Law Commons^™

How China’S Views On The Law Of Jus Ad Bellum Will Shape Its Legal Approach To Cyberwarfare, Julian Ku

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Semantic Types For Decomposing Evidence Assessment In Decisions On Veterans’ Disability Claims For Ptsd, Vern R. Walker, Nneka Okpara, Ashtyn Hemendinger, Tauseff Ahmed

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

This paper presents a semantic analysis for mining arguments or reasoning from the evidence assessment portions (fact-finding portions) of adjudicatory decisions in law. Specifically, we first decompose the reasoning into primary branches, using a rule tree of the substantive issues to be decided. Within each branch, we further decompose argumentation using two main categories: reasoning that deploys special legal rules and reasoning that does not. With respect to special legal rules, we discuss legal presumption rules, sufficiency-of-evidence rules, and the benefit- of-the-doubt rule. Semantic anchors for this decomposition are provided by identifying the inferential roles of sentences – principally evidence …

Editor's Corner, Miriam R. Albert

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Family Limited Partnerships And Section 2036: Not Such A Good Fit, Mitchell M. Gans, Jonathan G. Blattmachr

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

The IRS has struggled to close down abusive family limited partnerships. At first unreceptive to IRS arguments, the courts eventually embraced section 2036 as an estate-tax tool for attacking such partnerships. Because the section was not designed to apply to partnerships, difficulties have arisen as the courts have struggled with the fit. In its most recent encounter, the Tax Court in Powell grappled with a fit-related issue that implicates the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Byrum. The Powell court, it will be argued, misread Byrum, conflating the majority opinion with the dissent – and converting the rule-based approach adopted by …

Do English-Only Rules Have A Place In The Workplace?, Amy R. Stein

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Family Law Bar, The Interdisciplinary Resource Center For Separating And Divorcing Parents, And The "Spark To Kindle The White Flame Of Progress", Andrew Schepard, Marsha Kline Pruett, Rebecca Love Kourlis

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Choosing Privacy, Irina D. Manta

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

How does one balance national security and civil liberties when they are essentially incommensurable values? This Article seeks to answer that question by looking at both as a function of individual choice. We like national security in principle because it stops terrorists from taking away our choices—the choice to live, the choice to retain the integrity of our health, and the choice to act in the manner that we prefer. We like civil liberties because we want to be free from government interference when choosing the speech in which to engage, the religion we practice, and many other fundamental aspects …

Teaching The Art And Craft Of Drafting Public Law: Statutes, Rules, And More, J. Lyn Entrikin, Richard K. Neumann Jr.

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

For centuries, lawyers have been notorious for long-winded writing filled with legalese, hyper-technical expression, and convoluted sentence structure. Legal writing in memos and briefs has been characterized as wordy, unclear, pompous, and just plain dull. Legal drafting, defined as the specialized skill of creating legal rules, is even more fraught with problems. In particular, no standardized, consistently used methodology exists in the United States for drafting federal and state statutes, agency regulations, and court rules.

In 1954, the late Professor Reed Dickerson observed, “It would be hard to exaggerate the importance of knowing how to prepare an adequate legal instrument. …

Academic Freedom, Job Security, And Costs, Richard K. Neumann Jr.

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Religious Conceptions Of Corporate Purpose, Ronald J. Colombo

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Capital Punishment Of Unintentional Felony Murder, Guyora Binder, Brenner M. Fissell, Robert Weisberg

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

Under the prevailing interpretation of the Eighth Amendment in the lower courts, a defendant who causes a death inadvertently in the course of a felony is eligible for capital punishment. This unfortunate interpretation rests on an unduly mechanical reading of the Supreme Court's decisions in Enmund v. Florida and Tison v. Arizona, which require culpability for capital punishment of co-felons who do not kill. The lower courts have drawn the unwarranted inference that these cases permit execution of those who cause death without any culpability towards death. This Article shows that this mechanical reading of precedent is mistaken, because the …

Sanctions And Efficacy In Analytic Jurisprudence, Brenner M. Fissell

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

Legal theory has long grappled with the question of what features a rule system must have for it to be considered “law.” Over time, a consensus has emerged that might seem counterintuitive to most people: a legal system does not require punishment for the disobedience of its rules (“sanctions”), nor must it be obeyed by the people it purports to apply to (it need not have “efficacy”). In this Article, I do not challenge these conclusions, but instead stake out an attempt to reconcile these claims with other intuitions about law. I argue that while neither sanctions nor efficacy are …

Discriminating Gender: Legal, Medical, And Social Presumptions About Transgender And Intersex People, Janet L. Dolgin

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

"Discriminating Gender: Legal, Medical, and Social Presumptions About Intersex and Transgender People” analyzes the significance of the binary-gender presumption in legal responses to intersex people and to transgender people. Both intersex and transgender status challenge familiar understandings of gender, sex, bodies, and personhood. Intersexuality challenges the cultural belief that that everyone can be, and should be, categorized as female or as male. And transgender status challenges the belief that gender and sex are always coincident and that they are established at a person’s birth. More fundamentally, differences in social and legal responses to both transgender people and to intersex people …

Ministers Of Justice And Mass Incarceration, Lissa Griffin, Ellen Yaroshefsky

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

Over the past few years, scholars, legislators, and politicians have come to recognize that our current state of“mass incarceration” is the result of serious dysfunction in our criminal justice system. As a consequence, there has been significant attention to the causes of mass incarceration. These include the war on drugs and political decisions based on a “law and order” perspective. Congressional and state legislative enactments increased the financing of the expansion of police powers and provided for severely punitive sentencing statutes, thereby giving prosecutors uniquely powerful weapons in securing guilty pleas. All of this occurred as crime rates dropped.

Where …

When Genealogy Matters: Intercountry Adoption, International Human Rights, And Global Neoliberalism, Barbara Stark

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

This Article traces the genealogies of intercountry adoption, human rights, and neoliberalism and explains how they converge. Part I examines adoption genealogies, noting that “stranger” adoption erases genealogy, eliminating the legal and social consequences of an illegitimate birth and giving the child a new legal identity. This Part then describes the globalization of adoption after World War II, including the paradox of “saving” children by sending them away, and the futility of erasing genealogy when it is as plain as the nose on a child’s face, or the shape of her eyes, or the color of her skin.

Part II …

Parallel State, Gregory Dolin, Irina D. Manta

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

Alternatively glamorized and reviled, Rio de Janeiro's shantytowns, known as "favelas," have become a fixture of the city's architecture and life. It is estimated that about 1.5 million people reside in these informal settlements that are scattered in the center and outskirts of Brazil's second-largest metropolitan area. Operating in the shadow of the law and lacking formal ownership title, favela residents have constructed an intricate set of informal rules to buy, sell, rent, and bequeath property that is often administered by the residents' associations of individual neighborhoods, which also assist in mediating related conflicts. While largely untested legal mechanisms may …

Why Fiction?, Alafair Burke

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

When I sold my first novel the summer after my first year as a tenure-track law professor, I assured the dean of my law school that fiction was a hobby, completely separate from my academic work, no different than if a colleague were training for a marathon in her spare time. Fifteen years later, this symposium asks its participants - four of us published novelists, one of us a judge, all of us trained lawyers - to reflect on the depiction of the criminal justice system in fiction. Our contributions make clear that the promise I made to my dean …

Discovering That The Poor Pay More: Race Riots, Poverty, And The Rise Of Consumer Law, Norman I. Silber

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

David Caplovitz is remembered primarily for his book The Poor Pay More and his writing about poor consumers. This article addresses why this work propelled the reconstruction of consumer financial protection law, by placing it within the context of widespread urban rioting and the civil rights movements of the 1960s. It argues that Capolvoitz presented the American political center with a clinical, denatured sociological explanation for urban rioting, which involved a more palatable and less threatening suggested response to unrest than explanations premised on intrinsic white racism or class oppression. According to Caplovitz, the riots more than anything else reflected …

Sentence Boundary Detection In Adjudicatory Decisions In The United States, Jaromir Savelka, Vern R. Walker, Matthias Grabmair, Kevin D. Ashley

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

We report results of an effort to enable computers to segment US adjudicatory decisions into sentences. We created a data set of 80 court decisions from four different domains. We show that legal decisions are more challenging for existing sentence boundary detection systems than for non-legal texts. Existing sentence boundary detection systems are based on a number of assumptions that do not hold for legal texts, hence their performance is impaired. We show that a general statistical sequence labeling model is capable of learning the definition more efficiently. We have trained a number of conditional random fields models that outperform …