Law Commons^™

Understanding The Hard/Soft Distinction In International Law, Arnold N. Pronto

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

A common characterization employed in contemporary international law is that between "hard" and "soft" law. A determination that an instrument falls into either category carries with it a series of implications, including that pertaining to the legal consequence of noncompliance with the rules contained in the text. What is at times overlooked is the relatively common phenomenon of the two types of law co-existing, where hard rules provide the context or the limits (boundaries, ceilings, and floors), and the details are "filled-out" by soft rules. A full appreciation of the resulting legal picture requires not only a familiarity with both …

Recognition And Enforcement In Cross-Border Insolvency Law: A Proposal For Judicial Gap-Filling, Professor Sandeep Gopalan, Michael Guihot

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

The globalization of business activity necessarily entails contacts with a diverse array of national laws and legal systems, and insolvencies in this context often have transnational consequences. In such situations, there is a clash of competing national laws on weighty questions including the recognition of security interests, processes related to the disbursal of assets, and different policy preferences underlying the protection of different kinds of creditors. These clashes pose difficulties because each country has framed its insolvency laws in response to particular political exigencies and the policy preferences of its citizens, reflecting different bargains between creditor and debtor protection. Despite …

A Doctor’S Duty Of Disclosure: Uksc Sets New Paradigm In Montgomery V Lanarkshire Health Board, Kee Yang Low

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Montgomery v Lanarkshire Health Board (“Montgomery”)1 is about a baby being born with severe disabilities. Expectant mothers of small build and suffering from diabetes,2 such as the plaintiff, run the risk of shoulder dystocia, that is – the situation of the baby’s shoulders being unable to pass through the pelvis in a normal delivery.3 In this case, the patient was not told of the risk of shoulder dystocia as, in the doctor’s opinion, the possibility was very small. The doctor was not inclined to warn as most mothers, if told would opt for a ceasarean section and that would deprive …

Alternative Investment Markets Under Criticism: Reasons To Be Worried? Lessons From Gowex, Aurelio Gurrea-Martinez

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The recent financial scandal of Gowex in the Spanish Alternative Investment Market (MAB) has reopened the debate about the dangers of lightly regulated markets and their optimal level of regulation. This article argues that Gowex’s collapse was not a failure of these markets but a failure of the gatekeepers in charge of overseeing Gowex’s activities. Therefore, we propose that regulators should focus on providing mechanisms to encourage gatekeepers to do their work in an effective and credible way. Namely, we propose that regulators should enhance the role and effectiveness of Nominated Advisers, since these players have been created precisely for …

What Happens If We Call Discrimination A Tort?, Anthony J. Sebok

Articles

No abstract provided.

Is There A Way Out Of The Non-International Detention Dilemma?, Gabor Rona

Articles

The article addresses the legal ambiguities surrounding detention in non-international armed conflicts (NIACs), highlighting the lack of explicit rules under international humanitarian law (IHL) and the challenges posed by the extraterritorial application of human rights law. It critiques the argument that detention authority can be implied from the right to target under IHL and advocates for reform to establish clear legal frameworks for detention in NIACs, ensuring compliance with human rights protections.

Why Instrumentalism Matters, Kyron J. Huigens

Articles

Alon Harel argues that the acts of a public official acting with "fidelity of deference," are "necessary," "non-contingent," "intrinsic," "constitutive," integrative," "expressive," or "inherent" features of legal punishment. Accordingly, he calls his argument "noninstrumental." This can be taken as an argument for logical necessity, definition, extension, or modest or immodest conceptual necessity. Only the last interpretation fits Harel's text, but such an argument fails because instrumentality is necessarily present in any event in the natural world, including punishment. Harel does not say which aspects of natural instrumentality he means to exclude from his argument, or how, or why.

Facing Terror Together: Public Agents And Civic Worth, Ekow N. Yankah

Articles

No abstract provided.

Controversial Defenses To Legal Malpractice Claims: Are Attorney Experts Being Asked To Be Advocates?, David S. Caudill

Faculty Publications

Attorney-experts in legal malpractice litigation are like many other experts. Although easily distinguishable from experts offering science-based testimony, attorney expertise is similar to that of witnesses offering experience-based testimony, and very much like the expertise of a physician in a medical malpractice case. An attorney-expert is, however, somewhat unique among experts in terms of the type of expertise offered, the inherent risk that the expert’s testimony will invade the province of the judge or jury, and, I believe, the risk of over-testifying. First, there is a problem of defining the attorney-expert’s “expertise” to ensure that the expert is not testifying …

Income Inequality And Corporate Structure, Matthew T. Bodie

All Faculty Scholarship

Efforts to address income inequality generally focus on wealth redistribution through taxation and government benefits. But these efforts do not attack the core problem -- the unfair distribution of wealth at the firm level. This essay, a contribution to the "Inequality, Opportunity, and the Law of the Workplace" symposium, argues that workers need power within their firms to stake their claims to larger slices of the corporate pie. Even though the current law of the workplace does provide regulatory support for workers, it fails to change internal firm governance. Policymakers who want to take on income inequality as a structural …

Ebola, Quarantine, And Flawed Cdc Policy, Robert Gatter

All Faculty Scholarship

The CDC’s Interim Guidance for Monitoring and Movements of Persons with Potential Ebola Virus Exposure is deeply flawed because it disregards the science of Ebola transmission. It recommends that officials quarantine individuals exposed to the virus but who do not have any symptoms of illness, ignoring the fact that only those with Ebola symptoms can communicate the virus to others. Consequently, any quarantine order based on the Guidelines is surely unconstitutional and illegal under most states’ public health statutes — as exemplified by the State of Maine’s failed petition to quarantine Nurse Kaci Hickox in October 2014. This article examines …

What Patients With Disabilities Teach Us About The Everyday Ethics Of Health Care, Elizabeth Pendo

All Faculty Scholarship

In Healers: Extraordinary Clinicians at Work, by David Schenck and Dr. Larry Churchill, and in What PatientsTeach: The Everyday Ethics of Health Care, their follow-up with Joseph Fanning, the authors look at theeveryday experience of health care and the relationships that shape it. This article expands upon that inquiry by exploring the experiences and challenges of patients with disabilities and by exploring what patients withdisabilities can teach us about the everyday ethics of health care.

The authors of What Patients Teach provide a framework in which to focus on the everyday experience ofhealth care from the perspective of patients. This …

Training The Transactional Business Lawyer: Using The Business Associations Course As A Platform To Teach Practical Skills, Constance Z. Wagner

All Faculty Scholarship

Drawing on her own practice background as a business lawyer and her law school teaching experience, theauthor argues for the importance of introducing transactional lawyering skills into the law school course on business associations. She notes that business law practice is transactional in nature, but that the traditional method of teaching business associations centers on case law analysis. This litigation-focused approach misleads students about the nature of business law practice, which requires lawyers to act as problem solvers and planners and to engage in preventative lawyering. To bolster her argument, the author draws on some of the recent literature on …

Sick And Tired Of Being Sick And Tired: Putting An End To Separate And Unequal Health Care In The United States 50 Years After The Civil Rights Act Of 1964, Ruqaiijah A. Yearby

All Faculty Scholarship

Since the end of the Civil War in 1865, the U.S. health care system has been structured to be racially separate and unequal. Ninety-nine years later, the enactment of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VI) was supposed to put an end to this racially separate and unequal health care system by mandating equal access to health care for all races. However, fifty years later, African Americans continue to receive separate and unequal treatment compared to Caucasians, in hospitals, nursing homes, and physician offices. As a result, racial disparities in health status and access to health …

Property And Political Community: Democracy, Oligarchy, And The Case Of Ukraine, Monica E. Eppinger

All Faculty Scholarship

Widening wealth gaps in Western democracies have brought new scrutiny to relationships between property and political community. For the prior quarter century, Western legal scholars have urged privatization around the globe as the key to a virtuous circle of "market democracy." This Article traces origins of the market democracy consensus to ideas that identify positive features of political community -- liberty, wealth, or democracy -- with private property ownership. Fieldwork in Ukraine, where Western privatization advice was followed at a time of founding a new polity, provides data to compare predictions with outcomes. Two unexpected figures -- the Oligarch and …

Let’S Pretend That Federal Courts Aren’T Hostile To Discrimination Claims, Marcia L. Mccormick

All Faculty Scholarship

Professor Sandra Sperino’s article, Let’s Pretend Discrimination Is a Tort,[1] makes a valuable contribution to the debate about the proper interpretation of Title VII and other employment discrimination laws in light of Supreme Court trends. Professor Sperino ably describes the way that the Supreme Court has used tort concepts increasingly in recent cases,[2] even having gone so far as to have called employment discrimination statutes federal torts.[3] This development has created significant concern among scholars,[4] including Professor Sperino herself.[5]

Rather than simply reiterate those concerns, however, in her article Professor Sperino adopts a novel approach: she takes the Court at …

Jim Crow's Unwritten Code, Anders Walker

All Faculty Scholarship

In The Jim Crow Routine, historian Stephen Berrey brings fresh eyes to the intricate set of legal rules that maintained racial segregation in the American South. Building on works like Leon Litwack’s Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow and Neil R. McMillen’s Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow, Berrey focuses not on the rise or demise of Jim Crow so much as the manner in which it disciplined daily life. For average folks, argues Berrey, Jim Crow turned the South into a stage where whites and blacks learned to negotiate one …

Out Of The Black Box And Into The Light: Using Section 1115 Medicaid Waivers To Implement The Affordable Care Act's Medicaid Expansion, Sidney D. Watson

All Faculty Scholarship

What price Medicaid expansion? The Supreme Court's decision in National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) v. Sebelius,' sparked intense debate about how the Secretary of Health & Human Services (HHS) would respond to pressure from recalcitrant states. Policy experts and Sunday-moming pundits predicted that Red States would demand Section 1115 waivers of federal Medicaid rules as the quid pro quo for implementing the Affordable Care Act's (ACA) Medicaid expansion that covers adults with incomes up to 133% of the federal poverty level (FPL). They prophesized that the Obama Administration, desperate to move implementation forward, would have little leverage in its …

Kamil Kubik: The Artist And Copyright Observed, Elizabeth Townsend Gard, Yvette Joy Liebesman

All Faculty Scholarship

For over 60 years — from the time he fled his native Czechoslovakia in 1948 until his death in August 2011 — Kamil Kubik created amazing oil paintings and pastels. Many of his works were also printed as lithographs and serigraphs, for sale at more affordable prices than the four-to-five figures that he received for the originals. He was not dependent on the sale of these prints, which was a good thing — most of the original works were unprotected by copyright, and many of the prints were unauthorized reproductions.

Copyright law is the key law that protects the artistic …

The Benefits Of Integrating Entrepreneurship Into Business Associations, Ann M. Scarlett

All Faculty Scholarship

Integrating entrepreneurship into Business Associations through an emphasis on start-up and small businesses is worth sacrificing some coverage of public corporations. Attorneys are much more likely to work with clients who are self-employed or own small businesses, and thus the legal principles covered in a Business Associations course have more relevance to students when focused on these likely clients. Students are also able to more easily understand the legal concepts presented when focused on start-up and small businesses. Incorporating entrepreneurship also has the advantage of introducing law students to the cross-curricular nature of this practice area and at a time …

The Injustice Of Inclusion And Fair Opportunity: Exploiting Children In Medical Research For The Benefit Of An Unworthy Society, Ruqaiijah Yearby

All Faculty Scholarship

The history of pediatric medical research has been characterized as a history of child abuse. Usually, the debate regarding the use of children in medical research has centered on questions of Autonomy (informed consent) and Beneficence (the best interest of the child based on a benefit risk analysis). The debate has rarely focused on the question of which children should participate in medical research by discussing the legal principle of Justice (prohibits use of vulnerable populations for medical research who are already overly burdened for medical research unrelated to health issues affecting them and requires that populations who participate in …

Called To Serve: Five Habits Of Effective Board Members, Dana M. Malkus

All Faculty Scholarship

In any given year, a single nonprofit organization has the potential to positively impact hundreds of lives. Given their training, passion, and community standing, young lawyers are often a great asset for such organizations. At the same time, nonprofit organizations can provide excellent training and networking opportunities for young lawyers.

With a relatively modest investment of time, you can provide the kind of board service that brings substantial impacts for our communities. Whether you currently serve on a board or are simply considering doing so in the future, developing the following five habits will help you more effectively advance your …

A Vast Image Out Of Spiritus Mundi: The Existential Crisis Of Law Schools, Jeremiah A. Ho

All Faculty Scholarship

In her recent book, Teaching Law: Justice, Politics, and the Demands of Professionalism, Robin L. West articulates that the crisis is not merely as the The New York Times and other media outlets have described it — not entirely about the faulty business practices of law schools or the lack of practice-oriented teaching in law classrooms. Instead, the crisis lies at the existential core of law schools. The original nineteenth-century set-up of the American law school and that model’s continued existence today have contributed to an identity crisis for law schools, revealing its major incompatibility with how the law is …

The Cowboy Code Meets The Smash Mouth Truth: Meditations On Worker Incivility, Michael C. Duff

All Faculty Scholarship

This symposium essay argues that workers must face up and wake up to the emerging real world of perpetual employment vulnerability. Clinging to the faith that those who govern us will abide by simple moral codes simply will not do in this world. Workers must resist forces promoting vulnerability and internalize a steely and clear-eyed ethic of self-defense in response to the smash mouth truth of this challenging new environment. Workers and dissidents must not shrink when their frank opposition to the status quo is cabined and marginalized as “incivility.” The law — and I focus in the essay on …

When Does Copyright Law Require Technology Blindness? Aiken Meets Aereo, Yvette Joy Liebesman

All Faculty Scholarship

Within the Copyright Act, innovation and technological advances are the bases for the enactment or amendment of many sections. Technology is often fundamental to the language of the section, and the underlying technology matters even when it is paired with a technology-neutral section. And because technology matters, how it functions could be essential in resolving a copyright infringement dispute.

One such provision, 17 U.S.C. § 110(5), allows small businesses to “publicly perform” copyrighted music via a radio, as long as certain conditions regarding the equipment used are met. Only small businesses are eligible, and the proprietors can only use systems …

Merger Is Indirect Gift In Cavallaro, Kerry A. Ryan

All Faculty Scholarship

In Cavallaro v. Commissioner, the Tax Court held that a merger of two family-owned businesses resulted in a substantial taxable gift. The taxpayers avoided penalties by demonstrating that they relied in good faith on the mistaken advice of competent tax advisers.

The Indian Child Welfare Act's Waning Power After Adoptive Couple V. Baby Girl, Kathleena Kruck

Northwestern University Law Review

In the 1970s, state authorities began removing Indian children from their homes by the thousands and placing them into foster care, institutional housing, and with white families. To counteract this forced assimilation, Congress passed the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) in 1978. The ICWA conferred many powers previously held by the states to tribal courts and created a preference for Indian children to be placed with their extended family, other members of their tribe, or other Indian families. Despite congressional efforts, the practice of removing Indian children from their homes still persists. Many states resist the ICWA through judicially created …

Unavoidable Aesthetic Judgments In Copyright Law: A Community Of Practice Standard, Robert Kirk Walker, Ben Depoorter

Northwestern University Law Review

Aesthetic judgments are “dangerous undertakings” for courts, but they are unavoidable in copyright law. In theory, copyright does not distinguish between works on the basis of aesthetic values or merit (or lack thereof), and courts often go to great lengths to try to avoid artistic judgments. In practice, however, implicit aesthetic criteria are deeply embedded throughout copyright case law. The questions “What is art?” and “How should it be interpreted?” are inextricably linked to the questions “What does copyright protect?,” “Who is an author?,” “What is misappropriation?,” and many other issues essential to copyright. Although courts rarely (if ever) explicitly …

Protecting Title Vii's Antiretaliation Provision In The Wake Of University Of Texas Southwestern Medical Center V. Nassar, Kimberly A. Pathman

Northwestern University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Apple Pie Propaganda? The Smith–Mundt Act Before And After The Repeal Of The Domestic Dissemination Ban, Weston R. Sager

Northwestern University Law Review

For over sixty years, the Smith–Mundt Act prohibited the U.S. Department of State and the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) from disseminating government-produced programming within the United States over fears that these agencies would “propagandize” the American people. However, in 2013, Congress abolished the domestic dissemination ban, which has led to a heated debate about the role of the federal government in free public discourse. Although the 2013 repeal of the domestic dissemination ban promotes greater government transparency and may help counter anti-American sentiment at home, it also gives the federal government great power to covertly influence public opinion. To …