Law Commons^™

Archcity Defenders: Municipal Courts White Paper, Thomas Harvey, John Mcannar, Michael-John Voss, Megan Conn, Sean Janda, Sophia Keskey

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ArchCity Defenders represents St. Louis' indigent on a pro bono basis in criminal and civil legal matters while working closely with social service providers to connect clients with services. Our primary goal is to remove the legal barriers preventing our clients from accessing the housing, job training, and treatment they need to get on with their lives.

In the five years we have been doing this work, we have primarily focused on representation in the municipal courts that have jurisdiction over infractions for mostly traffic-related offenses. Our direct representation of clients in these courts and the stories they shared of …

Introduction To The Micro-­‐‑Symposium On Scalia & Garner's “Reading Law”:The Textualist Technician, Karen Petroski

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Recently, the Green Bag issued a call for short (1,000 words) essays on Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts, by Antonin Scalia and Bryan Garner. We sought “[a]ny theoretical, empirical, or practical commentary that will help readers better understand the book.” The result is this micro-symposium. Our call drew dozens of micro-essays, some thought-provoking, some chuckle-prompting, and some both. Blessed with an abundance of good work but cursed by a shortage of space, we were compelled to select a small set – representative and excellent – of those essays to publish in the Green Bag and its sibling publication, …

Collaboration In The Nonprofit Sector, Dana M. Malkus

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A practitioner who has had even casual contact with the nonprofit sector has undoubtedly noticed that both internal and external forces exert pressure on nonprofits to collaborate and to accomplish more with fewer resources. There are, of course, many factors driving this pressure, including the economic downturn, funder preferences, government policy changes, and the reality that many nonprofits focus on complicated issues that often require a multi-faceted approach.

In my work with the St. Louis nonprofit community, I see nonprofits grappling with this reality in a variety of ways. As practitioners, we can provide real value to our nonprofit clients …

To Count And Be Counted: A Response To Professor Levinson, Marcia L. Mccormick

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This Essay deepens the discussion Professor Levinson began in his lecture for the Richard J. Childress Memorial Lecture at SLU Law, Who Counts?. Professor Levinson explored the question of who counts as a member of the US community, and who gets to decide who counts. Inevitably, given our history of exclusion on the basis of race and sex, questions about belonging and race and sex form a central part of the current debate. Labeling a person with a race and sex presupposes the questions of what makes a person a certain race or sex? This essay explores what identity …

A Lawyer Looks At Civil Disobedience: How Lewis F. Powell, Jr. Reframed The Civil Rights Revolution, Anders Walker

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This essay reconstructs Lewis F. Powell, Jr.’s thoughts on the civil rights movement by focusing on a series of little-known speeches that he delivered in the 1960s lamenting the practice of civil disobedience endorsed by Martin Luther King, Jr. Convinced that the law had done all it could for blacks, Powell took issue with King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, impugning its invocation of civil disobedience and rejecting its calls for compensatory justice to make up for slavery and Jim Crow. Dismissive of reparations, Powell developed a separate basis for supporting diversity that hinged on distinguishing American pluralism from Soviet totalitarianism. …

Valuation Lessons From Estate Of Adell, Kerry A. Ryan

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In Estate of Adell, the Tax Court determined that the correct value of a decedent’s interest in a closely held corporation was the figure reported on the original estate tax return. The court rejected alternative values as either using the incorrect valuation method or failing to account for the significant value of a key employee’s personal goodwill.

Retreat From Progressive Taxation In The Swedish Welfare State: Does Immigration Matter?, Henry Ordower

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This paper questions whether late twentieth century immigration patterns may have contributed to retreat from progressive taxation in Sweden (and elsewhere). The paper applies critical methodology to ask whether the societal generosity reflected in development of Sweden’s welfare state yielded to greater parsimony as Sweden opened its borders to ethnically and racially diverse groups of immigrants. The paper explores whether Sweden’s loss of societal homogeneity facilitated the development of a political climate in which protecting traditional Scandinavian-owned capital from taxation became acceptable. Social science literature already has detected various unintentional ethnic and gender biases in delivery of welfare services and …

Marxist And Soviet Law, Stephen C. Thaman

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This chapter addresses both the Marxist critique of law before the Russian Revolution and the development of the Soviet Law Structure. It discusses the three main trends in Soviet Criminal Law before elucidating how these trends affected the General Part and the Special Part of Soviet Criminal Codes and overall Soviet criminal policy.

Diplomacy And Its Others: The Case Of Comfort Women, Monica E. Eppinger, Karen Knop, Annelise Riles

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The “Comfort Women incident,” now at least several decades old, troubles the familiar view of law as a funnel for politics. Viewed as a funnel, the wide range of legal, political, cultural, and diplomatic efforts to seek or resist redress for the system of sexual slavery institutionalized by the Japanese military during the Second World War would be assessed as ultimately pushing in the same direction: toward vindicating human rights. We see in the Comfort Women incident a far more chaotic interaction of law and politics. As critical legal feminist, we are concerned with finding a truthful and ethical way …

The Model Penal Code And The Dilemma Of Criminal Law Codification In The United States, Stephen C. Thaman

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In this chapter, the author discusses the legal international comparative study of codification. The author draws upon insights gained from the IACL Thematic Conference of 2012.

Financing Elections And 'Appearance Of Corruption': Citizen Attitudes And Behavior In 2012, Molly J. Walker Wilson

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As political spending reaches new highs in the 2012 election cycle, and as the controversy surrounding wealthy donors and interest groups grows, polls demonstrate a surge of cynicism among Americans who profess a belief that the American political system is corrupt. The Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United made possible the most recent expansion of political spending. In this case, the question was whether allowing corporations and unions to spend unlimited amounts of money on political advertising would result in corruption or the appearance of corruption. The majority on the Court determined that it would not. Many observers have …

Can Retributivism Be Saved?, Chad Flanders

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Retributive tbeory has long held pride of place among theories of criminal punishment in both philosophy and in law. It has seemed, at various times, either much more intuitive, or rationally persuasive, or simply more normatively right than other theories. But retributive theory is limited, both in theory and practice, and in many of its versions is best conceived not as a theory of punishment in its own right, but instead as shorthand for a set of constraints on the exercise of punishment. Whether some version of retributive theory is a live possibility in the contemporary world remains very much …

Further Reflections On The Pardoning Power: Reply To Hoskins And Drinan, Chad Flanders

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Galifianakis: "First question. In 2013, you pardoned a turkey. What do you have planned for 2014?"

Obama: "We'll probably pardon another turkey". ¹

First, let me express my gratitude to the incisive comments of Zach Hoskins and Cara Drinan. I have long been a fan of Hoskins' s work, and his forthcoming book on the collateral consequences of punishment promises to be pathbreaking.² The influence of Drinan's scholarship on the pardoning power³ is evident in my original essay⁴ and her newer work on the Graham case has again inspired me in new directions in my research.^{5 …}

Global Regulatory And Ethical Framework, Henry Ordower

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This chapter reviews statutory and court sanctioned private regulatory frameworks affecting the creation of private equity (PE) funds and their primary activity of acquiring corporate enterprises. The chapter reviews U.S. legislation regulating securities, investment companies, and tender offers, state antitakeover legislation, state court decisions on hostile corporate takeovers and “poison pill” defenses, as well as European Union directives on takeovers and alternative investment fund managers. It concludes that regulation in the United States has shifted the balance of power in corporate acquisitions to incumbent management. The chapter also examines the diametrically opposed ethical views of PE funds as investment entities …

The Law And Economics Of Corporate Social Responsibility And Greenwashing, Miriam A. Cherry

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In this symposium article, I explore the concept of greenwashing in more depth. In the first part of the article, I start with first principles, looking at the origins of greenwashing, its definitions, and identifying theeconomic incentives that lead firms into the practice. The second part of this article examines the legal structure that allows greenwashing to occur, and with it, explores the pervasiveness and extent ofgreenwashing. The third part of this article articulates the harms of greenwashing. Intuitively, greenwashing involves deception, falsity, and hypocrisy that reflexively seem problematic. Precisely identifying the actual harm inflicted by some forms of greenwashing, …

The Supreme Court And The Rehabilitative Ideal, Chad W. Flanders

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Graham v. Florida was a watershed decision, not least because of the centrality of the so-called “rehabilitativeideal” to its holding that life in prison for juveniles convicted of nonhomicide crimes was cruel and unusual. The Court’s emphasis on rehabilitation was surprising both in terms of the Court’s previous decisions on punishment, in which rehabilitation was barely included as a “purpose of punishment,” but also in terms of the history of academic and legislative skepticism if not hostility toward the idea of rehabilitation (which includes two recently decided sentencing cases, Tapia and Pepper). Courts and commentators have struggled to make sense …

Eitc As Income (In)Stability?, Kerry A. Ryan

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Congress enacted the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) to entice poor single mothers to work (or work more) as a means of lifting themselves out of poverty. Its design as a wage subsidy that phases out at higher earnings levels is intended to accomplish this goal. A strong labor market is crucial to the success of work-based benefit programs, like the EITC. The EITC can motivate female household heads to work (or work more) but they cannot act on that motivation if no jobs or additional hours exist. This article demonstrates that during economic downturns, the EITC wage subsidy contributes …

Fictions Of Omniscience, Karen Petroski

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Recent studies of the legislative process have questioned the rationales for many principles of statutory interpretation. One of those traditional rationales is the so-called fiction of legislative omniscience, understood to underpin many judicial approaches to statutory decisions. This Article presents the first comprehensive analysis of judicial assertions about legislative awareness and proposes a new way to understand them. The proposed perspective compares fictions of legislative omniscience with similar but more widely accepted imputations of knowledge in other areas of law; it also draws on recent findings from other disciplines regarding how we use and respond to statements about fictional states …

Corporate Social Responsibility And The Multinational Enterprise, Constance Z. Wagner

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In this book review, the author critiques Levi’s Children: Coming to Terms with Human Rights in the Global Marketplace by Karl Schoenberger. Schoenberger depicts the struggle by Levi Strauss & Co. to abide by its principles regarding workers’ rights after its decision to relocate some manufacturing operations abroad, an effort that he concludes was ultimately unsuccessful. In exploring this topic, he discusses the human rights issues confronting Levi Strauss & Co. and other U.S. multinationals and the increasing pressure exerted by the public for such companies to operate in a socially responsible manner. Schoenberger’s primary contribution to the growing literature …

The New Jim Crow? Recovering The Progressive Origins Of Mass Incarceration, Anders Walker

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This article revisits the claim that mass incarceration constitutes a new form of racial segregation, or JimCrow. Drawing from historical sources, it demonstrates that proponents of the analogy miss an important commonality between the two phenomena, namely the debt that each owe to progressive and/or liberal politics. Though generally associated with repression and discrimination, both Jim Crow and massincarceration owe their existence in part to enlightened reforms aimed at promoting black interests; albeit with perverse results. Recognizing the aspirational origins of systematic discrimination marks an important facet of comprehending the persistence of racial inequality in the United States.

House To House: Mergers, Annexations, & The Racial Implications Of City-County Politics In St. Louis, Anders Walker

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According to most scholars, Jim Crow's death elevated African Americans even as white departures depressed them, condemning blacks to isolated neighborhoods, segregated schools, and crumbling urban cores. To counter such reversals, liberals endorsed the consolidation of urban and suburban zones, hoping that such moves might thwart flight, promote integration, and ameliorate the effects of what scholars began in the 1970s to term “institutional” or “structural” racism. Initially such efforts focused primarily on schools, but quickly expanded to include other types of consolidation as well, including the consolidation, or merger, of major metropolitan areas and surrounding counties. While the rubric of …

Immaculate Defamation: The Case Of The Alton Telegraph, Alan M. Weinberger

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At the confluence of three major rivers, Madison County, Illinois, was also the intersection of the nation’s struggle for a free press and the right of access to appellate review in the historic case of the Alton Telegraph. The newspaper, which helps perpetuate the memory of Elijah Lovejoy, the first martyr to the cause of a free press, found itself on the losing side of the largest judgment for defamation in U.S. history as a result of a story that was never published in the paper—a case of immaculate defamation. Because it could not afford to post an appeal bond …

“To Corral And Control”: Stop, Frisk, And The Geography Of Freedom, Anders Walker

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This article revisits the emergence of stop and frisk law in the 1960s to make three points. One, the impetus for formalizing police stops arose midst confusion generated by Mapp v. Ohio, the landmark Warren Court opinion incorporating the exclusionary rule to the states. Two, police over-reactions to Mapp intersected with fears of urban riots, leading to a formalization of stop and frisk rules that aimed at better containing inner city minority populations. Three, the heightened control of urban streets coupled with the heightened protection of the private home bore geographic implications, interiorizing liberty in ways that perpetuated a national …

Medicaid, Marketplaces, And Premium Assistance: What Is At Stake In Arkansas? The Perils And Pitfalls Of Medicaid Expansion Through Marketplace Premium Assistance, Sidney D. Watson

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On September 27, 2013, Arkansas became the first state to obtain federal approval for a Section 1115 demonstration waiver to require adults eligible for the Affordable Care Act's (ACA) Medicaid Expansion to enroll in private plans offered through the State's new Health Insurance Marketplace rather than traditional Medicaid.² Hailed as a "game changer," Republican lawmakers dubbed this Marketplace Premium Assistance approach a new Medicaid "private option."' ³ Others described it as a potential "middle ground" in efforts to expand Medicaid that may be more politically palatable for those who oppose "Obamacare."...

Shifting The Lens: A Primer For Incorporating Social Work Theory And Practice To Improve Outcomes For Clients With Mental Health Issues And Law Students Who Represent Them, Susan Mcgraugh, Carrie Hagan, Lauren Choate

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This Essay is an effort to promote the inclusion of interdisciplinary practice in our work as attorneys and in our roles as clinical legal professors. As the legal community continues its renewed emphasis on skills training, law schools should look to other professions in order to produce more lasting solutions for our clients and for more satisfactory outcomes for our lawyers. In this Essay, the authors discuss their work incorporating social work theory and practice into clinical legal education when dealing with clients who have serious mental illness. With some studies reporting up to 64.2% of inmates in the United …

Creating And Teaching A Specialized Legal Research Course: The Benefits And Considerations, Erika Cohn

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This article outlines the author's experience creating and teaching a specialized legal research course. It includes the reasons for offering such a course, tips for selecting a topic and developing a syllabus, getting the course approved, creating student interest, developing a teaching plan, and evaluating the course.

Weather Permitting: Incrementalism, Animus, And The Art Of Forecasting Marriage Equality After U.S. V. Windsor, Jeremiah A. Ho

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Within LGBT rights, the law is abandoning essentialist approaches toward sexual orientation by incrementally de-regulating restrictions on identity expression of sexual minorities. Simultaneously, same-sex marriages are become increasingly recognized on both state and federal levels. This Article examines the Supreme Court’s recent decision, U.S. v. Windsor, as the latest example of these parallel journeys. By overturning DOMA, Windsor normatively revises the previous incrementalist theory for forecasting marriage equality’s progress studied by William Eskridge, Kees Waaldijk, and Yuval Merin. Windsor also represents a moment where the law is abandoning antigay essentialism by using animus-focused jurisprudence for lifting the discrimination against the …

Alt-Labor, Secondary Boycotts, And Toward A Labor Organization Bargain, Michael C. Duff

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Recently, workers led by non-union labor advocacy groups, popularly labelled “ALT-Labor,” have been staging strikes and other job actions across the low wage economy. Some observers see this activity as the harbinger of a reinvigorated labor movement or, more generally, as audacious dissent by low wage workers with nothing to lose. Others view the activity cynically as an exercise in futility, a struggle against inexorable market forces that refuse to pay $15 per hour to a fast food or big box retail worker. This article takes a different tack, presuming (implicitly using history as its guide) that employers will respond …

Income Imputation: Toward Equal Treatment Of Renters And Owners, Henry Ordower

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This chapter argues that fundamental fairness principles demand changes in U.S. tax law to place those who rent on an equal tax footing with those who own their residences. The disparity in tax treatment of owners and renters results primarily from the failure of the tax law to include the use value from investment of capital in a personal residence in the incomes of owners. While the yield from investment in a personal residence is not cash, the yield is valuable as it replaces an outlay for dwelling use the owner otherwise would have to make. That occupancy right as …

Charitable Contributions Of Services: Charitable Gift Planning For Non-Itemizers, Henry Ordower

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This Article examines the tax treatment of charitable contributions and concludes that contributors who do not itemize their deductions (nonitemizers) should contribute their services to charity whenever possible rather than contributing cash or property. Charitable donees similarly should embrace opportunities to accept and utilize service contributions from their donor bases, give service contributions as much recognition as money or property contributions, and encourage their lower-income donors to render services rather than giving money earned with performance of services. The Article suggests that nonitemizing taxpayers are the donors who have the most “skin in the game” for charitable contributions in terms …