Law Commons^™

Legal Ethics And Law Reform Advocacy, Jeffrey W. Stempel

Scholarly Works

Social activism, particularly law reform, has long been an accepted, even revered part of the lawyer's identity. However, modern developments such as nation-wide firms, the economic importance of client development, and aggressive attempts by clients to deploy attorneys as de facto, undisclosed lobbyists have put substantial pressure on the traditional vision of the attorney as a "lawyer-statesman" or someone who "checks clients at the door" when participating in law reform activities. Furthermore, law reform activism on behalf of one client (or prospective client when attorneys use their law reform lobbying as part of their marketing strategy) poses a real danger …

Public Art, Public Space, And The Panorama Right, Mary Lafrance

Scholarly Works

When art is installed in public spaces in the United States, the public's right to capture and share images for commercial or noncommercial purposes is not clearly defined by federal copyright law. This has led to both actual and threatened litigation. In the absence of a specific copyright rule designed to address these disputes, they must be resolved under a patchwork of other doctrines that are uncertain in scope, including fair use, de minimis use, and the statutory exception for images of architectural works, but none of these provide predictable results. In contrast, many foreign jurisdictions have enacted 'freedom of …

Cruzan And Surrogate Decision-Making, David Orentlicher

Scholarly Works

When the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark “right to die” decision in Cruzan v. Director, Missouri Department of Health thirty years ago, the dissenting Justices and many observers criticized the Court for rejecting a right of Nancy Cruzan’s parents to refuse medical care on her behalf. Ms. Cruzan had not written a living will or a durable power of attorney, nor did it appear that she had left clear oral instructions about her wishes. But she did have loving parents who were dedicated to doing what was best for her. Nevertheless, according to the Cruzan Court, “If the State …

Adversarial Failure, Benjamin P. Edwards

Scholarly Works

Investors, industry firms, and regulators all rely on vital public records to assess risk and evaluate securities industry personnel. Despite the information's importance, an arbitration-facilitated expungement process now regularly deletes these public records. Often, these arbitrations recommend that public information be deleted without any true adversary ever providing any critical scrutiny to the requests. In essence, poorly informed arbitrators facilitate removing public information out of public databases. Interventions aimed at surfacing information may yield better informed decisions. Although similar problems have emerged in other contexts when adversarial systems break down, the expungement process to purge information about financial professionals provides …

Invisible Prisons, M. Eve Hanan

Scholarly Works

Modern punishment theory is based on an inadequate conceptualization of the severity of incarceration. While the severity of a prison sentence is measured solely in terms of the length of time, the actual experience of imprisonment is often more punishing and more destructive than a simple loss of liberty. Yet, lawmakers and judges evince a surprising lack of institutional interest in understanding the experience of imprisonment and applying this knowledge to sentencing. This lack of official attention to how prison is experienced by incarcerated people is one of the drivers of mass incarceration.

This Article is the first scholarly work …

Targeting Factors And Conflict Of Laws On The Internet, Marketa Trimble

Scholarly Works

Courts have employed the concept of "targeting" to limit the reach of personal jurisdiction and applicable law on the Internet. To determine whether a defendant has targeted a particular country or state-and whether the defendant should be subject to the jurisdiction of and law in that country or state-courts consider various factors, such as the language, the top-level domain, and the currency used by the defendant on the Internet. However, developments in Internet technology and increasing Internet actor and user sophistication put the significance of the factors into question. In the absence of a defendant's express limitation on the territorial …

Foreword: The Labor Constitution In 2020, Ruben J. Garcia

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Building Worker Collective Action Through Technology, Ruben J. Garcia

Scholarly Works

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the inequality between workers and their employers, and decreased worker power over their terms and conditions of employment. At the same time, the workers are more dispersed than ever, with more employers disestablishing the traditional office in favor of a hybrid model that further atomizes workers and makes collective action harder. At the same time, the ability for workers to organize themselves on social media and on company e-mail systems has been limited by recent decisions of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), and are always subject to possible employer discovery and retaliation. New technologies …

Foreign Corruption As Market Manipulation, Gina-Gail S. Fletcher

Articles by Maurer Faculty

On March 6, 2019, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) announced that it would be taking an active role in prosecuting violations of the Commodities Exchange Act (CEA) that involve foreign corruption.[11 On the same date, the CFTC published an enforcement advisory further signaling its intention to investigate and prosecute violations of the laws and regulations of the CEA linked to foreign corrupt practices, such as violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). The FCPA prohibits US-based businesses from engaging in corrupt practices, such as bribery, in foreign countries in which they do business. Currently, both the Department of …

The Debt Collection Pandemic, Pamela Foohey, Dalie Jimenez, Chris Odinet

Articles by Maurer Faculty

To curb the rapid spread of the coronavirus set to overwhelm the United States' healthcare system, in mid-March 2020, the federal government declared a national emergency. Many states followed suit by implementing shelter-at-home orders and people began social distancing across America. As of this writing, the United States' reaction to the unique and alarming threat of COVID 19 has partially succeeded in slowing the virus's spread. Saving people's lives, however, has come at a severe economic cost. Economic activity plummeted. Unemployment numbers soured to figures not seen since the Great Depression and countless other people saw their income disappear.

Americans' …

Do Founders Control Start-Up Firms That Go Public?, Brian Broughman, Jesse M. Fried

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Black & Gilson (1998) argue that an IPO-welcoming stock market stimulates venture deals by enabling VCs to give founders a valuable "call option on control." We study 18,000 startups to investigate the value of this option. Among firms that reach IPO, 60% of founders are no longer CEO. With little voting power, only half of the others survive three years as CEO. At initial VC financing, the probability of getting real control of a public firm for three years is 0.4%. Our results shed light on control evolution in startups, and cast doubt on the plausibility of the call-option theory …

Doing Unrepresented Status: The Social Construction And Production Of Pro Se Persons, Victor D. Quintanilla

Articles by Maurer Faculty

In this Article, I propose an understanding of the dynamic process through which society does unrepresented status that is informed by psychological and sociological research. In describing this doing of unrepresented status, I elaborate on two new concepts: the social construction of pro se status and the social production of unrepresented persons. These concepts illuminate ways in which the doing of unrepresented status is a routine, recurring feature in how court officials, lawyers, and law-trained persons perceive and interact with unrepresented persons within our civil justice system. That is, a pro se party is not something that an unrepresented person …

Individual Preferences In Policy Analysis: A Normative Framework, Gabriel Weil

Scholarly Works

Measures of individual preferences are a key input in cost-benefit analysis. However, behavioral science has raised questions about the rationality of these preferences. The Nudge thesis relies on that scientific research to prescribe interventions to influence individual choices. However, the more modest step of limiting reliance on these preferences in evaluating non-paternalistic government policies has not been taken up. We lack a consistent theory of when public policy should defer to these preferences, with legal and policy advocates adopting ad hoc result-oriented approaches. I argue that policymakers should be prepared to override individual preferences in cases where their only plausible …

Translational Ecology And Environmental Law, Robert W. Adler

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Translational ecology is a comparatively new approach to the pursuit of ecology and other environmental sciences, the implications of which for environmental law have not previously been explored significantly. Emulating the concepts of translational medicine, proponents of transactional ecology seek to increase the relevance of their research to important environmental problems by improving how effectively they communicate research results to end users of that science, collaborating with those end users to identify research that is “actionable” rather than purely “curiosity-driven” or theoretical, recognizing that values as well as science have a legitimate role in environmental decisions, and engaging in ongoing …

Water Law And Climate Change In The United States: A Review Of The Scholarship, Robin Kundis Craig

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Climate change’s effects on water resources have been some of the first realities of ecological change in the Anthropocene, forcing climate change adaptation efforts even as the international community seeks to mitigate climate change. Water law has thus become one vehicle of climate change adaptation. Research into the intersections between climate change and water law in the United States must contend with the facts that: (1) climate change affects different parts of this large country differently; and (2) United States water law is itself a complicated subject, with each state having its own laws for surface water and groundwater and …

Amici Curiae Brief Of Law Professors Et Al., Pine Mountain Preserve, Llp V. Commissioner, Filed In The U.S. Court Of Appeals For The Eleventh Circuit, Nancy Mclaughlin

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Amici Curiae Brief of Law Professors et al., filed in support of the government in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit in Pine Mountain Preserve, LLP v. Commissioner, on appeal from U.S Tax Court No. 8956-13, 151 T.C. 247 (2018).

Brief Of Amicus Curiae Professor Jorge L. Contreras In Support Of Appellee And Affirmance In Ftc V. Qualcomm, Jorge L. Contreras

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Qualcomm participated in the development of 3G and 4G wireless telecommunication standards under the auspices of two SDOs, the Telecommunications Industry Association (“TIA”) and the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (“ATIS”). Each of these SDOs had adopted intellectual property rights policies (IPR Policies) that required their participants to grant licenses of SEPs to implementers of their standards on FRAND terms. Yet, over the course of several years, Qualcomm refused to license its SEPs to numerous actual and potential modem chip rivals including MediaTek, Project Dragonfly (a joint venture of NTT DoCoMo, Samsung and several Japanese manufacturers), Samsung, VIA Telecom, Intel, …

George Perkins Marsh: Anticipating The Anthropocene, Robin Kundis Craig

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

This chapter, part of the forthcoming volume PIONEERS OF ENVIRONMENTAL LAW, explores the vision of humanity's influence on social-ecological systems that George Perkins Marsh provided to the world in his 1964 work, MAN AND NATURE, OR PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY AS MODIFIED BY HUMAN ACTION, republished in 1874 as THE EARTH AS MODIFIED THROUGH HUMAN ACTION. In addition to tracing how Marsh and these publications influenced nature resources and environmental law in the United States well into the 20th century, this chapter also argues that Marsh anticipated, in many respects, the environmental legal and policy issues of the Anthropocene by tracing clearly …

The Drive To Advise: A Study Of Law Students At A Pro Bono Brief Advice Project, Linda F. Smith

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Law school aims to teach lawyering skills as well as legal analysis. While all students must acquire the skills of legal analysis, research and writing, law schools may decide what other skills to teach. Students also acquire skills and habits in informal ways, through clerkship experiences or pro bono volunteer work. However, there has been almost no study of what “skills” students pick up in these informal ways, and whether there are skills that would better be learned as part of the curriculum. This study looks at the skill of legal interviewing employed by students in a pro bono brief …

Learning From Our Mistakes: Conversation Analysis Reveals Best Practices For A Student-Staffed Pro Bono Project, Linda F. Smith

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Law schools make “pro bono” opportunities available to students to introduce them to the responsibilities of the profession. Often these pro bono law students help in “brief advice” projects staffed by volunteer attorneys. This staffing-supervision structure presents challenges in ensuring clients receive competent, individualized advice and the students receive adequate oversight so that this is a positive learning experience for them. This paper analyzes transcripts from 46 recorded student-client interviews and 35 student-attorney consultations. It focuses on those cases where there were “errors or omissions” -- either the client got some erroneous advice or the client did not receive complete, …

How To Close The Gender Pay Gap: Transparency In Data Regarding Compensation Is The Key, J. Andrew Morgan

Connecticut Journal of International Law

This Article will look at the problem of unequal pay and will argue that transparency regarding compensation of men and women must be increased before any decision can be made as to why the gender pay gap exists. This Article proceeds in three parts. Part I provides a comprehensive discussion of existing equal pay laws in the United States that prohibit pay discrimination by sex and an analysis of the most up-to-date data on the current gender pay gap in the United States. It also examines theories as to why or why not there is a pay gap and how …

The Complexities Of Democracy, Development, And Human Rights In China's Belt And Road Initiative, Diane A. Desierto

Connecticut Journal of International Law

China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)—a dense network of China-funded multi-year infrastructure projects in over 65 countries from the Western Pacific to the Baltic Sea, collectively aiming to establish China's strategic "Maritime Belt" and "Silk Road" connectivity using an estimated range of USD$1 Trillion to USD$8 Trillion—is as unprecedented phenomenon in sovereign project financing and bilateral investment lending, since the United States' grant of USD $800 Billion for the Marshall Plan was for Europe’s post World War II reconstruction. The scale, scope, and terms of BRI projects remain shrouded in relative opacity, with China as of this writing only incrementally …

Cognitive Biases, Dark Patterns, And The ‘Privacy Paradox’, Ari Ezra Waldman

Articles & Chapters

Scholars and commentators often argue that individuals do not care about their privacy, and that users routinely trade privacy for convenience. This ignores the cognitive biases and design tactics platforms use to manipulate users into disclosing information. This essay highlights some of those cognitive biases – from hyperbolic discounting to the problem of overchoice – and discusses the ways in which platform design can manipulate disclosure. It then explains how current law allows this manipulative and anti-consumer behavior to continue and proposes a new approach to reign in the phenomenon.

Consent Of The Governed: A Constitutional Norm That The Court Should Substantially Enforce, David Schoenbrod

Articles & Chapters

Available at https://www.harvard-jlpp.com/

Prejudice-Based Rights In Criminal Procedure, Justin Murray

Articles & Chapters

This Article critically examines a cluster of rules that use the concept of prejudice to restrict the scope of criminal defendants’ procedural rights, forming what I call prejudice-based rights. I focus, in particular, on outcome-centric prejudice- based rights—rights that apply only when failing to apply them might cause prejudice by affecting the outcome of the case. Two of criminal defendants’ most important rights fit this description: the right, originating in Brady v. Maryland, to obtain favorable, “material” evidence within the government’s knowledge, and the right to effective assistance of counsel. Since prejudice (or equivalently, materiality) is an element of these …

Critical Developments In Housing Policy - Symposium Comments, Kat Meyers, Cheryl Gonzales, Edward Josephson, Andrew Scherer

Articles & Chapters

Professor Scherer's talk starts on page 245

You That Build The Death Planes: Bob Dylan, War And International Affairs, Michael L. Perlin

Articles & Chapters

Several years ago, I wrote that Bob Dylan was “a scholar with a well-developed jurisprudence on a range of topics including civil, criminal, public, and private law” (Perlin, 2011, p.1396). In that article, I discussed and analyzed Dylan songs that dealt with, variously, civil rights, inequality in the criminal and civil justice systems, institutions, governmental/judicial corruption, equality and emancipation, and the role of lawyers in the legal process. (Id.). But I noted that I was omitting – for space considerations – any discussion of Dylan songs dealing with war and international affairs (Id., p. 1398, n. 15).

In this paper, …

A Law-Themed Charter High School Born At New York Law School Remains Indelibly Linked, Amy Wallace

Articles & Chapters

It was a confluence of unrelated events at New York Law School in the spring of 2009 that led to the founding of the Charter High School for Law and Social Justice (CHSLSJ) in the Bronx, New York. Dedicated law school faculty members were crucial to the school’s launch and the law school, its law students and faculty continue to nurture this unique and reciprocal relationship. Professor Richard Marsico was the unstoppable force behind the founding of the charter school and its close connection to New York Law School (NYLS). This article details the origins of CHSLSJ, the current relationship …

Classroom To Cyberspace: Preserving Street Law's Interactive And Student-Centered Focus During Distance Learning, Amy Wallace

Articles & Chapters

The Street Law program at New York Law School (NYLS) is a faculty taught, credit-bearing course that trains law students to teach interactive lessons covering practical legal topics at The Charter High School for Law & Social Justice (CHSLSJ), in the Bronx, New York.

On March 3, 2020, NYLS moved online due to the rapid rise of COVID cases in New York City. Like many clinical and experiential programs, we weighed options that would provide both valuable experiences for our high school and law students while keeping everyone safe.

On Sunday March 15, 2020, the New York City public schools …

The Makings Of A Culturally Savvy Lawyer: Novel Approaches For Teaching And Assessing Cross-Cultural Skills In Law School, Shahrokh Falati

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.