozo Law Review de•novo

It is a well-established rule that constitutional constraints governing public entities do not extend to private actors—until they do. If this principle seems unclear, it is largely due to the piecemeal jurisprudence that defines the “state action” doctrine. This doctrine applies when courts hold that a private actor is subject to constitutional constraints by virtue of the quasi-public role they have willingly accepted. In these situations, constitutional protections—and the resulting 42 U.S.C. § 1983 actions—may be available to those who demand relief. While questions of what entails a “state action” loom in the face of closely intertwined private and public …

The Dangers To The American Rule Of Law Will Outlast The Next Election, Paul Gowder

Cardozo Law Review de•novo

According to many constitutional lawyers and political scientists, the presidential administration of Donald Trump (for scholars on the left), or the response to that presidency (for scholars on the right) poses serious dangers to American constitutional democracy and the rule of law. However, this Essay argues that a more careful understanding of the contemporary dangers to the American rule of law are both broader-based and longer-term: inequality among the public, and epistemic polarization among the public as well as among legal elites (including constitutional law professors themselves), undermine the capacity of the American people to use the political tools available …

Robo-Bureaucrat And The Administrative Separation Of Powers, Matthew Seipel

Cardozo Law Review de•novo

This Essay argues that the administrative state's use of artificial intelligence (AI) creates concentrated, unchecked power at the agency leadership level. The Essay draws from Professor Jon Michaels' theory of the administrative separation of powers, and it describes how AI in government disrupts this separation. To alleviate this concern, the Essay puts forward one modest proposal: Congress should amend federal public sector labor law to require collective bargaining over an agency’s decision to use AI.

The Trump Administration’S Social Security Rules Will Harm Innovation In The Assistive Technology Industry And People With Disabilities, Christopher Buccafusco, Mariel Talmage

Cardozo Law Review de•novo

The following essay was adapted from the authors’ comment submitted in opposition to the Trump Administration’s Proposed Rules Regarding the Frequency and Notice of Continuing Disability Reviews.

The New York Prosecutorial Conduct Commission And The Dawn Of A New Era Of Reform For Prosecutors, Clyde Rastetter

Cardozo Law Review de•novo

This Note discusses the history of the national dialogue regarding prosecutorial misconduct, analyzes recent state reforms, and proposes that New York's standing Brady orders and prosecutorial conduct commission provide the blueprint for ushering in a new era of prosecutorial accountability.

Employers Should Owe A Duty Of Loyalty To Their Workers, Andrew Melzer, David Tracey

Cardozo Law Review de•novo

An employee’s overarching legal commitment to his or her employer is commonly known as the “duty of loyalty.” This lopsided duty of loyalty exacerbates the inordinate power that employers possess over their workers. We propose that the duty of loyalty owed by workers to their employers be made reciprocal: employers should also owe a general duty of loyalty and care towards their employees.

Child Vehicular Heatstroke Deaths: How The Criminal Legal System Punishes Grieving Parents Over A Neurobiological Response, Amanda Washabaugh

Cardozo Law Review de•novo

Twenty states have passed criminal statutes aimed at reducing heat stroke deaths resulting from a child being left in a vehicle. This Note examines those statutes and the legal theories of punishment they rely upon. The Note proposes that state legislatures repeal these statutes and instead increase funding for programs aimed at expanding awareness and technological advances focused on preventing these tragedies.

Effective Assistance Of Counsel? An Empirical Study Of Defense Attorneys’ Decision-Making In False-Confession Cases, Sara C. Appleby, Hadley R. Mccartin

Cardozo Law Review de•novo

Although there is considerable literature on the causes of false confessions and the effects confession evidence has on juror decision-making, little research has examined attorneys’ decision-making in disputed confession cases. As the intervening step between when the confession is elicited and the case is resolved, it is crucial that research examine effects of confession evidence on this population. The current studies investigate defense attorneys’ knowledge and perception of key interrogation and confession issues as well as their decision-making in a disputed confession case. Overall, results show that defense attorneys are knowledgeable about key interrogation and confession issues and are aware …