Law Commons^™

Comment On Proposed Regulation: Prudence And Loyalty In Selecting Plan Investments And Exercising Shareholder Rights, David H. Webber

Shorter Faculty Works

In my view, while it is a significant improvement over its predecessor, the proposed rule’s persistent relegation of job creation/preservation to the status of mere “collateral benefit” is a mistake and undermines ERISA’s duty of loyalty. In reality, job creation and preservation are inextricably linked to fund financial health. Relegating that fact to a mere collateral benefit means trustees fail to consider the effect on a pension of investing in projects that eliminate the jobs of the fund’s own participants, or ignore the benefit of creating new jobs and thereby new pension contributors. This runs counter to President Biden’s executive …

23rd Annual Open Government Summit: Attorney General State Of Rhode Island : Access To Public Records Act & Open Meetings Act July 30, 2021, Office Of The Attorney General State Of Rhode Island

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Hegemonic Marriage: The Collision Of 'Transformative' Same-Sex Marriage With Reactionary Tax Law, Anthony C. Infanti

Articles

Before there was a culture war in the United States over same-sex marriage, there was a battle between opponents and proponents of same-sex marriage within the LGBTQ+ community. Some opposed same-sex marriage because of the long patriarchal history of marriage and the more consequential need to bridge the economic and privilege gap between the married and the unmarried. Others, in contrast, saw marriage as a civil rights issue and lauded the transformative potential of same-sex marriage, contending that it could upset the patriarchal nature of marriage and help to refashion marriage into something new and better.

This Article looks back …

Unrules, Cary Coglianese, Gabriel Scheffler, Daniel Walters

All Faculty Scholarship

At the center of contemporary debates over public law lies administrative agencies’ discretion to impose rules. Yet, for every one of these rules, there are also unrules nearby. Often overlooked and sometimes barely visible, unrules are the decisions that regulators make to lift or limit the scope of a regulatory obligation, for instance through waivers, exemptions, and exceptions. In some cases, unrules enable regulators to reduce burdens on regulated entities or to conserve valuable government resources in ways that make law more efficient. However, too much discretion to create unrules can facilitate undue business influence over the law, weaken regulatory …

Law Library Blog (March 2021): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

The Ethics Of Research That May Disadvantage Others, Christopher Robertson

Faculty Scholarship

In prospective interventional research, a treatment may provide an advantage for the recipient over other humans not receiving it. If the intervention proves successful, the treated are better able to compete for a scarce ventilator, a class grade, or a litigation outcome, potentially risking the deaths, jobs, or incomes of non-treated persons. The concerns for “bystanders” have typically focused on direct harms (e.g., infecting them with a virus), unlike the mere competition for rivalrous goods at issue here.

After broadly scoping this problem, analysis reveals several reasons that such research is typically permissible, notwithstanding the potential setbacks to the interests …

Measuring Environmental Justice: Analysis Of Progress Under Presidents Bush, Obama, And Trump, Mollie Soloway

Student Articles and Papers

No abstract provided.

Efficient Ethical Principles For Making Fatal Choices, W. Kip Viscusi

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Resource allocations of all kinds inevitably encounter financial constraints, making it infeasible to make financially unbounded commitments. Such resource constraints arise in almost all health and safety risk contexts, which has led to a regulatory oversight process to ascertain whether the expected benefits of major regulations outweigh the costs. The economic approach to monetizing health and safety risks is well established and is based on the value of a statistical life (“VSL”). Government agencies use these values reflecting attitudes toward small changes in risk to monetize the largest benefit component of regulations--that dealing with mortality risks. This procedure consequently bases …

Digital Gatekeepers, Thomas E. Kadri

Scholarly Works

If in William Blackstone's time we might have thought of a person's home as their castle, in Mark Zuckerberg's time we might say that their website is too. Under cyber-trespass laws like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, courts have treated online platforms as digital gatekeepers--as property owners that may permit and restrict access to websites much like landowners may do with private land in the real world. If platforms withhold their consent through words or inference, cyber-trespass laws let them enforce their preferences about who may access their services and gather information from the internet. Concerned about reputations and …

Comments On Rights To Federally Funded Inventions And Licensing Of Government Owned Inventions, National Institute Of Standards And Technology (Nist), United States Department Of Commerce, Notice Of Proposed Rulemaking. 86 Fr 35. Agency/Docket Number: 201207-0327, Joshua D. Sarnoff, Liza Vertinsky, Yaniv Heled, Ana Santos Rutschman, Cynthia M. Ho

All Faculty Scholarship

This letter is written in response to the notice of proposed rulemaking published in the Federal Register on January 4, 2021, seeking public comments on the revised regulations proposed by NIST to the University and Small Business Patent Procedure Act of 1980 (the “Bayh-Dole Act”). We submit this letter as academics who engage in research on patent law and biomedical innovation. The arguments also reflect practical knowledge that one of us has acquired from a decade of working with U.S. universities and biotech companies in the process of technology transfer as a lawyer practicing in two highly regarded Boston law …