Law Commons^™

A Mathematical Model Of Juvenile Delinquency In The New York State, Oluwasegun Micheal Ibrahim

Articles

This report presents a mathematical model of juvenile delinquency in the New York State. In particular, we develop a juvenile delinquency system of non-linear differential equations using the mathematical epidemiology framework. In constructing this model, we assume that juvenile delinquency can be studied as a socially infectious disease. The stability of the juvenile delinquency-free equilibrium of the model is examined using the standard non-linear dynamical systems theory technique. We carried out a data fitting based on real-life data from the New York State Criminal Justice Services. The research result reveals that the formulated model conforms with the available data and …

Giving Shareholders The Right To Say No, Albert H. Choi, Adam C. Pritchard

Articles

When a public company releases misleading information that distorts the market for the company’s stock, investors who purchase at the inflated price lose money when (and if) the misleading information is later corrected. Under Rule 10b‑5 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, investors can seek compensation from corporations and their officers who make materially misleading statements that the investors relied on when buying or selling a security. Compensation is the obvious goal, but the threat of lawsuits can also benefit investors by deterring managers from committing fraud.

Delegation At The Founding: A Response To Critics, Julian Davis Mortenson, Nicholas Bagley

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This essay responds to the wide range of commentary on Delegation at the Founding, published previously in the Columbia Law Review. The critics’ arguments deserve thoughtful consideration and a careful response. We’re happy to supply both. As a matter of eighteenth-century legal and political theory, “rulemaking” could not be neatly described as either legislative or executive based on analysis of its scope, subject, or substantive effect. To the contrary: Depending on the relationships you chose to emphasize, a given act could properly be classified as both legislative (from the perspective of the immediate actor) and also executive (from the perspective …

An Evidence Review Of Behavioural Economics In The Justice Sector, Brian Barry, Lucia Morales, Aiden Carthy

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Behavioural economics combines elements of economics and psychology to better understand how and why people behave the way they do in the real world. While behavioural economics originally sought to better understand economic decision-making, it has since grown in scope and application, and it is increasingly used by governments, government departments and other organisations to shape and implement public policies in a range of policy areas. This Review considers the application of behavioural economics theories and concepts (commonly referred to as behavioural insights) to the justice sector in a range of areas of justice policy in different jurisdictions. Areas of …

Due Process Alignment In Mass Restructurings, Sergio J. Campos, Samir D. Parikh

Articles

Mass tort defendants have recently begun exiting multidistrict litigation by filing for bankruptcy. This new strategy ushers defendants into a far more hospitable forum that offers accelerated resolution of all state and federal claims held by both current and future victims.

Bankruptcy's structural, procedural, and substantive benefits also provide defendants with unique optionality. Bankruptcy's resolution promise is alluring, but the process relies on a very large assumption: that future victims can be compelled to relinquish property rights in their cause of action against the corporate defendant and others without consent or notice. Bankruptcy builds an entire resolution structure on the …

The Improvised Implementation Of Executive Agreements, Kathleen Claussen

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Implementation is at the core of lawmaking in our divided government. A rich literature covers the waterfront with respect to agencies' implementation of legislative mandates, and another equally robust line of scholarship considers Congress's implementation of treaties. Missing from those discussions, however, is another area of implementation central to U. S. foreign relations: the implementation of transnational regulatory agreements.

This Article examines how federal agencies have harnessed far-reaching discretion from Congress on whether and how to implement thousands of international agreements. Agencies regularly implement agreements by relying on a self-developed menu of options, much like they do in the domestic …

Just Say No? Shareholder Voting On Securities Class Actions, Albert H. Choi, Stephen J. Choi, Adam C. Pritchard

Articles

The U.S. securities laws allow security-holders to bring a class action suit against a public company and its officers who make materially misleading statements to the market. The class action mechanism allows individual claimants to aggregate their claims. This procedure mitigates the collective action problem among claimants, and also creates potential economies of scale. Despite these efficiencies, the class action mechanism has been criticized for being driven by attorneys and also encouraging nuisance suits. Although various statutory and doctrinal solutions have been proposed and implemented over the years, the concerns over the agency problem and nuisance suits persist. This paper …

Democracy Harms And The First Amendment, Deborah Pearlstein

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The First Amendment tolerates—has long tolerated—the regulation of certain kinds of false speech. Indeed, regulable lies are not limited to traditionally less-protected categories of speech like defamation and commercial deception. They include an array of other established speech regulations, administered by government institutions every day, from criminal laws barring perjury and other lies to government officials, to disciplinary measures by elected bodies sanctioning members for false or otherwise objectionable speech. Yet while it is easy to identify the kinds of lies that existing doctrinal categories make regulable for the personal, physical, or reputational harms they inflict on individuals¸ it has …

Collaborative Constructions: Designing High School History Curriculum With The Lost & Found Game Series, Owen Gottlieb, Shawn Clybor

Articles

This chapter addresses design research and iterative curriculum design for the Lost & Found games series. The Lost & Found card-to-mobile series is set in Fustat (Old Cairo) in the twelfth century and focuses on religious laws of the period. The first two games focus on Moses Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, a key Jewish law code. A new expansion module which was in development at the time of the fieldwork described in this article that introduces Islamic laws of the period, and a mobile prototype of the initial strategy game has been developed with support National Endowment for the Humanities. The …

Resurrecting Arbitrariness, Kathryn E. Miller

Articles

What allows judges to sentence a child to die in prison? For years, they did so without constitutional restriction. That all changed in 2012’s Miller v. Alabama, which banned mandatory sentences of life without parole for children convicted of homicide crimes. Miller held that this extreme sentence was constitutional only for the worst offenders—the “permanently incorrigible.” By embracing individualized sentencing, Miller and its progeny portended a sea change in the way juveniles would be sentenced for serious crimes. But if Miller opened the door to sentencing reform, the Court’s recent decision in Jones v. Mississippi appeared to slam it …

Jotwell's Thirteenth Birthday Celebration, A. Michael Froomkin

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No abstract provided.

Reducing Prejudice Through Law: Evidence From Experimental Psychology, Sara Emily Burke, Roseanna Sommers

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Can antidiscrimination law effect changes in public attitudes toward minority groups? Could learning, for instance, that employment discrimination against people with clinical depression is legally prohibited cause members of the public to be more accepting toward people with mental health conditions? In this Article, we report the results of a series of experiments that test the effect of inducing the belief that discrimination against a given group is legal (versus illegal) on interpersonal attitudes toward members of that group. We find that learning that discrimination is unlawful does not simply lead people to believe that an employer is more likely …

Color Of Creatorship - Author's Response, Anjali Vats

Articles

This essay is the author's response to three reviews of The Color of Creatorship written by notable intellectual property scholars and published in the IP Law Book Review.

Too Much Of A Good Thing? A Governing Knowledge Commons Review Of Abundance In Context, Michael J. Madison, Brett M. Frischmann, Madelyn Sanfilippo, Katherine J. Strandburg

Articles

The economics of abundance, along with the sociology of abundance, the law of abundance, and so forth, should be re-framed, linked, and situated in a common context for empirical rather than conceptual research. Abundance may seem to be a new, big thing, between anxiety over information overload, Big Data, and related technological disruptions. But scholars know that abundance is an ancient phenomenon, which only seemed to disappear as twentieth century social science focused on scarcity instead. Restoring the study of abundance, and figuring out how to solve the problems that abundance might create, means shedding disciplinary blinders and going back …

A Hague Parallel Proceedings Convention: Architecture And Features, Paul Herrup, Ronald A. Brand

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In Paul Herrup and Ronald A. Brand, A Hague Convention on Parallel Proceedings, 63 Harvard International Law Journal Online 1(2022), available at https://harvardilj.org/2022/02/a-hague-convention-on-parallel-proceedings/ and https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3894502, we argued that the Hague Conference on Private International Law should not undertake a project to require or prohibit exercise of original jurisdiction in national courts. Rather, the goal of current efforts should be to improve the concentration of parallel litigation in a “better forum,” in order to achieve efficient and complete resolution of disputes in transnational litigation. The Hague Conference is now taking this path. As the Experts Group and Working Group …

Blame The Victim: How Mistreatment By The State Is Used To Legitimize Police Violence, Tamara R. Lave

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No abstract provided.

Judges, Judging And Otherwise, Michael Pollack

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Ask the average person to imagine what a judge does, and the answer will most likely be something right out of a courtroom from Law & Order — or Legally Blonde, Just Mercy, My Cousin Vinny, Kramer vs. Kramer, or any of the myriad law-themed movies and television shows. A judge is faced with a dispute brought by some parties and their lawyers and is charged with resolving it, whether it be a breach of contract, a tort action, a competing claim over property, a disagreement about the meaning of a statute, some accusation that someone …

Government By Code? Blockchain Applications To Public Sector Governance, Pedro Bustamante, Meina Cai, Marcela Gomez, Colin Harris, Prashabnt Krishnamurthy, Wilson Law, Michael J. Madison, Ilia Murtazashvili, Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili, Tymofiy Mylovanov, Nataliia Shapoval, Annette Vee, Martin B. H. Weiss

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Studies of blockchain governance can be divided into analyses of the governance of blockchains (such as rules and power dynamics within a given network) and governance by blockchains (such as how blockchains can be implemented to improve self-governance of community-based peer production networks). Less emphasis has been placed on applications of distributed ledgers to public sector governance. Our review clarifies that the decentralization and distributive features that enable blockchains to link up loosely connected private organizations and public agencies to improve efficiency and transparency of government transactions. However, most blockchain applications lack clear advantages over the conventional digital recording of …

Racial Trauma In Civil Rights Representation, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Anthony V. Alfieri

Articles

Narratives of trauma told by clients and communities of color have inspired an increasing number of civil rights and antiracist lawyers and academics to call for more trauma-informed training for law students and lawyers. These advocates have argued not only for greater trauma-sensitive practices and trauma-centered interventions on behalf of adversely impacted individuals and groups but also for greater awareness of the risks of secondary or vicarious trauma for lawyers who represent traumatized clients and communities. In this Article, we join this chorus of attorneys and academics. Harnessing the recent civil rights case of P.P. v. Compton Unified School District, …

The Case For Banning (And Mandating) Ransomware Insurance, Kyle D. Logue, Adam B. Shniderman

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Ransomware attacks are becoming increasingly pervasive and disruptive, resulting in ransom demands becoming more exorbitant. Payments for ransom costs are increasingly being covered by insurance, which may offer coverage for a variety of cyber-related losses. Some commentators have expressed concern over this market phenomenon. Specifically, the concern is that the presence of insurance is making the ransomware problem worse based on the following theory: because there is ransomware insurance that covers ransom payments, and because paying the ransom is often far cheaper than paying the restoration and business interruption costs covered under the policy, there is an increased tendency to …

Square Pegs And Round Holes: Differentiated Instruction And The Law Classroom, Karen J. Sneddon

Articles

As the academic semester begins, law students enter the classroom with sharpened pencils and charged laptops. Law professors enter the classroom with prepared notes and tabbed casebooks. But how will law professors ensure that the learning of each individual student is supported? Students do not take one path to law school. From English majors to engineering majors, students enter law school immediately upon graduating from college or years after graduation with various professional experiences. Despite criticism that legal education is resistant to change and over-relies on the Socratic Method, law school educators know that learning is not a one-size-fits-all experience. …

The Power Of A Good Story: How Narrative Techniques Can Make Transactional Documents More Persuasive, Karen J. Sneddon

Articles

Transactional documents are complex, multi-faceted documents reviewed by various audiences at multiple points in time. They are more than descriptive legal devices that dictate the exchange of widgets for cash. While the core of many transactional documents will be the acquisition, creation, or exchange of property or services, transactional documents do more than memorialize that understanding. At first glance, transactional documents may seem simply like expository texts that aim to create the private law between the transacting parties and educate the audience by delivering a sequence of instructions, but transactional documents do much more. They tell the stories of the …

Autonomous Vehicle Regulation & Trust: The Impact Of Failures To Comply With Standards, William H. Widen, Phillip Koopman

Articles

The autonomous vehicle (AV) industry works very hard to create public trust in both AV technology and its developers. Building trust is part of a strategy to permit the industry itself to manage the testing and deployment of AV technology without regulatory interference. This article explains how industry actions to promote trust (both individually and collectively) have created concerns rather than comfort with this emerging technology. The article suggests how the industry might change its current approach to law and regulation from an adversarial posture to a more cooperative one in which a space is created for government regulation consistent …

Inoculating The Next Generation Of Lawyers: Mandating Substances Use And Mental Health Education For Law Students, Janet Stearns

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No abstract provided.

The False Allure Of The Anti-Accumulation Principle, Michael E. Herz, Kevin M. Stack

Articles

Today the executive branch is generally seen as the most dangerous branch. Many worry that the executive branch now defies or subsumes the separation of powers. In response, several Supreme Court Justices and prominent scholars assert that the very separation-of-powers principles that determine the structure of the federal government as a whole apply with full force within the executive branch. In particular, they argue that constitutional law prohibits the accumulation of more than one type of power—legislative, executive, and judicial—in the same executive official or government entity. We refer to this as the anti-accumulation principle. The consequences of this principle, …

Disaggregating Slavery And The Slave Trade, Jocelyn Getgen Kestenbaum

Articles

International law prohibits slavery and the slave trade as peremptory norms, customary international law prohibitions and crimes, humanitarian law prohibitions, and non-derogable human rights. Human rights bodies, however, focus on human trafficking, even when slavery and the slave trade—and not human trafficking—are enumerated within their mandates. International human rights law has conflated human trafficking with slavery and the slave trade. Consequently, human trafficking has subsumed the slave trade and, at times, slavery prohibitions, increasing perpetrator impunity for slavery and the slave trade abuses and denying full expressive justice to survivors.

This Article disaggregates slavery from the slave trade and slavery …

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

Articles

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), …

Lawyering The Presidency, Deborah Pearlstein

Articles

Among its many profound effects on American life, the Trump presidency has triggered a surge of interest in the project of law reform to better check the exercise of presidential power. Yet these reform efforts arise against a wholly unsettled debate about the function and effectiveness of existing checks, perhaps none more so than the role of executive branch legal counsel. With courts often deferential, and Congress hamstrung by partisan polarization, scholars have drawn on the experiences of executive branch lawyers to assess whether counsel functions as part of an “internal separation of powers” form of constraint. Yet while these …

New Innovation Models In Medical Ai, W Nicholson Price Ii, Rachel E. Sachs, Rebecca S. Eisenberg

Articles

In recent years, scientists and researchers have devoted considerable resources to developing medical artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. Many of these technologies—particularly those that resemble traditional medical devices in their functions—have received substantial attention in the legal and policy literature. But other types of novel AI technologies, such as those related to quality improvement and optimizing use of scarce facilities, have been largely absent from the discussion thus far. These AI innovations have the potential to shed light on important aspects of health innovation policy. First, these AI innovations interact less with the legal regimes that scholars traditionally conceive of as …

Judicial Impartiality In The Judicial Council Act 2019: Challenges And Opportunities, Brian M. Barry Dr

Articles

The Judicial Council is tasked with promoting and maintaining high standards of judicial conduct. The Judicial Council Act 2019 identifies judicial impartiality as a principle of judicial conduct that Irish judges are required to uphold and exemplify. Despite its ubiquity, judicial impartiality is perhaps under-explained and under-examined.

This article considers the nature and scope of judicial impartiality in contemporary Irish judging. It argues that the Judicial Council ought to take a proactive, multi-faceted approach to promote and maintain judicial impartiality, to address contemporary challenges that the Irish judiciary face including increasingly sophisticated empirical research into judicial performance, the proliferation of …