Law Commons^™

Judith S. Kaye In Her Own Words: Reflections On Life And The Law, With Selected Judicial Opinions And Articles, Jennifer Dixon

Staff Publications

No abstract provided.

Conducting 50-State Survey Research: Lessons Learned Through Criminal Justice Research, Janet Kearney

Staff Publications

No abstract provided.

Documenting The Pandemic: Libraries Launch Covid-19 Archival Projects, Jennifer Dixon

Staff Publications

No abstract provided.

Equipping First-Year Students For Remote Success, Jennifer Dixon

Staff Publications

No abstract provided.

Find Your Focus: What Kind Of Librarian Should You Be?, Jennifer Dixon

Staff Publications

No abstract provided.

In Second Pandemic Wave, College Libraries Again Adjust To Shutdowns, Jennifer Dixon

Staff Publications

No abstract provided.

Reopening Libraries: Campus Concerns, Jennifer Dixon

Staff Publications

No abstract provided.

Tulane University Acquires Archives Of Anne Rice— New Orleans Novelist Of Vampires And Witches, Jennifer Dixon

Staff Publications

No abstract provided.

Opt-In Stewardship: Toward An Optimal Delegation Of Mutual Fund Voting Authority, Sean J. Griffith

Faculty Scholarship

This article offers a theory of mutual fund voting to answer when mutual funds should vote on behalf of their investors and when they should not. It argues that voting authority for mutual funds ought to depend upon: (1) whether the fund possesses a comparative information advantage, and (2) the ability of the fund to assume a common investor purpose. The strongest case for mutual fund voting is one in which high-quality information is produced and the fund is able to assume a common investor purpose. The case for mutual fund voting is weaker when low quality information is produced …

Protecting Against An Unable President: Reforms For Invoking The 25th Amendment And Overseeing Presidential Nuclear Launch Authority, Louis Cholden-Brown, Daisy De Wolff, Marcello Figueroa, Kathleen Mccullough

Reports

The immense powers of the presidency and the vast array of global threats demand a physically and mentally capable president. To help ensure able presidential leadership, this report advocates reforms related to the 25th Amendment, including proposals for an “other body” to act with the vice president in certain circumstances to declare the president unable and a mechanism for officials to report concerns about the president’s capacity. The report also recommends new checks on the president’s authority to use nuclear weapons, such as procedures for notifying top national security officials when use is contemplated.

This report was researched and written …

Review Of Friendship In The Hebrew Bible By Saul M. Olyan, Ethan J. Leib

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Protecting Against An Unable President: Reforms For Invoking The 25th Amendment And Overseeing Presidential Nuclear Launch Authority, Louis Cholden-Brown, Daisy De Wolff, Marcello Figueroa, Kathleen Mccullough

Faculty Scholarship

The immense powers of the presidency and the vast array of global threats demand a physically and mentally capable president. To help ensure able presidential leadership, this report advocates reforms related to the 25th Amendment, including proposals for an “other body” to act with the vice president in certain circumstances to declare the president unable and a mechanism for officials to report concerns about the president’s capacity. The report also recommends new checks on the president’s authority to use nuclear weapons, such as procedures for notifying top national security officials when use is contemplated.

This report was researched and written …

Special Education Disparities Are Social Determinants Of Health: A Role For Medical-Legal Partnerships, Karen Bonuck, Leah Hill

Faculty Scholarship

Problem: Education is a key social determinant of health. The federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) purportedly affords children the right to a free and appropriate education. Yet, racial, ethnic, and economic disparities exist regarding appropriate identification and classification of children with needs for special education, and access to services.

Purpose: This article first highlights gaps and disparities in special educational services, and their structural linkage to poverty. The second section describe the first years of a medical–legal collaboration between a University Center of Excellence in Developmental Disabilities (UCEDD) and Fordham University, focused on special education.

Key Points: The …

Case-Linked Jurisdiction And Busybody States, Howard M. Erichson, John C.P. Goldberg, Benjamin Zipursky

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The “Welfare Queen” Goes To The Polls: Race-Based Fractures In Gender Politics And Opportunities For Intersectional Coalitions, Catherine Powell, Camille Gear Rich

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Broken Records: Reconceptualizing Rational Basis Review To Address “Alternative Facts” In The Legislative Process, Joseph Landau

Faculty Scholarship

In 2016, North Carolina passed “HB2,” also known as the “bathroom ban”—a law prohibiting transgender individuals from accessing public restrooms corresponding to their gender identity—based on the unfounded fear that cisgender men posing as transgender women would assault women and girls in bathrooms. Around the same time, Alabama enacted a punishing immigration law in which sponsors distorted statistics regarding the undocumented population by using the terms “Latino/Hispanic” and “illegal immigrant” interchangeably. These laws are reflective of a larger pattern. In our increasingly polarized political climate, policymakers are affirmatively distorting legislative records and promoting dubious justifications for their policy goals—that is, …

Liberalism And The Distinctiveness Of Religious Belief, Abner S. Greene

Faculty Scholarship

Finding the appropriate sweet spot for religion’s role in the state and how state action may affect the lives of religious people continues to be elusive. Cécile Laborde’s ambitious book Liberalism’s Religion comes down firmly on the side of seeing religion as not distinctive, even in a liberal democracy. To the extent that nonestablishment and free exercise norms should prevail, they should prevail insofar as we can disaggregate religion into components that it shares with nonreligious belief and practice. In this review essay, I advance a position on which Laborde spends little time in her book — religion is distinctive …

International Dispute Resolution And Access To Justice: Comparative Law Perspectives, Jacqueline Nolan-Haley

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Should Criminal Justice Reformers Care About Prosecutorial Ethics Rules?, Bruce A. Green, Ellen C. Yaroshefsky

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Conceptualizing Legal Childhood In The Twenty-First Century, Clare Huntington, Elizabeth S. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

The law governing children is complex, sometimes appearing almost incoherent. The relatively simple framework established in the Progressive era, in which parents had primary authority over children, subject to limited state oversight, has broken down over the past few decades. Lawmakers started granting children some adult rights and privileges, raising questions about their traditional status as vulnerable, dependent, and legally incompetent beings. As children emerged as legal persons, children’s rights advocates challenged the rationale for parental authority, contending that robust parental rights often harm children. And a wave of punitive reforms in response to juvenile crime in the 1990s undermined …

Victims’ Rights From A Restorative Perspective, Lara Bazelon, Bruce A. Green

Faculty Scholarship

The criminal adjudicatory process is meant in part to help crime victims heal. But for some crime victims, the process is re-victimizing. For decades, efforts have been made to make the criminal process fairer and more humane for victims. For example, state and federal laws are now designed to keep victims informed, allow them to be heard at sentencing, and afford them monetary restitution. But these efforts, while important, have not persuaded crime victims to trust criminal process. For example, sexual assaults remain grossly under-reported and under-prosecuted. Less than 1 percent of sexual assault crimes result in a felony conviction. …

Tracking Client Outcomes: A Qualitative Assessment Of Civil Legal Aid’S Use Of Outcomes Data, With Recommendations, David Udell, Amy Widman

Faculty Scholarship

In virtually all sectors of society, people are using data to improve what they do. Everyone, it seems, is interested in data, and is searching for best strategies to draw on its power. The stakes are high in the civil legal aid community, where strengthened advocacy can enable people to preserve their homes, their relationships with their children, their life savings, their physical and emotional well-being, and even their freedom.

Yet, in the civil legal aid community, awareness of the power of data is just beginning to take root. Traditionally, civil legal aid has been thinly funded, with little infrastructure …

May Class Counsel Also Represent Lead Plaintiffs?, Bruce A. Green, Andrew Kent

Faculty Scholarship

For decades, courts and commentators have been aware that the potential for conflicting interests among the class representatives, class counsel, and absent class members is inherent in the class action device. Notwithstanding this realization and a substantial amount of scholarly and judicial commentary on class conflicts, one kind of conflict has not received due attention: the conflict that inevitably arises when class counsel also represents class members as individuals. We demonstrate that this conflict— so common to be almost invisible—arises from the very beginning of a putative class representation, and may create a fraught situation for a lawyer concurrently representing …

The Mainstreaming Of Sex Workers' Rights As Human Rights, Chi Adanna Mgbako

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Afrodescendants, Law, And Race In Latin America, Tanya K. Hernandez

Faculty Scholarship

Law and Society research in and about Latin America has been particularly beneficial in elucidating the gap between the ideals of racial equality laws in the region and the actual subordinated status of its racialized subjects. Some of the recurrent themes in the race-related literature have been: the limits of the Latin American emphasis on criminal law to redress discriminatory actions; the limits of multicultural constitutional reform for full political participation; the insufficiency of land reform and recognition of ethnic communal property titles; and the challenges to implementing race conscious public policies such as affirmative action. Especially illuminating have been …

Why The Policy Failures Of Mass Incarceration Are Really Political Failures, John F. Pfaff

Faculty Scholarship

In his forthcoming book, The Insidious Momentum of Mass Incarceration, Franklin Zimring argues that the most effective way to end mass incarceration is to target the policy failures that drive it. He focuses in particular on the “prosecutorial free lunch”: prosecutors are county-funded officials who can send as many people as they like to state-funded prisons, which is a classic moral hazard problem. While Zimring is correct to focus on how relatively technocratic issues have posed outsized and underappreciated problems, his analysis suffers from some important shortcomings. In particular, he gives too little attention to the politics that have …

What Should Presidential Candidates Tell Us About Themselves? Proposals For Improving Transparency In Presidential Campaigns, Megha Dharia, Rikki Lavine, Ryan Partelow, James Auchincloss, Krysia Lenzo

Faculty Scholarship

Elections are at the foundation of our democracy, but voters sometimes cast their ballots without critical information about presidential candidates. This report calls for requirements that candidates release more personal financial information, including five years of tax returns, and undergo criminal and intelligence background checks. The report also advocates for a system allowing candidates to submit to voluntary medical exams with some results released to the public.

This report was researched and written during the 2018-2019 academic year by students in Fordham Law School’s Democracy and the Constitution Clinic, which is focused on developing non-partisan recommendations to strengthen the nation’s …

Why The House Of Representatives Must Be Expanded And How Today’S Congress Can Make It Happen, Caroline Kane, Gianni Mascioli, Michael Mcgarry, Meira Nagel

Faculty Scholarship

The House of Representatives was designed to expand alongside the country’s population—yet its membership stopped growing a century ago. Larger and, in some cases, unequal sized congressional districts have left Americans with worse representation, including in the Electoral College, which allocates electors partially on the size of states’ House delegations. This report recommends tying the House’s size to the cube root of the nation’s population, which would lead to 141 more seats. It also calls for an approach to drawing districts that would eliminate gerrymandering.

This report was researched and written during the 2018-2019 academic year by students in Fordham …

Toward An Independent Administration Of Justice: Proposals To Insulate The Department Of Justice From Improper Political Interference, Rebecca Cho, Louis Cholden-Brown, Marcello Figueroa

Faculty Scholarship

The rule of law is undermined when political and personal interests motivate criminal prosecutions. This report advances proposals for ensuring that the federal criminal justice system is administered uniformly based on the facts and the law. It recommends a law preventing the president from interfering in specific prosecutions, another law establishing responsibilities for prosecutors who receive improper orders, and new conflict of interest regulations for Department of Justice officials.

This report was researched and written during the 2018-2019 academic year by students in Fordham Law School’s Democracy and the Constitution Clinic, which is focused on developing non-partisan recommendations to strengthen …

Presidents Must Be Elected Popularly: Examining Proposals And Identifying The Natural Endpoint Of Electoral College Reform, Gianni Mascioli, Caroline Kane, Meira Nagel, Michael Mcgarry, Ezra Medina, Jenny Brejt, Siobhan D'Angelo

Faculty Scholarship

The Electoral College effectively disenfranchises voters who live outside the few states that decide presidential elections. This report endorses a change in the way electoral votes are allocated to ensure that Americans’ votes receive the same weight. States should sign on to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, an agreement among states to allocate their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote. Ranked choice voting should also be employed to ensure that candidates receive majority support.

This report was researched and written during the 2018-2019 academic year by students in Fordham Law School’s Democracy and the Constitution …