Law Commons^™

Regulation And The New Politics Of (Energy) Market Entry, David B. Spence

Notre Dame Law Review

This Article examines the dynamics of nongovernmental organization (NGO) opposition to proposed energy infrastructure in the twenty-first century, specifically the tactics and issue arguments used by NGOs to oppose new energy infrastructure. The analysis is built around a data set comprising information more than four hundred NGOs whose missions include active opposition to one or more of nine different types of energy projects, including various types of fossil fuel infrastructure, renewable energy facilities, and smart grid technology.

Part I of this Article explains the legal context in which NGOs may challenge the approval of new energy projects. Siting regulation typically …

Vol. 36, No. 4, Helen J. Kim

The Illinois Public Employee Relations Report

Which ULP is It?: An Examination of Retaliation under Sections 10(a)(1) and 10(a)(2) of the Illinois Public Relations Act by Helen J. Kim

Recent Developments

The Privileges Or Immunities Clause, Abridged: A Critique Of Kurt Lash On The Fourteenth Amendment, Randy E. Barnett, Evan D. Bernick

Notre Dame Law Review

In earlier writings, both of us have expressed sympathy for the view that the Privileges or Immunities Clause affords absolute protection to unenumerated rights, such as those contained in the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and authorizes Congress to enact protective legislation. Neither of us, however, has engaged with Kurt Lash’s most recent and unique two-class interpretation of the original meaning of the Privileges or Immunities Clause in the depth that it deserves. Nor have we evaluated his recent efforts to demonstrate that the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process of Law Clause empowers the federal courts and Congress to protect unenumerated …

Virtual Briefing At The Supreme Court, Jeffrey L. Fisher, Allison Orr Larsen

Cornell Law Review

The open secret of Supreme Court advocacy in a digital era is that there is a new way to argue to the Justices. Today's Supreme Court arguments are developed online: they are dissected and explored in blog posts, fleshed out in popular podcasts, and analyzed and re-analyzed by experts who do not represent the parties or have even filed a brief in the case at all. This "virtual briefing" (as we call it) is intended to influence the Justices and their law clerks but exists completely outside of traditional briefing rules. This article describes virtual briefing and makes a case …

Progressive Textualism In Administrative Law, Kathryn E. Kovacs

Michigan Law Review Online

Nicholas Bagley’s article The Procedure Fetish is destined to be a classic. In it, Bagley systematically dismantles administrative law’s obsession with procedure. He decimates the arguments that procedure is necessary to legit-imize the administrative state and avoid agency capture. He nullifies the con-tention that administrative law is neutral by showing how proceduralism inhibits regulation and “favors a libertarian agenda over a progressive one.” Bagley urges progressives to abandon “gauzy claims about legitimacy and accountability” and approach procedure with skepticism.

The Procedure Fetish addresses the normative question of what adminis-trative law ought to require. Bagley writes about how progressives should solve …

Changes Are Not Enough: Problems Persist With Ncaa's Adjudicative Policy, Elizabeth Lombard

Notre Dame Law Review

Recently, the critical eye of the public has focused on the adjudicative and enforcement policy of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). Social media sites serve as a testament to the rampant shock and confusion that the general population has harbored with regard to the enforcement and adjudication process on the heels of recent, high-profile cases. Witnessing verified sports reporters and outlets refer to the NCAA as powerless or questioning its purpose or existence altogether is evidence of the NCAA’s trying times in the court of public opinion. On the one hand, and rightfully so, one might think that this …

Safety & Risk Management News - December 2019, Otterbein University

Otterbein Police Department

No abstract provided.

Please Tweet Responsibly: The Social And Professional Ethics Of Public Defenders Using Client Information In Social Media Advocacy, Nicole Smith Futrell

Publications and Research

Every day the criminal legal system hauls poor and marginalized individuals through a process wrought with trauma, indignity, and abuse. Public defenders representing the criminally accused view their clients and the system from a unique vantage point: they bear witness to the human costs of a system that falls far short of its purported norms and ideals. For the public defender who works within this reality day in and day out, fighting for each individual client might feel limited in its wider impact. Some public defenders have found that using online and social media platforms, such as Twitter, to provide …

Tax Policy For The Wider Cryptoverse, Arild B. Doerge

Student Scholarship

The rapid rise of Bitcoin and other “cryptoassets” offers many interesting technological capabilities but also comes with uncertainty and volatility in the markets for these assets. The diversity of types of cryptoassets is increasing rapidly, while public understanding and government policy have generally been slow to take account of this diversity. In regard to taxation policy related to cryptoassets, current IRS guidance merely categorizes cryptoassets as general property. The policy implications of this classification run contrary to fundamental goals of tax policy by inhibiting how people use cryptoassets, making compliance more complex and ambiguous than necessary, and taxing cryptoasset transactions …

Senate Bill 1383 Stinks, Steffani Fausone

Student Scholarship

Climate change is no longer a prediction; it is a reality. Part of the climate change conversation revolves around increased methane emissions, focusing on the agricultural industry as a culprit. To address these concerns, the California legislature recently passed Senate Bill 1383, which aims to reduce methane emissions from one agricultural industry in particular--dairies. This far-fetched bill is the first in the country to attempt to regulate methane from dairy cattle. With so much uncertainty surrounding this bill's effects, this Comment argues that the bill will hurt the dairy industry more than it helps combat climate change. This Comment also …

Subverting Democracy To Save Democracy: Canada’S Extra-Constitutional Approaches To Battling “Fake News”, Michael Karanicolas

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

Nearly a decade after the first Twitter and Facebook revolutions, the early narratives pointing to social media as a great agent of democratization1 have given way to a more nuanced understanding of the impact of the Internet on our political discourse. While there is no question that Internet access provides tremendous expressive benefits, scholars are increasingly questioning whether this information diet is ultimately healthy for society. An analogy to sugars, fats and salts has emerged, where just as an appetite for rich foods served our species well when resources were scarce, but have become a liability in an age of …

The United States, The International Criminal Court, And The Situation In Afghanistan, Sara L. Ochs

Notre Dame Law Review Reflection

The United States has always had a very complicated and tense relationship with the International Criminal Court (ICC) and with international criminal law generally. Yet, under the Trump administration, the U.S.–ICC relationship has deteriorated to an unprecedented level. Within the last few years, the U.S. government has launched a full-scale attack on the ICC—denouncing its legitimacy, authority, and achievements, blocking investigations, and loudly withdrawing all once-existing support for the court.

These hostilities bubbled over following the November 2017 request by the ICC Chief Prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, for the court to open an investigation into alleged war crimes and crimes against …

Going Rogue: Mobile Research Applications And The Right To Privacy, Stacey A. Tovino

Notre Dame Law Review

This Article investigates whether nonsectoral state laws may serve as a viable source of privacy and security standards for mobile health research participants and other health data subjects until new federal laws are created or enforced. In particular, this Article (1) catalogues and analyzes the nonsectoral data privacy, security, and breach notification statutes of all fifty states and the District of Columbia; (2) applies these statutes to mobile-app-mediated health research conducted by independent scientists, citizen scientists, and patient researchers; and (3) proposes substantive amendments to state law that could help protect the privacy and security of all health data subjects, …

Narrowing The Trapdoor Of The Government Employee Rights Act, Henry Leaman

Notre Dame Law Review

We should revisit what protections are available to these state workers and push for reforms that further sexual equality. One way to do so is to decrease the size of Title VII’s trapdoor. This Note aims to fight sexual harassment in politics by advocating for a narrower understanding of the trapdoor, such that more plaintiffs are eligible to bring Title VII actions rather than Government Employee Rights Act of 1991 (GERA) actions. Specifically, this Note explains why the “personal staff” trapdoor should be narrowed and then provides a method for how to do so—by settling a circuit split on the …

Improving Human Rights Compliance In Supply Chains, Kishanthi Parella

Notre Dame Law Review

Corporations try to convince us that they are good global citizens: “brands take stands” by engaging in cause philanthropy; CEOs of prominent corporations tackle a variety of issues; and social values drive marketing strategies for goods and services. But despite this rhetoric, corporations regularly fall short in their conduct. This is especially true in supply chains where a number of human rights abuses frequently occur. One solution is for corporations to engage in meaningful human rights due diligence that involves monitoring human rights, reporting on social and environmental performance, undertaking impact assessments, and consulting with groups whose human rights they …

Prior Art In The District Court, Stephen Yelderman

Notre Dame Law Review

This Article is an empirical study of the evidence district courts rely upon when invalidating patents. To construct our dataset, we collected every district court ruling, verdict form, and opinion (whether reported or unreported) invalidating a patent claim over a six-and-a-half-year period. We then coded individual invalidity rulings based on the prior art supporting the court’s decision, observing 3320 invalidation events relying on 817 distinct prior art references.

The nature of the prior art relied upon to invalidate patents is relevant to two distinct sets of policy questions. First, this data sheds light on the value of district court litigation …

Regulating Bite Mark Evidence: Lesbian Vampires And Other Myths Of Forensic Odontology, Jennifer D. Oliva, Valena E. Beety

Washington Law Review

This is the third piece in a trilogy that examines and evaluates the standards that American courts apply to admit forensic “science” evidence proffered by prosecutors in criminal trials. The first two articles in the trilogy expose the criminal courts’ on-going practice of admitting false forensic evidence that is virtually always excluded in civil cases. They also advance a panoply of procedural and evidentiary solutions aimed at reforming this legally unviable discrepancy. Those solutions are court-centric insofar as they advocate for, among other things, open and early criminal discovery, pre-trial Daubert hearings to challenge evidence and experts, and court-appointment of …

Setting Our Feet: The Foundations Of Religious And Conscience Protections, Hanna Torline

Notre Dame Law Review

This Note does not attempt to claim that religion and conscience are not moral equivalents, that they are not equally important, or that they do not require equal legal treatment. Nor does it attempt to claim the converse. Simply put, it argues that a consideration of the different foundations underlying conscience protections and religious protections should give pause to anyone arguing that the two are equivalent. This Note concludes that the rationales behind protecting religion and conscience are different enough to merit consideration in the debate. For if religion and conscience are treated as equivalents under the law, they will …

Volume 105, Number 1 Table Of Contents And Front Matter

Cornell Law Review

No abstract provided.

United We Stand, Divided We Fall? An Inquiry Into The Values And Shortcomings Of Uniform Methodology For Statutory Interpretation, Chelsea A. Bunge-Bollman

Notre Dame Law Review Reflection

How should courts interpret statutes? This question has fueled generations of debate. Some believe generally that legislative intent should be understood based on the greater purpose of the statute; others believe that would be “pure applesauce” and the legislative intent should be understood through the plain meaning of the statute as written. Where one lands on that spectrum dictates the acceptable use of various tools for statutory interpretation, from legislative history to dictionaries. But, this is largely a theoretical exercise because statutory interpretation is messy in practice. The judiciary employs a variety of methodologies across cases, courts, time periods, and …

Why Robert Mueller's Appointment As Special Counsel Was Unlawful, Steven G. Calabresi, Gary Lawson

Notre Dame Law Review

Since 1999, when the independent counsel provisions of the Ethics in Government Act expired, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has had in place regulations providing for the appointment of “special counsels” who possess “the full power and independent authority to exercise all investigative and prosecutorial functions of any United States Attorney.” Appointments under these regulations, such as the May 17, 2017 appointment of Robert S. Mueller to investigate the Trump campaign, are patently unlawful, for three distinct reasons.

First, all federal offices must be “established by Law,” and there is no statute authorizing such an office in the DOJ. We …

Empowering The Poor: Turning De Facto Rights Into Collateralized Credit, Steven L. Schwarcz

Notre Dame Law Review

The shrinking middle class and the widening gap between rich and poor threaten social and financial stability. Though sometimes identified as a problem of developing nations, the inability of the poor to obtain credit by using their de facto rights in property as collateral impedes upward mobility in nearly all countries, including the United States. Efforts to solve this problem have focused on trying to transform de facto rights into de jure title under property law. Those efforts have been unsuccessful because, among other reasons, property law is tightly bound to tradition and protecting vested ownership. This Article proposes an …

Experimental Punishments, John F. Stinneford

Notre Dame Law Review

The Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause prohibits, under its original meaning, punishments that are unjustly harsh in light of longstanding prior practice. The Clause does not prohibit all new punishments; rather, it directs that when a new punishment is introduced it should be compared to traditional punishments that enjoy long usage. This standard presents a challenge when the government introduces a new method of punishment, particularly one that is advertised as more “progressive” or “humane” than those it replaces. It may not always be obvious, for example, how to compare a prison sentence to a public flogging, or death by …

Broadening Consumer Law: Competition, Protection, And Distribution, Rory Van Loo

Notre Dame Law Review

Policymakers and scholars have in distributional conversations traditionally ignored consumer laws, defined as the set of consumer protection, antitrust, and entry-barrier laws that govern consumer transactions. Consumer law is overlooked partly because tax law is cast as the most efficient way to redistribute. Another obstacle is that consumer law research speaks to microeconomic and siloed contexts—deceptive fees by Wells Fargo or a proposed merger between Comcast and Time Warner Cable. Even removing millions of dollars of deceptive credit card fees across the nation seems trivial compared to the trillion-dollar growth in income inequality that has sparked concern in recent decades. …

Existential Copyright And Professional Photography, Jessica Silbey, Eva E. Subotnik, Peter Dicola

Notre Dame Law Review

Intellectual property law has intended benefits, but it also carries certain costs—deliberately so. Skeptics have asked: Why should intellectual property law exist at all? To get traction on that overly broad but still important inquiry, we decided to ask a new, preliminary question: What do creators in a particular industry actually use intellectual property for? In this first-of-its-kind study, we conducted thirty-two in-depth qualitative interviews of photographers about how copyright law functions within their creative and business practices. By learning the actual functions of copyright law on the ground, we can evaluate and contextualize existing theories of intellectual property. More …

Glorious Revolution To American Revolution: The English Origin Of The Right To Keep And Bear Arms, Diarmuid F. O'Scannlain

Notre Dame Law Review

It is definitively not my intention to wade into such debates about the wisdom of the Second Amendment or to deal with pending or recent court interpretations. Rather, I want to explore how it came to be and what role British history had in its genesis. For Americans like myself, such history helps us to understand the meaning of our own Constitution. For the Britons, it is a powerful example of how your own constitutional principles shaped the legal landscape of far-flung countries once within the British Empire. And for those simply interested in law as a discipline, irrespective of …

A Practice Worth Ending: Eps Guidance Harming Long-Term Growth, Rachel G. Miller

Notre Dame Law Review

This Note focuses on one factor—earnings per share (EPS) guidance—that contributes to myopic behavior and short-termism within public companies. Part I discusses the history of the shareholder primacy norm and the need for management to act in the best interest of its shareholders. Additionally, this Part provides background on EPS guidance and the notion of short-termism. Part II lays out a framework for quarterly reporting and argues that the current disclosure requirements should remain intact. This Part addresses the importance of frequency in quarterly reporting and provides two examples—the United Kingdom and Regulation A—of practices with longer reporting frequencies that …

The Enumerated-Rights Reading Of The Privileges Or Immunities Clause: A Response To Barnett And Bernick, Kurt T. Lash

Notre Dame Law Review

In their new article, The Privileges or Immunities Clause, Abridged: A Critique of Kurt Lash on the Fourteenth Amendment, Randy Barnett and Evan Bernick insist that this historical evidence does not support the enumerated-rights reading. Instead, Barnett and Bernick embrace what I call the “fundamental-rights” reading of the Privileges or Immunities Clause. This view maintains that the Clause should be understood as protecting a set of absolute rights nowhere expressly enumerated in the text of the Constitution, for example the unenumerated economic right to contract or to pursue a trade.

Rather than agreeing with John Bingham, Barnett and Bernick …

The Difference Narrows: A Reply To Kurt Lash, Randy E. Barnett, Evan D. Bernick

Notre Dame Law Review

We thank the Notre Dame Law Review for allowing us to respond to Kurt Lash’s reply to our critique of his interpretation of the Privileges or Immunities Clause. We could forgive readers for having difficulty adjudicating this dispute. When Lash argues, evidence always comes pouring forth, and the sheer volume can overwhelm the senses. We sometimes have a hard time following his arguments, and we are experts in the field. We can only imagine how it seems to those who are otherwise unfamiliar with this terrain.

So, in this reply—with a few exceptions—we will avoid piling up any new evidence …

Rediscovering Corfield V. Coryell, Gerard N. Magliocca

Notre Dame Law Review

This Article reveals new details about Corfield v. Coryell based on archival research. In 2017, the author found Justice Washington’s original notes on Corfield in the Chicago History Museum. The most important revelation about Corfield is that the Justice was initially inclined to hold that the state law his decision upheld was, in fact, unconstitutional under the Privileges and Immunities Clause. The notes also say that he saw Livingston v. Van Ingen as the leading precedent on the Privileges and Immunities Clause and backed Chancellor Kent’s view in that case that the Clause articulated a nondiscrimination rule for out-of-state citizens …