Law Commons^™

Asian American Allyship, Victor C. Romero

Faculty Scholarship

George Floyd's tragic death not only sparked numerous nationwide protests decrying the continued violence against Black people, but also resurrected conversations around the complicity of Asian Americans in Black oppression. Just as officer Tou Thao, a Hmong American, stood idly by while a white officer stepped on Floyd's neck, many Asian Americans have taken positions that run contrary to policies that foster inclusion, or what may be termed "integrative egalitarianism" -- the idea that "governmental programs . . . designed to overcome arbitrary inequalities stemming from accidents of birth are a worthwhile investment in society's future."

Using the Floyd-Thao narrative …

Promoting Female Sporting Opportunities Without Title Ix: The Spanish Experience, Stephen Ross, Maria Josefa Garcia Cirac

Faculty Scholarship

This article compares the American approach to improving sporting opportunities for females – Title IX – with approaches taken by Spain. Because of the singular American dedication to elite interscholastic and intercollegiate sports, Title IX’s requirement of equal treatment requires that elite female athletes have equivalent opportunities to elite male athletes. The Spanish approach looks instead on the social benefits of athletics participation for boys, men, girls, and women.

Our Unruly Administrative State, Philip A. Hamburger

Faculty Scholarship

One of the perennial academic rituals of administrative “law” is to explain its compatibility with the rule of law. As surely as seasons pass, academics muster their formidable intellectual resources to reassure us, and themselves, that in pursuing administrative power, they have not abandoned the rule of law.

A more immediate justificatory project might be to explain the constitutionality of the administrative state. But notwithstanding valiant efforts, its constitutionality remains in doubt. So a fallback measure of its legitimacy seems valuable.

From this perspective, even if the administrative state is not quite constitutional, it can enjoy legitimacy under traditional common …

Congressional Power, Public Rights, And Non-Article Iii Adjudication, John M. Golden, Thomas Lee

Faculty Scholarship

When can Congress vest in administrative agencies or other non–Article III federal courts the power to adjudicate any of the nine types of “Cases” or “Controversies” listed in Article III of the United States Constitution? The core doctrine holds that Congress may employ non–Article III adjudicators in territorial courts, in military courts, and for decision of matters of public right. Scholars have criticized this so-called “public rights” doctrine as incoherent but have struggled to offer a more cogent answer.

This Article provides a new, overarching explanation of when and why Congress may use non–Article III federal officials to adjudicate matters …

U.S. Law And Discrimination In Health Care, Kimani Paul-Emile

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

What’S “Controversial” About Esg? A Theory Of Compelled Commercial Speech Under The First Amendment, Sean J. Griffith

Faculty Scholarship

This Article uses the Securities and Exchange Commission’s SEC’s recent foray into Environmental, Social, and Governance ESG to illuminate ambiguities in First Amendment doctrine. Situating mandatory disclosure regulations within the compelled commercial speech paradigm, it identifies the doctrinal hinge as “controversy.” Rules compelling commercial speech receive deferential judicial review, provided they are purely factual and uncontroversial. The Article argues that this requirement operates as a pretext check, preventing regulators from exceeding the plausible limits of the consumer protection rationale.

Applied to securities regulation, the compelled commercial speech paradigm requires the SEC to justify disclosure mandates as a form of investor …

Private Law And Public Discourse, Aditi Bagchi

Faculty Scholarship

Democracies need institutions that help to build public consensus on fundamental principles of justice. However, the major public institutions associated with this task – electoral institutions, the press, education, and civil society—each face a trade-off between a high degree of governmental control over their agendas, on the one hand, and self-segregation by participants, on the other. This Article identifies private law—the litigation of private claims and their judicial resolution—as an unlikely but ultimately critical site for building consensus on political principles. After laying out what public discourse requires (and what it does not), the Article argues that private law is …

Binding Hercules: A Proposal For Bench Trials, Maggie Wittlin

Faculty Scholarship

Should the Federal Rules of Evidence apply at bench trials? By their own terms, they apply, but courts have been reluctant to enforce them on themselves with the same rigor that they enforce them on juries. Scholarship on the issue has been mixed. Although McCormick deemed the rules of evidence "absurdly inappropriate" outside of the jury context, more recently, scholars have suggested that many reasons for imposing exclusionary rules on jurors also apply to judges. Yet practical problems persist. For one, once judge evaluate the admissibility of evidence, they can’t “unring the bell” and ignore evidence they've decided to exclude. …

Reflections: My Mother Who Fathered Me, Eleanor Brown

Faculty Scholarship

Despite the prevalence of West Indian Americans and their networks throughout the United States, little attention is given to the significant accomplishments stemming from the collective work of West Indian Americans. Even less attention is given to the fact that many of these networks are predominantly comprised of women, many of whom are single mothers. This article focuses on the trend amongst West Indian American women to pursue motherhood regardless of marriage or intimate partnership despite the risks attendant to motherhood. The author argues that para-professional West Indian American women may be more willing than their counterparts in other communities …

Muted Voices: United States Employees’ Role In Regulating And Protecting Workplace Health, James J. Brudney

Faculty Scholarship

The COVID-19 pandemic has given workplace health a higher profile, perhaps its highest since passage of the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 (OSH Act). Increased visibility and public support are based on national awareness of how frontline essential (FE) workers risked their health and lives to protect fellow Americans and preserve economic stability. That said, the greater attentiveness to workplace health risks, and the heroism of FE workers, has been accompanied by what is at best a limited role for employee voice and participation in improving workplace protections. In a larger context, while unions have been heavily involved …

War On Covid: Warfare And Its Discontents, Catherine Powell

Faculty Scholarship

This essay analyzes the wartime framing of “fighting” a war on COVID-19—to “fight that invisible enemy,” coronavirus. How might lawmakers address social crises, such as COVID, with the urgency of an emergency without reinforcing our overly-militarized, securitized, and policed state? The problem with a securitized approach is that the notion of security combines conceptual ambiguity with heightened urgency and this indeterminacy can shape and even distort legality in exceptional moments.

I examine the use of the security framework in the context of war-related legal authority to address the pandemic and steps necessary for building a post-pandemic recovery. Importantly, this project …

Forging A Future Title Ix, Naomi M. Mann

Faculty Scholarship

Title IX is in transition. Fifty years after its passage, Title IX is at the center of multiple culture wars, notably those around the definition of sex¹ and the contours of due process² in schools. Since 2011, the federal Department of Education (“ED”) has issued multiple guidance documents, containing widely divergent obligations for schools.³ In the last decade, the meaning of Title IX has been highly contested, appearing sometimes more dependent on the administration in power than on the statute’s text and purpose.⁴ This pendulum swing has diverted attention away from Title IX’s core goal: equal …

The New Orleans Transformation: Foster Care As A Rare, Time-Limited Intervention, Joshua Gupta-Kagan, Christopher Church, Melissa Carter, Vivek S. Sankaran, Andrew Barclay

Faculty Scholarship

This Article offers an initial evaluation of one reformed child protection system — New Orleans, Louisiana — and describes how a system that dramatically reduces the number of children in foster care might look. This system shows how a major metropolitan area can shrink its daily population of children in foster care to the low double digits, which would correspond to a reduction of the national daily foster care population by about 360,000. This reduction was mostly due to sending children home — usually to the homes from which they were removed — within days or weeks of removal, raising …

Patent's New Salience, Janet Freilich

Faculty Scholarship

The vast majority of patents do not matter. They are almost never enforced or licensed and, in consequence, are almost always ignored. This is a well-accepted feature of the patent system and has a tremendous impact on patent policy. In particular, while there are many aspects of patent law that are potentially troubling—including grants of unmerited patents, high transaction costs in obtaining necessary patent licenses, and patents’ potential to block innovation and hinder economic growth—these problems may be insignificant in practice because patents are under-enforced and routinely infringed without consequence.

This Article argues that technological developments are greatly increasing the …

Unfair Competition Under The Usmca: The Case Of Migrant Workers On Us Farms, Jennifer Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Tax Benefits And Fairness In K–12 Education, Linda Sugin

Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines the tax law’s subsidies for inequality and segregation in primary and secondary education, analyzing the federal charitable deduction and education savings plans, and state tax credits for education. It argues that the tax system diverts funds from traditional public education into private education, fostering economic, racial, religious, and political separation. The tax law also operates to increase resource inequality within public education by subsidizing schools that affluent children attend. In a novel analysis, the Article contends that the jurisprudence around the charitable deduction for education—though longstanding—is legally incoherent, and argues that no deduction should ever be allowed …

`Representing And Being Represented In Turn’ – A Symposium On Hélène Landemore’S Open Democracy, Ethan J. Leib

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

When Donor Meets Purpose, Atinuke O. Adediran

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay addresses a gap in law and the Restatement of the Law Charitable Nonproít Organizations regarding the relationship between a charitable nonproít’s donors and its purpose. I argue that charitable nonproíts can align their purposes with the personal or professional identities of their donors, and it may be in the best interest of some charities to do so. Charities whose purposes are to address racial or economic inequality should seriously consider aligning their donor identity with their purpose as a way of improving their legitimacy in the communities they serve, and to reach previously untapped sources of funding.

Civil Justice At The Crossroads: Should Courts Authorize Nonlawyers To Practice Law?, Bruce A. Green

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Measuring Follow-On Innovation, Janet Freilich, Sepehr Shahshahani

Faculty Scholarship

How patents affect follow-on innovation is a key question for the patent system. We disaggregate follow-on innovation into activities that infringe patents and others that do not infringe but can be indirectly affected by patents. Replicating an important study using our disaggregated measure, we find that 87 percent of followon innovation is not patent infringement. Supplementing the study’s empirical strategy with data on patent expiration dates, we find that gene patents which are not close to expiration cause an increase in noninfringing follow-on research, but the effect disappears for patents close to expiration. Our nuanced measure helps better identify the …

Black Liberty In Emergency, Norrinda Brown

Faculty Scholarship

COVID-19 pandemic orders were weaponized by state and local governments in Black neighborhoods, often through violent acts of the police. This revealed an intersection of three centuries-old patterns— criminalizing Black movement, quarantining racial minorities in public health crises, and segregation. The geographic borders of the most restrictive pandemic order enforcement were nearly identical to the borders of highly segregated, historically Black neighborhoods.

The right to free movement is fundamental and, as a rule, cannot be impeded by the state. But the jurisprudence around state power in public health emergencies, deriving from the 1905 case Jacobson v. Massachusetts, has practically resulted …

Megalopolis Bound?, Nestor M. Davidson

Faculty Scholarship

Since ancient Greece’s “megalopolis,” the concept of vast cities has loomed in the urban discourse. A century ago, English planner Patrick Geddes warned about a growing imbalance between traditional society and ever-larger conurbations, an anxiety that Lewis Mumford later invoked to predict that urban hubris would inevitably collapse of its own weight. In 1961, by contrast, the geographer Jean Gottman surveyed the interconnected agglomeration stretching from Washington, D.C. up the east coast of the United States to the cities of southern New England, and more optimistically highlighted this new urban form’s governance potential.

Today, the question is not whether urbanism …

Class Action Settlements As Contracts?, Howard M. Erichson, Ethan J. Leib

Faculty Scholarship

Courts routinely declare that class action settlement agreements are contracts, and when called on to interpret and enforce such settlements, courts invoke principles of contract law. But is a class action settlement really a contract? The relevant agreement in a class settlement is struck between a defendant and class counsel or class representatives; it is not an agreement with class members. What binds class members to the deal is not that they agreed to it, nor even that they agreed to be represented, but rather that a judge found the matter suitable for class treatment and entered judgment approving the …

Testing Political Antitrust, Nolan Mccarty, Sepehr Shahshahani

Faculty Scholarship

Observers fear that large corporations have amassed too much political power. The central fact that animates this concern is growing economic concentration—the rise in the market share of a small number of top firms. These firms are thought to use their enhanced economic power to capture the government and undermine democracy by lobbying. Many scholars and activists have urged the use of antitrust law to combat this threat, leading a “political antitrust” movement that advocates explicit incorporation of political considerations into antitrust enforcement. Political antitrust has sparked great debate not only in academic circles but also among policymakers.

But the …

Tragedy Of The Digital Commons, Chinmayi Sharma

Faculty Scholarship

Google, iPhones, the national power grid, surgical operating rooms, baby monitors, surveillance technology, and wastewater management systems all run on open-source software. Open-source software, or software that is free and publicly available, powers our day-to-day lives. As a resource, it defies economic logic; it is built by developers, many of whom are volunteers, who build projects with the altruistic intention of donating them to the digital commons. Developers use it because it saves time and money and promotes innovation. Its benefits have led to its ubiquity and indispensability. Today, over ninety-seven percent of all software uses open source. Without it, …

Depoliticizing Federal Prosecution, Bruce A. Green, Rebecca Roiphe

Faculty Scholarship

There is broad agreement that federal prosecutors should not use their power to pursue partisan political objectives, but there is stark disagreement about how to prevent them from abusing their power in this way. Geoffrey Berman, a former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, recently argued that U.S. Attorneys should have complete autonomy and independence from the Attorney General and administration. Attorney General Bill Barr, in contrast, has insisted that Attorneys General should have full control over prosecutors so the administration can be held politically accountable. Neither view fully addresses the problem. Barr minimizes the significant risk …

Democracy And Law In The New American Antitrust, Zephyr Teachout

Faculty Scholarship

There is an inverse relationship between those who argue that judges, guided by economists, are well suited to the task of determining the ultimate social value of an individual merger or business practice, and those who believe that antitrust law plays a central role in the protection of human freedom and democracy.

The more one is concerned with private sector threats to freedom, the more one treats antitrust as a public enterprise and seeks simple, publicly legible rules, with less discretion for judges, and a limited role for case-specific economic analysis. Conversely, if one is relatively unconcerned with democratic threats …

Sherman V. Department Of Public Safety: Institutional Responsibility For Sexual Assault, John C.P. Goldberg, Benjamin C. Zipursky

Faculty Scholarship

This article addresses the intersection of three important topics: sexual assault, police misconduct, and employer liability for employee torts. As to the last of these, while there have long been debates among jurists in the U.S. concerning the proper scope of respondeat superior liability, courts have mostly adhered to an approach that focuses on whether the employee acted for the purpose of serving the employer’s interests. The narrowness of this purpose-based test, as compared to available alternatives, makes it imperative for lawyers, judges, and scholars to be attentive to other, less well-known, bases for employer liability. In Sherman v Department …

Getting The Law Right: An Essay In Honor Of Aaron Twerski, John C.P. Goldberg, Benjamin C. Zipursky

Faculty Scholarship

Written in honor of the great torts scholar Aaron Twerski, this article critically analyzes disturbing developments in New York negligence law as it applies to police who injure innocent bystanders. With the New York Court of Appeals’ 2022 decision in Ferreira v. City of Binghamton as a focal point, it argues that Ferreira and other contemporary decisions have largely betrayed the promise of the 1929 Court of Claims Act, which waived state and municipal immunity for police torts. While courts may be warranted in recognizing certain limits on police negligence liability that do not apply to private actors, the current …

Family Law For The One-Hundred-Year Life, Naomi R. Cahn, Clare Huntington, Elizabeth Scott

Faculty Scholarship

Family law is for young people. To facilitate child rearing and help spouses pool resources over a lifetime, the law obligates parents to minor children and spouses to each other. Family law’s presumption of young, financially interdependent, conjugal couples raising children privileges one family form—marriage—and centers the dependency needs of children.

This age myopia fundamentally fails older adults. Families are essential to flourishing in the last third of life, but the legal system offers neither the family forms many older adults want nor the support of family care older adults need. Racial and economic inequities, accumulated across lifetimes, exacerbate these …