Law Commons^™

Disciplinary Regulation Of Prosecutorial Discretion: What Would A Rule Look Like?, Samuel J. Levine

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This Essay is the third part of a larger project examining the potential role of professional discipline in the regulation and supervision of prosecutors’ charging decisions. The first two parts of the project argued that courts have both the authority and the ability to exercise effective disciplinary review of charging decisions through the adoption of ethics rules and their enforcement in the disciplinary process. This Essay takes the next step in the project, considering the nature of rules that courts might adopt, by exploring potential rules targeting two improprieties: arbitrary and capricious charging decisions, and discriminatory charging decisions.

The Constitution As Poetry, Samuel J. Levine

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Building upon a body of scholarship that compares constitutional interpretation to biblical and literary interpretation, and relying on an insight from a prominent nineteenth century rabbinic scholar, this Article briefly explores similarities in the interpretation of the Torah—the text of the Five Books of Moses—and the United States Constitution. Specifically, this Article draws upon Rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehudah Berlin’s (“Netziv”) intriguing suggestion that the interpretation of the text of the Torah parallels the interpretation of poetry. According to Netziv, this parallel accounts for the practice of interpreting the Torah expansively in ways that derive substantive legal rules and principles far …

Introduction: Singapore Convention Reference Book, Harold Abramson

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No abstract provided.

Singapore Mediation Convention Reference Book, Harold Abramson (Faculty Editor)

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No abstract provided.

Advanced Artificial Intelligence And Contract, John Linarelli

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The aim of this article is to inquire whether contract law can operate in a state of affairs in which artificial general intelligence (AGI) exists and has the cognitive abilities to interact with humans to exchange promises or otherwise engage in the sorts of exchanges typically governed by contract law. AGI is a long way off but its emergence may be sudden and come in the lifetimes of some people alive today. How might contract law adapt to a situation in which at least one of the contract parties could, from the standpoint of capacity to engage in promising and …

Relationships And Ethics In The Land Use Game, Patricia E. Salkin, Thomas Brown, Aisha Scholes

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Ethical considerations in the land use decision making process can be organized into a number of categories, including, first and foremost, the broad subject of conflicts of interest.1 Players in the land use game can find themselves in real or perceived conflicts situations based on personal financial interests resulting from investments, including businesses and real estate holdings (such as the location of their property vis-à-vis the location of the subject property before the Board), employment for themselves or members of their immediate family, and memberships in nonprofit organizations that may be either passive or active (e.g., simply dues paying member …

Contract Creep, Tal Kastner, Ethan J. Leib

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Scholars and judges think they can address the multiple purposes and values of contract law by developing different doctrinal regimes for different transaction types. They think if we develop one track of contract doctrine for sophisticated parties and another for consumers, we can build a better world of contract: protecting private ordering for sophisticated parties and protecting consumers’ needs all at once. Given the growing enthusiasm for laying down these separate tracks and developing their infrastructures, this Article brings a necessary reality check to this endeavor by highlighting for scholars and judges how doctrine in contract law functions in fact: …

Defining Law, Tal Kastner

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Commenting on Chaim Saiman’s book, Halakhah: The Rabbinic Idea of Law, this essay views the difficulty of defining halakha as indicative of the universal challenge of defining the bounds of what constitutes “law.” Considering the dynamic of contingent norms, social context, history, and narrative that shapes the meaning of law, it focuses on a series of decisions by a federal district court judge in connection with the case of Bayless v. United States (1996) involving the sufficiency of reasonable suspicion to justify a police stop. Tracing the slippage in this case between holding and dicta, among other sources of authority …

Are Wide Streets Negligent?, Michael Lewyn

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American commercial streets are typically designed to encourage rapid automobile traffic, thus making streets unsafe for pedestrians. In the 2016 case of Turturro v. City of New York, the New York Court of Appeals upheld a jury verdict against a city for failing to slow down such traffic. This article describes Turturro, but shows how limited its holding was: the Turturro court emphasized a city's failure to study traffic calming, so if a city studies its options adequately it can avoid liability even if its policies are unsuccessful.

Law, Religion, And Secular Order, Zachary R. Calo

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This article compares the law and religion jurisprudence of the US Supreme Court and the European Court of Human Rights across three legal areas: religious symbols and religion-state relations, individual religious freedom, and institutional religious freedom or freedom of the church. Particular focus is given to the manner in which this jurisprudence reveals the underlying structure and meaning of the secular. Although there continues to be significant jurisprudential diversity between these two courts and across these legal areas, there is also emerging a shared accounting of religion, secularity, and moral order in the late modern West.

Crime Follies: Overcriminalization, Independent Prosecutors, And The Rule Of Law, Glenn Harlan Reynolds

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This chapter from Peter W. Morgan & Glenn H. Reynolds, "The Appearance of Impropriety: How The Ethics Wars Have Undermined American Government, Business, and Society" describes how the combination of politically inspired prosecutions and indeterminate criminal offenses has served to undermine fairness and faith in government.

Excerpt: "In the old days, we would refrain from ringing up the cops until after there was fairly clear evidence of a crime, such as Professor Plum lying in a pool of blood in the conservatory. Off everyone would go looking for clues, with the concrete fact of Professor Plum's corpse to focus their …

Prosecuting Poverty, Criminalizing Care, Wendy A. Bach

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In 2013, state legislators sitting at the heart of America’s opiate epidemic created the crime of fetal assault. Although they offered a fairly standard series of criminologic rationales to justify the legislation, they also posited that the creation of this crime was a precondition to secure treatment (or care) resources for women addicted to opiates. This extraordinary supposition—that criminalizing conduct creates a road to care—is an outgrowth of three interlinked socio-legal trends: the building of the carceral state, the criminalization of poverty, and the rapid growth, since the late 1980s, of a new generation of problem-solving courts. Framed in this …

Minimizing And Addressing Microaggressions In The Workplace: Be Proactive, Part Two, Shamika Dalton

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No abstract provided.

Lawclinics@50: 50 Years Of Clinical Legal Education At Georgia Law, Alex Scherr

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Director of the Veterans Legal Clinic Alex Scherr penned this blog post announcing the LawClinics@50 celebration plans as well as the collaboration with the Georgia Law Review Online platform and sharing the first in a series of articles related to the fiftieth anniversary of legal clinical education at the School of Law.

50 Years Of Clinical And Experiential Learning At Georgia Law, Eleanor Lanier

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This note serves as an introduction of the partnership between the Georgia Law Review Online Platform and the School of Law's Clinical Programs and Experiential Learning faculty to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of clinical legal education at the University of Georgia's law school. It provides a brief history of the program beginnings in 1967 and discusses the program expansions to present which reached a total of 18 different options when the note was published.

Minimizing And Addressing Implicit Bias In The Workplace: Be Proactive, Part One, Shamika Dalton

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Librarians and information professionals cannot hide from bias: a prejudice for or against something, someone, or a group. As human beings, we all have biases. However, implicit biases are ones that affect us in an unconscious manner. Awareness of our implicit biases, and how they can affect our colleagues and work environment, is critical to promoting an inclusive work environment. Part one of this two-part article series will focus on implicit bias: what is implicit bias, how these biases affect the work environment, and best practices for reducing these biases within recruitment, hiring, and retention in the library workplace.

The Politics Of Selecting Chevron Deference, Kent H. Barnett, Christina L. Boyd, Christopher J. Walker

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In this article, we examine an important threshold question in judicial behavior and administrative law: When do federal circuit courts decide to use the Chevron deference framework and when do they select a framework that is less deferential to the administrative agency's statutory interpretation? The question is important because the purpose of Chevron deference is to give agencies-not judges-policy-making space within statutory interpretation. We expect, nonetheless, that whether to invoke the Chevron framework is largely driven by political dynamics, with judges adopting a less deferential standard when their political preferences do not align with the agency's decision. To provide insight, …

New York Leads From The Middle: Crowdsourcing The Bar Exam Cut Score, Joan W. Howarth

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In this article, Prof. Howarth urges states to move to a uniform cut score on the Multistate Bar Exam (MBE) through the use of crowdsourcing.

Unregulated Charity, Eric Franklin Amarante

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The vast majority of charities in the United States operate in a regulatory blind spot: they are neither meaningfully evaluated when they apply for charitable status nor substantively monitored after they receive charitable status. Driven by severe budget constraints, the IRS decided to essentially ignore any charity that claims it will realize less than $50,000 in annual gross receipts. From a practical perspective, the IRS’s decision makes sense. To the extent smaller charities are less likely to cause harm, it is reasonable (perhaps even preferable) to subject them to less scrutiny. This type of prioritization, known as risk-based regulation, has …

Tribute To Professor Jonathan G. Rohr, Michael J. Higdon

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No abstract provided.

Publishing Basics: How To Get Started & Where To Begin, Shamika Dalton

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No abstract provided.

Time Is Money: Technology Can Help You Create More Of Both, Benjamin H. Barton

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No abstract provided.

Rebooting Justice: Odr Is Disrupting The Judicial System, Benjamin H. Barton

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No abstract provided.

The Opioid Epidemic: Regulation, Responsibility, And Remedies, Isaac ("Zack") D. Buck

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No abstract provided.

Diversity Dialogues: Navigating Law Librarianship While Black: A Week In The Life Of A Black Female Law Librarian, Shamika Dalton

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No abstract provided.

The Rise Of Market Urbanism, Michael Lewyn

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Compares market urbanism to new urbanism and to defenders of suburban sprawl. Like new urbanists, market urbanists find urban life to be socially valuable, and emphasize that sprawl is not always in line with consumer preferences. But market urbanists are more likely to emphasize the role of government regulation in creating suburbanization, and to oppose anti-sprawl land use regulations.

Access-To-Justice Challenges For Expungement In Tennessee, Joy Radice

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No abstract provided.

Let's Not Give Up On Traditional For-Profit Corporations For Sustainable Social Enterprise, Joan Macleod Heminway

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The past ten years have witnessed the birth of (among other legal business forms) the low-profit limited liability company (commonly known as the L3C), the social purpose corporation, and the benefit corporation. The benefit corporation has become a legal form of entity in over 30 states. The significant number of state legislative adoptions of new social enterprise forms of entity indicates that policy makers believe these alternative forms of entity serve a purpose (whether legal or extra legal).

The rise of specialty forms of entity for social enterprise, however, calls into question, for many, the continuing role of the traditional …

Retaliation Backlash, Alex B. Long

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No abstract provided.

Access To Justice And Routine Legal Services: New Technologies Meet Bar Regulators, Benjamin H. Barton

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We are in the early stages of a technological revolution in legal services. Technology is displacing lawyers in a wide array of tasks such as document drafting, review, and assembly, and is also reshaping the way that lawyers find clients and deliver assistance. For most consumers, these are welcome developments. Such innovations generally reduce costs and increase both accessibility and efficiency. The potential gains are particularly great for low- and middle-income consumers, who lack access for a vast array of basic, often urgent, legal needs. Yet for lawyers, the consequences of technology have been more mixed. Many feel that their …