Law Commons^™

Blackness As Fighting Words, Etienne C. Toussaint

Faculty Publications

The resurgence of worldwide protests by activists of the Movement for Black Lives (BLM) has ushered a global reckoning with the meaning of this generation’s rallying cry – “Black Lives Matter.” As citizens emblazon their streets with this expression in massive artistic murals, the Trump administration has responded with the militarized policing of non-violent public demonstrations, revealing not merely a disregard for public safety, but far worse, a concerted dismantling of protestors’ First Amendment rights. Nevertheless, BLM protests have persisted. Accordingly, this Essay considers the implications of this generation’s acclamation of Black humanity amidst the social tensions exposed during the …

Fair Use In Sayre V. Moore: A Reply To Oracle, Ned Snow

Faculty Publications

The Supreme Court is now considering the case of Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc. Oracle has argued that Google infringed its copyright in computer software, but a jury found that Google’s use was not infringing under the fair use doctrine. The Federal Circuit reversed the jury verdict under a de novo standard of review. I have argued that this reversal violates the Seventh Amendment.

Seventh Amendment rights depend on whether an issue would have been decided by a jury in English law courts during the late 1700s. My argument is that in the 1785 English case of Sayre v. …

Immoral Trademarks After Brunetti, Ned Snow

Faculty Publications

For more than a century, marks that were vulgar, profane, and obscene could not receive trademark protection. In 2019, however, the Supreme Court in Iancu v. Brunetti invalidated the statutory provision that had prevented such marks from receiving protection—the bars to “immoral” and “scandalous” marks. Those bars violated the First Amendment because they enabled the government to judge whether ideas in marks were inappropriate. Similarly, two years prior to Brunetti, the Court in Matal v. Tam struck down a bar to marks that could “disparage” others. The Court reasoned that to disparage is to offend, and the ability to offend …

The Fourth Amendment At Home, Thomas P. Crocker

Faculty Publications

A refuge, a domain of personal privacy, and the seat of familial life, the home holds a special place in Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. Supreme Court opinions are replete with statements affirming the special status of the home. Fourth Amendment text places special emphasis on securing protections for the home in addition to persons, papers, and effects against unwarranted government intrusion. Beyond the Fourth Amendment, the home has a unique place within constitutional structure. The home receives privacy protections in addition to sheltering other constitutional values protected by the Due Process Clause and the First Amendment. For example, under the Due …

The Title Ix Paradox, Emily Suski

Faculty Publications

When Christine Blasey Ford explained to the Senate Judiciary Committee why she had not reported her sexual assault at age fifteen, she captured the struggle of many children who must decide whether to make such reports: “For a very long time, I was too afraid and ashamed to tell anyone the details.” Thousands of sexual assaults happen to children in school each year. Title IX, a potentially powerful civil rights law, should protect them. Title IX’s main purpose is to protect individuals from sex discrimination, including in the form of sexual harassment and assault, in public schools. Yet Title IX …

Workplace Law, Social Neuroscience, And The Right To Be Different, Joseph Seiner

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Bar Bytes: Fastcase As A Supplement To Westlaw, Eve Ross

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Who Feels Entitled To Assert Legal Rights?, Elizabeth S. Chambliss

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Litigation As Parenting, Lisa Martin

Faculty Publications

Children have legal rights. Yet, children typically lack the legal capacity to represent their interests in courts. When federal courts are presented with children’s claims, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure require courts to ensure that children’s legal interests are adequately protected. To do so, courts decide who can speak and make decisions for the child within the litigation. Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 17(c) maps out a loose process for addressing these concerns but fails to fully account for a critical factor in protecting child litigants: the decision making rights of parents.

Because parents have constitutionally protected authority to …

Managerial Fixation And The Limitations Of Shareholder Oversight, Emily R. Winston

Faculty Publications

BlackRock’s recent public letters to the CEOs of the companies in which it invests have drawn substantial attention from stock market actors and observers for their conspicuous call on corporate CEOs to focus on sustainability and social impacts on non-shareholder stakeholders. This Article explores the market changes that propelled BlackRock into a position to make such a call, and whether institutional shareholders can be effective monitors of these broad social goals. It argues that while corporate attention to non-shareholder stakeholders can improve firm value, shareholder oversight of these stakeholder relationships will not succeed in having this effect.

In the past …

Decarbonization In Democracy, Shelley Welton

Faculty Publications

Conventional wisdom holds that democracy is structurally ill-equipped to confront climate change. As the story goes, because each of us tends to dismiss consequences that befall people in other places and in future times, “the people” cannot be trusted to craft adequate decarbonization policies, designed to reduce present-day, domestic carbon emissions. Accordingly, U.S. climate change policy has focused on technocratic fixes that operate predominantly through executive action to escape democratic politics — with vanishingly little to show for it after a change in presidential administration.

To help craft a more durable U.S. climate change strategy, this Article scrutinizes the purported …

The Uniform Basis Rules And Terminating Interests In Trusts Early, F. Ladson Boyle, Howard M. Zaritsky, D. Ryan Wallace

Faculty Publications

The resolution of income tax issues that may arise for trust beneficiaries who dispose of temporal interests in trusts remains relatively obscure. Additional issues exist for subsequent interest holders; the methods that the Code and Regulations prescribe for establishing, maintaining, and potentially recovering basis for successor owners of interests in a trust are not well developed.

In some instances, the trust instrument creating a temporal interest will supply a suitable path for early termination and distribution of assets. In those cases, Sub-chapter J of the Code typically governs the transaction and provides that terminating the trust and distributing its assets …

Icwa International: The Benefits And Dangers Of Enacting Icwa-Type Legislation In Non-U.S. Jurisdictions, Marcia A. Yablon-Zug

Faculty Publications

For decades, the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) has been considered the “gold standard” in Indigenous child protection. As a result, Indigenous advocates around the world have sought the passage of similar legislation. However, it is far from clear that the benefits of the ICWA are easily exported. The ICWA is based on a recognition of tribal sovereignty. Unfortunately, many of the countries that could benefit from ICWA-type protections do not recognize the sovereignty of their Indigenous populations.

This Article explores how the ICWA would have to be adapted to work in such countries and whether the needed changes would …

Distributive Justice And Rural America, Ann M. Eisenberg

Faculty Publications

Today’s discourse on struggling rural communities insists they are “dying” or “forgotten.” Many point to globalization and automation as the culprits that made livelihoods in agriculture, natural resource extraction, and manufacturing obsolete, fueling social problems such as the opioid crisis. This narrative fails to offer a path forward; the status quo is no one’s fault, and this “natural” rural death inspires mourning rather than resuscitation. This Article offers a more illuminating account of the rural story, told through the lens of distributive justice principles. The Article argues that rural communities have not just “died.” They were sacrificed. Specifically, distributive justice …

New Technologies And Old Treaties, Bryant Walker Smith

Faculty Publications

Every road vehicle must have a driver able to control it while in motion. These requirements, explicit in two important conventions on road traffic, have an uncertain relationship to the automated motor vehicles that are currently under development—often colloquially called “self-driving” or “driverless.” The immediate legal and policy questions are straightforward: Are these requirements consistent with automated driving and, if not, how should the inconsistency be resolved? More subtle questions go directly to international law’s role in a world that artificial intelligence is helping to rapidly change: In a showdown between a promising new technology and an entrenched treaty regime, …

Legislative History In The Modern Congress, Jesse M. Cross

Faculty Publications

A central debate in the field of legislation has asked: how reliable are the different types of legislative history? Yet there has been no understanding, throughout this debate, of who inside Congress drafts this legislative history. This is surprising, given the common intuition that authorship is a key indicator of reliability.

In response, this Article presents the results of an original empirical study—one that illuminates this unknown dimension of Congress, uncovering the actors and processes that produce modern legislative history. For this study, the author conducted interviews with congressional staffers drawn from both parties, both chambers of Congress, and numerous …

How Reporters Can Evaluate Automated Driving Announcements, Bryant Walker Smith

Faculty Publications

This article identifies a series of specific questions that reporters can ask about claims made by developers of automated motor vehicles (“AVs”). Its immediate intent is to facilitate more critical, credible, and ultimately constructive reporting on progress toward automated driving. In turn, reporting of this kind advances three additional goals. First, it encourages AV developers to qualify and support their public claims. Second, it appropriately manages public expectations about these vehicles. Third, it fosters more technical accuracy and technological circumspection in legal and policy scholarship.

Why States Must Consider Innocence Claims After Guilty Pleas, Colin Miller

Faculty Publications

The first DNA exoneree in this country was a man with a sub-70 IQ who pleaded guilty to avoid the death penalty, and a total of 139 out of 315 (44.1%) DNA and non-DNA exonerees in 2015 and 2016 had been convicted after guilty pleas. Nonetheless, a number of states have pleading defendant prohibitions in their postconviction statutes that preclude defendants who pleaded guilty from (1) seeking DNA testing; and/or (2) presenting freestanding claims of actual innocence based on non-DNA evidence. Existing Constitutional challenges to these statutes have been largely foreclosed by the Supreme Court’s opinion in District Attorney’s Office …

The Rise And Fall Of Clean Air Act Climate Policy, Nathan Richardson

Faculty Publications

The Clean Air Act has proven to be one of the most successful and durable statutes in American law. After the Supreme Court’s 2008 decision in Massachusetts v. EPA, there was great hope that the Act could be brought to bear on climate change, the most pressing current environmental challenge of our time. Massachusetts was fêted as the most important environmental case ever decided, and, upon it, the Environmental Protection Agency under President Obama built a sweeping program of greenhouse gas regulations, aimed first at emissions from road vehicles, and later at fossil fuel power plants. It was the most …

Of American Fragility: Public Rituals, Human Rights, And The End Of Invisible Man, Etienne C. Toussaint

Faculty Publications

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the fragility of American democracy in at least two important ways. First, the coronavirus has ravaged Black communities across the United States, unmasking decades of inequitable laws and public policies that have rendered Black lives socially and economically isolated from adequate health care services, educational resources, housing stability, environmental security, stable and living wage jobs, generational wealth, and other institutional structures necessary for resilience. Second, government-mandated social distancing in response to the coronavirus has failed to dampen America’s racially biased, violent, and supervisory policing culture, reigniting demands from the Movement for Black Lives for police …

Tax Policy And Our Democracy, Clint Wallace

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Rethinking The Conflicts Revolution In Personal Jurisdiction, Jesse M. Cross

Faculty Publications

It is widely acknowledged that, from roughly 1940 to 1970, a revolution occurred in Conflicts of Law. Referred to as the “Conflicts revolution,” this movement remade nearly every legal test in the field. According to conventional wisdom, this revolution rejected the same idea in each instance: namely, that Conflicts tests should be grounded in a theory of sovereignty. Instead, the argument goes, it pivoted the field to pragmatic tests that focus on practicality, fairness, and convenience.

As this Article explains, this conventional wisdom is incorrect. It misunderstands the intellectual revolution that remade the field, and it has generated needless confusion …

Lessons From Disaster: Assessing The Covid19 Response In Youth Jails & Prisons, Madalyn K. Wasilczuk

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.