Law Commons^™

Striking The Balance Between Contractual Rights And Obligations: Restructured Contract Law In The Newly Enacted Chinese Civil Code, Mo Zhang

Cardozo International & Comparative Law Review

Contract legislation in China experienced a significant change as a result of the Civil Code's enactment in 2020. With a focus on civil rights and private interests, contract law and other areas of law are expected to help promote the development of a rights-based society under the Civil Code-a much wanted shift from the traditionally obligation-based society. In this context, the Civil Code is hailed in China as a milestone in the country's legal landscape.

The Civil Code consolidated the 1999 Contract Law with judicial practices and restructured the legal framework governing contracts by modifying or adding provisions aimed at …

Transforming Affirmative Action Jurisprudence: Applying Eidelson's Theory On The Supreme Court Of India, Sawinder Singh

Cardozo International & Comparative Law Review

This paper compares the affirmative action jurisprudence developed by the Indian Supreme Court with United States affirmative action jurisprudence in the context of the philosophy of equality developed by Harvard Law School Professor Benjamin Eidelson. It evaluates the potential of Eidelson's claim that if the U.S. Supreme Court accepts his philosophy, it may incrementally allow the Court to adopt a more favorable attitude towards the affirmative action policies. The question raised here is whether Eidelson's approach can provide a constitutionalfoundation capable of giving us a consistently benevolent interpretation of affirmative action policies, as he hoped. This article concludes that, at …

Q: What Is Tort? A: Categorical Hurt, Anita Bernstein

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The End Of Liberty, Adam J. Kolber

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Ministerial Exception: Our Lady Of Guadalupe School And Antidiscrimination Employment Laws, Shelly A. Yeini

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

The Ministerial Exception (ME) is a legal doctrine providing that antidiscrimination employment laws do not apply to the relationship between religious institutions and their ministers. Such a notion appears in various democracies, as it aims to confront a shared problem: the attempt to solve the clash between antidiscrimination employment laws and religious autonomy. Liberal democracies strive to protect employees from discrimination, as well as to accommodate freedom of religion, which cannot be fulfilled without the existence of religious organizations. While being able to choose their staff is at the heart of the existence of religious institutions, the fulfillment of such …

The Fighting's Done, Now Pay Me: Investment Treaties, War And State Liability, Thomas C. Hildebrand, Iii

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Where major conflict erupts, major state liability follows. Sri Lanka, Zaire, Libya, and Syria have all found themselves subject to extensive liability to investors under bilateral investment treaties for harms incurred in the midst of armed conflicts raging within their borders. This Note argues that war-loss clauses, present in nearly every bilateral investment treaty, should be interpreted to create a lex specialis regime limiting investor compensation following armed conflicts. Arbitral tribunals, however, have consistently refused to apply war-loss clauses in this manner. This has lead to an over-extension of state liability to foreign investors in the wake of armed conflict. …

Intro To Contracts, Anjelica Cappellino

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

A Bolt Of Lightning: Measuring The Impact Of Modern Transitions On The Supreme Court, Daniel Kiel

Cardozo Law Review

Lightning struck on September 18, 2020. In a year in which so many unimaginable events had unfolded and were unfolding, the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg sent shock waves not only through the nation’s legal community, but throughout the country. Ginsburg, a champion of women’s rights as both lawyer and Justice, the multi-time survivor of cancer, the Court’s tiny, surprising, and notorious rock star, passed away at a precarious moment. Aside from the existential challenge presented by the COVID-19 pandemic, the nation was 46 days from a presidential election. Given that the responsibility of nominating Supreme Court Justices fell …

I Choose, You Decide: Checking The Judiciary From Within, Jeremy N. Sheff

Cardozo Law Review

Efforts to rein in partisanship (or the perception thereof) on the Supreme Court tend to focus either on what Ryan Doerfler and Samuel Moyn call “personnel reforms”—changes to the selection, appointment, or tenure of Justices—or on what they call “disempowering reforms”—changes that divert some of the judiciary’s authority to the political branches, for example via jurisdiction stripping. I propose a different—and perhaps complementary—reform, which would achieve some of the goals of both types of reform without requiring a constitutional amendment. I propose that the selection of a case for the Supreme Court’s discretionary appellate docket should be performed by a …

Masthead, Volume 43 (2021-2022)

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Employers’ Secret Weapon: How The After-Acquired Evidence Doctrine Allows Employers To Get Away With Disability Discrimination, Emma Schwab

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Foreword, A. Benjamin Spencer

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Climate Reparations: Moral, Historical, And Legal Justifications For United States Reparations Payments To Female Population Groups In Developing Countries, Kate Belsito

Cardozo International & Comparative Law Review

The note advocates for a community-based reparations program targeting women in rural, developing countries most affected by climate change. It asserts that the United States, as a major historical emitter of greenhouse gases, bears significant responsibility for these harms and has failed to meet its international treaty obligations. The proposed program would address past injustices while promoting future adaptation, emphasizing moral accountability and systemic change.

The Right To Dine: Why New York City's Restaurant Culture Is Worth Saving, Evelyn Baert

Cardozo International & Comparative Law Review

The note argues that New York City's restaurant culture, akin to Paris's, holds significant cultural and economic value and should be preserved through comprehensive government relief measures. It advocates for adopting a French-inspired approach to economic aid, emphasizing the importance of restaurants as social and cultural hubs beyond mere economic entities.

Title Vii Prohibits Employment Discrimination... Except When It Doesn't: Eliminating The Small Firm Exemption, Hayley Bronner

Cardozo International & Comparative Law Review

The note argues that the small firm exemption in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which excludes employers with fewer than fifteen employees from coverage, undermines the law's purpose of eradicating employment discrimination. The exemption, initially a political compromise, lacks an evidence-based foundation and disproportionately affects vulnerable groups such as women and minorities. The analysis suggests that eliminating this exemption is essential to achieve universal protection and align Title VII with broader state and international laws, proposing measures like damage caps to mitigate potential burdens on small businesses.

Hamiltonian Shifts In State Aid And The Coming Breakdown Of The Internal Market: Can The European Union Survive Its Covid-19 Response?, Richard Dacher

Cardozo International & Comparative Law Review

This Note analyzes the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic to the legal structure of the EU and its path forward. The EU's and the member states' actions to combat the pandemic have brought the political and economic union to the precipice of a breakdown of the Internal Market. Fiscal policies mirroring those of the United States will likely rise in its place. Recent tax court decisions, acquiescence to federal debt-sharing schemes, and deregulated state aid policies highlight the federalization of the EU as a unified economic structure, and also foreshadow its diminished influence over the member states' state aid policies. …

Nature-Based Solutions To Sea Level Rise And Other Climate Change Impacts On : A Law And Policy Perspective, Meinhard Doelle, Tony George Puthucherril

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

There are several nature-based adaptation options available to coastal nations. In this paper, we offer a brief overview of these options and then focus on mangroves to consider how laws and policies can support nature-based solutions and thereby contribute to more effective overall adaptation efforts. We first outline the concept of adaptation and its variants, thereby setting the context for this study. We then briefly explore the science relating to nature-based adaptation. We analyze the international legal regime in place to protect mangrove ecosystems. Finally, we discuss the merits, the challenges, and strategies developed to surmount some of the challenges …

Collaterally Attacking The Prison Litigation Reform Act's Application To Meritorious Prisoner Civil Litigation, Melissa Benerofe

Fordham Law Review

Earlier this year, the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) reached its twenty-fifth birthday, reinvigorating discussion on its effects on people in prison and the U.S. criminal justice system more broadly. This Note examines how the PLRA deters and obstructs prisoners’ ability to file meritorious civil rights lawsuits regarding the conditions of their confinement. The PLRA does so primarily through four of its provisions, which this Note refers to as the “access provisions.” The access provisions include: (1) the exhaustion of administrative remedies; (2) the filing fee provision; (3) the three-strikes rule; and (4) limitations on attorney’s fees. This Note argues …

Schrems's Slippery Slope: Strengthening Governance Mechanisms To Rehabilitate Eu-U.S. Cross-Border Data Transfers After Schrems Ii, Edward W. Mclaughlin

Fordham Law Review

In July 2020, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) invalidated the Privacy Shield Framework, the central data governance mechanism that once governed cross-border data transfers from the European Union (EU) to the United States. For the second time in five years, Europe’s top court invalidated the primary method of cross-border data transfers. Both times the CJEU found that the United States’s surveillance laws were, and remain, overbroad and fail to provide EU citizens with protections that are essentially equivalent to those guaranteed under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in light of the Charter of Fundamental …

Corporate Law's Forgotten Constituents: Reimagining Corporate Lawyering In Routine Business Contexts, Melissa E. Romanovich

Fordham Law Review

Although they are artificial entities, corporations are operated, managed, and represented by people. Sometimes, these people have personal interests at stake—interests that are separate and distinct from the corporation’s interests and that arise from these people acting in their corporate roles. These personal interests and related potential liabilities range from employment concerns and civil liability to criminal prosecution and imprisonment. Until now, however, the law has determined that, in most situations, a corporation’s lawyer neither represents the corporation’s constituents nor their personal interests. The corporate lawyer, therefore, has the challenging role of discharging the proper ethical and legal obligations to …

A Regulatory Policy Strategy For Protecting Immigrant Workers, W. Kip Viscusi, N. Marquiss

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Immigration has become a focal point of many political campaigns, most notably that of President Trump in 2016 and again in 2020. Populist rhetoric also decries immigrant workers for taking Americans' jobs and depressing wages for U.S.-born workers. Yet immigrants serve a constructive role by working in some of the most dangerous occupations in the country. It is well-known that immigrant workers, particularly those from Mexico with limited English language skills, face a higher workplace fatality rate than native workers. Efforts to reverse this trend have long been the focus of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), which undertook …

Federal Corporate Law And The Business Of Banking, Morgan Ricks, Lev Menand

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The only profit-seeking business enterprises chartered by a federal government agency are banks. Yet there is barely any scholarship justifying this exception to state primacy in U.S. corporate law.

This Article addresses that gap. It reinterprets the National Bank Act (NBA) the organic statute governing national banks, the heavyweights of the financial sec- tor-as a corporation law and recovers the reasons why Congress wrote this law: not to catalyze private wealth creation or to regulate an existing industry, but to solve an economic governance problem. National banks are federal instrumentalities charged with augmenting the money supply-- a delegated sovereign privilege. …

Brown, Massive Resistance, And The Lawyer's View: A Nashville Story, Daniel Sharfstein

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Every grassroots story complicates what we already know, and the history of Cecil Sims and his world48 stands out in at least two important ways. First, Sims's work on issues relating to segregated education predates Brown. In the late 1940s, as Southern states responded to Supreme Court decisions desegregating graduate education, Sims assumed a central role in developing nominally race-neutral proposals that involved a series of complex transactions and legal forms. Just as the Civil Rights Movement began years before Brown and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Sims is emblematic of the segregated South's "long history" of resistance to civil rights. …

Praxis And Paradox: Inside The Black Box Of Eviction Court, Lauren Sudeall, Daniel Pasciuti

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

In the American legal system, we typically conceive of legal disputes as governed by specific rules and procedures, resolved in a formalized court setting, with lawyers shepherding both parties through an adversarial process involving the introduction of evidence and burdens of proof. The often-highlighted exception to this understanding is the mass, assembly-line processing of cases, whether civil or criminal, in large, urban, lower-level courts. The gap left unfilled by either of these two narratives is how "court" functions for the average unrepresented litigant in smaller and nonurban jurisdictions across the United States.

For many tenants facing eviction, elements of the …

Pure Privacy, Jeffrey Bellin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

In 1890, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis began a storied legal tradition of trying to conceptualize privacy. Since that time, privacy's appeal has grown beyond those authors' wildest expectations, but its essence remains elusive. One of the rare points of agreement in boisterous academic privacy debates is that there is no consensus on what privacy means. The modern trend is to embrace the ambiguity. Unable to settle on boundaries, scholars welcome a broad array of interests into an expanding theoretical framework. As a result, privacy is invoked in debates about COVID-19 contact tracing, police body cameras, marriage equality, facial recognition, …

Becoming Visible, Jennifer B. Shinall

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This Article will consider the consequences of a large number of workers making their health conditions known to their employers during the pandemic. Becoming visible will likely have short-term costs for both employers and employees-—in terms of health-status discrimination, privacy, and administrative burdens. Nonetheless, this Article will ultimately argue that becoming visible also has a major benefit: improved information flow between employers and employees. Although the long-run cost-benefit analysis of increased health-status visibility during the pandemic remains to be seen, increased visibility ultimately has the potential to improve the employer-employee relationship.

The Locale And Damages Of Fatal Policing, W. Kip Viscusi, Scott Jeffrey

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

George Floyd and Breonna Taylor's violent deaths sparked global protests condemning police violence. Many agree that reforms to policing are necessary and while some changes have occurred, the structure, cul- ture, and budgeting of policing are largely unchanged. This Article first introduces the term "fatal policing" to denote incidents in which police actions, such as shootings, result in victims' deaths. This Article next re- views data on fatal policing to corroborate findings that Black people are disproportionate victims of fatal policing, calls for a complete census of fatal policing from independent governmental sources, and analyzes re- gional differences in fatal …

Recent Developments: State V. Elzey, Olga Petrovskikh

University of Baltimore Law Forum

No abstract provided.

Recent Developments: Whittington V. State, Brandon Ewing

University of Baltimore Law Forum

No abstract provided.

The Religion Of Race: The Supreme Court As Priests Of Racial Politics, Audra Savage

Utah Law Review

The tumultuous summer of 2020 opened the eyes of many Americans, leading to a general consensus on one issue—racism still exists. This Article offers a new descriptive account of America’s history that can contextualize the zeitgeist of racial politics. It argues that the Founding Fathers created a national civil religion based on racism when they compromised on the issue of slavery in the creation of the Constitution. This religion, called the Religion of Race, is built on a belief system where whiteness is sacred and Blackness is profane. The sacred text is the Constitution, and it is interpreted by the …