Law Commons^™

Nonprofit College Crash: Enforcing Board Fiduciaries Through Increased Accountability And Transparency In The Irs Form 990 Procedure, Kaleb Paul Byars

Articles

Since 1997, the United States has experienced a steady increase in college closings. Private, nonprofit colleges are the most prevalent among these affected institutions. A 2017 study confirmed that 177 colleges failed a U.S. Education Department test for “financial responsibility.” Of these 177 colleges, well over half are private nonprofits. Further, several colleges have closed since the study was completed. It is reasonable to conclude the financial irresponsibility of these schools contributes to their closures. ...

Part I describes fiduciary duties of nonprofit board members and instances of their failure. Part II discusses inadequate nonprofit oversight and provides information regarding …

An“Astonishingly Excellent” Solution To Super-Fake Narratives, Cathren Page

Articles

Persuasion studies indicate that facts and logic have likely never persuaded people. Rather, people typically hold “deep frame” beliefs, and story persuades them. People then use facts and logic to justify their beliefs.

While this potentially persuasive “fake news” itself is old, the widespread dissemination of fake news via bots is new. Donald Trump’s campaign benefitted from these bots and from an electoral college map more favorable to Republicans. But these super-powers were not his only strengths, the Trump campaign wielded the power of superhero storytelling techniques.

So, faced with an army of bots, a superhero story, and an unfavorably …

How The Boogeyman Saved Brett Kavanaugh, Cathren Page

Articles

We love to hate these boogeymen. When the societal narrative creates these invisible boogeymen, people can pour their rage against sexual abuse into these faceless antagonists. At the same time, the enraged survivors and protectors avoid conflicts with family, neighbors, colleagues, and social acquaintances who might actually commit or enable sexual abuse. We can dodge sticky questions regarding how a churchgoer, a judge, or an Ivy Leaguer could have committed a heinous act. The survivors can avoid all the victim-blaming backlash, threats of violence, and invalidation that accompanies reporting a sexual offense. Moreover, having less power on their own, survivors …

What American Legal Education Can Learn From The 'Harry Potter' Series, Sarah Gerwig-Moore

Articles

Both legal education and a Hogwarts magical education involve a new way of seeing the world—an immersive and intense process requiring, in many ways, a transformation. Students need a new wardrobe for both law school and wizarding school—and an awful lot of puzzling and expensive textbooks. Both Hogwarts and law school have been accused of operating entirely apart from reality. One of these criticisms may be valid. ...

This lighthearted comparison to the Harry Potter stories can perhaps join other voices to help make a serious and important case for practical legal education. There are few principled reasons for not …

New Metrics And The Politics Of Judicial Selection, Jeremy Kidd

Articles

Recent Supreme Court nomination hearings have become increasingly rancorous, revealing the increasing political importance of the judiciary in our system of government. We need to know more about those who are chosen to wield this power, but those being considered have strong incentives to obscure all but the most basic characteristics of integrity, decorum, intellect, and courtesy. One of the most important decisions in our democracy is therefore made with far less information than would be ideal. Only through development of new metrics and refinement of existing metrics can we begin to cut through obfuscation and identify the goals and …

“You Can't Afford To Flinch In The Face Of Duty”: Judge William Augustus Bootle And The Desegregation Of The University Of Georgia, Patrick Emery Longan

Articles

On January 6, 1961, United States District Judge William Augustus Bootle granted a permanent injunction that required the University of Georgia to admit its first two black students, Hamilton E. Holmes and Charlayne A. Hunter. The backlash began immediately. Newspaper editorials condemned the decision. The Governor of Georgia threatened to close the University. Students rioted. A man escaped from an insane asylum, armed himself and went looking for Charlayne Hunter at her dormitory. Judge Bootle received numerous critical letters, including some that were threatening. Yet Judge Bootle’s attitude was that he did no more than what his position as a …

Voice, Strength, And No-Contest Clauses, Karen J. Sneddon

Articles

The will is a unilateral written disposition of probate property to be effective upon the will-maker's death. To have any legal effect, however, the will-maker's family, beneficiaries, and personal representatives, along with the probate court, need to implement the will provisions. To buttress the strength of the will, the language of the will is definitive, certain, and strong. But when the will relies upon standardized language, the voice of the will-maker is flattened or even non-existent. The absence of the willmaker's voice may jeopardize the legal effect of the will.

This Article argues that the over-reliance on "time-tested" formulaic language …

Probate Funding And The Litigation Funding Debate, Jeremy Kidd

Articles

Third-party funding of legal claims is becoming more common, and increasingly more controversial. Whether in the legislative arena or in the courts, the fight over whether and how independent parties might provide funding to litigants has become heated. The fight now threatens to spill over into the probate realm, where funders have begun purchasing probate rights from putative heirs. These probate funding transactions share many characteristics with broader litigation funding but also differ in important respects. The meager existing literature tends to address the issue in a pre-biased and methodologically unsound way, making it impossible to properly assess the nature …

You’Re Fired! Why The Alj Multi-Track Dual Removal Provisions Violate The Constitution & How To Fix Them, Linda D. Jellum

Articles

This Article explains why the for-cause removal provisions for ALJs are unconstitutional and offers three potential solutions to remedy this problem. Part I provides background information, which explains that the APA was a compromise of competing interests. Some wanted ALJs to be completely in-dependent from their agencies to further unbiased decision-making and inde-pendence, and others feared agencies would lose control over setting policy, should ALJs have such an independent function.Ultimately, Congress com-promised by including provisions to make the ALJs more independent, while also ensuring that agencies retained complete control to set policy.

As part of the independence piece of the …

Restructuring Rebuttal Of The Marital Presumption For The Modern Era, Jessica Feinberg

Articles

The marital presumption of paternity, which arose from English common law, has served as a core component of the law governing parentage in the United States since the nation’s inception. Pursuant to the marital presumption, a husband is presumed to be the legal father of any child born to or conceived by his wife during the marriage. Historically, the marital presumption was extremely difficult to rebut, generally requiring proof of the husband’s non-access to his wife during the time of conception, the husband’s sterility or impotence, or adultery on the part of the wife. As these early grounds for rebuttal …

Happily Ever After: Fostering The Role Of The Transactional Lawyer As Storyteller, Karen J. Sneddon

Articles

Transactional documents do more than allocate the risk of loss or select the governing law. Transactional documents, whether employment contracts or lease agreements, encapsulate the wishes, hopes, and fears of the transacting parties. The documents share a series of events, identify the key actors in those events, and anticipate particular outcomes or future events. In other words, the transactional documents are narratives. The transactional lawyer is thus more than a transactional intermediary. The transactional lawyer is the narrative agent or storyteller.

The “narrative” is often associated with the following words: story, tale, fiction, and entertainment. These associations may appear to …

Law School And Professional Identity Formation, Patrick Emery Longan, Daisy Hurst Floyd, Timothy W. Floyd

Articles

Law school is a transformative process. Students learn things that lawyers need to know and learn how to do some of the things that lawyers do. But that is not all. Beyond knowledge and skill, law students absorb lessons about the professional values that are supposed to guide the deployment of their newfound knowledge and skill.

Law School In A Different Voice: Legal Education As A Work Of Mercy, Pamela A. Wilkins

Articles

What might it mean for a law school to share this Mercy charism? More broadly, what would it mean for a law school to share the spiritual DNA of a female order, seeing the world from historically female perspectives and motivated by historically female concerns? More broadly still, in this #metoo era, in which women make up the majority of American law students, should it simply be business as usual at religiously affiliated law schools, or should we seize the opportunity to consider seriously, and in the light of faith, women’s perspectives on legal education, law, and justice?

This article …

From Clause A To Clause Z: The Transactional Reader And Narrative Transportation, Karen J. Sneddon

Articles

You know the phrase “lost in a good book.” The book’s story is so compelling that you are absorbed by the characters, setting, actions, and plot. The book pulls you into the narrative such that you must continue to read—even if that means staying up all night to finish the book. Because many associate that immersive experience with reading a novel, the phrase “lost in a good book” is most often connected to reading for pleasure. But the experience of being transported by the words of a narrative can occur when reading a variety of texts, including legal texts. That …