Law Commons^™

War Crime Clemency: The President’S Self- (Defeating) Pardon, Dan Maurer

Maryland Law Review

No abstract provided.

Omnipotent Squirrels In The Attic: Trapping The Elusive “Intent” In Employment Racial Discrimination, Richard D. Crane

Student Works

No abstract provided.

Lost In Transit: How Enforcement Of Foreign Copyright Judgements Undermines The Right To Research, Naama Daniel

American University International Law Review

The ease of travel in the globalized, modern world is a doubleedged sword for the right to research: while research opportunities are bolstered due to information and data traveling extremely easily in the digital world, the right to research may be undermined by the easy travel of foreign copyright judgments between countries. This article analyzes thoroughly, for the first time, the threats posed to the right to research by private international law instruments on recognition and enforcement of foreign copyright judgments. This article uses a theoretical and doctrinal perspective to analyze the matter, demonstrating that the right to research, aimed …

Private Caregiver Presumption For Elder Caregivers, Raymond C. O’Brien

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The percentage of older Americans increases each year, with a corresponding percentage increase of those considered the older old. Many older persons will develop chronic conditions, decreasing their ability to manage the activities of daily living and requiring many to move into assisted living facilities or group homes. When surveyed, a majority of people expressed that they wish to age in their own homes, and government programs are increasingly supportive of this option. This is a viable option for many if they have the assistance of private caregivers—who provide a vast array of support services—and essential person-to-person human contact during …

Pretext, Reality, And Verisimilitude: Truth-Seeking In The Supreme Court, Robert N. Weiner

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The assault on truth in recent public discourse makes it especially important that judicial decisions about Executive actions reflect the world as it is. Judges should not assume some idealized reality where good faith prevails, the motives of public officials are above reproach, and administrative processes are presumptively regular. Unfortunately, however, the Supreme Court has acted on naïve or counterfactual assumptions that limit judicial review of administrative or Presidential action. Such intentional judicial blindness or suspension of justified disbelief—such lack of verisimilitude—can sow doubt regarding the Court’s candor and impartiality.

In analyzing the Court’s fealty to objective reality in its …

Former Whistleblowers: Why The False Claims Act's Anti-Retaliation Provision Should Protect Former Employees, Jim Stehlin

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Since the Civil War, the False Claims Act has served as a tool to combat fraud perpetrated against the government. Early fraud by government contractors during the Civil War was quaint: contractors selling the same horse twice or filling a Union Army contract for sugar with sand. Today, the government recovers billions of dollars annually through actions under the FCA.

Essential to the FCA’s functioning are “relators,” private citizens who serve as whistleblowers incentivized to report fraud by receipt of a percentage of whatever amount the government recovers in damages. The government relies on relators to blow the whistle on …

Modernizing Notice Of Breach Rules To Preserve Contract Remedies, Stephen Plass

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Recently, the legal community has scrutinized the capacity of mandatory arbitration rules to deter or foreclose claims for breach of contract. But little attention has been paid to express and constructive notice of breach rules that are just as effective at foreclosing contractual remedies. While four-year statutes of limitations are typically viewed as the default cutoff time for breach of contract claims, contracting parties, particularly buyers of goods, must act much sooner to preserve their legal remedies. It is now common practice for sellers to require notice of breach within days or weeks of their performance as an express condition …

Hard Truths: Libel By Implication Doctrine And The Need For A Uniform Standard, Carly Ryan

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Since the inception of the tort of libel, claims against the media have created a tension between the First Amendment’s commitment to a free press and the desire to prevent reputational harm to individuals. Further complicating the issue are cases in which plaintiffs allege that literally true statements are defamatory based on implications created through juxtapositions or omissions of facts. This is known as libel by implication, a tort currently governed by states through a patchwork of varying standards and interpretations. Not only does the lack of uniformity leave journalists without due notice of the law in the jurisdictions they …

Sacred Children, Taboo Tradeoffs, And Distorted Discourses, Sean Hannon Williams

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

This Article brings together three literatures—bioethics, psychological research on taboo tradeoffs, and family law—to reveal pervasive distortions in current family law scholarship and judicial reasoning. Empirical work in bioethics shows that child welfare occupies a unique moral sphere. People routinely resist making tradeoffs between spheres. Just as sacrificing adult lives for money is taboo, so too is sacrificing child welfare for adult welfare. When faced with the prospect of these tradeoffs, people engage in a predictable set of avoidance and moral mitigation strategies. Across five case studies, this Article shows how child welfare has talismanic qualities which, even in the …

Climate Change And Sea Level Rise: Assessing Their Impacts On Belize, Carlos Fuller

American University International Law Review

First of all, as we all know, there are three aspects of climate change that we know occur. The first is the increase of global temperatures because of greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere. As a result of the warming of the oceans, sea levels rise; but even more importantly, additional fresh water is entering the oceans, which is now the predominant factor leading to increased sea-level rates. Finally, a change of the hydrological cycle—because of warmer temperatures, we are seeing more extreme weather events and shifts in precipitation patterns.

The impacts, however, are more important—for example, the impacts of …

Legal Cooperation Issues On Sea Level Rise, Maria Teresa Infante

American University International Law Review

This is a very timely event. Although there have been several cases in which experts—both academics and governments—discuss the connection between sea-level rise and the legal framework, this event is important because it will bring to the forefront the fact that the practice in the Americas and the Caribbean should be analyzed when discussing this pressing topic. This is a very important initiative; I encourage the Inter-American system and the juridical committee to tackle this issue. I hope it will be in connection with the work that is being conducted by the International Law Commission itself.

Towards Critical Environmental Justice Approach In Multicultural Divided States: Lessons From The Israeli Regulative System, Manal Totry-Jubran

Fordham Environmental Law Review

This article draws upon the evolving framework of the Critical Environmental Approach in examining the conceptualization and manifestation of the Environmental Justice approach and its pillars within the regulatory system of multicultural and divided societies. These are states comprised of marginalized ethnic and minority groups that frequently face instances of social and environmental injustice. Employing this perspective through a case study show that gradual and anecdotic but unorganized and incoherent incorporation of Environmental Justice pillars lacks the capacity to effectively address long-standing historical environmental injustices and fails to challenge the prevailing social framework. In fact, it runs the risk of …

Does The Supreme Court Of Canada Give A “Freak” About Disability Dignity?: The Inclusion Fallacy 25 Years After Eldridge, Ena Chadha, Emmett Rogers

The Supreme Court Law Review: Osgoode’s Annual Constitutional Cases Conference

For almost 20 years, the Supreme Court of Canada increasingly rejected the idea of disability as an inherent impairment and progressively endorsed the social model of disability, which recognizes the disabling condition is a consequence of structural and societal factors. However, recent Supreme Court jurisprudence has resurfaced the fallacy of disability being defined by individual defects and deviance. This paper surveys the Court’s disability discrimination jurisprudence from the seminal Eldridge v. British Columbia decision to the splintered Ward v. Quebec decision, examining how the Court appears to be retreating from the social model’s understanding of disability being a product of …

Court Polarization: A Comparative Perspective, Iddo Porat

UC Law SF International Law Review

Polarization is on the rise around the globe. Political views are driven to the poles, and moderate views are weakened. Many studies have been carried out on the increase in social and political polarization, but far fewer on the effects of polarization on constitutional and supreme courts, and none on a comparative or global scale. This Article attempts to fill this gap. It aims, for the first time, to describe and typologize the effects of political polarization on constitutional and supreme courts in different parts of the world.

The Article identifies three models of such effects: mirror polarization (the U.S.) …

Corporate Responsibility For Rogue Agents, Daniel Harris

Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics & Public Policy

No abstract provided.

The Failure To Protect Free Speech In Higher Education: A Nonpartisan Right With Bipartisan Consequences, Alyce Hammer

Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics & Public Policy

No abstract provided.

Countering Public Pressure: Jury Anatomy As A Protection Of Criminal Defendants, Silas J. Peterson

Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics & Public Policy

No abstract provided.

The Duality Of Dogs: Property Or Person?, Amber L. Shepard

Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics & Public Policy

No abstract provided.

Masthead

UC Law SF International Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Certainty-Severity Tradeoff In Antitrust Law And Administration: Where The United States And India Differ, Akhil Sud

UC Law SF International Law Review

In this paper, I use the certainty-severity tradeoff as my analytical lens—a novel move in antitrust—to explain the difference between U.S. and Indian antitrust law. I argue that, in antitrust, India prefers certainty of enforcement while the U.S. prefers severity of enforcement. This difference is not driven by doctrine or economic policy; rather, I locate this difference in six key institutional factors. And using economic theory, I argue that a difference in social attitudes to risk explains and justifies this institutionally-manifested difference in law.

Corporate Income Tax: We Tried The Stick, How About The Carrot?, Doron Narotzki, Tamir Shanan

Michigan Business & Entrepreneurial Law Review

Due to their ongoing focus on tax planning and continuous efforts to find new tax minimization strategies, multinational corporations have not been paying their fair share of taxes for a long time. As a result, the federal government is unable to generate much revenue through taxes levied on corporations. The government’s response to this problem has always been the same: introduce new tax laws and regulations, revise old tax laws to close “loopholes,” and hope that this will solve corporate tax evasion. For decades, this approach has failed.

This Article examines the history of the corporate income tax in the …

Who Owns Data? Understanding The Rights & Duties Of Platform Stakeholders, James Steiner

Michigan Business & Entrepreneurial Law Review

While mindlessly scrolling Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok, users often forget that a complicated web of personal data ownership lies under the screen. This Note analyzes the legal interactions of users, platforms, and third-parties regarding this personal data. Hohfeldian analysis of rights and reciprocal duties in the context of California’s various data privacy statutes and common law doctrines provides a powerful tool for understanding the rocky legal landscape data stakeholders navigate. Courts add further definition to this landscape when adjudicating conflicts between these stakeholders. Legal scholars have also proposed frameworks to simplify the rules of engagement for these stakeholders. Data privacy …

Civil Rights Liability For Bad Hiring, Nancy Leong

Minnesota Law Review Vols. 106:2 onward (2021-present)

Suppose that a municipality hires a police officer, teacher, corrections officer, or other official with an extensive record of past misconduct—someone the municipality should have known better than to hire. When such an employee causes a violation of constitutional rights, the injured party often brings a civil rights suit under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, arguing that the municipality failed to screen the wrongdoer prior to hiring. Yet little is known about how such lawsuits play out on the ground.

In the first empirical study of municipal liability for bad hiring, this Article demonstrates that municipalities enjoy de facto immunity for …

Hello, World? Domestic Software Patent Protection Stands Alone Due To Uncertain Subject Matter Eligibility Jurisprudence, Maxwell H. Terry

Minnesota Law Review Vols. 106:2 onward (2021-present)

In the last sixteen years, software-related inventions have encompassed the majority of all utility patents issued in the United States. Further, studies estimate that spending within the global information technology market will grow to $4.6 trillion in 2023, as industries such as data security, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence continue to innovate and expand at alarming rates. Needless to say, software is a crucial and ever-expanding industry for the global economy. In a series of recent cases, however, the Supreme Court injected unpredictability into the patenting of software and computer-implemented inventions by overhauling the long-standing patentable subject matter doctrine.

Embodied …

From Powell To Present: Defining The Right To Counsel Beyond Rothgery, Amy M. Cohen

Minnesota Law Review Vols. 106:2 onward (2021-present)

Every morning in jails across America, new arrestees are woken up and ushered into a courtroom to be heard on their re- lease. Some might be coming down from a high, dealing with the consequences of binge drinking, or distressed about what this arrest might mean for their future. No matter the condition in which these defendants arrive to court, many will be forced to represent themselves and plead their own case for release without ever having spoken to an attorney. This leaves the defendant at risk of being detained pretrial, incriminating themselves in the courtroom, or even pleading guilty …

The Virtuous Executive, Alan Z. Rozenshtein

Minnesota Law Review Vols. 106:2 onward (2021-present)

As currently conceived, executive power law and scholarship detach the identity of the President from the powers and duties of the presidency. Whether an official was properly dismissed without cause, whether a pardon was validly issued, whether a foreign policy debacle rose to the level of an impeachable offense—the answers to all these questions are not supposed to depend on the President’s personal characteristics. This Article argues that this veil of ignorance is incompatible with a correct understanding of Article II. To properly empower good Presidents and constrain bad ones, constitutional actors must take into account the President’s personal characteristics. …

Just Extracurriculars?, Emily Gold Waldman

Minnesota Law Review Vols. 106:2 onward (2021-present)

Extracurricular activities have been the battleground for a striking number of Supreme Court cases set at public schools, from cases involving speech to religion to drug testing. Indeed, the two most recent Supreme Court cases involving constitutional rights at public schools—Kennedy v. Bremerton School District (2022) and Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L. (2021)—both arose in the extracurricular context of school sports. Even so, the Supreme Court has never fully clarified the status of extracurricular activities themselves. Once a school offers an extracurricular activity, is participation merely a privilege? Does the fact that extracurricular activities are voluntary for students affect …

Banking Deserts, Structural Racism, And Merger Law, Christopher R. Leslie

Minnesota Law Review Vols. 106:2 onward (2021-present)

Roughly seventy million Americans cannot access a bank account or traditional financial services. Many of these individuals live in a “banking desert”—a town or community that has neither an independent bank nor a branch office of a larger bank. The United States has over 1,100 banking deserts, with another 1,000 communities at risk of losing their last bank. Banking deserts are generally in low- and moderate-income neighborhoods, which are disproportionately communities of color. Residents of banking deserts lack access to credit, including mortgages and small business loans, as well as savings accounts and other basic financial services. Consolidation in the …

Sidestepping The Escherian Stairwell: Explicit Establishment As A Method For Circumventing Qualified Immunity's Constitutional Stagnation, Earl Y. Lin

Minnesota Law Review Vols. 106:2 onward (2021-present)

In recent years, the doctrine of qualified immunity (QI) has gained increased prominence in the public consciousness. Prior to the murder of George Floyd and the resulting nationwide racial justice protests and uprisings, this Supreme Court–made doctrine—and the ways it shields law enforcement officers from legal accountability—was a relatively esoteric legal topic. Yet by the summer of 2020, Americans were marching in the streets with signs calling for QI’s demise, and polling found QI to be disfavored by a margin of two-to-one. This same polling also showed a sharp decline in public confidence that police would use force appropriately, treat …

Editorial Board, Montana Law Review

MLR Editorial Boards

Editors-in Chief Benjamin McKee Eric Monroe Articles Editors Brian Hagan Denise LaFontaine Spencer Pedemonte Symposium Editors Blake Koemans Lauren O’Neill Online Editor Marti Liechty Business Editor Annie Holland Managing Editor Marisa Owens Staff Monte Cole Paul Dougherty Lauren Fox Moriah Greenstein Levi Kimmel Ellen Boland Monroe Rachel Parker Kerry Roebke Zachary Stauffer Emily Steinberg Parker Streets Adam Taub Gordon Wallace Moriah Williams Callie Woody Faculty Advisor Anthony Johnstone