Law Commons^™

A Mixed Bag For Chicken Little: Analyzing Year 2000 Claims And Insurance Coverage, Jeffrey W. Stempel

Scholarly Works

A visitor from another planet reading the popular and insurance trade press would probably conclude that the world stands on the abyss of a business, tort, and insurance crisis of unprecedented proportion. Media coverage of an impending Year 2000 “crisis” has reached a fevered pitch, with predictions of both a gigantic volume of Year 2000 claims and a correspondingly large amount of insurance coverage litigation. Many predict that the Year 2000 problem (also known as the “Y2K” or “Millennium Bug” problem) will create coverage controversies and costs dwarfing major insurance battles of the late twentieth century such as those concerning …

Judge-Made Insurance That Was Not On The Menu: Schmidt V. Smith And The Confluence Of Text, Expectation, And Public Policy In The Realm Of Employment Practices Liability, Jeffrey W. Stempel

Scholarly Works

In Schmidt v. Smith, the New Jersey Supreme Court caught more than a few observers by surprise. New Jersey courts have generally issued opinions regarded as pro-claimant and pro-policyholders. But everyone's taste for recompense and coverage has limits. In Schmidt, the court exceeded those limits for many observers by holding that despite what it regarded as clear contract language in an exclusion, an insurer providing Employers’ Liability (“EL”) coverage along with Workers' Compensation (“WC”) insurance for the employer was required to provide coverage in a case of blatant sexual harassment bordering on criminal assault. In doing so, the Schmidt court, …

Embracing Descent: The Bankruptcy Of A Business Paradigm For Conceptualizing And Regulating The Legal Profession, Jeffrey W. Stempel

Scholarly Works

Lawyers are said to travel in packs, or at least pairs, and in the popular parlance are often compared to hoards of locusts, herds of cattle, or unruly mobs. However, at least for purposes of assessing concerns with professionalism currently surrounding the bar and the public, whether attorneys are more or less social than other human animals does not matter. My point is simply that lawyers are social beings; like other human beings in social and occupational groups, lawyers behave largely in accordance with group norms, in much the same way peer pressure led Julian English toward juvenile delinquency in …

Running From The Law: Should Bounty Hunters Be Considered State Actors And Thus Subject To Constitutional Restraints?, Andrew D. Patrick

Vanderbilt Law Review

The issue of bounty hunter misconduct catapulted into the public spotlight in September, 1997, when a team of commando-like criminals who claimed to be searching for a bail-jumper gunned down a Phoenix couple in their own bedroom. Though the perpetrators' story was later uncovered as a hoax, and though the men would likely have been convicted of second-degree murder regardless of their profession,s their case and others like it aroused impassioned demands for bounty hunter regulation and, more radically, constitutional restraints on the bail bond industry.

Constitutional protections are applicable only against the government and "state actors." Bounty hunters have …

Separate But Not Sovereign: Reconciling Federal Commandeering Of State Courts, Tonya M. Gray

Vanderbilt Law Review

"The question is not what power the federal government ought to have but what powers in fact have been given by the people." Determining the division of power between the states and the federal government has been a debated issue throughout constitutional jurisprudence. Indeed, "[n]o problem has plagued the nation's constitutional history more." In joining the union, the states relinquished power to the federal government. The states were not left without power, as the Tenth Amendment guarantees that powers not enumerated to the federal government or restricted from the states are retained by the states. The broad language of the …

Public Health And Private Medicine: Regulation In Colonial And Early National America, Nissa M. Strottman

UC Law Journal

Historians are currently debating the role of regulation in eighteenth- and nineteenth century American public policy. Among the issues involved in this debate are the prevalence of regulation and the emerging distinction between private and public law. One historian, Morton Horwitz, has argued that the separation between private and public law, which resulted in less government regulation of commercial activities occurred early in the nineteenth century. In contrast, William Novak argues that regulation was pervasive in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America, and that the split between private and public law did not occur until the 1870's.

This not addresses this historiographical …

Pigeonholing Illness: Medical Diagnosis As A Legal Construct, Lars Noah

UC Law Journal

Disease definitions and clinical judgments routinely affect coverage and reimbursement decisions by health insurers, the licensing determinations of regulatory agencies charged with reviewing new therapeutic technologies, evidentiary and substantive rulings by the judiciary in personal injury lawsuits and criminal trials, eligibility decisions in disability programs, and the resolution of claims before workers' compensation tribunals. This reliance on the definition and identification of disease by the medical profession fails to appreciate the extent to which our conceptions of illness are socially constructed rather than based on value-neutral scientific data and the application of technical expertise.

Just as social forces shape medical …

Procompetitive Theories Of Vertical Control, Andy C. M. Chen, Keith N. Hylton

UC Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Supreme Court And Public Law Remedies: A Tale Of Two Kansas Cities, Wendy Parker

UC Law Journal

Forty-plus years after Brown v. Board of Education, hundreds of should reconsider the validity of applying different legal standards to different types of vertical restraints, and should instead replace rigid doctrinal categories with a functionally-oriented "rule of reason" analysis.

Engalla V. Permanente Medical Group, Inc.: Can Arbitration Clauses In Employment Contracts Survive A "Fairness" Analysis?, Russell Evans

UC Law Journal

This Note examines the California Supreme Court's treatment of binding arbitration clauses in Engalla v. Permanente Medical Group, Inc. Rather than limit its review to the traditional arbitration issues of formation and consent, the Engalla Court carefully scrutinized the functions and procedures of a particular arbitration process. By refusing to compel arbitration in this case, the decision implies that minimum levels of procedural fairness will be required for all arbitration systems.

An increase in the judicial scrutiny of arbitration clauses has important implications for the employment context where the use of binding arbitration clauses has become increasingly prevalent. This Note …

In Defense Of Dissents, William J. Brennan Jr.

UC Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Reading Justice Brennan: Is There A "Right" To Dissent?, Rory K. Little

UC Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Author's Comments To Public Employee Bargaining In California: The Meyers-Millias-Brown Act In The Courts, Joseph Grodin

UC Law Journal

No abstract provided.

"Or Of The Press", Potter Stewart

UC Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Quo Vadis, Prospective Overruling: A Question Of Judicial Responsibility, Roger J. Traynor

UC Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Strict Liability To The Consumer In California, William L. Prosser

UC Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Wealth Transfers As The Original And Primary Concern Of Antitrust: The Efficiency Interpretation Challenged, Robert H. Lande

UC Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Public Employee Bargaining In California: The Meyers-Milias-Brown Act In The Courts, Joseph R. Grodin

UC Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Punitive Damages: On The Path To A Principled Approach, Jane Mallor, Barry S. Roberts

UC Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Proving The Obvious: The Antitrust Laws Were Passed To Protect Consumers (Not Just To Increase Efficiency), Robert H. Lande

UC Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Punitive Damages: Toward A Principled Approach, Jane Mallor, Barry Roberts

UC Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Our Straight-Laced Judges: Twenty Years Later, Rhonda R. Rivera

UC Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Our Straight-Laced Judges: The Legal Position Of Homosexual Persons In The United States, Rhonda R. Rivera

UC Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Modes Of Regulatory Enforcement And The Problem Of Administrative Discretion, Ashutosh Bhagwat

UC Law Journal

In addition to regulating different substantive areas, administrative agencies differ in the enforcement systems they use to implement regulatory regimes. In this article, Professor Bhagwat identifies a crucial distinction between ex ante enforcement regimes, which authorize agencies to review, approve, or disapprove of regulated conduct before it occurs, and ex post regimes, which limit agencies to prosecuting and penalizing regulatory violations after they have occurred. Ex ante authority appears in a variety of guises, including licensing schemes, preclearance or preapproval requirements, and certification requirements. Their common feature is that ex ante enforcement regimes place the burden of inertia, delay, and …

"What A Tangled Web We Weave, When First We Practice To Deceive": Frames, Hyperlinks, Metatags, And Unfair Competition On The World Wide Web, Shelby Clark

UC Law Journal

The World Wide Web makes possible a variety of novel activities, and new variations on old ones, with which intellectual-property law has struggled. Technical aspects of the Web known as links, metatags, and frames enable web-page builders to use and display information to which others have a legal claim, and to otherwise gain an advantage at someone else's expense. At the same time, these techniques permit us to connect information in novel, useful ways. Unfair competition law has been relatively underutilized in addressing the conflicts that these techniques generate, but it has much to offer both in resolving particular disputes …

The Judicial Politics Of White Collar Crime, J. Kelly Strader

UC Law Journal

White collar crime cases produce a curious paradox in Supreme Court jurisprudence: in a substantial number of the Court's leading white collar criminal cases, ranging from insider trading to political corruption cases, the "liberal" justices have voted to affirm convictions, and the "conservative" justices to reverse them. Even more frequently, these cases have produced strange alliances among the liberals and conservatives, who rarely split into such groupings in non-white collar criminal cases. And it is not merely votes and alliances that change in white collar cases; judicial philosophies, attitudes, and rhetoric transmogrify into a veritable twilight zone of Supreme Court …

Future Of Telecommunications, The Future Of Telecommunications Regulation, The, Eli M. Noam

UC Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Economic And Political Consequences Of The 1996 Telecommunications Act, Thomas W. Hazlett

UC Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Unnatural Competition?: Applying The New Antitrust Learning To Foster Competition In The Local Exchange, Ashutosh Bhagwat

UC Law Journal

No abstract provided.

From The Fall Of The Bell System To The Telecommunications Act: Regulation Of Telecommunications Under Judge Greene, Joseph D. Kearney

UC Law Journal

No abstract provided.