Law Commons^™

The Progressives: Economics, Science, And Race, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

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This essay is a brief review of Thomas C. Leonard, Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era (Princeton Univ. Press 2016).

How The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Should Interpret Wynne, Michael S. Knoll, Ruth Mason

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In this special report, Knoll and Mason discuss how the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court should apply Wynne when it hears on remand First Marblehead v. Commissioner of Revenue. The authors conclude that when it originally heard the case, the Massachusetts court mistakenly considered, as part of its internal consistency analysis, whether Gate Holdings Inc. experienced double state taxation. As developed by the U.S. Supreme Court and most recently applied in Wynne, the internal consistency test is not concerned with actual double taxation that may arise from the interaction of different states’ laws. Rather, the test is designed to determine …

How The Black Lives Matter Movement Can Improve The Justice System, Paul H. Robinson

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This op-ed piece argues that because the criminal justice system's loss of moral credibility contributes to increased criminality and because blacks are disproportionately the victims of crimes, especially violent crimes, the most valuable contribution that the Black Lives Matter movement can make is not to tear down the system’s reputation but rather to propose and support reforms that will build it up, thereby improving its crime-control effectiveness and reducing black victimization.

Criminal Law And Common Sense: An Essay On The Perils And Promise Of Neuroscience, Stephen J. Morse

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This article is based on the author’s Barrock Lecture in Criminal Law presented at the Marquette University Law School. The central thesis is that the folk psychology that underpins criminal responsibility is correct and that our commonsense understanding of agency and responsibility and the legitimacy of criminal justice generally are not imperiled by contemporary discoveries in the various sciences, including neuroscience and genetics. These sciences will not revolutionize criminal law, at least not anytime soon, and at most they may make modest contributions to legal doctrine, practice, and policy. Until there are conceptual or scientific breakthroughs, this is my story …

Book Review: Body Banking From The Bench To The Bedside, Natalie Ram

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How much is a kidney worth? An ounce of breast milk? Genetic material from an individual facing a Parkinson's diagnosis? In today's America, it depends on who is selling. One might think that such body products are beyond value or that their value depends on the individual characteristics of the supplier. But under existing American law and practices, what matters more is whether the seller is also the supplier of that body product, or whether the seller is another entity, such as a pharmaceutical company, hospital, or biobanker.

Discrimination As Disruption: Addressing Hostile Environments Without Violating The Constitution, Cara Mcclellan

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In early March 2015, a video surfaced showing members of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon (SAE) fraternity at the University of Oklahoma chanting: “There will never be a nigger at SAE . . . you can hang him from a tree, but he’ll never sign with me.” Following the wide circulation of this video, the university’s president expelled two students leading the chants in the video for creating a hostile racial environment on campus. Legal commentators criticized this disciplinary action, arguing that it violated the First Amendment and principles of academic freedom. On the other hand, a review of Title VI …

How The Right To Speedy Trial Can Reduce Mass Pretrial Incarceration, Zina Makar

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Kenny Johnson1 was thirty-two years old when he was released from a Baltimore City jail— almost three years after his arrest in October 2012. Johnson was not serving a sentence, but these three years were spent under pretrial detention. He had been denied bail. Johnson’s case was a rollercoaster of delays and uncertainty, particularly towards the end of his pretrial incarceration. The need for certainty convinced Johnson to plead guilty—he could not stand knowing that his pretrial incarceration could be indefinite and he wanted to be sure he was going home, guilty or not guilty.

Between the time he was …

Faced With Crisis: The Importance Of Establishing A Comprehensive Crisis Management Plan, David E. Matchen Jr., Jason Hawkins

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By now, the story surrounding the death of Baltimore man Freddie Gray while in police custody is common knowledge. A series of protests afterward and emergency responses by state and local governments turned the lives of many of Baltimore’s residents upside-down for more than a week in late April and early May, including the staff at the law libraries at the University of Baltimore School of Law (UB Law) and the Thurgood Marshall Law Library at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law (Carey Law). The mood got progressively uglier as the days wore on until, just …

Teaching "Ferguson", Chad Flanders

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What we now refer to simply as "Ferguson" erupted in August of 20T4 and immediately raised a cluster o f legal issues. What crime had Michael Brown allegedly committed? Did Officer Darren Wilson commit a crime when he shot at Brown? Protests ensued, and they in turn inspired a police response, a response that seemed to many more violent than the protests themselves. What of the First Amendment rights o f the protesters and o f the journalists covering them? What laws were they-protestors and some journalists-supposedly breaking?¹

As the days and weeks passed, the legal issues multiplied, and …

Marriage (In)Equality And The Historical Legacies Of Feminism, Serena Mayeri

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In this essay, I measure the majority’s opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges against two legacies of second-wave feminist legal advocacy: the largely successful campaign to make civil marriage formally gender-neutral; and the lesser-known struggle against laws and practices that penalized women who lived their lives outside of marriage. Obergefell obliquely acknowledges marriage equality’s debt to the first legacy without explicitly adopting sex equality arguments against same-sex marriage bans. The legacy of feminist campaigns for nonmarital equality, by contrast, is absent from Obergefell’s reasoning and belied by rhetoric that both glorifies marriage and implicitly disparages nonmarriage. Even so, the history …

One Centimeter Over My Back Yard: Where Does Federal Preemption Of State Drone Regulation Start?, Henry H. Perritt Jr.

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The proliferation of cheap civilian drones and their obvious utility for precision agriculture, motion picture and television production, aerial surveying, newsgathering, utility infrastructure inspection, and disaster relief has accelerated the FAA’s sluggish effort to develop a proposal for generally applicable rules and caused it to grant more than 600 “section 333 exemptions” permitting commercial drone flight before its rules are finalized.

Federal preemption in the field of aviation safety regulation is generally assumed, but political pressure on states and municipalities to regulate drones and the ability of this revolutionary aviation technology to open up space close to the ground for …

Eviction Court And A Judicial Duty Of Inquiry, Harold J. Krent

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ABSTRACT

The Illinois Appellate Court in Draper & Kramer v. King reversed a court ordered eviction on the ground that the tenant likely did not appreciate that she had agreed in a settlement to vacate her residence in addition to paying arrears on rent. In the chaotic environment of eviction court proceedings, tenants too often pledge paying back rent without realizing that, at the same time, they have agreed to be evicted and that the court ordered eviction will follow them for the rest of their lives. In Chicago, at least, the potential for confusion is enhanced because the agreed …

Sports, Doping, And The Regulatory "Tipping Point", Dionne L. Koller

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This Essay seeks to explore whether there is a regulatory tipping point for sports-the point at which the government will take action to address a perceived problem in sports-and if so, what the circumstances are that generate such a moment. Such an issue is particularly important now. Troubling stories about athletes' health and well-being and the consequences of our most beloved games are nothing new. Reports of the effects of sports concussions, exploitation of college athletes, and other examples of the harms wrought by the "win at all costs" mentality dominate sports headlines and prompt calls for meaningful change. Many …

Deferred Action: Considering What Is Lost, Elizabeth Keyes

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This response to Professor Motomura considers what is lost through the elaboration of formally defined boundaries around prosecutorial discretion. Professor Motomura and others in this Issue rightly extol the many benefits of the President's November 2014 executive actions. While I share the view that those benefits are considerable, I believe a full accounting requires us to consider what gets lost in this process, including identification of the immigrants in the limbo space between the actions' prospective beneficiaries at the one end and those who are priorities for removal on the other. This Essay focuses on the cost that comes from …

A Framework For A Formal Sovereign Debt Restructuring Mechanism: The Kiss Principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid) And Other Guiding Principles, Charles W. Mooney Jr.

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Given the ongoing work on a multilateral restructuring process for sovereign debt in the UN, consideration of the content and implementation of a sovereign debt restructuring mechanism (SDRM) is timely. The framework and content of the SDRM proposed here differs from earlier proposals in several important respects. For the classification and supermajority voting of claims in the approval a restructuring plan, it would mimic the structure and operation of the model collective action clauses (Model CACs) proposed by the International Capital Markets Association. Restructuring under a qualified sovereign debt restructuring law (QSDRL) would be guided by four principles: (i) observe …

Ending Security Council Resolutions, Jean Galbraith

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The Security Council resolution implementing the Iran deal spells out the terms of its own destruction. It contains a provision that allows any one of seven countries to terminate its key components. This provision – which this Comment terms a trigger termination – is both unusual and important. It is unusual because, up to now, the Security Council has almost always either not specified the conditions under which resolutions terminate or used time-based sunset clauses. It is important not only for the Iran deal, but also as a precedent and a model for the use of trigger terminations in the …

Improving Lawyers’ Judgment: Is Mediation Training De-Biasing?, Douglas N. Frenkel, James H. Stark

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When people are placed in a partisan role or otherwise have an objective they seek to accomplish, they are prone to pervasive cognitive and motivational biases. These judgmental distortions can affect what people believe and wish to find out, the predictions they make, the strategic decisions they employ, and what they think is fair. A classic example is confirmation bias, which can cause its victims to seek and interpret information in ways that are consistent with their pre-existing views or the goals they aim to achieve. Studies consistently show that experts as well as laypeople are prone to such biases, …

The Developmental Effect Of State Alcohol Prohibitions At The Turn Of The 20th Century, Mary F. Evans, Eric Helland, Jonathan Klick, Ashwin Patel

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We examine the quasi-randomization of alcohol consumption created by state-level alcohol prohibition laws passed in the U.S. in the early part of the 20th century. Using a large dataset of World War II enlistees, we exploit the differential timing of these laws to examine their effects on adult educational attainment, obesity, and height. We find statistically significant effects for education and obesity that do not appear to be the result of pre-existing trends. Our findings add to the growing body of economic studies that examines the long-run impacts of in utero and childhood environmental conditions.

The Surety's Exposure For Wages And Related Liabilities, Lisa D. Sparks, Marc A. Campsen

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A surety faces potential exposure to a multitude of liabilities under payment and performance bonds issued for state and federally funded bonded projects as well as from the express obligations imposed by private common law performance and payment bonds. This paper, however, focuses only on a surety’s potential exposure for wage and related liabilities.

Under federal law, a surety faces possible liability under a Miller Act Payment Bond to laborers for the bonded principal’s failure to pay wages. Union trusts may also recover against a surety under a Miller Act Payment Bond for the bonded principal’s failure to remit union …

Can Simple Mechanism Design Results Be Used To Implement The Proportionality Standard In Discovery?, Jonah B. Gelbach

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I point out that the Coase theorem suggests there should not be wasteful discovery, in the sense that the value to the requester is less than the cost to the responder. I use a toy model to show that a sufficiently informed court could design a mechanism under which the Coasean prediction is borne out. I then suggest that the actual information available to courts is too little to effect this mechanism, and I consider alternatives. In discussing mechanisms intended to avoid wasteful discovery where courts have limited information, I emphasize the role of normative considerations.

Sexuality And Incapacity, Alexander Boni-Saenz

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No abstract provided.

It's Not Just Ferguson: Missouri Supreme Court Should Consolidate The Municipal Court System, Thomas Harvey, John Mcannar, Michael-John Voss, Joshua Feinzig, Chris Mcallister

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The Missouri Supreme Court's unprecedented decision to take control of Ferguson's Municipal Court was based primarily on issues raised during sustained protest following the killing of Mike Brown and reports published by ArchCity Defenders and the Department of Justice. These reports highlighted racial disparity in traffic stops, excessive revenue generation, and excessive warrants and arrests and confirmed the lived experiences of poor and Black people in St. Louis: there is a racially discriminatory and profit-driven approach to law enforcement made possible only by the collaborative efforts of local government, police, and courts.

These condemned practices are not unique to Ferguson. …

The Importance Of Being Dismissive: The Efficiency Role Of Pleading Stage Evaluation Of Shareholder Litigation, Lawrence A. Hamermesh, Michael L. Wachter

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It has been claimed that the risk/reward dynamics of shareholder litigation have encouraged quick settlements with substantial attorneys’ fee awards but no payment to shareholders, regardless of the merits of the case. Fee-shifting charter and bylaw provisions may be too blunt a tool to control agency costs associated with excessive shareholder litigation, and are in any event now prohibited by Delaware statute. We claim, however, that active judicial supervision of public company shareholder litigation at an early stage reduces the costs of frivolous litigation to shareholders by separating meritorious from unmeritorious litigation before the full costs of discovery are incurred. …

Meeting The Experiential Challenge: A Fee-Generating Law Clinic (With Harold J. Krent), Gary S. Laser

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No abstract provided.

Meeting The Experiential Challenge: A Fee-Generating Law Clinic (With Gary S. Laser), Harold J. Krent

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No abstract provided.

Ratification, Reporting, And Rights: Quality Of Participation In The Convention Against Torture, Cossette D. Creamer, Beth A. Simmons

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The core international human rights treaty bodies play an important role in monitoring implementation of human rights standards through consideration of states parties’ reports. Yet very little research explores how seriously governments take their reporting obligations. This article examines the reporting record of parties to the Convention against Torture, finding that report submission is heavily conditioned by the practices of neighboring countries and by a government’s human rights commitment and institutional capacity. This article also introduces original data on the quality and responsiveness of reports, finding that more democratic—and particularly newly democratic—governments tend to render higher quality reports.

Institutional Investors In Corporate Governance, Edward B. Rock

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This chapter of the Oxford Handbook on Corporate Law and Governance examines the role of institutional investors in corporate governance and the role of regulation in encouraging institutional investors to become active stewards. I approach these topics through asking what lessons we can draw from the U.S. experience for the E.U.’s 2014 proposed amendments to the Shareholder Rights Directive.

I begin by defining the institutional investor category, and summarizing the growth of institutional investors’ equity holdings over time. I then briefly survey how institutional investors themselves are governed and how they organize share voting. This leads me to two central …

Obama's Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free Decree, Paul H. Robinson

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While agreeing that sentences for nonviolent drug offenses are too long, this Wall Street Journal op-ed piece argues that the large-scale clemency program planned by President Obama is misguided. It sets a dangerous precedent for using the clemency power beyond its traditional and intended purpose of providing a last-resort check on fairness and justice errors in individual cases, and instead uses the power to set sentencing policy. While many people will like the results of the current program, they will be less than happy when some future president uses it as precedent to promote a sentencing policy of which they …

Medicare Secondary Payer And Settlement Delay, Eric Helland, Jonathan Klick

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The Medicare Secondary Payer Act of 1980 and its subsequent amendments require that insurers and self-insured companies report settlements, awards, and judgments that involve a Medicare beneficiary to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The parties then may be required to compensate CMS for its conditional payments. In a simple settlement model, this makes settlement less likely. Also, the reporting delays and uncertainty regarding the size of these conditional payments are likely to further frustrate the settlement process. We provide results, using data from a large insurer, showing that, on average, implementation of the MSP reporting amendments led to …

Lost In A Legal Thicket, Paul H. Robinson

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This op-ed piece argues that criminal law recodification is badly needed in the states and the federal system, but that prosecutors stand out as the group who appear to regularly oppose it.