Law Commons^™

A Path Forward To #Niunamenos Based On An Intersectional Analysis Of Laws Criminalizing Femicide/Feminicide In Latin America, Melissa Padilla

San Diego International Law Journal

Since 2007, eighteen Latin American countries have enacted laws that criminalize femicide/‌feminicide in an effort to address gender-based murders in the region and to uphold their obligations under international human rights law. However, the COVID-19 pandemic and its systemic lingering effects exacerbated the existent dangerous levels of gender-based violence in the region, resulting in an increase in gender-based murders. To address these murders, between 2020 and 2021, a quarter of the eighteen Latin American countries that criminalized femicide/‌feminicide have implemented or are in the process of implementing reforms to their laws criminalizing femicide/‌feminicide. Given this new trend to address the …

Fixing "Litigating The Fix", Steven C. Salop, Jennifer E. Sturiale

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Merging firms have increasingly been asking trial courts to adjudicate their merger “as remedied” by a voluntary “fix.” These are remedies that have been rejected by (or never proposed to) the agency. This procedure is known as Litigating-the-Fix” (“LTF”). This article proposes a judicial procedure for managing cases in which the merging parties attempt to LTF. Our recommendations flow from a decision theory approach informed by the relevant LTF case law, the merger enforcement record, the language and goals of Section 7, and an economic analysis of the incentives of the parties and agencies created by LTF. Our recommendation addresses …

Navigating Beyond The Lodestar: Borrowing The Federal Sentencing Guidelines To Provide Fee-Shifting Predictability, Matthew Ahn

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

The lodestar has been the dominant calculation method for fee-shifting awards for nearly 40 years. But the lodestar has numerous persistent issues: it leads to extra litigation and judicial effort, it results in highly variable fee awards, and it incentivizes plaintiffs’ attorneys to bill extravagantly and reject settlement. This Article argues that these issues with the lodestar, along with many others, result from a mismatch between the lodestar and the purpose of the underlying fee-shifting statutes, which is to encourage attorneys to bring suits that would not normally be economically viable. Encouraging attorneys to do so requires the fee awards …

A Call To Abolish Determinate-Plus Sentencing In Washington, Rachel Stenberg

Washington Law Review

For certain incarcerated individuals who commit sex offenses, Washington State’s determinate-plus sentencing structure requires a showing of rehabilitation before release. This highly subjective “releasability” determination occurs after an individual has already served a standard sentence. A review of recent releasability determinations reveals sentences are often extended on arbitrary and inconsistent grounds—especially for individuals who face systemic challenges in prison due to their identity or condition. This Comment shows that the criteria to determine whether individuals are releasable is an incomplete picture of their actual experience in the carceral setting, using the distinct example of incarcerated individuals with mental illness. While …

Copyright And Federalism: Why State Waiver Of Sovereign Immunity Is The Best Remedy For State Copyright Infringement, Leroy J. Ellis V

Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property

When a photographer intentionally takes a picture of a subject, or a writer puts a story to paper, the resulting works are protected by copyright. That protection is bolstered after the authors register their works with the Copyright Office. All private parties, from individuals to corporations, can be sued for infringing on the work should they use it without pay or permission.

However, what happens when the infringer is not a private party? What happens when the state or a state entity is the infringer? What happens when a public university decides to use a copyright owner’s work without pay …

Statutory Interpretation And Agency Disgorgement Power, Caprice L. Roberts

Journal Articles

What happens when obstacles foreclose claims and threaten to leave parties without adequate relief? Or, when the cause of action escapes conventional classification? Or, when Supreme Court decisions frustrate private litigation causing pressure for public enforcement by agencies? Or, when individuals engage in novel forms of wrongdoing that the law may fail to reach? It becomes hard to resist the siren call of equity and its powerful remedies. This trend includes sweeping national injunctions, constructive trusts, and more. Disgorgement is also one such remedy, and its popularity is rising in terms of private and public applications and challenges. It is …

Ministerial Employees And Discrimination Without Remedy, Charlotte Garden

Indiana Law Journal

The Supreme Court first addressed the ministerial exemption in a 2012 case, Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC. The ministerial exemption is a defense that religious employers can invoke in discrimination cases brought by employees who qualify as “ministerial,” and it is rooted in the First Amendment principle that government cannot interfere in a church’s choice of minister. However, Hosanna-Tabor did not set out a test to determine which employees are covered by this exemption, and the decision was susceptible to a reading that the category was narrow. In 2020, the Court again took up the ministerial exemption, …

24th Annual Open Government Summit 2022, Roger Williams University School Of Law, Rhode Island Office Of The Attorney General

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

The 24th Annual Open Government Summit: Your Guide To The Access To Public Records Act & Open Meetings Act, Peter F. Neronha, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Abstaining Equitably, Fred O. Smith Jr.

Notre Dame Law Review

The doctrine of Younger abstention—which counsels federal courts not to interrupt ongoing state criminal proceedings—balances dueling considerations. On the one hand, the doctrine preserves federal courts’ ability to exercise Congressionally conferred, properly invoked jurisdiction to prevent irreparable violations of the federal constitution. On the other, the doctrine provides space for autonomous state courts to carry out their traditional role in the realm of criminal justice. This Essay identifies four central features of the Younger doctrine that maintain this balance. By protecting these features, federal courts can ensure that Younger remains a doctrine of equitable restraint, instead of inequitable abdication.

First, …

Federal Judicial Power And Federal Equity Without Federal Equity Powers, John Harrison

Notre Dame Law Review

This Article discusses the ways in which the federal courts do and do not have equity powers. Article III courts have the judicial power, which enables them to apply the law, primary and remedial. Applicable remedial law often includes the law of equitable remedies, so the federal courts have the power and obligation to give remedies pursuant to equitable principles. The law of equitable remedies, written and unwritten, is external to the courts, not created by them, the same way written law is external to the courts. Because the unwritten law of equitable remedies is found largely in judicial practice, …

Getting Into Equity, Samuel L. Bray, Paul B. Miller

Notre Dame Law Review

For two centuries, common lawyers have talked about a “cause of action.” But “cause of action” is not an organizing principle for equity. This Article shows how a plaintiff gets into equity, and it explains that equity is shaped by the interplay of its remedial, procedural, and substantive law. Equity is adjectival, that is, it modifies law rather than the other way around. Its power comes from remedies, not rights. And for getting into equity, what is central is a grievance. To insist on an equitable cause of action is to work a fundamental change in how a plaintiff gets …

Equity's Federalism, Kellen Funk

Notre Dame Law Review

The United States has had a dual court system since its founding. One might expect such a pronouncement to refer to the division between state and federal courts, but in the early republic the equally obvious referent would have been to the division between courts of common law and the court of chancery—the distinction, that is, between law and equity. This Essay sketches a history of how the distinction between law and equity was gradually transformed into a doctrine of federalism by the Supreme Court. Congress’s earliest legislation jealously guarded federal equity against fusion with common law at either the …

Empire In Equity, Seth Davis

Notre Dame Law Review

This Essay tells a story of how a contest for empire contributed to the law of justiciability in the U.S. federal courts. It begins in the eighteenth century in the Carnatic, a region in East India, winds its way through the territory of the Cherokee Nation in the nineteenth century, and eventually touches on the State of Tennessee in the twentieth. It is a story about a 1793 decision of the English Court of Chancery that American lawyers and judges would come to cite for the principles that courts will not address political questions and that equity will not intervene …

Nonparty Interests In Contract Law, Omri Ben-Shahar, David A. Hoffman, Cathy Hwang

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

Contract law has one overarching goal: to advance the legitimate interests of the contracting parties. For the most part, scholars, judges, and parties embrace this party primacy norm, recognizing only a few exceptions, such as mandatory rules that bar enforcement of agreements that harm others. This Article describes a distinct species of previously unnoticed contract law rules that advance nonparty interests, which it calls “nonparty defaults."

In doing so, this Article makes three contributions to the contract law literature. First, it identifies nonparty defaults as a judicial technique. It shows how courts deviate from the party primary norm with surprising …

This Aggression Will Not Stand, Schools: The Need For Federal Legislation Protecting Bullied Students With Disabilities, Russell A. Vogel

Touro Law Review

A boy with Autism comes home from school, visibly upset. His parents ask him why, and he responds that nobody in his class likes him. To his parents’ horror, they learn that their son’s teacher encouraged a class discussion about why they dislike their son. When the boy’s parents complain to the school about this issue, school administrators brush it aside. The next day, students sitting near the boy move their desks away from him and taunt him for the way he acts every time he tries to socialize with them. The boy then refuses to go to school each …

Sexual Violence, Intangible Harm, And The Promise Of Transformative Remedies, Jill C. Engle

Journal Articles

This Article describes alternative remedies that survivors of sexual violence can access inside and outside the legal system. It describes the leading restorative justice approaches and recommends one of the newest and most innovative of those—“transformative justice”—to heal the intangible harms of sexual violence. The Article also discusses the intersectional effects of sexual violence on women of color and their communities. It explains the importance of transformative justice’s intersectional approach to redress sexual violence. Transformative justice offers community-based, victim-centric methods that cultivate deep, lasting healing for sexual violence survivors and their communities, with genuine accountability for those who have caused …

Preliminary Damages, Gideon Parchomovsky, Alex Stein

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

Historically, the law helped impecunious plaintiffs overcome their inherent disadvantage in civil litigation. Unfortunately, this is no longer the case: modern law has largely abandoned the mission of assisting the least well off. In this Essay, we propose a new remedy that can dramatically improve the fortunes of poor plaintiffs and thereby change the errant path of the law: preliminary damages. The unavailability of preliminary damages has dire implications for poor plaintiffs, especially those wronged by affluent individuals and corporations. Resource constrained plaintiffs cannot afford prolonged litigation on account of their limited financial means. Consequently, they are forced to either …

Equity, Law And The Seventh Amendment, Samuel Bray

Journal Articles

The Seventh Amendment requires that the civil jury trial right be “preserved” in “Suits at common law.” Those bits of constitutional text have long set the justices on a path of historical reconstruction. For roughly two centuries, the Supreme Court has determined the scope of the civil jury trial right in federal court by reference to historic English courts. But no one is happy with the current test. In one widely used variant, it requires an inquiry into analogous 1791 actions, followed by an inquiry into the legal or equitable provenance of the remedy sought, and then a weighing that …

Getting Into Equity, Samuel Bray, Paul Miller

Journal Articles

For two centuries, common lawyers have frequently talked about a “cause of action.” But “cause of action” is not an organizing principle for equity. This Article shows how a plaintiff gets into equity, and it shows equity is shaped by the interplay of its remedial, procedural, and substantive law. Equity is adjectival, related to law rather than the other way around. Remedies, not rights, are what give it power. And for getting into equity, it is the grievance that is central. To insist on an equitable cause of action is to work a fundamental change in how a plaintiff gets …

Tort Law: Cases And Commentaries, Samuel Beswick

All Faculty Publications

The law of obligations concerns the legal rights and duties owed between people. Three primary categories make up the common law of obligations: tort, contract, and unjust enrichment. This coursebook provides an introduction to tort law: the law that recognises and responds to civil wrongdoing. The material is arranged in two parts. Part I comprises §§1-11 and addresses intentional and dignitary torts and the overarching theories and goals of tort law. Part II comprises §§12-25 and addresses no-fault compensation schemes, negligence, nuisance, strict liability, and tort law’s place within our broader legal systems.

Themes explored within this coursebook include:

• …

Interpretation, Remedy, And The Rule Of Law: Why Courts Should Have The Courage Of Their Convictions, Jack M. Beermann, Ronald A. Cass

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Arthrex opens a window on a set of issues debated in different contexts for decades. These issues—how to interpret statutes and constitutional provisions, what sources to look to, whether so far as possible to adopt interpretations that avoid declaring actions of coordinate branches unconstitutional, and where such actions are deemed to have been unconstitutional whether to provide remedies that cabin the most significant implications of such a declaration—go to the heart of the judicial role and the division of responsibilities among the branches of government.

Our principal focus, however, is on the …