Law Commons^™

Family Law And Female Empowerment, Andrea B. Carroll

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Why The Late Justice Scalia Was Wrong: The Fallacies Of Constitutional Textualism, Ken Levy

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Derecho Constitucional [2015-2016 Puerto Rico Supreme Court Term Analysis: Constitutional Law], Jorge M. Farinacci Fernós

Journal Articles

Este Término fue muy variado en temas constitucionales. (1) Por medio de un caso de derecho a la lactancia en el empleo, el derecho a la intimidad adquirió “forma operativa” y se concretizo como arma de litigio constitucional. (2) Se aclaró que el poder de nombramiento de la figura del o de la Juez(a) Presidente(a) del Tribunal Supremo de Puerto Rico recae en el Gobernador. (3) Ocurrió un cambio importante en la doctrina de la legitimación activa: la ausencia de legitimación activa no tiene como consecuencia inmediata la desestimación de la demanda por falta de jurisdicción. (4) En relación a …

You’Re It! Tag Jurisdiction Over Corporations In Canada, Tanya J. Monestier

Journal Articles

In September 2015, the Supreme Court of Canada released its decision in Chevron v. Yaiguaje, a case that legal commentators had been keeping an eye on for years. The Chevron case has spanned several decades as well as several continents, and the enforcement action in Ontario was the latest in a series of procedural moves aimed at enforcing a nearly $10 billion Ecuadorian judgment against the oil giant. In Chevron, the plaintiffs sought to have the judgment enforced in Ontario against both Chevron (the judgment debtor) and Chevron Canada (a seventh-level indirect subsidiary of the judgment debtor). The Chevron case …

Penal Incapacitation: A Situationist Critique, Guyora Binder, Ben Notterman

Journal Articles

Incapacitation of offenders has been an influential goal of criminal justice policy during the era of mass incarceration. The Supreme Court’s Eighth Amendment Jurisprudence has accepted incapacitation alone as a justifying purpose for recidivist sentencing enhancements. Yet recent Eighth Amendment decisions have required that severe sentences of incarceration be justified by reference to all purposes of punishment cumulatively, and have tested claims of incapacitative benefits against empirical evidence. This Article critiques penal incapacitation as both theoretically and empirically flawed. Incapacitation theory underestimates situational factors contributing to crime, over-attributes dangerousness to individuals, and fails to account for crime committed in prison. …

Captive: Zoometric Operations In Gaza, Irus Braverman

Journal Articles

“We are the only people in this world who are living under such total occupation. Israel sees us as being equal to our animals, and sometimes they even value us less than our animals.” This quote, from the founder of the Gaza Zoo, demonstrates both the significance and the complexities of human-animal relations in Gaza, especially at times of siege and war. My article draws on ethnographic encounters and investigative analysis to relay how Gaza’s spatial confinement generally, and the Israeli incursion into Gaza of summer 2014 in particular, has lent itself to a radicalized discursive interplay between the animalization …

Missouri*@!!?*@! - Too Slow, Mae Quinn

Journal Articles

When asked to share my thoughts at this symposium about contemporary human rights issues in domestic criminal law—and how they manifest in St. Louis, Missouri in particular—I could not help but think of these words. Nina Simone, the brilliant vocal artist and civil rights activist, wrote these lyrics over fifty years ago and then bravely and controversially sang them for a mostly-white audience at New York City’s Carnegie Hall following the 1963 shooting death of Medgar Evers.2 Evers was a military veteran who turned civil rights activist and organizer for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (“NAACP”) …

Operation Sojourner: The Government Infiltration Of The Sanctuary Movement In The 1980s And Its Legacy On The Modern Central American Refugee Crisis, Kristina M. Campbell

Journal Articles

This Article will discuss “Operation Sojourner,” the federal government’s covert infiltration, and subsequent criminal prosecution, of persons involved in the Sanctuary Movement in the 1980s, as well as its impact on the modern Sanctuary Movement in Arizona and the Southwest occurring in response to the current Central American refugee crisis. Section I will provide an overview of the Sanctuary Movement in the 1980s, and the general religious beliefs and philosophies of those involved in the movement. Section II will discuss the genesis of Operation Sojourner by the former Immigration and Nationality Service (INS) in the early 1980s, and the criminal …

Reimagining Accountability: A Move Toward Re-Entrenching The Higher Education Act, Twinette L. Johnson

Journal Articles

In 1964, while delivering his "Great Society Speech"' at the University of Michigan, President Lyndon B. Johnson stated that, "[e]ach year, more than 100,000 high school graduates, with proven ability, do not enter college because they cannot afford it." 2 In 1964, there were 1,037,000 students enrolled in college, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). 3 By 1965, President Johnson signed into law the Higher Education Act4 (HEA or the Act). "[T]he Act sought to bridge the ... gap for [economically and socially disadvantaged] citizens ... by providing [them] the means to pursue higher education." 5 The …

Prop Up The Heavenly Chorus? Labor Unions, Tax Policy, And Political Voice Equality, Philip T. Hackney

Journal Articles

Labor Unions are nonprofit organizations that provide laborers a voice before their employer and before governments. They are classic interest groups. United States federal tax policy exempts labor unions from the income tax, but effectively prohibits labor union members from deducting union dues from the individual income tax. Because these two policies directly impact the political voice of laborers, I consider primarily the value of political fairness in evaluating these tax policies rather than the typical tax critique of economic fairness or efficiency. I apply a model that presumes our democracy should aim for one person, one political voice. For …

Who Are The Punishers, Raff Donelson

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Constitutionalizing Class Certification, Margaret S. Thomas

Journal Articles

While class actions have been in decline in federal mass tort litigation since at least the 1990s, a quiet shift has been occurring in their landscape in state courts. Although most scholarly attention has been focused on federal courts and on the U.S. Supreme Court’s reworking of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23 in the aftermath of the Class Action Fairness Act, state supreme courts have been engaged in a little-noticed but tremendously important battle over the future of class certification.

Defendants in non-removable class actions in state courts have increasingly shifted their arguments against class certification from objections based …

"I Am The Master": Some Popular Culture Images Of Ai In Humanity's Courtroom, Christine Corcos

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Clear Statement Rules And The Integrity Of Labor Arbitration, Stephen F. Ross, Roy Eisenhardt

Journal Articles

Under the common law, employment contracts are submitted to civil courts to resolve disputes over interpretation, breach, and remedies. As an alternative, parties in labor contexts can agree to resolution by an impartial arbitrator, whose decision is reviewed deferentially by judges. Where employees are subject to rules of a private association, they are often contractually obligated to submit their claims to an internal association officer or committee; the common law provides for judicial review more limited than a civil contract but more searching than is the case for an impartial labor arbitrator. Recently, the National Football League and its players …

Hypothesis Testing In Law And Forensic Science: A Memorandum, David H. Kaye

Journal Articles

The Organization of Scientific Area Committees for Forensic Science (OSAC), was established to promote and develop forensic-science standards based on sound scientific principles. One of the first standards to be approved deals with declaring fragments of glass to be either distinguishable or indistinguishable in their chemical composition. This determination is important when it is suspected that small fragments associated with a defendant came from the scene of a crime involving broken glass. Because of instrumental measurement error, even fragments with identical elemental concentrations will display some differences. To account for measurement error, the standard uses statistical hypothesis tests that presume …

Hurricanes, Fraud, And Insurance: The Supreme Court Weighs In On, But Does Not Wade Into, The Concurrent Causation Conundrum In State Farm Fire And Casualty Company V. Rigsby, Chris French

Journal Articles

In the December 6, 2016 Supreme Court decision, State Farm v. Rigsby, a homeowner’s house was damaged by Hurricane Katrina. The homeowner had homeowners insurance with State Farm and a flood insurance policy that was administered by State Farm on behalf of the federal government. The claims adjusters assigned by State Farm to handle the homeowner’s claim allegedly were instructed by State Farm to misclassify wind damage as flood damage in order to shift State Farm’s own liability for the loss to the federal government. The claims handlers filed a lawsuit against State Farm under the False Claims Act …

State Action Doctrine And The Logic Of Constitutional Containment, Jud Mathews

Journal Articles

Deriding the state action doctrine is one of the great pastimes of American constitutional law. It has been described as a shamble and "incoherent." On its face, the core concept seems straightforward enough constitutional rights are rights against the government. But what counts as the "state action" that triggers the protection of rights seems to shift, maddeningly, from case to case in the Supreme Court's state action jurisprudence.

In this article, I aim to help make some sense of why the state action doctrine has developed as it has by setting it in a comparative and historical frame. It can …

Insurance Policies: The Grandparents Of Contractual Black Holes, Chris French

Journal Articles

In their recent article, The Black Hole Problem in Commercial Boilerplate, Professors Stephen Choi, Mitu Gulati, and Robert Scott identify a phenomenon found in standardized contracts they describe as “contractual black holes.” The concept of black holes comes from theoretical physics. Under the original hypothesis, the gravitational pull of a black hole is so strong that once light or information is pulled past an event horizon into a black hole, it cannot escape. In recent years, the theory has been reformulated and now the hypothesis is that some information can escape, but it is so degraded that it is virtually …

The Yates Memo: Looking For "Individual Accountability" In All The Wrong Places, Katrice Bridges Copeland

Journal Articles

The Department of Justice has received a great deal of criticism for its failure to prosecute both corporations and individuals involved in corporate fraud. In an effort to quiet some of that criticism, on September 9, 2015, then Deputy Attorney General Sally Q. Yates issued a policy entitled, "Individual Accountability for Corporate Wrongdoing," or the "Yates Memo," as it has been called. The main thrust of the Yates Memo is that in order for a corporation to receive any credit for cooperating with the government and obtain leniency in the form of a deferred prosecution agreement, the corporation must not …

Money Norms, Julia Y. Lee

Journal Articles

Money norms present a fundamental contradiction. Norms embody the social sphere, a system of internalized values, unwritten rules, and shared expectations that informally govern human behavior. Money, on the other hand, evokes the economic sphere of markets, prices, and incentives. Existing legal scholarship keeps the two spheres distinct. Money is assumed to operate as a medium of exchange or as a tool for altering the payoffs of different actions. When used to make good behavior less costly and undesirable behavior more costly, money functions to incentivize, sanction, and deter. Although a rich literature on the expressive function of law exists, …

The Rules Of Maternity, Dara Purvis

Journal Articles

A diverse body of laws and regulations speaking to reproductive rights, healthcare, criminal punishment of drug use, termination of parental rights, and more creates the rules of maternity. These rules are guidance provided both obliquely and explicitly by the law's coercive power telling women both how to and who should mother. Rule one begins in pregnancy, with the message that "your body is your child's vessel." During pregnancy, women are counselled that doctor knows best. After the child's birth, the mother remains responsible for the people who enter a child's life, leading to rule 3: "mothers must always protect." …

Better Than Basic Income? Liberty, Equality, And The Regulation Of Working Time, Matthew Dimick

Journal Articles

Basic income has attracted the attention of academics, policy makers, and politicians around the globe. Basic income—a no-strings-attached cash transfer made to all citizens of a country, rich or poor—has been lauded as a plan to eliminate poverty, reduce income inequality, redress imbalances in the labor market, remedy the impending problem of mass technology-induced unemployment—the “robot apocalypse”—and make possible meaningful lives for those otherwise dependent on menial work in the labor market. It has also been proposed as an efficient, nonpaternalistic, and stigma-free alternative to existing welfare state policies. This Article compares basic income to an alternative policy proposal: the …

Freedom From Detention: The Constitutionality Of Mandatory Detention For Criminal Aliens Seeking To Challenge Grounds For Removal, Darlene Goring

Journal Articles

The article focuses on the immigration system of the U.S., and mentions constitutionality of mandatory detention for criminal aliens who are seeking to challenge grounds for removal. Topics include U.S. Supreme Court case Demore v. Kim, which deals with mandatory detention during removal proceedings; current statutory framework governing mandatory detention for criminal aliens; and modification of the mandatory detention framework offering protection of the fundamental liberty.

Truth And Politics: A Symposium On Peter Simpson's Political Illiberalism: A Defense Of Freedom., Gerard V. Bradley

Journal Articles

There is no more important question in thinking about life-and actually living-in political community than whether it is to be permeated by, and purposefully oriented around, the main truths about human flourishing. It is at least paradoxical that, precisely when the state and its law and political life are shaping people's lives more and more, the professed roots of all this influence are growing thinner, more shallow. Lawmakers who profess and in many cases even think they should be "neutral" about values are more involved with how persons' lives go than, perhaps, ever before.

Of course, any community which has …

Criminal Trademark Enforcement And The Problem Of Inevitable Creep, Mark Mckenna

Journal Articles

This Article, delivered as the 2017 Oldham Lecture at the University of Akron School of Law, focuses on the federal Trademark Counterfeiting Act (TCA), the primary source of federal criminal trademark sanctions. That statute was intended to increase the penalties associated with the most egregious form of trademark infringement — use of an identical mark for goods identical to those for which the mark is registered and in a context in which the use is likely to deceive consumers about the actual source of the counterfeiter’s goods. The TCA was intended to ratchet up the penalties associated with counterfeiting, but …

Solving The Riddle Of Rape By Deception, Luis E. Chiesa

Journal Articles

Is sex obtained by lies an act of lawful seduction or criminal rape? This deceptively simple question has baffled courts and scholars for more than a century. In an influential recent article, Yale Law Professor Jed Rubenfeld argued that our ambivalence towards this question generates what he called the “riddle of rape-by-deception”. The riddle is that if rape is defined as having sex without consent, then rape statutes should prohibit sex by deception just as much as they prohibit sex by force. Yet they don’t. So either rape statutes are guilty of a huge, inexplicable oversight or rape law is …

Jurisprudencia Del Tribunal Supremo De Los Estados Unidos [Term Analysis: Supreme Court Of The United States (2015-2016)], Jorge M. Farinacci Fernós

Journal Articles

El profesor Jorge M. Farinacci Fernós analiza una serie de casos resueltos por el Tribunal Supremo de los Estados Unidos durante el término 2015-2016 en los renglones de Derecho Constitucional, Procedimiento Criminal, Derecho Laboral, Procedimiento Civil, Derecho Administrativo, Derecho Penal, Quiebras y Derechos de Autor. El autor evalúa y critica en parte los casos de Puerto Rico v. Sánchez Valle y Puerto Rico v. Franklin California Tax Free Fund, cuyo efecto denomina como sustancial para la relación jurídico-política entre Puerto Rico y los Estados Unidos, particularmente en el segundo caso. En general, el profesor Farinacci Fernós comenta que el término …

Constitutional Economic Justice: Structural Power For "We The People", Martha T. Mccluskey

Journal Articles

Toward that goal, this essay proposes a structural principle of collective economic power for “we the people.” This principle is both consistent with longstanding Constitutional ideals and tailored to the current challenges of neoliberal ideology and policy. It develops two premises: first, it rejects the neoliberal economic ideology that defines legitimate power and freedom as individualized “choice” constrained by an existing political economy. Instead, this proposed principle recognizes that meaningful political economic freedom and power fundamentally consist of access to collective organizations with potential to create a “more perfect union” with better and less constrained options. Second, the post-Lochner principle …

Vote Fluidity On The Hughes Court: The Critical Terms, 1934-1936, Barry Cushman

Journal Articles

This article makes four principal claims. The first is that the justices of the Hughes Court often changed their positions in major cases between the time that they cast their votes in conference and their final votes on the merits. The second is that the Court achieved comparatively high rates of unanimity even during its most turbulent Terms because justices who had served on earlier Courts had internalized a norm counseling those who lost at the conference vote to acquiesce in the judgment of the majority. The third is that the justices who most frequently did so in this period’s …

Justice Scalia, Implied Rights Of Action, And Historical Practice, Anthony J. Bellia

Journal Articles

In the realm of Federal Courts, the question of “implied rights of action” asks when, if ever, may a plaintiff bring a federal right of action for the violation of a federal statute that does not expressly create one. Justice Scalia argued that a court should not entertain an action for damages for the violation of a federal statute unless the text of the statute demonstrates that Congress meant to create a right of action. The Supreme Court adopted this approach in 2001 in Alexander v. Sandoval, with Justice Scalia writing for the majority. Certain judges and scholars have argued …