Law Commons^™

Advance Trade Discounts: A Reprise, Deborah A. Geier

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Prof. Deborah A. Geier, in a response to a recent article by Robert Willens on advance trade discounts, discusses the differences between the courts' analyses and some academics' approaches to measuring the income tax base properly.

Another Take On The Mortgage Debt Relief Situation, Deborah A. Geier

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Prof. Deborah A. Geier responds to Prof. Stephen Cohen's viewpoint on the mortgage debt relief debate.

Equal Access To Public Education: An Examination Of The State Constitutional And Statutory Rights Of Nonpublic Students To Participate In Public School Programs On A Part-Time Basis In North Carolina And Across The Nation, John Plecnik

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

This article argues that private and homeschool students in North Carolina have a state constitutional and statutory right to participate in public school programs on a part-time basis. This right is based on the North Carolina Constitution's explicit acknowledgment of nonpublic education and guarantees of equal protection and equal access to public schools. This right is also based on state statutes that mirror the wording and spirit of the state constitution's guarantees. Since the North Carolina Supreme Court has held that equal access to public schools is a fundamental right under the state constitution, this right can only be restricted …

Creating Online Tutorials: Five Lessons Learned, Lauren M. Collins

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

In the fall of 2005, two librarians, a legal research and writing program director, and an instructional technologist at Wayne State University received a grant to create online tutorials introducing novices to the basics of legal research. Tutorials were planned on subjects that the library and the legal research and writing program had traditionally covered jointly via library workshops, coordinated with classroom instruction for first-year law students. Since the mission of the law library is to support campus-wide activity and to assist members of the general public with legal research needs, the content of the tutorials was designed to serve …

Lawyer Deception To Uncover Wrongdoing, Lloyd B. Snyder

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

A Colorado district attorney used deception to get a man who had murdered three people and was threatening to kill again to surrender himself to the police. Following this, the Colorado Attorney Regulation Counsel charged the attorney with violating Rules 8.4(c) and 4.3 of the Colorado Rules of Professional Conduct. This article discusses the Rule 8.4(c) charge. Colorado and Ohio have identical provisions in their Codes of Professional Conduct on dishonesty and violations of professional conduct rules.

Children Of Men: Balancing The Inheritance Rights Of Marital And Non-Marital Children, Browne C. Lewis

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Average U.S. citizens are routinely having children out of wedlock. In America, at least one out of every three babies born is a non-marital child. As more and more children continue to be born out of wedlock, society must enact laws to protect the interests of those children. They are the children of men and they are entitled to financial support both during the lives and after the deaths of their parents.

Part II of this article briefly discusses the historical treatment of non-marital children. Part Ill explores the modem legal treatment of non-marital children, which consists of three distinct …

Expensing And The Interest Deduction, Deborah A. Geier

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

The difficulty of envisioning an effective provision that would deny interest deductions in this context may be reason enough to advocate for the alternative proposal described at the beginning of this viewpoint. The mixing of consumption tax provisions with the income tax treatment of debt in the U.S. tax system already provides too many opportunities for tax arbitrage. The expensing proposal would exacerbate these problems. The alternative proposal of broadening the base and lowering the rates (especially if coupled with eliminating the capital gains preference and integrating the corporate and individual taxes) would go far toward reducing the unfortunate mixing …

A Frank & Honest Talk: Aall’S Diversity Symposium Takes On Hard Questions Of Creating And Maintaining Diversity In The Legal Community, Lauren M. Collins

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

"Getting a Rise Out of Diversity: Celebrating the Challenge" took on hard questions of diversity, while keeping the spirit of New Orleans alive through celebration. With speakers who work to maintain diversity in legal practice and education every day, participants engaged in a lively discussion of what diversity actually is and how to create and sustain it.

A Sign Of Contradiction, David F. Forte

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Hadley Arkes offers a brilliant manifesto for natural law. In it, he suggests that judges do not pay enough attention to reason, that their realm of reason is too circumscribed—and he levels the criticism at both modern liberal and conservative judges. He urges them to reach out specifically to the principles of the natural law. Yet the judges resist the invitation. They seem always to have resisted the invitation. Why is that so? Why are natural law reasons resisted?, Arkes asks. Why do judges not seek a proper grounding of their judgment in natural law?

The Mystery Of David Barnhizer, Sheldon Gelman

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Professor Sheldon Gelman recalls the professional contributions and personal qualities of his colleague Professor David Barnhizer upon the occasion of his retirement.

No Credit For Gross Withholding Taxes On Portfolio Investments?, Deborah A. Geier

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Prof. Deborah Geier discusses the creditability of foreign gross withholding taxes on portfolio investments.

The Role Of Financial Journalists In Corporate Governance, Michael J. Borden

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

This Article pursues the important theme of disclosure, but focuses on a feature that has remained almost entirely overlooked by corporate and securities law scholars: the role of financial journalists in corporate governance. This omission is perhaps due to the fact that journalists do not fit easily into a legal discussion because they are largely unregulated. They are, in a sense, not legal actors, and, therefore do not comfortably become the subject of a legal prescription. Nevertheless, journalists contribute in many ways to the legal system at large and the system of corporate governance in particular.This Article uses case studies …

What I Did Last Summer: A Few Thoughts On Getting Tenure, Christopher Sagers

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Professor Sagers shares his humorous reflections on obtaining tenure, noting that even if tenure is not really all that funny, and even if it courts some controversy, it turns out that it is nevertheless really interesting.

Privatizing Public Forums To Eliminate Dissent, Kevin F. O'Neill

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

As the 2008 presidential campaign gets underway, the candidates may be tempted to suppress dissent at public forum rallies by using a tactic that Ronald Reagan pioneered and George W. Bush perfected. Under this tactic, the candidate's advance team “privatizes” a public square or public park by securing a municipal permit for the rally date that authorizes the expulsion of any citizen who manifests support for a rival candidate. At a 2004 Bush re-election rally, citizens who held signs opposing the President or opposing the war in Iraq were systematically expelled from a public park by Secret Service agents, who …

The Myth Of "Privatization", Christopher L. Sagers

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

The very large body of recent scholarship on the phenomenon of American 'privatization', which means roughly the performance of some seemingly public function through a non-state instrumentality, and which is purportedly very new and very important, suffers from certain problems. Not least of these is that 'privatization' appears not to exist. Or, more accurately, this phenomenon, which is said both to be important in itself and the chief symptom of the changing new order of governance under which we now live, is in fact a thin sliver of relevant reality, at best. Indeed, privatizing talk takes as a given a …

Some Words On Arthur Landever's Retirement From His Colleague, Steve Lazarus, Stephen R. Lazarus

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Professor Lazarus recalls the years of service Professor Landever contributed to the Cleveland-Marhshall College of Law, and his contributions as an educator, legal scholar, and colleague.

Clash Of The Titans: Collisions Of Economic Regulations And The Need To Harmonize Prescriptive Jurisdiction Rules, Milena Sterio

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Part I of this article describes regulatory clashes involving different states' public laws, and then focuses on certain areas of law, including antitrust, securities, and Internet commerce and publishing, where such clashes are most likely to take place. Part II focuses on the different solutions to this regulatory puzzle invoked by scholars, advocating either territorial-based or substance-based approaches. Part III then critiques the two approaches, while emphasizing the need to address the issue from a global perspective, that is, by seeking to harmonize jurisdiction-allocating rules on an international level.

Regulating White Desire, Reginald Oh

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

This Article contends that segregationist justifications for miscegenation and segregation laws shows that those laws effectively imposed a legal duty on whites to adhere to cultural norms of endogamy. Dominant social groups enforce rules of endogamy⁠—the cultural practice of encouraging people to marry within their own social group⁠—to protect the dominant status of their individual members and of the social group in general. Thus, laws prohibiting interracial marriages regulated white desire in order to protect the dominant status of whites as a group. The Loving Court, therefore, ultimately was correct in declaring that miscegenation laws denied blacks equal protection.

Part …

The Standing And Removal Decisions From The Supreme Court's 2006 Term, Steven H. Steinglass

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

This article reviews some of the more important jurisdictional decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court during the court's 2006-07 term, the first full term that included both of the court's newest justices--Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Associate Samuel A. Alito Jr. The term begins an era that will likely become known as the Roberts Court, but this term surely belonged to Associate Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who cast the deciding vote in all 24 of the court's 5-4 decisions.

Iraq, Secured Transactions & The Promise Of Islamic Law,, Mark J. Sundahl

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

When Iraq regains political stability, major reconstruction projects will have to be funded and local businesses will need financing in order to gain a foothold in the new economy. In order to attract the necessary capital, the Iraqi law of secured transactions must be reformed to allow for lenders to take security in the assets of their borrowers. However, the challenge of reforming Iraqi commercial law is complicated by the requirement under the new Iraqi Constitution that any new statutes enacted by the Iraqi legislature must comply with the principles of Islamic law. This Article sets forth proposals for reform …

The Detention, Confinement, And Incarceration Of Pregnant Women For The Benefit Of Fetal Health, April L. Cherry

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Section One of this Article discusses the effect of drug policy on the detention and confinement of pregnant women. This section also outlines three types of "fetal protection measures" that result in the detention, confinement, or incarceration of pregnant women in the name of fetal health and examines the legal rationales behind these mechanisms. Section One then questions whether detention is an effective way to reach the state's articulated goal of better fetal outcomes. Section Two offers a discussion of the constitutional rights at issue. This section addresses the ways in which detention violates two essential components of women's rights: …