Law Commons^™

Law Students And Cell Phone Use: Results Of A Six-School Survey, Hugh D. Spitzer, Robert M. Jarvis, Cindy I.T. Archer, Linda Galler, Jodi L. Wilson, Mark E. Wojcik

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The sight of a law student using his or her cell phone now is so common that law professors do not give it a second thought. But what, exactly, is the student doing? Texting with friends? Shopping? Watching a movie? To try to find out, during the Fall 2019 semester we asked our six diverse law schools to take an online survey consisting of eighteen questions. To our knowledge, this is the first phone survey of law students.

This paper presents the results of the survey, exploring applications used (text, social media, email, etc.) and differences by audience (e.g., whether …

Presidential Laws And The Missing Interpretive Theory, Tara Leigh Grove

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There is something missing in interpretive theory. Recent controversies-involving, for example, the first travel ban and funding for sanctuary cities-demonstrate that presidential "laws" (executive orders, proclamations, and other directives) raise important questions of meaning. Yet, while there is a rich literature on statutory interpretation and a growing one on regulatory interpretation, there is no theory about how to discern the meaning of presidential directives. Courts, for their part, have repeatedly assumed that presidential directives should be treated just like statutes. But that does not seem right: theories of interpretation depend on both constitutional law and institutional setting. For statutes, the …

A Unified Approach To Erie Analysis For Federal Statutes, Rules, And Common Law, Allan Erbsen

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Aging Judges, Francis Shen

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Diploma Privilege And The Constitution, Carol Chomsky

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Eminent Domain Law As Climate Policy, Alexandra Klass

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Can Sentencing Guidelines Commissions Help States Substantially Reduce Mass Incarceration?, Richard Frase

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Prison-Release Reform And American Decarceration, Kevin Reitz

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The Intersectionality Of Age And Gender On The Bench: Are Younger Female Judges Harsher With Serious Crimes?, Francis Shen

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Regulating The Energy “Free Riders, Alexandra Klass

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Determining The Perspective Of A Reasonable Police Officer: An Evidence-Based Proposal, Mitchell Zamoff

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Law And Economics As We Grow Younger, Francesco Parisi

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The European Association of Law and Economics grants a biennial Lifetime Achievement Award and Honorary Membership to a scholar “for his or her significant contributions to the field of Law and Economics, in particular to the development of this scientific movement in Europe.” This paper is the award lecture delivered by Professor Francesco Parisi at the Annual Meeting of the European Association of Law and Economics, held at Tel-Aviv University on September, 19, 2019.

After Ice: A New Humane & Effective Immigration Enforcement Paradigm, Peter L. Markowitz

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In recent years, as the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency's ("ICE') brutal tactics have devasted communities across the nation, a growing chorus of activists and policymakers have begun calling for the agency to be abolished. Abolish ICE advocates have made a compelling case for the irredeemable deficiencies of ICE; they have exposed the core injustices that lay at the heart of our current enforcement scheme, and they have proposed specific and thoughtful changes that are both defensible and achievable. However, these changes tend to focus on a negative vision of what we need to eliminate in our current enforcement …

Safety, Crisis, And Criminal Law, Jenny E. Carroll

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Regulating Cleanups Of Homeless Encampments, Stephen J. Schnably

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Capitalizing On Healthy Lawyers: The Business Case For Law Firms To Promote And Prioritize Lawyer Well-Being, Jarrod F. Reich

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The Commonality Of Causation, Sergio J. Campos

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This essay, a version of which was given as the inaugural Goldman Endowed Lecture at Ohio Northern University School ofLaw, discusses the treatment of causation in class actions, multidistrict litigation, and similar collective litigation. Causation is a ubiquitous element of civil claims, and typically it is treated as an individual element of a claim because it is dependent on the circumstances of each individual claimant. Even if the conduct at issue in litigation is "common, " or the same, for a group of claimants, whether that conduct caused harm to a specific claimant will depend on the unique circumstances of …

Trade's Security Exceptionalism, Kathleen Claussen

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At the core of U.S. trade law is an under-studied structural dichotomy. On the one hand, well-established statutory authorities enable the President to eliminate trade barriers through negotiations with U.S. trading partners. On the other hand, different, lesser-known authorities allow the President to erect trade barriers on an exceptional basis where necessary for U.S. economic security. Rather than thinking of free trade as a source of or tool for economic security as political theorists long have, our law codifies these authorities as though they are in contrast to one another-allowing departures from the free trade norm when security so demands. …

The State Qui Tam To Enforce Employment Law, Andrew Elmore

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The Supreme Court's Facilitation Of White Christian Nationalism, Caroline Mala Corbin

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Doug Jager, a band student of Native-American ancestry, complained about the Christian prayers at his Georgia public school’s football games. Rather than address his concerns, the school lectured him on Christianity and proposed an alternative that appeared neutral yet would result in the continuation of the Christian prayers. In striking down the school’s proposal, Judge Frank M. Johnson Jr. understood some of the ramifications of state-sponsored Christianity.

Despite Supreme Court rulings limiting Christian invocations at public-school events, government-sponsored Christian prayers and Christian symbols remain plentiful in the United States. This proliferation of government-sponsored Christianity around the country both reflects and …

Networks Of Empathy, Thomas E. Kadri

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Digital abuse is on the rise. People increasingly use technology to perpetrate and exacerbate abusive conduct like stalking and harassment, manipulating digital tools to control and harm their victims. By some accounts, 95% of domestic-abuse cases involve technology, while a sizeable chunk of the U.S. population now admits to having suffered or perpetrated serious abuse online. To make matters worse, people often trivialize digital abuse or underestimate its prevalence. Even among those who do appreciate its severity, there remains ample disagreement about how to address it.

Although law can be a powerful tool to regulate digital abuse, legal responses are …

Payday, Yonathan A. Arbel

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Legislation lags behind technology all too often. While trillions of dollars are exchanged in online transactions-safely, cheaply, and instantaneously-workers still must wait two weeks to a month to receive payments from their employers. In the modern economy, workers are effectively lending money to their employers, as they wait for earned wages to be paid.

The same worker who taps a credit card to pay for groceries in semiautomated checkout lines depends on dated payroll systems that only transfer payments on a "payday." Workers, especially those living paycheck-to-paycheck, are hard-pressed to meet their daily needs and turn to expensive, short-term credit …

Religious Liberty In A Pandemic, Caroline Mala Corbin

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The coronavirus pandemic caused an unprecedented shutdown of the United States. The stay-at-home orders issued by most states typically banned large gatherings of any kind, including religious services. Churches sued, arguing that these bans violated their religious liberty rights by treating worship services more strictly than analogous activities that were not banned, such as shopping at a liquor store or superstore. This Essay examines these claims, concluding that the constitutionality of the bans turns on the science of how the pathogen spreads, and that the best available scientific evidence supports the mass gathering bans.

The Unconstitutionality Of Government Propaganda, Caroline Mala Corbin

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Government propaganda-the government's deliberate dissemination of false claims on matters of public interest-has increasingly become a source of concern in the United States. Not only does the current presidential administration disseminate propaganda at a rate unprecedented in the modern era, so that Americans now live in an age of government-created "alternative facts," but the internet and social media have made it possible to find receptive audiences with alarming speed and accuracy. This surge of government propaganda poses troubling questions for the health of our democracy, which requires political accountability and the valid consent of the governed to thrive.

Although the …

Challenging Racial Injustice In The Criminalization Of Homelessness In The United States: A Human Rights Approach, David Berris, Joseph Candelaria, Tamar Ezer, Lily Frances Fontenot

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The criminalization of homelessness in the United States perpetuates a cycle of racial injustice and violates fundamental human rights. Longstanding discrimination in housing and law enforcement have resulted in disproportionate homelessness among Black Americans. Thus, laws and policies that criminalize life-sustaining behaviors, such as sleeping, in public further exacerbate racial disparities, punishing people for homelessness rather than addressing root causes. Criminalization results in fines that people cannot pay and criminal records, driving employment and housing out of reach and circulating individuals from the street to the criminal justice system and back. The criminalization of homelessness also directly violates international human …

The Internet As A Speech Machine And Other Myths Confounding Section 230 Reform, Mary Anne Franks, Danielle Citron

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How The Internet Unmakes Law, Mary Anne Franks

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The Second Amendment's Safe Space, Or The Constitutionlization Of Fragility, Mary Anne Franks

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Failure To Capture: Why Business Does Not Control The Rulemaking Process, Gabriel Scheffler

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Leading figures on both the political right and the political left have concluded that the agency rulemaking process is captured: that it serves to benefit businesses, at the expense of the general public. This perception appears to be supported by recent theoretical and empirical scholarship and has prompted lawmakers to introduce various proposals to reform the federal rulemaking process.

Yet as I will demonstrate in this Article, the view of the rulemaking process as captured is unwarranted. I will show that the academic literature actually provides little guidance as to the magnitude of business influence that is, the extent to …

Conduct Yourself Accordingly: Amending Bar Character & Fitness Questions To Promote Lawyer Well-Being, Janet Stearns, David Jaffe

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