Law Commons^™

When Ai Goes To War: Corporate Accountability For Virtual Mass Disinformation, Algorithmic Atrocities, And Synthetic Propaganda, Jon M. Garon

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Environmental Enforceability, Seema Kakade

Faculty Scholarship

There are great expectations for a resurgence in federal environmental enforcement in a Biden-led federal government. Indeed, federal environmental enforcement suffered serious blows during the Trump administration, particularly at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), including large cuts in the budget for enforcement and reversals of key enforcement policies. Yet, while important to repair the damage, truly strengthening federal environmental enforcement will require more. This Article highlights the need for greater attention to the multiple hurdles that plague environmental enforcement. In doing so, it makes three contributions to the literature. First, it asserts that even though environmental statutes, regulations, and guidance …

Mental Health Care And Intimate Partner Violence: Unasked Questions, Delaney E. Anderson, Richard C. Boldt

Faculty Scholarship

There is significant overlap between the group of people who experience trauma, including domestic or intimate partner violence, and those who are hospitalized for severe mental illness. In recent years there has been a growing awareness in the mental health treatment community of the prevalence of trauma among individuals with behavioral health problems. Despite the strong evidence of elevated rates of exposure to domestic or intimate partner violence among individuals experiencing mental illness (including depression, anxiety, and posttraumatic stress disorder), mental health professionals often do not effectively address this co-occurring factor in assessing and treating their clients or patients. The …

Show Me The Money The Applicability Of Contract Laws Ratification And Tenderback Doctrines To Title Vii Releases, Rachel E. Deming

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Anonymous Companies, William J. Moon

Faculty Scholarship

Hardly a day goes by without hearing about nefarious activities facilitated by anonymous “shell” companies. Often described as menaces to the financial system, the creation of business entities with no real operations in sun-drenched offshore jurisdictions offering “zero percent” tax rates remains in vogue among business titans, pop stars, multimillionaires, and royals. The trending headlines and academic accounts, however, have paid insufficient attention to the legal uses of anonymous companies that are both ubiquitous and almost infinite in their variations.

This Article identifies privacy as a functional feature of modern business entities by documenting the hidden virtues of anonymous companies—business …

Teach Your Citizens Well: Demeaning Government Speech, Equal Protection Animus, And Government's Legitimate Power, William D. Araiza

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Florida’S Judicial Ethics Rules: History, Text, And Use, Robert M. Jarvis

Faculty Scholarship

A handy summary of Florida’s federal and state judicial ethics codes does not exist. As a result, Florida attorneys and judges often must invest considerable time and effort when a question of judicial ethics arises. To assist such queries, this article provides a comprehensive description of both the Florida Code of Judicial Conduct and the Code of Conduct for United States Judges.

Divest, Invest, & Mutual Aid, Cynthia Godsoe, Caitlyn Garcia

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Historical Disproportional Placement Of Students In Special Education Based On Race And Ethnicity, Margaret A. Dalton

Faculty Scholarship

This commentary, presented at the Practicing Law Institute in San Francisco on September 12, 2022, takes a look back at the 1970s, when the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals attempted to remedy the disproportionate placement of black students into isolated special education classrooms. As a result of legal challenges, the 9th Circuit granted an injunction to halt the practice of placing students in classrooms for the "educable mentally retarded" based solely on IQ tests. The challenge since that time has been how to identify and use culturally sensitive testing to determine ability levels, when some states, including California, forbid the …

Agents And Advisors, Deborah A. Demott

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

10 Things Judges Should Know About Cryptocurrency, Lee Reiners

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Law And Science Of Eyewitness Evidence, Thomas D. Albright, Brandon L. Garrett

Faculty Scholarship

Eyewitness evidence crucially depends on visual perception and memory, which are quite fallible. The potential inaccuracy of eyewitness memory has been long demonstrated in cases of wrongful conviction. Today, decades of scientific research on visual perception and memory have identified key causes of error and methods for improving eyewitness performance. Eyewitness evidence, where identification procedures themselves involve experiments, lends itself to scientific research as do few other areas in law. As a result, eyewitness evidence has become a testing ground for the use of science to inform the law. This Article examines how legal actors—state and federal courts, state lawmakers, …

Setting The Price Of Fertility: Egg Donor Compensation Following Kamakahi V. American Society For Reproductive Medicine, Bailey K. Sanders

Faculty Scholarship

Although much ink has been spilled debating whether the United States should permit the sale and purchase of human eggs, fewer scholars have considered how we might encourage more efficient competition in this market. This article considers the market impact of a 2011 price-fixing lawsuit brought on behalf of egg donors in the United States; the plaintiffs argued that the American Society for Reproductive Medicine was artificially suppressing compensation rates by requiring its members to adhere to pricing caps. When the plaintiffs secured the removal of the guidelines, many observers expected compensation rates to increase substantially.

I argue, however, that …

Emotional Distress Recovery For Mishandling Of Human Remains: A Fifty State Survey, Christopher Ogolla

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Evolving Standards Of Irrelevancy?, Joanmarie Davoli

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Reparations For Racial Wealth Disparities As Remedy For Social Contract Breach, Martha M. Ertman

Faculty Scholarship

Acute crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2008 financial meltdown exposed and exacerbated chronic racial wealth disparities. Those disparities accumulated over time as government and private actions—often involving contracts—systemically benefitted White Americans and institutions at the expense of African-Americans. This essay focuses on a private law mechanism—loan contracts—as one important contributor to systemic racial wealth disparities, labels particular lending contracts and related government action as breaches of the social contract, and proposes a restitution-based form of reparations as a remedy for that breach.

Educating Robot-Proof Attorneys, Tammy Oltz

Faculty Scholarship

Technology, particularly that powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI), is disrupting the legal profession. In the coming years, lawyers who do not understand technology will face both ethical and professional risks. This year, the duty of technological competence marks its tenth anniversary. While lawyers are still learning what the duty means and what it will mean in the future, one thing is certain: those who ignore it could find themselves at risk of being on the wrong side of an ethics violation.

However, even without that regulatory obligation, lawyers who continue to ignore the current technological revolution put themselves at risk …

New Copyright Stories: Clearing The Way For Fair Wages And Equitable Working Conditions In American Theater And Other Creative Industries, Jessica Silbey

Faculty Scholarship

We need some new intellectual property stories. By stories, I don’t mean entertaining fictions. I mean instead accounts or explanations that make sense of the world as it is lived by everyday people. Most of our relevant intellectual property laws were forged in the mid-twentieth century and have failed to keep pace with the transformations in creative and innovative practices of the twentyfirst. Being out-of-sync or failing to recognize broader existing stakeholders means laws are poorly aligned with on-the-ground realities and are out-of-touch with values and interests of the people laws serve. The Article at the center of this Symposium …

Restructuring Support Agreements: An Empirical Analysis, Anthony J. Casey, Frederick Tung, Katherine Waldock

Faculty Scholarship

Restructuring support agreements (RSAs), or contracts that commit bankruptcy parties to supporting a plan of reorganization that will conform to certain requirements, are now a common feature of Chapter 11. Parties utilize these agreements in nearly half of all large cases. While prior literature has debated the normative value of RSAs, we take an empirical approach to look at what provisions the parties include in these agreements and how those provisions have changed over time.

Our analysis looks at all RSAs associated with large bankruptcies through the end of 2020. We characterize the types of firms with RSAs, the parties …

Yes, Alito, There Is A Right To Privacy: Why The Leaked Dobbs Opinion Is Doctrinally Unsound, Nancy C. Marcus

Faculty Scholarship

On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court released the final Dobbs majority opinion, which is substantially identical to the draft opinion. Consequently, the critique contained in this essay applies equally to the final Dobbs opinion.

On May 2, 2022, a draft majority opinion dated February 2022 and authored by Justice Alito in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was leaked to the public. This Essay addresses the doctrinal infirmities of the underlying analysis of the draft Dobbs opinion, as well as the resulting dangers posed for the protection of fundamental privacy rights and liberties in contexts even beyond abortion.

The …

Same As It Ever Was : The Tijuana River Sewage Crisis, Non-State Actors, And The State, James M. Cooper

Faculty Scholarship

Sewage—a scary mixture of human waste and industrial toxins—flows into the Tijuana River Valley, an environmentally sensitive watershed that straddles the United Mexican States ("Mexico") and the United States of America. Treatment plants, a deteriorating one in Punta Bandera with limited capacity south of the border, and another in San Diego County completed in 1997, are inadequate to process the volume of sewage. So much sewage made its way into the Tijuana River that CBS 60 Minutes broadcast a special report on the binational environmental disaster in 2020.

Border factories and a population spike contribute to the sewage. Maquiladoras, …

Is Fire Insurable?, Kenneth S. Klein

Faculty Scholarship

The focus of this chapter is on the extant data on the prevalence, causes, and depth of inadequate, unavailable, and/or unaffordable dwelling insurance for fire, and what might be done about it. Whether it is ‘bushfire’ in Australia or ‘wildfire’ in the United States, the frequency, intensity, and cost of fire is increasing, with no reason to expect the upward trend to dissipate any time soon. Most homeowners want to insure their homes for fire and think they both have done so and done so adequately. More often than not, they are wrong. And many are finding that insurance now …

Bizarre Love Triangle: The Trilateral Responses To Tame The United States-Mexico Border, James M. Cooper

Faculty Scholarship

This article explores the role that multilateral agreements among Canada, Mexico, and the United States, and bilateral agreements between the United States and Mexico, have played along the border. Part I of this article explores the Washington Consensus and the culture of accumulation, plunder, and extractivism that it has engendered. Part II delves into various economic integration pacts that are part of the Washington Consensus starting with the NAFTA, then the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), and finally, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. It concludes that neither agreement make the border safer, nor make its working people more prosperous.

Genetically Engineered Food, Food Security, And Climate Change, Joanna K. Sax

Faculty Scholarship

Malnutrition is the leading cause of death and disease worldwide. Climate change is an existential crisis. We need to feed people and address the role of agriculture in climate change – at the same time. This is problematic, as agriculture inherently creates issues that contributes to climate change. Utilizing science, through genetically engineered crops, is one way to close the harm gap between food security and climate change. This essay addresses the controversial issue of genetically engineered crops with the complicated issues of food security and climate change by analyzing three main issues: (1) how the science of genetically engineered …

Solving The Settlement Puzzle In Human Rights Litigation, William J. Aceves

Faculty Scholarship

In human rights litigation, there are no formal standards to guide lawyers and their clients when they are considering whether to settle a case. Moreover, there is a paucity of published data on human rights settlements. This Article provides a quantitative assessment of recorded settlements in human rights cases litigated under the Alien Tort Statute and Torture Victim Protection Act. It examines both confidential and public settlements. It then considers how and why these cases settled. Finally, this Article proposes a set of standards for assessing proposed settlements. When cases involve fundamental rights and individuals have suffered immeasurable harms, litigants, …

On The Meaning Of Color And The End Of White(Ness), William J. Aceves

Faculty Scholarship

This Article explores the history of the term “people of color” and its current status in a country struggling to overcome its racist origins. The murders of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many other victims of state violence have generated profound anger, calls for action, and demands for dialogue. It is undoubtedly simplistic to assert that words matter. But accurate descriptions are essential for honest conversations, and words convey meanings beyond their syntax. In discussions about race and racial identity, the term “people of color” is routinely used as the antipode to the white community. …

Evaluation Of Risk Perception Of Smoking After The Implementation Of California’S Tobacco 21 Law, Joanna K. Sax, Neal Doran

Faculty Scholarship

Decreasing smoking initiation remains a public health priority. In 2016, California, in the United States, enacted the Tobacco 21 law, which raised the minimum age for the purchase of tobacco products from age 18 to age 21. This paper evaluates whether the enactment and implementation of the Tobacco 21 law changed how young adults perceive the risk(s) of smoking. Data were drawn from a cohort of emerging adults (n = 575) in California who were non-daily smokers at enrollment and followed quarterly for 3 years. Data were collected during 2015–2019. Piecewise multilevel regression models were used to test for changes …

Thank You For Not Publishing (Unexamined Patent Applications), Lidiya Mishchenko

Faculty Scholarship

Since 2000, the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (“PTO”) has published nearly all patent applications as they are submitted by applicants. Scholars and practitioners have praised this practice for providing timely notice of the potential legal rights the application may eventually cover. But maximizing timeliness and transparency in this way can also create significant costs, which may chill innovation and deter the development and funding of new research areas. This Article explores these often-unrecognized costs of publishing unexamined patent applications and proposes solutions that balance the benefits of early notice with the costs of patent system uncertainty.

Published patent applications …

On “The Alt-Right Movement And Us National Security”, Charles J. Dunlap Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Close Encounters Of The Third Kind: The Third Restatement, Duty, And Foreseeability, Michael K. Steenson

Faculty Scholarship

The Restatement (Third) of Torts: Liability for Physical and Emotional Harm (the “Third Restatement”) was adopted by the American Law Institute in 2010. The approach taken by the Third Restatement to negligence law excludes foreseeability from the duty determination and places it squarely as a relevant factor in the breach issue; it adopts the “but-for” standard for causation; and rejects proximate cause terminology, instead utilizing a scope of liability approach in which the key question is whether the harms that occurred were of the same general type that made the actor’s conduct tortious. Removal of foreseeability from the duty determination …