Law Commons^™

Texas Appellate Courts Are Likely To Find Waivers Of Sovereign Immunity Of State Agencies In Anti-Retaliation Claims Under The State Applications Act, Tri T. Truong

Tri T Truong

The State of Texas, its agencies, and political subdivisions enjoy immunity from suit and liability unless the Texas Legislature (“Legislature”) expressly waives immunity. When an anti-retaliation claim is filed against a state agency, that agency does not have the same protection under Texas law to invoke sovereign immunity as does a municipality or other governmental subdivisions, even though the two governmental entities are governed by similar statutes—the State Applications Act (“Act”) and the Political Subdivisions Law (“PSL”), respectively. This paper focuses on four principal cases: Barfield, Fernandez, Norman, and Beltran. In 1995, the Barfield court decided that the election-of-remedies provision …

Taking Outcomes Seriously, Daphna Lewinsohn-Zamir

Daphna Lewinsohn-Zamir

The goal of economic efficiency is to promote best outcomes by maximizing the satisfaction of people’s preferences. Given the crucial role of outcomes in efficiency analysis, surprisingly little attention has been devoted to the question of what an outcome actually is. Law-and-economics scholars typically disregard this issue, implicitly adopting the narrowest possible definition of outcome, namely end-results in terms of wealth. Furthermore, no attempt has been made to examine the fundamental question of what notion of outcomes individuals actually embrace.

This Article aims to fill this void by presenting an experimental study of perceptions of outcomes, conducted with both laypersons …

Altruism Trumping Privacy Hipaa, Privacy, Big Data Set Benefits, Douglas J. Henderson

DOUGLAS J HENDERSON

The United States Government must administer a publicly held cloud networked Big Data Set of Private Health Information (PHI) in order to utilize Big Data Analytics and allow free data mining of such PHI so that the health care industry can operate most cost effectively while also meeting the health care needs of the aging United States populace with the highest quality of care.

Of Particles And Proportionality: Negotiating A Truce Between Humanitarian And Human Rights Principles In The Law Of Armed Conflict, Matt Meltzer

Matt Meltzer

The conflict between international humanitarian law (“IHL”) and human rights law (“HRL”) in the regulation of combat is one of the most hotly debated issues in the law of armed conflict. As human rights law has come into greater prominence over the past twenty years, international tribunals and non-government organizations have struggled with how to effectively integrate its principles with the longer-established strictures of international humanitarian law. Because human rights law would prohibit a large swathe of hostile conduct that international humanitarian law has long permitted, a conflict between these two fields is inevitable. At stake in this legal debate …

Empirical Associative Regulation – Drawing Future Regulatory Tools From The Experience Of The Past, Nachshon Goltz

Nachshon Goltz

Traditionally, theories on regulation have suggested choosing the “right” regulatory tool for a given situation of desired behavioral steer, using a broad theoretical approach of understanding the factors involved in the regulatory realm and speculating or deducting from it toward the efficient choice.

In contrast, I am arguing that the process of choosing the “right” regulatory tool should be guided by an opposite process, in which a database of regulatory success and failure case studies will be created. The institute (i.e., governments, regulation agencies, etc.) seeking to steer behavior using regulatory tools (“the regulator”) will search this information body using …

Keeping Secrets: An Alternative To The Economic Penalty Enhancement Act, Brittani N. Baldwin

Brittani N. Baldwin

No abstract provided.

Opting Out Of The Procedural Morass: A Solution To The Class Arbitration Problem, Emanwel J. Turnbull

Emanwel J Turnbull

American class actions are internationally regarded as a procedural form to avoid and widely criticized in the United States. They have been narrowed and restricted by U.S. statutes and case law. Plaintiffs' lawyers in consumer class actions are portrayed as greedy and fraudulent, while businesses are increasingly acting to avoid class actions through mandatory pre-dispute arbitration clauses. Even class arbitration is criticized as leading to a “procedural morass.” This Article proposes that parties and arbitral fora opt out of the American procedural morass (and the attendant long-running disputes about American class actions) by adopting an English procedural rule for aggregation. …

From Desegregation To Overrepresentation: The Unlawful And Damaging Effects Of Nationally Normed Assessments And Missidentification Of Black Students As Disabled, Ashley Heard

Ashley Heard

Segregation in schools today creates a two-tier system wherein minority students often receive a substandard education. Moreover, they are often tested for cognitive deficits and identified for special education services using a nationally normed assessment. The practice of assessing students from substandard schools on a nationally-normed assessment leads to the misidentification and overrepresentation of minority students identified as disabled and provided special education services.

In this article, I argue that rather than utilizing a nationally normed assessment for the purposes of special education identification, school districts should create a normed scale based on district-specific assessment data. Norming at the district …

Collaborating With Students As Co-Authors, Wendy B. Davis

Wendy B. Davis

The purpose of this article is to describe the process of collaborating with students enrolled in a course to produce a casebook to be published after the conclusion of the course. I have written two published casebooks, with significant portions of each book written by students as contributing authors. Utilization of a variety of teaching methods facilitates learning by our students. While this article only describes one end- result, the creation of a casebook, the process of creating that book involves many different teaching methods, thus many different opportunities to address students’ differing learning styles. Students learn best when they …

Building Bio-Based Supply Chains: Theoretical Perspectives On Innovative Contract Design, A. Bryan Endres, Jody M. Endres, Jeremy J. Stoller

A. Bryan Endres

By 2030, the United States will consume over 300 million tons of forest and agricultural feedstocks for energy production. The supply chain necessary to provide unprecedented quantities of new “bioenergy crops,” however, is fraught with uncertainty. The vertically integrated model the nascent sector currently uses may have limited opportunity for expansion to meet renewable energy mandates. A hybrid structure is likely to emerge as the industry evolves, in which end-users closely cooperate with a large number of heterogeneous producers through long-term contracting rather than as direct owners or operators of biomass farms. This “vertically coordinated” industry model is dependent on …

Caught In The Cross-Fire: The Psychological And Emotional Impact Of The Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (Idea) Upon Teachers Of Children With Disabilities, A Therapeutic Jurisprudence Analysis, Richard Peterson

Richard Peterson

This paper addresses the psychological and emotional consequences of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) for public school teachers in the United States as viewed through the lens of Therapeutic Jurisprudence.

Therapeutic Jurisprudence was founded in the 1990s as an interdisciplinary approach to evaluating how law acts as a therapeutic agent upon those who engage in its context. It calls for the study of such consequences to ascertain whether the law’s anti-therapeutic effects can be lessened, and its therapeutic effects increased, without subordinating due process and other values associated with justice. In the context of Special Education Law, for …

Death To Immunity From Service Of Process Doctrine!, John Martinez

John Martinez

The immunity from service of process doctrine provides that a nonresident cannot be served while going to, attending, and leaving an ongoing judicial proceeding. However, the doctrine evolved while "tag" jurisdiction was in vogue, whereby mere presence in the forum state sufficed, and the nonresident only had to be "tagged" with service to confer jurisdiction on the forum state. This article suggests that modern "minimum contacts" territorial jurisdiction theory more adequately addresses the concerns of efficiency of judicial proceedings and fairness to nonresidents than the immunity from service of process doctrine. The article proposes that the immunity from service of …

Mandatory Reporting Of Abuse: A Historical Perspective On The Evolution Of States’ Current Mandatory Reporting Laws With A Review Of The Laws In The Commonwealth Of Pennsylvania, Leonard G. Brown Iii

Leonard G Brown III

Mandatory Reporting of Abuse: A Historical Perspective on the Evolution of States’ Current Mandatory Reporting Laws with a Review of the Laws in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania

The first states passed laws in 1963, following the publishing of a seminal article titled, “The Battered Child Syndrome.” By 1967, all fifty states had passed some form of mandatory reporting law. The federal government’s first major foray into the area of child abuse prevention occurred on January 31, 1974, when Congress enacted the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (“CAPTA”). CAPTA has no federal mandatory reporting provision, but rather requires states to …

Paul Clement And The State Of Conservative Legal Thought, Sam Singer

Sam Singer

If 2011 is remembered as the year the states stood up to the Obama Administration and its bold vision of federal power, Paul Clement will be remembered as the lawyer they chose to make their case to the Supreme Court. In addition to the healthcare challenge, Clement appeared on behalf of Arizona in defense of the State’s sweeping new immigration law and helped Texas defend its new electoral map against interference from the federal courts. Along the way, he became the go-to lawyer for the states’ rights cause--a “shadow Solicitor General” leading the states in their push to reclaim power …

U.S.Foreign Trade Zones, Tax-Free Trade Zones Of The World, And Their Impact On The U.S. Economy, Susan W. Tiefenbrun

Susan W Tiefenbrun

ABSTRACT

U.S. Foreign Trade Zones, Tax-Free Trade Zones of the World, and Their Impact on the United States Economy , by Susan Tiefenbrun

Free trade zones (FTZs) date back to the time of the Phoenicians; they developed in the l970s and proliferated from 1980 until today. FTZs are duty-free areas where goods may be warehoused, processed, sold, serviced, distributed, showcased, packaged, labeled, sorted, assembled, and/or manufactured as finished goods prior to re-exporting them as duty-exempt finished products. More than one 135 countries operate tax-free trade zones. There are more than 3,500 of these zones and subzones all over the world, …

Clarifying State Action Immunity Under The Antitrust Laws: Ftc V. Phoebe Putney Health System, Inc., Angela Diveley

Angela Diveley

The tension between federalism and national competition policy has come to a head. The state action doctrine finds its basis in principles of federalism, permitting states to replace free competition with alternative regulatory regimes they believe better serve the public interest. Public restraints have a unique ability to undermine the regime of free competition that provides the basis of U.S.- and state-commerce policies. Nevertheless, preservation of federalism remains an important rationale for protecting such restraints. The doctrine has elusive contours, however, which have given rise to circuit splits and overbroad application that threatens to subvert the state action doctrine’s dual …

Legal Barriers To Implementing International Providers Into Medical Provider Networks For Workers' Compensation, Richard Krasner

Richard Krasner

Over the last twenty years, medical costs associated with lost time workers’ compensation claims has risen dramatically, despite efforts to reform the system. Medical tourism, a popular option for many seeking lower cost health care, is one option that has yet to catch on. Issues of quality of health care in other countries is no different for workers’ compensation patients, as it is for health care patients, and with accreditation from the Joint Commission International (JCI), hospitals that cater to medical tourists offer better care at lower cost than most U.S. hospitals offer. Certain procedures, common to workers’ compensation claims, …

Of Testing And Tablespoons: Evaluating The Use Of Student Test Scores For Teacher Assessment, Daniel Straw

Daniel Straw

This note argues that the use of student test scores as a significant part of teacher evaluations has no rational basis in law, and therefore the government should instead focus on performance-based assessments and take steps to elevate the status of teaching as a profession.

Federal Common Law And The Courts’ Regulation Of Pre-Litigation Preservation, Joshua Koppel

Joshua M. Koppel

With the proliferation in recent years of electronically stored information and the skyrocketing cost of retaining large amounts of data, issues of preservation have played an increasing role in litigation. Companies and individuals that anticipate that they will be involved in litigation in the future may be obligated to preserve relevant evidence even before litigation is initiated. Because litigation has not yet commenced, they cannot seek clarification regarding their obligations from a court or negotiate them with an adverse party. Statutory or common law preservation duties play a large role in guiding potential litigants in this area.

The federal courts …

Monopolies And The Constitution: A History Of Crony Capitalism, Steven G. Calabresi

Steven G Calabresi

This article explores the right of the people to be free from government granted monopolies or from what we would today call “Crony Capitalism.” We trace the constitutional history of this right from Tudor England down to present day state and federal constitutional law. We begin with Darcy v. Allen (also known as the Case of Monopolies decided in 1603) and the Statute of Monopolies of 1624, both of which prohibited English Kings and Queens from granting monopolies. We then show how the American colonists relied on English rights to be free from government granted monopolies during the Revolutionary War …

Religion And The Equal Protection Clause, Steven G. Calabresi, Abe Salander

Steven G Calabresi

This article argues that state action that discriminates on the basis of religion is unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Doctrine even if it does not violate the Establishment Clause or the Free Exercise Clause as incorporated by the Fourteenth Amendment. State action that discriminates on the basis of religion should be subject to strict scrutiny and should almost always be held unconstitutional. We thus challenge the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez in which a 5 to 4 majority of the Court wrongly allowed a California state school to discriminate against a Christian Legal Society chapter …

Prometheus And The Natural Phenomenon Doctrine: Let’S Not Lose Sight Of The Forest For The Trees, Samantak Ghosh

Samantak Ghosh

The Supreme Court’s recent decision on patentable subject matter, Mayo Collaborative Services. v. Prometheus Laboratories, has come in for a lot of criticism from the biotechnology industry. Whenever the Supreme Court renders a judgment that is a significant departure from the past and arguably gets it wrong, the voices questioning the underlying principle behind the decision become stronger. Unfortunately, Prometheus was a poor vehicle for recalibrating a doctrine that has been untouched for the past three decades. However, it is important to dissociate the specific opinion from the principle animating the opinion, the natural phenomenon doctrine. If the natural phenomenon …

Hydropower: It's A Small World After All, Gina Warren

Gina Warren

Global warming is here. As exhibited by the recent droughts, heat waves, severe storms and floods, climate change is no longer a question for the future, but a problem for the present. Of the many ways to help combat climate change, this article discusses the use of the most abundant renewable energy source on the plant – water. While large-scale hydropower (think Hoover Dam) is unlikely to see increased development due to its negative impact on the environment, fish, and wildlife, small-scale hydropower (think a highly technologically-advanced water mill) is environmentally-friendly and would produce clean, renewable energy to benefit local …

Putting Boomers To Pasture: Does The 2010 Mippa Legislation Reinforce The Nursing Home Bias?, Robert S. Bloink

Robert S Bloink

Unfunded health care expenses pose one of the greatest threats to the postretirement income security of seniors in America today. It is estimated that the average couple retiring in 2012 will require savings of approximately a quarter million dollars dedicated solely to their unfunded postretirement health care expenses, but this estimate does not factor in the expensive long-term care that most retirees will require toward the end of their lives. That the quarter-million dollar figure does not include the rapidly increasing cost of long-term care should alarm both retirees and those baby boomers approaching retirement age today. Controversial healthcare reform …

Building A Better America: Tax Expenditure Reform And The Case Of State And Local Government Bonds And Build America Bonds, Blaine G. Saito

Blaine G. Saito

Currently most subnational government borrowing in the United States is done via tax-exempt muni bonds. But they are riddled with problems. They are inefficient at delivering the subsidy, and they create economic distortions of investment choices. They are inequitable, and they have significant democratic deficiencies. Direct payment Build America Bonds (BABs) provide an alternative, as they directly pay a cash subsidy to a subnational government. While there are simple technical problems that can easily be remedied, BABs face significant political hurdles that will prevent the permanence of the program. Policy entrepreneurship is a way forward. The piece also discusses how …

What Do Kim Kardashian And Lance Armstrong Have In Common?: Celebrity Complaints In The Classroom, Amy K. Langenfeld

Amy K Langenfeld

Every day brings a report of a celebrity suing or being sued. The complaints initiating these suits are available online within hours. Regardless of the merits or outcomes of these complaints by or against celebrities, celebrity complaints are a rich source of samples for the law school classroom. As supplements to course materials in civil procedure or legal writing, celebrity complaints are likely to generate discussion for several reasons. First, they show a range of strategies and persuasive writing techniques. Second, they engage students because they are real world documents, and because they have a pop culture setting. Third, they …

Religion / State: Where The Separation Lies, Vincent Samar

Vincent J. Samar

The article traces the history of the establishment clause including various court tests that have been used to interpret it, discusses various contemporary justifications for the clause, and culls from those justifications why the “accommodationist” approach sometimes used by the Court must be rejected.

I then introduce the ethical Doctrine of Double Effect to reconsider other tests the Court has applied (total separation, endorsement, neutrality and coercion), ultimately to justify a new neutrality test that provides a clearer understanding of the principles behind non-establishment. I show how the new neutrality test could be used in resolving future cases, for example, …

16 And Pregnant: Minors' Consent To Abortion And Adoption, Malinda L. Seymore

Malinda L. Seymore

A minor girl’s decision about the resolution of an unplanned pregnancy is a highly contested issue. Especially contentious is the minor’s ability to consent to an abortion without the assistance of an adult such as her parents or a judge. That issue has received substantial attention from policy makers, scholars, judges and legislators. Almost no attention has been paid, however, to the decision of a minor parent to continue her pregnancy, relinquish her constitutionally-protected parental rights and place a child for adoption. In 37 states, a minor’s abortion decision is regulated differently from the decision of an adult’s, while in …

Adr’S Place In Foreclosure: Remedying The Flaws Of A Securitized Housing Market, Lydia Nussbaum

Lydia R. Nussbaum

Millions of Americans lost their homes during the foreclosure crisis, an unprecedented disaster still plaguing local and national economies. A primary factor contributing to the crisis has been the failure of conventional foreclosure procedures to account for the new realities of securitization and the secondary mortgage market, which transformed the traditional borrower-lender relationship. To compensate for the shortcomings of conventional foreclosure procedures and stem the tide of residential foreclosure, state and local governments turned to ADR processes for a solution. Some foreclosure ADR programs, however, have greater potential to avoid unnecessary foreclosures than others. This article comprehensively examines the key …

Adr's Place In Foreclosure: Remedying The Flaws Of A Securitized Housing Market, Lydia Nussbaum

Lydia R. Nussbaum

Millions of Americans lost their homes during the foreclosure crisis, an unprecedented disaster still plaguing local and national economies. A primary factor contributing to the crisis has been the failure of conventional foreclosure procedures to account for the new realities of securitization and the secondary mortgage market, which transformed the traditional borrower-lender relationship. To compensate for the shortcomings of conventional foreclosure procedures and stem the tide of residential foreclosure, state and local governments turned to ADR processes for a solution. Some foreclosure ADR programs, however, have greater potential to avoid unnecessary foreclosures than others. This article comprehensively examines the key …