Law Commons^™

Wage Theft Criminalization, Benjamin Levin

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Over the past decade, workers’ rights activists and legal scholars have embraced the language of “wage theft” in describing the abuses of the contemporary workplace. The phrase invokes a certain moral clarity: theft is wrong. The phrase is not merely a rhetorical flourish. Increasingly, it has a specific content for activists, politicians, advocates, and academics: wage theft speaks the language of criminal law, and wage theft is a crime that should be punished. Harshly. Self-proclaimed “progressive prosecutors” have made wage theft cases a priority, and left-leaning politicians in the United States and abroad have begun to propose more criminal statutes ...

Shareholder Primacy And The Moral Obligation Of Directors, Mark J. Loewenstein, Jay Geyer

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One of the most written-about and important topics in corporate law is the fiduciary obligations of corporate directors. Increasingly, critics of American capitalism have urged that corporations, and implicitly, corporate directors, act in a more socially responsible fashion and thus eschew the notion that shareholder primacy is the exclusive guide to a director’s fiduciary duty. Under this view, directors must consider the effect of their actions on “stakeholders” other than shareholders and be guided by morality—doing the right thing—when making business judgments.

When directors move away from shareholder primacy, however, decision-making becomes more difficult and problematic. This ...

Pandemic Emotions: The Good, The Bad, And The Unconscious —Implications For Public Health, Financial Economics, Law, And Leadership, Peter H. Huang

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Pandemics lead to emotions that can be good, bad, and unconscious. This Article offers an interdisciplinary analysis of how emotions during pandemics affect people’s responses to pandemics, public health, financial economics, law, and leadership. Pandemics are heart-breaking health crises. Crises produce emotions that impact decision-making. This Article analyzes how fear and anger over COVID-19 fueled anti-Asian and anti-Asian American hatred and racism. COVID-19 caused massive tragic economic, emotional, mental, physical, and psychological suffering. These difficulties are interconnected and lead to vicious cycles. Fear distorts people’s decision readiness, deliberation, information acquisition, risk perception, and thinking. Distortions affect people’s ...

Decolonizing Indigenous Migration, Angela R. Riley, Kristen A. Carpenter

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As global attention turns increasingly to issues of migration, the Indigenous identity of migrants often remains invisible. At the U.S.-Mexico border, for example, a significant number of the individuals now being detained are people of indigenous origin, whether Kekchi, Mam, Achi, Ixil, Awakatek, Jakaltek or Qanjobal, coming from communities in Venezuela, Honduras, Guatemala and other countries. They may be leaving their homelands precisely because their rights as Indigenous Peoples, for example the right to occupy land collectively and without forcible removal, have been violated. But once they reach the United States, they are treated as any other migrants ...

Women’S Votes, Women’S Voices, And The Limits Of Criminal Justice Reform, 1911–1950, Carolyn B. Ramsey

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Deriving its vigor from the work of grassroots organizations at the state and local levels, the League of Women Voters (LWV) sought, in the first half of the twentieth century, to provide newly enfranchised women with a political education to strengthen their voice in public affairs. Local branches like the San Francisco Center learned from experience—through practical involvement in a variety of social welfare and criminal justice initiatives. This Article, written for a symposium commemorating the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment, assesses the role of LWV leaders in California and especially San Francisco in reforming three aspects of the ...

Catalyzing Privacy Law, Anupam Chander, Margot E. Kaminski, William Mcgeveran

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The United States famously lacks a comprehensive federal data privacy law. In the past year, however, over half the states have proposed broad privacy bills or have established task forces to propose possible privacy legislation. Meanwhile, congressional committees are holding hearings on multiple privacy bills. What is catalyzing this legislative momentum? Some believe that Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which came into force in 2018, is the driving factor. But with the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) which took effect in January 2020, California has emerged as an alternate contender in the race to set the new standard ...

The Political (Mis)Representation Of Immigrants In Voting, Ming H. Chen, Hunter Knapp

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Who is a member of the political community? What barriers to inclusion do immigrants face as outsiders to this political community? This Essay describes several barriers facing immigrants and naturalized citizens that impede their political belonging. It critiques these barriers on the basis of immigrants and foreign-born voters having rights of semi-citizenship. By placing naturalization backlogs, voting restrictions, and reapportionment battles in the historical context of voter suppression, it provides a descriptive and normative account of the political misrepresentation of immigrants.

A Prolegomenon To The Study Of Racial Ideology In The Era Of International Human Rights, Justin Desautels-Stein

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There is no critical race approach to international law. There are Third World approaches, feminist approaches, economic approaches, and constitutional approaches, but notably absent in the catalogue is a distinct view of international law that takes its point of departure from the vantage of Critical Race Theory (CRT), or anything like it. Through a study of racial ideology in the history of international legal thought, this Article offers the beginnings of an explanation for how this lack of attention to race and racism came to be, and why it matters today.

Getting Real About Procedure: Changing How We Think, Write And Teach About American Civil Procedure, Suzette M. Malveaux

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No abstract provided.

Free Speech And Democracy: A Primer For Twenty-First Century Reformers, Toni M. Massaro, Helen Norton

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Left unfettered, the twenty-first-century speech environment threatens to undermine critical pieces of the democratic project. Speech operates today in ways unimaginable not only to the First Amendment’s eighteenth-century writers but also to its twentieth-century champions. Key among these changes is that speech is cheaper and more abundant than ever before, and can be exploited — by both government and powerful private actors alike — as a tool for controlling others’ speech and frustrating meaningful public discourse and democratic outcomes.

The Court’s longstanding First Amendment doctrine rests on a model of how speech works that is no longer accurate. This invites ...

Imagining The Progressive Prosecutor, Benjamin Levin

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As criminal justice reform has attracted greater public support, a new brand of district attorney candidate has arrived: the “progressive prosecutors.” Commentators increasingly have keyed on “progressive prosecutors” as offering a promising avenue for structural change, deserving of significant political capital and academic attention. This Essay asks an unanswered threshold question: what exactly is a “progressive prosecutor”? Is that a meaningful category at all, and if so, who is entitled to claim the mantle? In this Essay, I argue that “progressive prosecutor” means many different things to many different people. These differences in turn reveal important fault lines in academic ...

Researching Colorado Employment Law, Jill Sturgeon

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No abstract provided.

Government Falsehoods, Democratic Harm, And The Constitution, Helen Norton

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No abstract provided.

Introduction To The Symposium On The Impact Of Indigenous Peoples On International Law, S. James Anaya, Antony Anghie

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No abstract provided.

Indigenous Peoples And Diplomacy On The World Stage, Kristen Carpenter, Alexey Tsykarev

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No abstract provided.

Agency Genesis And The Energy Transition, Sharon B. Jacobs

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Commentators and policymakers frequently propose new government agencies in response to novel or intractable problems. New agencies can refocus public attention on the problems they regulate. They can attract new talent and bypass calcified or captured channels. But they are also costly, and there is no guarantee that they will be more successful than their predecessors.

This Article examines agency genesis at the state level. In the process, it expands recent thinking about the administrative separation of powers to the states. At the federal level, setting up agency rivalries within the executive branch can be an effective tool for mitigating ...

Policing And "Bluelining", Aya Gruber

Articles

In this Commentary written for the Frankel Lecture symposium on police killings of Black Americans, I explore the increasingly popular claim that racialized brutality is not a malfunction of policing but its function. Or, as Paul Butler counsels, “Don’t get it twisted—the criminal justice system ain’t broke. It’s working just the way it’s supposed to.” This claim contradicts the conventional narrative, which remains largely accepted, that the police exist to vindicate the community’s interest in solving, reducing, and preventing crime. A perusal of the history of organized policing in the United States, however, reveals ...

Sanctuary Cities And The Power Of The Purse: An Executive Dole Test, Douglas M. Spencer

Articles

A constitutional clash is brewing. Cities and counties are flexing their muscles to frustrate national immigration policy while the federal Executive is threatening to interfere with local law enforcement decision making and funding. Although the federal government generally has plenary authority over immigration law, the Constitution forbids the commandeering of state and local officials to enforce federal law against their will. One exception to this anti-commandeering principle is the Spending Clause of Article I that permits Congress to condition the receipt of federal funds on compliance with federal law. These conditions, according to more than 30 years of Supreme Court ...

Book Review, Aamir S. Abdullah

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No abstract provided.

Environmental Law, Disrupted By Covid-19, Rebecca Bratspies, Vanessa Casado Peréz, Robin Kundis Craig, Lissa Griffin, Sarah Krakoff, Keith Hirokawa, Katrina Kuh, Jessica Owley, Melissa Powers, Shannon Roesler, Jonathan Rosenbloom, J.B. Ruhl, Erin Ryan, David Takacs

Articles

For over a year, the COVID-19 pandemic and concerns about systemic racial injustice have highlighted the conflicts and opportunities currently faced by environmental law. Scientists uniformly predict that environmental degradation, notably climate change, will cause a rise in diseases, disproportionate suffering among communities already facing discrimination, and significant economic losses. In this Article, members of the Environmental Law Collaborative examine the legal system’s responses to these crises, with the goal of framing opportunities to reimagine environmental law. The Article is excerpted from their book Environmental Law, Disrupted, to be published by ELI Press later this year.

American Common Market Redux, Richard Collins

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The Tennessee Wine case, decided in June of 2019, had a major effect on the path of the law for an issue not argued in it. The Supreme Court affirmed invalidity of a protectionist state liquor regulation that discriminated against interstate commerce in violation of the dormant commerce clause doctrine. Its holding rejected a vigorous defense based on the special terms of the Twenty-first Amendment that ended Prohibition—an issue of interest only to those involved in markets for alcoholic drinks. However, the Court’s opinion removed serious doubts about validity of the Doctrine itself, even though the petitioner and ...

Intersectionality In The Opioid Crisis: Anti-Black Racism And White, Pregnant, Opioid Users, Craig Konnoth

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No abstract provided.

Public Purpose Finance: The Government's Role As Lender, Nadav Orian Peer

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This Article explores the workings of Public Purpose Finance, and its role within the U.S. political economy. “Public Purpose Finance” (PPF) refers to the broad range of institutions through which the government extends credit to private borrowers in sectors like housing, education, agriculture and small business. At a total of $10 trillion, PPF roughly equals the entire U.S. corporate bond market, and is around one half of the U.S. Gross national debt (2018 figures). The Article begins by surveying and quantifying the scope of PPF. It then demonstrates that PPF enjoys a considerable degree of insulation from ...

Are Data Privacy Laws Trade Barriers?, Margot Kaminski

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No abstract provided.

A Recent Renaissance In Privacy Law, Margot Kaminski

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Considering the recent increased attention to privacy law issues amid the typically slow pace of legal change.

Narrowly Tailoring The Covid-19 Response, Craig Konnoth

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No abstract provided.

Internet Architecture And Disability, Blake E. Reid

Articles

The Internet is essential for education, employment, information, and cultural and democratic participation. For tens of millions of people with disabilities in the United States, barriers to accessing the Internet—including the visual presentation of information to people who are blind or visually impaired, the aural presentation of information to people who are deaf or hard of hearing, and the persistence of Internet technology, interfaces, and content without regard to prohibitive cognitive load for people with cognitive and intellectual disabilities—collectively pose one of the most significant civil rights issues of the information age. Yet disability law lacks a comprehensive ...

Telehealth And Telework Accessibility In A Pandemic-Induced Virtual World, Blake E. Reid, Christian Vogler, Zainab Alkebsi

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This short essay explores one dimension of disability law’s COVID-related “frailty”: how the pandemic has undermined equal access to employment and healthcare for Americans who are deaf or hard of hearing as healthcare and employment migrate toward telehealth and telework activities. This essay’s authors—a clinical law professor; a computer scientist whose research focuses on accessible technology; and a deaf policy attorney for the nation’s premier civil rights organization of, by, and for deaf and hard of hearing individuals in the United States—have collaborated over the past months on detailed advocacy documents aimed at helping deaf ...

Foreword, National Injunctions: What Does The Future Hold?, Suzette Malveaux

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This Foreword is to the 27th Annual Ira C. Rothgerber Jr. Conference, National Injunctions: What Does the Future Hold?, which was hosted by The Byron R. White Center for the Study of American Constitutional Law at the University of Colorado Law School, on Apr. 5, 2019.

Beyond The Marrakesh Vip Treaty: Typology Of Copyright Access-Enabling Provisions For Persons With Disabilities, Caroline B. Ncube, Blake E. Reid, Desmond O. Oriakhogba

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This paper builds upon the evidence drawn from a scoping study on access to copyright works by persons with disabilities. It identifies and discusses specific access‐enabling technologies for persons with aural, cognitive, physical, and visual disabilities and how they are affected by the exercise of exclusive rights. It shows how, and the extent to which states' ratification of the Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons Who Are Blind, Visually Impaired, or Otherwise Print Disabled (Marrakesh Treaty) has enabled the making of accessible format of copyright works for persons with disabilities. To this end, the paper ...