Law Commons^™

Climate Change And The Specter Of Statelessness, Mark P. Nevitt

Faculty Articles

What happens when climate change extinguishes entire nations? Neither international nor environmental law has provided a satisfactory answer to this weighty question. Climate change-induced flooding, storm surge, and sea level rise threaten the territorial integrity and habitability of several small island developing states, raising the specter of statelessness. We know that climate catastrophe is coming, but we have failed to take the necessary steps to safeguard several developing nations. This Article argues that innovative legal and policy solutions are needed today to prevent nation extinction tomorrow. I focus on two potential international governance solutions: the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate …

Response To Professor Dinner, Martha Albertson Fineman

Faculty Articles

I want to thank the Texas A&M Law Review for including my work in this special Issue and express my appreciation to Professor Dinner for her thoughtful comments concerning the evolution of my scholarship. Professor Dinner raises the question of whether that earlier work is relevant to the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization opinion, specifically, and to broader issues of reproductive justice, more generally. For me, Dobbs illustrates—once again—how our American obsession with both individual rights and Supreme Court jurisprudence can distort our sense of the possibilities for achieving social (or reproductive) justice. I see my work as an …

The Market For Corporate Criminals, Andrew K. Jennings

Faculty Articles

This Article identifies problems and opportunities at the intersection of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and corporate crime and compliance. In M&A, criminal successor liability is of particular importance, because it is quantitatively less predictable and qualitatively more threatening to buyers than successor liability in tort or contract. Private successor liability requires a buyer to bear bounded economic costs, which can in turn be reallocated to sellers via the contracting process. Criminal successor liability, however, threatens a buyer with non-indemnifiable and potentially ruinous punishment for another firm’s wrongful acts.

This threat may inhibit the marketability of businesses that have criminal exposure, …

Climate Security Insights From The Covid-19 Response, Mark P. Nevitt

Faculty Articles

The climate change crisis and COVID-19 crisis are both complex collective action problems. Neither the coronavirus nor greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions respect political borders. Both impose an opportunity cost that penalizes inaction. They are also increasingly understood as nontraditional, novel security threats. Indeed, COVID-19’s human cost is staggering, with American lives lost vastly exceeding those lost in recent armed conflicts. And climate change is both a threat accelerant and a catalyst for conflict—a characterization reinforced in several climate-security reports. To counter COVID-19, the President embraced martial language, stating that he will employ a “wartime footing” to “defeat the virus.” Perhaps …

Addiction And Liberty, Matthew B. Lawrence

Faculty Articles

This Article explores the interaction between addiction and liberty and identifies a firm legal basis for recognition of a fundamental constitutional right to freedom from addiction. Government interferes with freedom from addiction when it causes addiction or restricts addiction treatment, and government may protect freedom from addiction through legislation empowering individuals against private actors’ efforts to addict them without their consent. This Article motivates and tests the boundaries of this right through case studies of emergent threats to liberty made possible or exacerbated by new technologies and scientific understandings. These include certain state lottery programs, addiction treatment restrictions, and smartphone …

The Market-Essential Role Of Corporate Climate Disclosure, George S. Georgiev

Faculty Articles

This Article focuses on capital market efficiency as an often-downplayed legal rationale for mandating corporate climate disclosure, and explores it alongside the notion of investor demand, which has assumed a prominent and, increasingly, contested role in debates on climate disclosure. Because market efficiency (encompassing both securities price accuracy and overall capital market allocative efficiency) is generally unobservable, many commentators have instead emphasized the highly visible investor demand for climate-related disclosure as evidenced by shareholder proposals, voting behavior, stewardship policies, and public statements. Unfortunately, investor demand can be disputed, fairly or unfairly, because investor preferences are heterogeneous, dynamic, and difficult to …

Disclosure Procedure, Andrew K. Jennings

Faculty Articles

Securities disclosure is a human process. Each year, public companies collectively spend over fifteen million hours producing disclosures that undergird an equities market with tens of trillions in market capitalization. The procedures they follow in doing so affect whether their disclosures contain misstatements or omissions—errors that can cause trading losses for investors, and litigation for issuers. Yet despite the importance of the disclosures that firms produce, the literature says little about how they do it, including whether they are spending too much, too little, or just enough on their disclosure procedures. To fill that gap, this Article uses original surveys …

Thinly Rooted: Dobbs, Tradition, And Reproductive Justice, Darren L. Hutchinson

Faculty Articles

In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey. These two cases held that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment encompassed a right of women to terminate a pregnancy. Roe reflected over 60 years of substantive due process precedent finding and reaffirming a constitutional right of privacy with several animating themes, including bodily integrity, equality, and dignity. The Court’s substantive due process doctrine had established that the analysis in such cases would involve multiple points of inquiry, such as tradition, contemporary practices, and …

Contract Law Should Be Faith Neutral: Reverse Entanglement Would Be Stranglement For Religious Arbitration, Michael J. Broyde, Alexa J. Windsor

Faculty Articles

The first section of this Article will outline the ways in which communities—religious and other groups, including the LGBTQ+ community—have used and continue to use private law to achieve meaningful dispute resolution. By diminishing the role of civil courts to review arbitrations, parties may tailor their resolutions to prioritize community values that may be misaligned with secular society. Outside of historical religious usage, private law offers a field ripe for jurisprudential growth. Through alternative dispute resolution, affinity-based minority groups can pave an avenue towards justice which accurately reflects the unique values of their lived experiences.

The second section will provide …

Searches Without Suspicion: Avoiding A Four Million Person Underclass, Tonja Jacobi, Addie Maguire

Faculty Articles

In Samson v. California, the Supreme Court upheld warrantless, suspicionless searches for parolees. That determination was controversial both because suspicionless searches are, by definition, anathema to the Fourth Amendment, and because they arguably undermine parolees’ rehabilitation. Less attention has been given to the fact that the implications of the case were not limited to parolees. The opinion in Samson included half a sentence of dicta that seemingly swept probationers into its analysis, implicating the rights of millions of additional people in the United States. Not only is analogizing parolees and probationers not logically sound because the two groups differ …

The Campus Battle Over Expression And Equality: Combatting Discrimination By Restricting Freedom?, Faisal Bhabha

Articles & Book Chapters

Given that the purpose of post-secondary education is to advance knowledge, academic life requires protection from unreasonable interference arising from institutional policies or public pressure. This paper argues that, in the interests of providing a safe and inclusive learning environment, universities have run the risk of unduly restricting debate and the exchange of ideas through unwarranted applications of anti-discrimination norms on campus. Based on a detailed review of the jurisprudence, the author contends that human rights legislation imposes no requirement, and provides little authority, for constraining thought or speech in higher education. Indeed, the threats to freedom of expression on …

Insulating The Church: Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church Of Canada St. Mary Cathedral V. Aga And The Suppression Of Public Law In The Construction Of Religious Communities, Rabiat Akande, Faisal Bhabha

Articles & Book Chapters

In Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church of Canada St. Mary Cathedral v. Aga, the Supreme Court of Canada undertook to grapple with the question of whether, when, and to what extent courts should get involved in the internal decisions of religious groups where there are allegations of procedural unfairness. This paper approaches Aga with an interest in the issue of state regulation of religion through law. The paper (1) reviews and assesses the Court's judgment; (2) summarizes and analyzes the 12 intervener submissions, many of which were made by religious groups likely to be affected by the Court's eventual judgment; and …

Public Order Policing: A Proposal For A Charter-Compliant Legislative Response, Jamie Cameron, Robert Diab

Articles & Book Chapters

This article offers a brief response to the Final Report of the Public Order Emergency Commission by two authors who provided expert reports to the Commission. We focus on Commissioner Rouleau’s recommendation that the provinces and the federal government create a “major event management unit” to ensure “integrated command and control” of large events, and that governments clarify the scope of police power to create exclusion zones and to impose other limits on protest and assembly. We argue that nothing short of legislation on point would suffice to address problems of coordination among police agencies and the lack of clarity …

Walking The Line: The Politics Of Federalism And Environmental Change, Allan C. Hutchinson

Articles & Book Chapters

This short paper looks at the Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act decision through a wider and more critical jurisprudential lens. In so doing, I demonstrate that the courts are no less political than legislatures in making decisions about who has the constitutional capacity to decide on how the challenges of climate change should be met. This is not so much a criticism of the Supreme Court of Canada, but an inevitable feature of constitutional law. After introducing the traditional and received explanation of the differences between political decision-making and judicial decision-making, I delve deeper into the Court's opinions and show …

The Role Of Traditional Environmental Knowledge In Planetary Well-Being, Deborah Mcgregor, Danika Billie Littlechild, Mahisha Sritharan

Articles & Book Chapters

No abstract provided.

Introducing A Global Minimum Tax (Pillar Two) In Canada: Some Knowns And Unknowns, Jinyan Li

Articles & Book Chapters

This paper provides a high-level overview of Pillar Two Global Minimum Tax in terms of its policy objectives, technical design and implications for Canada. After teasing out some significant known and unknown challenges, it offers some thoughts on whether, and if so, how and when Canada can proceed with implementation.

Safety In Numbers Or Lost In The Crowd? Litigation Of Mass Claims And Access To Justice In Ontario, Suzanne E. Chiodo

Articles & Book Chapters

Ontario’s Class Proceedings Act is 30 years old. In the past three decades, it has inspired similar legislation across Canada and around the world, and its capacity for bringing about social change has been widely acknowledged. But, like all things that mature, some cracks are beginning to show. The certification test under section 5 of the CPA has been made more restrictive by recent legislative amendments. In addition, class action practitioners are starting to recognize that the CPA can be a blunt instrument and that some mass claims are better litigated outside of that context. While smaller claims may find …

The Future Concept Of Work, Nicola Countouris, Valerio De Stefano

Articles & Book Chapters

This chapter offers a reappraisal of the idea of ‘personal work’ and a critical assessment of the concept of subordination, which shapes the traditional contract of employment and subordinate work. The authors suggest that the notion of personal work may be more useful in attempts to develop a newly conceptualised concept of human labour, one capable of incorporating certain dimensions of (unpaid) gendered labour, ‘heteromated’ labour (‘heteromation’ is the extraction of economic value from low-cost or free labour in computer-mediated networks), and other forms of socially (and ecologically) valuable labour that hitherto have been excluded from the realm of formal, …

Workers' Boards: Sectoral Bargaining And Standard-Setting Mechanisms For The New Gilded Age, Sara Slinn

Articles & Book Chapters

This article explores the potential of sectoral standard-setting models (often referred to as “wage boards” or “workers’ boards”) as a solution for contemporary workplace issues, which existing labor relations and minimum standards regulatory systems continue to struggle to address. This argument, the article examines three historical statutory systems of sector-based minimum workplace standard-setting established in the early 20th century as a response to unacceptable wages and working conditions: the British Wages Council system, the Canadian Industrial Standards Act, and the US Fair Labor Standards Act. The article applies the conceptions of fairness identified in Seth Harris's study of the origins …

Come As You Are?: Democratizing Healthcare Through Black Church - Telehealth Initiatives, Meighan Parker

Scholarly Works

Drawing from the phrase “come as you are,” which is frequently used in Black Churches to encourage and welcome people to church spaces for spiritual restoration and healing irrespective of their various social and economic dispositions, this Article aims to describe how telehealth partnerships with community organizations, such as Black Churches, can help democratize healthcare.

In this project, I develop two models for Black Church-Telehealth Initiatives—a Telehealth Clinic on the Church’s campus and a Designated Telehealth Space with the requisite technology to facilitate telehealth encounters—to argue that Black Church-Telehealth Initiatives can help address certain social determinants of health, such as …

The Right To A Public Trial, Conditional Courtroom Entry And Tiers Of Constitutional Scrutiny, Stephen Smith

Faculty Publications

The constitutional test the SupremeCourt has prescribed to review courtroom closures for compliance with the Sixth Amendment’s right to a public trial is in the nature ofstrictscrutiny. The Courtrequires an “overriding interest” to justify the closure, and a narrow, minimally restrictive scope to the closure. Many lower courts have imposed a less demanding test for “partial” closures, which admit to the courtroom some, but not all, of the public. These courts require a less demanding justification before closing the courtroom to certain individuals—the justification need be only “substantial,” ratherthan “overriding.” Thisstandard is in the nature of intermediate scrutiny, as applied …

Black Boarding Academies As A Prudential Reparation: Finis Origine Pendet, Roy L. Brooks

Faculty Scholarship

With billions of dollars pledged and trillions of dollars demanded to redress slavery and Jim Crow (“Black Reparations”) the question of how best to use these funds has moved into the forefront of the ongoing campaign for racial justice in our post-civil rights society. Reparatory strategies typically target the norms and structures that sustain racial disadvantage wrought by slavery and Jim Crow. The goal of such transitional reparations is to extinguish the menace of white supremacy and systemic racism across the board. Restructuring in housing, education, employment, voting, law enforcement, health care, and the environment—social transformation—is absolutely needed in the …

Removing Barriers To State Tax Incentive Reform, Michelle D. Layser

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Error Aversions And Due Process, Brandon L. Garrett, Gregory Mitchell

Faculty Scholarship

William Blackstone famously expressed the view that convicting the innocent constitutes a much more serious error than acquitting the guilty. This view is the cornerstone of due process protections for those accused of crimes, giving rise to the presumption of innocence and the high burden of proof required for criminal convictions. While most legal elites share Blackstone’s view, the citizen-jurors tasked with making due process protections a reality do not share the law’s preference for false acquittals over false convictions.

Across multiple national surveys, sampling more than 10,000 people, we find that a majority of Americans views false acquittals and …

Restating The Law In The Shadow Of Codes: The Ali In Its Formative Era, Deborah A. Demott

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter recounts the American Law Institute’s (ALI’s) history in its formative era (1923–1945), drawing from archival sources to deepen existing accounts of the ALI’s self-definition as an ongoing institution. The history is more complex than it appears in prior accounts because institutional necessities—including funding—as well as multiple contingencies shaped both the ALI and its work. Likewise, the ALI’s signal work in this period, the Restatement, departed in significant ways from its original plan. Generating the revenues requisite to its ongoing existence required that the ALI partner with commercial publishers and, at their urging, separately publish Annotations for each Restatement …

Extreme Risk Protection Orders In The Post-Bruen Age: Weighing Evidence, Scholarship, And Rights For A Promising Gun Violence Prevention Tool, Andrew Willinger, Shannon Frattaroli

Faculty Scholarship

Extreme Risk Protection Orders (ERPOs) are civil court orders that temporarily prohibit gun purchase and possession by people who are behaving dangerously and at risk of committing imminent violence. As of September 2023, ERPOs are available in 21 states and the District of Columbia. This Article presents an overview of ERPO laws, the rationale behind their development, and a review and analysis that considers emerging constitutional challenges to these laws (under both the Second Amendment and due process protections) in the post-Bruen era. This Article notes that the presence of multiple constitutional challenges in many ERPO-related cases has confused judicial …

The Territories Under Text, History, And Tradition, Andrew Willinger

Faculty Scholarship

In two of its major decisions in the 2021–2022 Term, New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen and Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Court continued solidifying its originalist method of constitutional interpretation by looking increasingly to historical regulatory practice to construe how the Constitution protects individual rights. The Court is focused not only on the original public meaning of constitutional provisions, but also on historical practice. Historical laws and practices are now key to understanding how those who lived at the relevant time thought a constitutional provision might be applied and what regulatory approaches were consistent …

Law And Courts In An Age Of Debt, Jared A. Ellias, Elisabeth De Fontenay

Faculty Scholarship

Judges perform very different analyses when investors ask for protection. When the petitioning party is a shareholder, the court will deploy broad equitable doctrines with an eye towards reaching a fair result. On the other hand, creditors usually find a much less sympathetic ear, as courts typically march through technical analyses such as examining whether the offending party violated a contract term, with far less concern for whether the outcome is fair. In an era where many firms are highly leveraged, the end result is that the role of the courts in regulating investor opportunism and creating boundaries for “market” …

How A Professional Describes Reasons For Working In And Ultimately Leaving The Foster Care Field In The State Of Missouri: A Case Study, Lauren Williams

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

The foster care field continues to have a high turnover rate of the professionals working in the field. While support and work balance are available for some professionals, many face the challenges of heavy workloads, unrealistic expectations, and health sacrifices that lead to many professionals leaving the field. This case study of one former foster care professional’s description of reasons they worked in the field, and reasons they ultimately left the field provides insight of the challenges and support as a foster care professional. The findings of this study are organized into three major themes including “Challenges for Foster Care …

The Waiting Game: Who Benefits From Recovered Assets Associated With Venezuelan State Corruption? Remission As A Solution, Alejandro Rodriguez Vanzetti

FIU Law Review

The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela (“Venezuela”) has, and continues to undergo, significant political and economic challenges stemming from government corruption. In response, the United States government has seized assets of current or former Venezuelan state officials associated with criminal wrongdoing, imposed sanctions on Nicolas Maduro’s government, and proposed legislation to combat corruption. The Department of Justice (“DOJ”) has led dozens of prosecutions against those responsible for these crimes through its use of asset forfeiture, a critical tool in the recovery of illicit proceeds. An estimated $300 billion of these assets are held in South Florida alone, with $1.5 billion identified …