Law Commons^™

Recent Developments In Hydraulic Fracturing Regulation And Litigation, Keith B. Hall

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Discrimination In Baby Making: The Unconstitutional Treatment Of Prospective Parents Through Surrogacy, Andrea B. Carroll

Journal Articles

The article focuses on limited use of reproductive technologies in defense of discriminating against unmarried intended parents. It emphasizes to eliminate unconstitutional treatment of prospective parents involved in the surrogacy process. It informs that State laws related to surrogacy create discrimination which is based on marital status. It suggests that surrogacy should be included as a permissible reproductive avenue for right to married and unmarried intended parents in the U.S.

Lock-Up Creep, Christina M. Sautter, Steven M. Davidoff

Journal Articles

The article discusses a reported increase in the number of merger agreement lock-ups that have occurred as of June 2013, focusing on the causes of lock-up creep and its potential impact on the takeover market. It states that lock-up creep is a phrase that is used to describe a rise in the number and type of merger agreement contractual devices that buyers and sellers negotiate in an acquisition agreement. Attorney negotiations, bidders, and various legal cases are examined.

Constitutional Privileging, Michael Coenen

Journal Articles

“Constitutional privileging” occurs when courts treat the constitutional status of a legal claim as a reason to afford it specialized procedural or remedial treatment — in effect providing to that claim a greater degree of judicial care and attention than its nonconstitutional counterparts receive. Though seldom scrutinized by courts and commentators, this practice occurs within a variety of doctrinal settings. For example, a stricter standard of harmless error review governs constitutional claims; district court findings of facts (and mixed findings) are subject to a stricter form of appellate review in constitutional cases; collateral relief from federal court judgments is more …

Promises Made To Be Broken? Standstill Agreements In Change Of Control Transactions, Christina M. Sautter

Journal Articles

Many promises are made in the negotiation of a merger but not all promises are necessarily enforceable or consistent with a board of directors’ fiduciary duties. This article explores the enforceability of one such promise: the buyer’s standstill agreement. When a publicly traded company explores a sale, that company, the target, customarily requires each potential buyer to execute a standstill agreement. A typical standstill prevents potential buyers from publicly making or announcing a bid for the target during the sale process without the target’s prior consent and for a period of approximately twelve to eighteen months from the conclusion of …

The Bp B1 Bundle Ruling: Federal Statutory Displacement Of General Maritime Law, John Costonis

Journal Articles

Among the many unresolved legal questions posed by BP’s Gulf well blowout are whether and to what extent maritime tort negligence remedies escape displacement by relevant federal statutes, including, principally, the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 (OPA or OPA 90). OPA jurisprudence over two decades holds that OPA displaces these remedies. Contrarily, however, the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana’s decision in In re Oil Spill by the Oil Rig “Deepwater Horizon” (hereinafter B1 Bundle) insists that general maritime law affords a parallel track to OPA’s remedies for economic and property oil discharge losses suffered by …

Uncommon Approaches To Commons Problems: Nested Governance Commons And Climate Change, Blake Hudson, Jonathan Rosenbloom

Journal Articles

Natural capital resources crucial to combatting climate change are potentially subject to tragic overconsumption absent a requisite degree of vertical government regulation of resource appropriators and/or horizontal collective action among resource appropriators. In federal systems, these vertical and horizontal approaches may (or may not) take place in any one of four scales — local, state, national, and global — “nested” one within another. Prior research has described how natural capital in federal systems of government, though privatized and/or subject to government regulation, may nonetheless remain in a tragic plight due to the allocation of governance authority in federal systems — …

Networking Customary Law, Scott Sullivan

Journal Articles

In United States v. Jones, the U.S. Supreme Court considered whether gathering four weeks of GPS information capturing a suspect’s movement on public roads constituted an unlawful search under the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

In two separate concurring opinions, Justices Alito and Sotomayor rejected the notion that all of a citizen’s movements in public were free from the Amendment’s protection. A unifying theme for both justices was the power of contemporary technology to aggregate isolated acts into a comprehensive knowledge of a person’s private life. Justice Alito writing on behalf of four Justices notes that, over time, the …

Auction Theory And Standstills: Dealing With Friends And Foes In A Sale Of Corporate Control, Christina M. Sautter

Journal Articles

A fundamental issue in Delaware mergers & acquisitions (M&A) law is the extent to which a target company’s board of directors may restrict a sales process to extract value from bidders and grant a “winning bidder” certain deal protections to protect a transaction from being overbid. Standstill agreements are one such form of deal protection. Standstills prevent bidders from making or announcing a bid for the target without the target’s consent both during the sales process and for a period after the sales process is completed and the target has executed an agreement with a “winning bidder.” Recent 2011 and …

Hydraulic Fracturing Contamination Claims: Problems With Proof, Keith B. Hall

Journal Articles

Hydraulic fracturing is controversial. Many people believe that hydraulic fracturing has caused contamination of groundwater and that the process should be prohibited because it is likely to cause additional contamination if it continues to be used. Many other people believe that hydraulic fracturing has not caused contamination and that little additional regulation is needed because fracturing is a useful process that poses little risk. Notably, this disagreement is not merely a difference of opinion regarding how society should balance economic development and environmental protection. Instead, the disagreement concerns facts – whether fracturing already has caused contamination and how much risk …

Louisiana Oil & Gas Update, Keith B. Hall

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

The American Takings Revolution And Public Trust Preservation: A Tale Of Two Blackstones, Blake Hudson

Journal Articles

The U.S. Constitution was forged out of a revolution that both rejected and embraced aspects of English legal tradition. The Takings Clause and its subsequent jurisprudential interpretation represents a rejection of what the Framers at the time and constitutional Reframers since that time viewed as central government over-reaching and improper interference with private property rights. The Framers left fully intact — and a different set of constitutional Reframers are increasingly seeking to use — the English common law doctrine of public trust to prevent private property rights from trumping the public’s interest in certain resources, especially in the coastal zone. …

Hydraulic Fracturing: Trade Secrets And The Mandatory Disclosure Of Fracturing Water Composition, Keith B. Hall

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

In The Civic Republic: Crime, The Inner City, And The Democracy Of Arms - A Disquisition On The Revival Of The Militia At Large, Raymond T. Diamond, Robert J. Cottrol

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Constraining The Federal Rules Of Civil Procedure Through The Federalism Canons Of Statutory Interpretation, Margaret S. Thomas

Journal Articles

The doctrine for deciding when to apply the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure to state claims heard in federal court has become a quagmire of exceptions and ephemeral distinctions, in large measure due to the persistent difficulty courts have in separating substantive rules from procedural ones in an era where special procedural rules are often used as an essential regulatory tool in state governance. This article examines the power of Federal Rules of Civil Procedure to displace contrary state law in diversity cases by focusing on the limited functional competence of the Supreme Court and its Advisory Committee to displace …

Calling On Congress: Take A Page From Parliament's Playbook And Fix Employment Discrimination Law, William Corbett

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Unmasking A Pretext For Res Ipsa Loquitur: A Proposal To Let Employment Discrimination Speak For Itself, William R. Corbett

Journal Articles

Has too much tort law been incorporated into the case law under the federal employment discrimination statutes? The debate on this issue has been reinvigorated by the Supreme Court’s decision in Staub v. Proctor Hospital, 131 S. Ct. 1186 (2011). In Staub the Court referred to the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act, a federal employment discrimination statute, as a “federal tort.” The Court then adopted the tort doctrine of proximate cause as the standard for evaluating subordinate bias (or “cat’s paw”) liability. Staub was not the first case in which the Court has suggested that a federal employment …

What We Talk About When We Talk About Tax Exemption, Philip T. Hackney

Journal Articles

Certain nonprofit organizations are granted exemption from federal income tax (“tax exemption”). Most theories assume tax exemption is a subsidy for organizations such as charities that provide some underprovided good or service. To make the subsidy case, these theories assume that there should be a tax on nonprofit organization income but provide no justification for this assumption. This article contributes to the literature by considering corporate income tax rationales as a proxy for why we might tax nonprofit organizations. The primary two corporate tax theories hold that the corporate tax is imposed to: (1) tax shareholders (“shareholder theory”), and (2) …