Law Commons^™

Integrating Performance Tests Into Doctrinal Courses, Skills Courses, And Institutional Benchmark Testing: A Simple Way To Enhance Student Engagement While Furthering Assessment, Bar Passage, And Other Aba Accreditation Objectives, Sara J. Berman

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This article explores ways to weave performance tests into the law school curriculum to enhance student engagement and active learning, and to further ABA-mandated assessment and accreditation objectives. Some options include using them as discrete simulation exercises in doctrinal courses, as content for certain dedicated skills courses, or as possible institutional benchmark testing. Section II provides an overview of PTs, suggesting how they can be effective teaching tools. Section III demonstrates how integrating PTs into the law school curriculum, at both the course and institutional levels, may help law schools comply with numerous ABA Standards, including those regarding assessment and …

A Tribute To Douglas Scherer, Howard A. Glickstein

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No abstract provided.

A Dream Still Deferred: The Unlawful Use Of Student Fees For Instructional Technology In An Alabama Public School Causing A Disparate Impact For Minority Children, Taurus Myhand

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In framing the United States Constitution, the public education mandate was reserved for the states to strengthen, not weaken, the efforts of the governments to provide an education for the people. However, there are far too many instances where equal access to educational opportunities is still a dream deferred for many racial and ethnic minority children that are enrolled in public school systems throughout the United States. That is particularly the case for racial and ethnic minority students at one public school system in Alabama. This Note explores the constitutional issues raised by Pike Road School System’s use of mandatory …

Will The Jury System Survive The Peña-Rodriguez Exception To Rule 606(B)?: The Court’S Response To Racial Discrimination By A Juror Leaves The Future Of The American Jury Trial System In Jeopardy, Taurus Myhand

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The enforcement of no-impeachment rules has been a long-standing tradition in the United States preventing jurors from offering testimony as to impeach their own verdict. In March 2017, the Supreme Court changed course from centuries of jurisprudence and superseded the Federal Rules of Evidence with a new exception to Rule 606(b) in the Court’s decision in Peña-Rodriguez v. Colorado. The Court’s effort to “root out” racial bias in the justice system resulted in the debunking of the legislative authority granted to the Congress while creating an exception that does little, if anything, toward eliminating racial bias during jury deliberations. In …

Incentive Compatible Climate Change Mitigation: Moving Beyond The Pledge And Review Model, Gabriel Weil

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Climate change represents a global commons problem, where individuals, businesses, and nation-states all lack sufficient incentives to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions to levels consistent with meeting their collectively agreed upon mitigation goals. The current "pledge and review" paradigm for global climate change mitigation, which many see as a major breakthrough, relies primarily on moral pressure, reputational incentives, and global public opinion to foster cooperation on mitigation efforts over and above those driven by maximization of narrow conceptions of national interests. Given the scale of the emissions reductions required to meet stated mitigation goals, the substantial economic costs of deep …

Super Problems In Superstar Cities, Michael Lewyn, Beth Gazes

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Review of Richard Florida's The New Urban Crisis

There Is A Place For Muslims In America: On Different Understandings Of Neutrality, Mark Goldfeder

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No abstract provided.

Stop Defending Discrimination: Anti-Boycott, Divestment, And Sanctions* Statutes Are Fully Constitutional, Mark Goldfeder

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No abstract provided.

Law, Religion, And Immigration: Building Bridges With Express Lanes, Mark Goldfeder, Gideon Sapir

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This Article asks whether it can ever be moral or legal to use certain criteria, including nationality and/or religion, in formulating preferential immigration policies. In order to answer the question, it presents an in-depth look at the controversial "right of return, " focusing in particular on the example of the Israeli Law of Return. It contains a detailed history of the law and its development; a defense of the right of return in general; the principle and contextual arguments in favor of an amendment to or abrogation of Israel’s law; and a theoretical and practical defense of the law, with …

How To Build A Better Bar Exam, Eileen Kaufman, Andrea Anne Curcio, Carol L. Chomsky

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As a licensing exam, the purpose of the bar exam is consumer protection–-ensuring that new lawyers have the minimum competencies required to practice law effectively. As critics point out, however, the exam, and particularly the multiple-choice question portion of the exam, has significant flaws because it assesses legal knowledge and analysis in an artificial and unrealistic context, and the closed-book format rewards the ability to memorize thousands of legal rules, a skill unrelated to law practice.

This essay discusses how to improve the exam by changing its multiple-choice content and format. We use two law licensing exams to illustrate how …

Fashioning An Effective Negotiation Style: Choosing Between Good Practices, Tactics, And Tricks, Harold I. Abramson

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This article addresses two long standing issues in negotiations. First, what choices should we make to be effective? This article offers a schema for classifying the choices into one of three categories and in so doing, classifies choices based on likely benefits and degree of risk when fashioning an effective negotiation style. The second question is how to distinguish between negotiation style, the subject of this article, and our natural conflict style. By highlighting the distinction between how we want to negotiate (negotiation style) and how we naturally negotiate (conflict style), this article offers a way to become the negotiator …

Afterword: What's Next? Into A Third Decade Of Latcrit Theory, Community, And Praxis, Steven W. Bender, Francisco Valdes, Jorge R. Roig, Jasmine Gonzalez Rose, Saru Matambanadzo, Roberto Corrada, Shelley Cavalieri, Tayyab Mahmud, Zsea Bowmani, Anthony E. Varona

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In this multi-vocal Afterword, we reflect-personally and collectively to help chart renewed agendas toward and through a third decade of LatCrit theory, community, and praxis. This personal collective exercise illustrates and reconsiders the functions, guideposts, values, and postulates for our shared programmatic work a framework for our daily work as individuals and teams through our portfolio of projects, which in turn emerged as a "reflection and projection of LatCrit theory, community and praxis." These early anchors expressly encompassed (1) a call to recognize and accept the inevitable political nature of U.S. legal scholarship; (2) a concomitant call toward anti-subordination praxis …

Policing Narrative, Tal Kastner

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Counter narrative, a story that calls attention to and rebuts the presumptions of a dominant narrative framework, functions as an essential tool to reshape the bounds of the law. It has the potential to shape the collective notion of what constitutes legal authority. Black Lives Matter offers a counter narrative that challenges the characterization of the shared public space, among other aspects of contemporary society, as the space of law. Using the concept of necropower--the mobilization and prioritization of the state's power to kill--I analyze the contested physical and conceptual space of law exposed by the counter narrative of Black …

Explaining Market Urbanism, Michael Lewyn

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Compares Market Urbanism to New Urbanism and Landscape Urbanism

Due Process Abroad, Nathan Chapman

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Defining the scope of the Constitution’s application outside U.S. territory is more important than ever. This month the Supreme Court will hear oral argument about whether the Constitution applies when a U.S. officer shoots a Mexican child across the border. Meanwhile the federal courts are scrambling to evaluate the constitutionality of an Executive Order that, among other things, deprives immigrants of their right to reenter the United States. Yet the extraterritorial reach of the Due Process Clause — the broadest constitutional limit on the government’s authority to deprive persons of “life, liberty, and property” — remains obscure. Up to now, …

The Legal Regulation Of U.S. Crowdfunding: An Organically Evolving Patchwork, Joan Macleod Heminway

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The legal regulation of crowdfunding in the United States is neither well calibrated nor holistic. With the exception of specific securities regulation legislation, the regulation of crowdfunding under U.S. law exists as an extension of principles of pre-existing regulation to a specific new and continually changing Internet-based financing space. As a result, while some common consumer protection objectives can be identified, the legal regulatory approach to crowdfunding did not develop through deliberate, rational choice based on coherent public policy objectives. Instead, it arose and evolved by necessity in response to the spontaneous and natural origination and development of crowdfunding as …

To Avoid The Ieds, Mind The Ethical Touchstones, George Kuney

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No abstract provided.

Selling Crowdfunded Equity: A New Frontier, Joan Macleod Heminway

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This article briefly offers information and observations about federal securities law transfer restrictions imposed on holders of equity securities purchased in offerings that are exempt from federal registration under the CROWDFUND Act, Title III of the JOBS Act. The article first generally describes crowdfunding and the federal securities regulation regime governing offerings conducted through equity crowdfunding — most typically, the offer and sale of shares of common or preferred stock in a corporation over the Internet — in a transaction exempt from federal registration under the CROWDFUND Act and the related rules adopted by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. …

Incorporating Race Into Your Legal Research Class, Shamika Dalton

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No abstract provided.

Tennessee's For Profit Benefit Corporation Act: Will More Regulation Achieve The Desired Results, Brian Krumm

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No abstract provided.

Polygamous Marriage, Monogamous Divorce, Michael J. Higdon

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Could the constitutional right to marry also encompass polygamy? That question, which has long intrigued legal scholars, has taken on even greater significance in the wake of Obergefell v. Hodges. This Article answers that question in a novel way by scrutinizing the practice of plural marriage through the lens of economic game theory, exploring the extreme harms that would befall the state should polygamy become law. More specifically, the Article delves into the ex ante consequences of legalization, not on practicing polygamists (as is typically the focus), but on sequential bigamists—that is, those who never intend to have more than …

Professional Responsibility In An Age Of Alternative Entities, Alternative Finance, And Alternative Facts, Joan Macleod Heminway

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Business lawyers in the United States find little in the way of robust, tailored guidance in most applicable bodies of rules governing their professional conduct. The relative lack of professional responsibility and ethics guidance for these lawyers is particularly troubling in light of two formidable challenges in business law: legal change and complexity. Change and complexity arise from exciting developments in the industry that invite — even entice — the participation of business lawyers.

This essay offers current examples from three different areas of business law practice that involve change and complexity. They are labeled: “Alternative Entities,” “Alternative Finance,” and …

Chevron In The Circuit Courts: The Codebook Appendix, Kent H. Barnett, Christopher J. Walker

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For our empirical study on the use of Chevron deference in the federal courts of appeals, we utilized the following Codebook. This Codebook draws substantially from the codebook appended to William Eskridge and Lauren Baer's pathbreaking study of administrative law's deference doctrines at the Supreme Court. Our research assistants and we followed the instructions below when coding judicial decisions. To address questions as they arose and to ensure consistent coding, we maintained close contact with each other and our research assistants throughout the project and clarified the Codebook to address additional issues. Further details concerning our methodology (and its limitations) …

Inimicus Libertatis: Chief Justice Rehnquist’S Majority Or Plurality Opinions In The Field Of Criminal Procedure, Donald E. Wilkes Jr.

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Since the early 1970’s an increasingly conservative Supreme Court of the United States has been leading this country through a “Criminal Procedure Counterrevolution” (also called “The Rehnquisition”), during which the federal rights and remedies of criminal defendants have been inexorably and significantly eroded. There are numerous books and law review articles discussing this counterrevolution. Chief Justice Rehnquist, the most articulate and ideological of the Courts conservative justices, may properly be regarded as the intellectual founder and leader of this trend in favor of restricting criminal procedure rights.

This article analyzes and provides a bibliography of Supreme Court criminal procedure opinions …

Financing Social Enterprise: Is The Crowd The Answer?, Joan Macleod Heminway

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How does a business that wants “do good” while doing well finance its operations? In particular, how does a business of that kind find investors who understand and are committed to both its nonfinancial and financial objectives? This chapter addresses issues at the intersection of corporate governance and corporate finance with those questions in mind. Specifically, the pages that follow assess common foundational elements of social enterprise and crowdfunding and whether crowdfunding may be a promising (or even suitable) source of funding for social enterprise businesses.

As young popular and populist corporate governance and corporate finance adventures, social enterprise and …

2017 Transactional Clinic Conference -- June 1-2, 2017 Philadelphia. Results Of A Survey Of Conference Participants On Skills, Competencies, Learning Outcomes And Assessments (And Other Transactional Clinic Demographics), Brian Krumm

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The authors were presenters at the 2017 Transactional Clinic Conference: Built for Impact, held at University of Pennsylvania Law School in Philadelphia on June 1-2. Their topic was Learning Outcomes, Competencies, Skills and Assessments in Transactional Clinics. As part of their presentation, they prepared a survey of conference participants to gather information about how they define learning outcomes, and define and assess competencies and skills in their transactional clinics. The survey also asked numerous demographic questions about the transactional clinics which were represented, including types of clients represented and matters addressed, number of students supervised, prerequisites, grading, use of technology, …

Equality And Nondiscrimination Through The Eyes Of An International Religious Organization: The Organization Of Islamic Cooperation's (Oic) Response To Women's Rights, Robert C. Blitt

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This article is the first of a two part series that draws on women’s rights and sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) to explore how the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) represents, interprets and seeks to impact the right to equality and protection against discrimination as enshrined under international human rights law. The study is a novel one in as much as the OIC is neither a state nor a religious group per se. Rather, the OIC stands out as the only contemporary intergovernmental organization unifying its member states around the commonality of a single religion. In this capacity, the …

We, The People - Whoever That Is [Reviews], Glenn Harlan Reynolds

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No abstract provided.

Safe Haven Conundrum: The Use Of Special Bailments To Keep Pets Out Of Violent Households, Joan Macleod Heminway

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Family violence is a continuing social problem that breeds new complexity at every turn. Just as we seem to get a modicum of control over the sheltering of at-risk mothers and children (among other human victims), we find that family pets—dependent creatures endangered by the same violent behavior that threatens their human caretakers—often are left unprotected or under-protected by both law and society. In most cases, pets are unable to be sheltered with human victims of domestic violence due to shelter restrictions. Restrictions on the sheltering of abuse victims with their pets result in difficult choices for human victims who …

Why Can't We Be Friends? A Business Finance Lawyer's Plaintive Plea To Entrepreneurs, Joan Macleod Heminway

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Entrepreneurs have the capacity to add value to the economy and the community. Business lawyers — including business finance lawyers — want to help entrepreneurs achieve their objectives. Despite incentives to a symbiotic relationship, however, entrepreneurs and business finance lawyers are not always the best of friends. This symposium piece offers several approaches to bridging this gap between entrepreneurs and business finance lawyers.