Law Commons^™

Byte Marks: Making Sense Of New F.R.C.P. 37(E), Charles Yablon

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New FRCP 37(e) limits severe, case ending sanctions for lost electronically stored information (ESI) to situations where a party acted with “intent to deprive” other parties of the use of that information. But it makes no change in existing preservation duties and never explains how “intent” is to be determined for the corporation and other entities likely to be parties in such litigation. The question is – does this Rule make any sense? This Essay seeks to make sense of Rule 37(e) in terms of its language, the stated goals of its drafters, and its role in the regulation of …

The Downside Of Requiring Additional Experiential Courses In Law School, Douglas A. Kahn

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In recent years, the bar has expressed dissatisfaction with what is considered by some to be inadequate preparation of law students to begin practicing law immediately after graduation. There are several reasons why this has become a matter of concern for the legal profession. The profession itself has undergone significant changes. Although there are a few exceptions, most law firms no longer wish to spend time training their young associates or allowing them much time to develop the skills they need. First, clients are unwilling to pay for the time a young lawyer spends in acquiring needed skills. Second, the …

Random If Not "Rare"? The Eighth Amendment Weaknesses Of Post-Miller Legislation, Kimberly Thomas

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First, this Article surveys the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to analogize life without parole for juveniles to the death penalty for adults, and discusses the Eighth Amendment law regarding the parameters around death penalty statutory schemes. Second, this Article examines the state legislative response to Miller, and scrutinizes it with the Court's Eighth Amendment death penalty law-and the states' responses to this case law-in mind. This Article highlights the failure of juvenile homicide sentencing provisions to: 1) narrow offenses that are eligible for life without parole sentences; 2) further limit, once a guilty finding is made, the categories of …

Toward A Theory Of Motion Practice And Settlement: Comment, Adam C. Pritchard

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"Scott Baker (2017) has provided a thought-provoking contribution to this symposium volume, helping us to better understand the strategic game of litigation. In terms of both resources and actual disputes resolved, pretrial practice is vastly more important than actual trials. Trials are a rarity in the American civil justice system, as the overwhelming majority of disputes are resolved via settlement. Indeed, rational-choice scholars have struggled to explain why all disputes are not resolved via settlement, as settlement avoids the expense of a trial, which is a dead-weight loss to both sides of the dispute. The parties’ mutual incentive toward settlement …

Speaking Law: Towards A Nuanced Analysis Of 'Cases', Susanne Baer

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“The headscarf case” is more than just a case. Talking law is often talking cases, but we need to understand law more specifically as a powerful practice of regulation. Law is also not only another discourse, or just text, or politics, with fundamental rights as “an issue,” or a promise, or just an idea. Instead, to protect fundamental rights, it is necessary to understand how in reacting to a conflict, we in fact speak rights today—Rechtsprechung—as a form of practice. The German Federal Constitutional Court’s decision in the conflict about female teachers wearing headscarves in German public schools may be …

What Do Traditional Knowledge And Traditional Cultural Expressions Have To Do With Intellectual Property Rights, J. Janewa Osei-Tutu

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No abstract provided.

Too Big To Disclose: Firm Size And Materiality Blindspots In Securities Regulation, George S. Georgiev

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This Article argues that the securities disclosure regime contains previously unexamined structural deficiencies that pertain to the information provided by the largest public companies. These deficiencies arise from the operation of the materiality standard, a core element of the disclosure regime that is used in a number of SEC disclosure rules. The materiality standard is designed to limit firms' disclosure to information that would be of importance to investors, and to prevent the overproduction of information. I suggest, however, that in the case of large firms the materiality standard can also lead to the underdisclosure of information-or to "materiality blindspots." …

The Law Of Interpretation, William Baude, Stephen E. Sachs

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No abstract provided.

The President And The Detainees, Aziz Huq

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Does International Human Rights Law In African Courts Make A Difference?, Daniel Abebe

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What Is It Like To Think Like A Pre-Modern?, Anthony J. Sebok

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Mineral Estate Conservation Easements: A New Policy Instrument To Address Hydraulic Fracturing And Resource Extraction, Jessica Owley, Robert B. Jackson, James Salzman

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No abstract provided.

Democracy, Law, Compliance, Don Herzog

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Professors Schauer and McAdams both seek a more or less sweepingly general theory of why we obey the law. But we should split, not lump. There are different reasons different actors in different social settings obey different laws–not only, but not least, out of regard for democratic decision making.

Whither The Functional Parent? Revisiting Equitable Parenthood Doctrines In Light Of Same-Sex Parents’ Increased Access To Obtaining Formal Legal Parent Status, Jessica Feinberg

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Until relatively recently, the law did not provide avenues through which both members of a same-sex couple could gain recognition as the parents of the children they were raising together. Instead, generally only the member of the same-sex couple who was the child’s biological parent was recognized as the child’s legal parent, and the nonbiological parent was considered a legal stranger to the child. Historically, nonbiological parents in same-sex relationships could not gain legal parent status because the traditional avenues for establishing legal parent status in the United States have been based upon biology, marriage, and adoption. Since joint biological …

#Betterrules: The Appropriate Use Of Social Media In Rulemaking, Stephen M. Johnson

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In December 2015, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) concluded that the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) use of various social media tools in a rulemaking under the Clean Water Act violated prohibitions in federal appropriations laws against publicity, propaganda, and lobbying. Although academics previously explored whether the use of technology in rulemaking might violate the Administrative Procedures Act (APA), the Paperwork Reduction Act, or the Federal Advisory Committee Act, none predicted that one of the first firestorms surrounding the use of social media in rulemaking would arise out of federal appropriations laws. ...

As the Administrative Conference of the United States …

Public Employee Speech: Answering The Unanswered And Related Questions In Lane V. Franks, John E. Rumel

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No abstract provided.

Civil Asset Forfeiture Abuses: Can State Legislation Solve The Problem?, David Pimentel

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Civil Asset Forfeiture Abuses: Can State Legislation Solve The Problem?, David Pimentel

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On Competence: (Re)Considering Appropriate Legal Standards For Examining Sixth Amendment Claims Related To Criminal Defendants’ Mental Illness And Disability, Sarah Gerwig-Moore

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This Article addresses the questions of attorney error and client competency and examines the following issues: the origin and development of the legal tests for intellectual competency to stand trial or enter a plea and the tests for evaluating Sixth Amendment effective assistance of counsel claims; the range of state and federal approaches to circumstances when those two situations converge; and whether and how our legal tests should be shaped to best assess attorney error when the client likely has an intellectual disability or incompetence. When consideration of a defendant's mental illness or mental disability forms the basis of a …

Chile, The Biobio, And The Future Of The Columbia River Basin, Jerrold A. Long

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No abstract provided.

Regulation Of Teacher Certification In Idaho: Proceedings Before Idaho's Professional Standards Commission Covering The Denial Of An Application For Or Action Against A Teaching Certificate, John E. Rumel

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No abstract provided.

Glass Half-Empty Approach To Securities Regulation, Wendy Gerwick Couture

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In this Article, I propose a novel approach, which I call the “glass-half-empty” approach, to analyze the appropriate boundaries of securities regulation. This approach assumes a baseline of “full” regulation and then analyzes which regulations should be stripped away because the costs exceed the benefits. This is the opposite of the traditional approach, which assumes a baseline of zero regulation, identifies a market failure, and then weighs the costs and benefits of regulatory intervention.

Although, in theory, the two approaches should reach the same conclusions about the appropriate bounds of securities regulation, the glass-half-empty approach yields new insights because it …

Cycling, Safety, And Victim-Blaming: Toward A Coherent Public Policy For Bicycling In 21st Century America, David Pimentel

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No abstract provided.

Circumcision: Immigration, Religion, History, And Constitutional Identity In Germany And The U.S., David Abraham

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A four-year-old Muslim boy was brought to a local Cologne emergency room by his mother, who was concerned about minor bleeding around the site of a circumcision. A District Court there found that circumcision, notwithstanding parental consent or religious motivation, constituted a criminal bodily injury and child abuse. Ultimately, on July 19, 2012 the Bundestag resolved that "Jewish and Muslim religious life be viable in Germany," and in December a bill was passed that legislatively overrode the ruling of the District Court and recognized circumcision as a non-punishable undertaking when undertaken for religious reasons by someone professionally trained. Two years …

The Shadow Of Free Enterprise: The Unconstitutionality Of The Securities & Exchange Commission's Administrative Law Judges, Linda D. Jellum, Moses M. Tincher

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Six years ago, Congress enacted the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (Dodd-Frank Act), for the first time giving the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) the power to seek monetary penalties through its in-house adjudication. The SEC already had the power to seek such penalties in federal court. With the Dodd-Frank Act, the SEC’s enforcement division could now choose between an adjudication before an SEC Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) or a civil action before an Article III judge. With this new choice, litigants contended that the SEC realized a significant home-court advantage. For example, the Wall Street Journal …

Risk Of Regulatory Arbitrage: A Response To "Securities Regulation In Virtual Space", Wendy Gerwick Couture

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In Securities Regulation in Virtual Space, Eric C. Chaffee explores the potential applicability of the securities laws to virtual transactions based on virtual activity and argues that, although many of these transactions likely qualify as “investment contracts” under S.E.C. v. W.J. Howey Co., they should be excluded under the context clause because, among other reasons, application of the securities laws would stifle creativity within this innovative space. This Response proposes a reframing of the Howey test as a response to the risk of regulatory arbitrage, argues that the context clause should only exclude transactions that do not pose such …

Supreme Court Supremacy In A Time Of Turmoil, Richard Henry Seamon

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Last term's decision in James v. City of Boise encapsulates the current civil rights turmoil and the legal system's inadequate response to it. In James, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed a decision in which the Idaho Supreme Court (1) awarded attorney's fees against a civil rights plaintiff despite her credible claim of excessive police force and (2) denied that it was bound by U.S. Supreme Court decisions interpreting the federal statute authorizing the award. Although the Court in James reaffirmed the state courts' well-settled duty to obey the Court's decisions on federal law, this article shows that the duty rests …

Sharing Economy Meets The Sherman Act: Is Uber A Firm, A Cartel, Or Something In Between?, Mark Anderson

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The sharing economy is a new industrial structure that is made possible by instantaneous internet communication and changes in the life, work, and purchasing habits of individual entrepreneurs and consumers. Antitrust law is an economic regulatory scheme dating back to 1890 in the United States that is designed to address centrally controlled concentrations of economic power and the threats that those concentrations pose to consumer interests and economic efficiency. In order to accommodate a modern enterprise structure in which thousands or millions of independent contractors join forces to provide a service by agreement among themselves, antitrust law requires re-envisioning and …

Harmonizing Cultural Ip Across Borders: Fashionable Bags & Ghanaian Adinkra Symbols, J. Janewa Osei-Tutu

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Global copyright and trademark laws protect symbols, names, and literary and artistic works. However, when their primary significance is cultural, because they are neither individual original works nor symbols that are used as commercial identifiers, intellectual property laws do not protect these symbols or artistic works. This is true, even if these goods are protected under national laws as part of that nation's cultural heritage. Once these cultural goods cross borders, there is no international law that will enable the country from which these goods originate to assert its rights in other countries. This Article characterizes these cultural goods as …

Preemption Deals, Aziz Huq

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No abstract provided.