Jurisprudence Commons^™

The Esg Information System, Stavros Gadinis, Amelia Miazad

Seattle University Law Review

The mounting focus on ESG has forced internal corporate decision-making into the spotlight. Investors are eager to support companies in innovative “green” technologies and scrutinize companies’ transition plans. Activists are targeting boards whose decisions appear too timid or insufficiently explained. Consumers and employees are incorporating companies sustainability credentials in their purchasing and employment decisions. These actors are asking companies for better information, higher quality reports, and granular data. In response, companies are producing lengthy sustainability reports, adopting ambitious purpose statements, and touting their sustainability credentials. Understandably, concerns about greenwashing and accountability abound, and policymakers are preparing for action.

In this …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

The Marijuana Insurgency: Federalism And Social Reframing In Policy Reform, Matthew P. Cavedon

Seattle University Law Review

After fifty years of federal prohibition, marijuana reform efforts have won political and legal success. These victories hold lessons for anyone seeking to resist federal law without being able to directly affect it.

Victory can come from reframing an issue. For marijuana reform, social reframing—not formal legal analysis or material factors—provides the best explanation for how advocates achieved change. Their unconventional political tactics, akin to those used by insurgents in wartime, undercut federal prohibition by winning hearts and minds.

This is an analysis of the sociology of legal change. It is also the story of how ordinary Americans retook personal …

Shareholder Primacy Versus Shareholder Accountability, William W. Bratton

Seattle University Law Review

When corporations inflict injuries in the course of business, shareholders wielding environmental, social, and governance (“ESG”) principles can, and now sometimes do, intervene to correct the matter. In the emerging fact pattern, corporate social accountability expands out of its historic collectivized frame to become an internal subject matter—a corporate governance topic. As a result, shareholder accountability surfaces as a policy question for the first time. The Big Three index fund managers, BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street, responded to the accountability question with ESG activism. In so doing, they defected against corporate legal theory’s central tenet, shareholder primacy. Shareholder primacy builds …

Verses Turned To Verdicts: Ysl Rico Case Sets A High-Watermark For The Legal Pseudo-Censorship Of Rap Music, Nabil Yousfi

Seattle University Law Review

Whichever way you spin the record, rap music and courtrooms don’t mix. On one side, rap records are well known for their unapologetic lyrical composition, often expressing a blatant disregard for legal institutions and authorities. On the other, court records reflect a Van Gogh’s ear for rap music, frequently allowing rap lyrics—but not similar lyrics from other genres—to be used as criminal evidence against the defendants who authored them. Over the last thirty years, this immiscibility has engendered a legal landscape where prosecutors wield rap lyrics as potent instruments for criminal prosecution. In such cases, color-blind courts neglect that rap …

The Unreasonableness Of The Reasonable Woman Standard: Evaluating And Reforming Sexual Harassment Jurisprudence, Richa Parikh

CMC Senior Theses

The “Reasonable Woman Standard” was first used in the 1991 case of Ellison v. Brady and has been central in shaping legal responses to sexual harassment. However, as societal norms and understandings of gender dynamics continue to evolve, as we experienced with the #MeToo movement, this “Reasonable Woman” often fails to grow with the times. I argue that this “Reasonable Woman” fails to encapsulate the complexities of sexual harassment experiences across different genders and cultural backgrounds. In this thesis, I deconstruct the historical development of the “Reasonable Woman Standard,” analyzing its roots in the “Reasonable Person Standard.” Through a combination …

We Shall Overcome: The Evolution Of Quotas In The Land Of The Free And The Home Of Samba, Stella Emery Santana

Seattle University Law Review

When were voices given to the voiceless? When will education be permitted to all? When will we need to protest no more? It’s the twenty-first century, and the fight for equity in higher education remains a challenge to peoples all over the world. While students in the United States must deal with the increase in loans, in Brazil, only around 20% of youth between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four have a higher education degree.

The primary objective of this Article is to conduct an in-depth comparative analysis of the development, implementation, and legal adjudication of educational quota systems within …

Pacific Islands And The U.S. Military: The Legal Borderlands Of The Environmental Movement, Sonia Lei

Seattle University Law Review

Climate change remains an urgent, ongoing global issue that requires critical examination of institutional polluters. This includes the world’s largest institutional consumer of petroleum: the United States military. The Department of Defense (DoD) is a massive institution with little oversight, a carbon footprint spanning the globe, a budget greater than the next ten largest nations combined, and overly generous exemptions to environmental regulations and carbon reduction targets. This Comment examines how this lack of accountability and oversight plays out in the context of three Pacific islands that have hosted U.S. military bases for decades. By considering the environmental impact of …

The Consumer’S Choice To Boycott, Agnes Bresee

Seattle University Law Review

In the wake of employees losing their jobs upon voicing their political opinions concerning Israel, Harvard and Columbia law students’ job offers being rescinded upon expressing support for Palestine, and the names and social media profiles of individuals who support Palestine being collected and listed on Canary Mission, such backlash may leave many Americans wondering what form of resistance to settler-colonialist apartheid is acceptable in the twenty-first century. Recently, the movement to collectively boycott brands like Starbucks, which sued its Worker’s Union for a tweet expressing support for Palestine; Disney, which donated money to Israel; and McDonald’s, where a location …

A Different Approach To Agency Theory And Implications For Esg, Jonathan Bonham, Amoray Riggs-Cragun

Seattle University Law Review

In conventional agency theory, the agent is modeled as exerting unobservable “effort” that influences the distribution over outcomes the principal cares about. Recent papers instead allow the agent to choose the entire distribution, an assumption that better describes the extensive and flexible control that CEOs have over firm outcomes. Under this assumption, the optimal contract rewards the agent directly for outcomes the principal cares about, rather than for what those outcomes reveal about the agent’s effort. This article briefly summarizes this new agency model and discusses its implications for contracting on ESG activities.

Overseeing The Administrative State, Jill E. Fisch

Seattle University Law Review

In a series of recent cases, the Supreme Court has reduced the regulatory power of the Administrative State. Pending cases offer vehicles for the Court to go still further. Although the Court’s skepticism of administrative agencies may be rooted in Constitutional principles or political expediency, this Article explores another possible explanation—a shift in the nature of agencies and their regulatory role. As Pritchard and Thompson detail in their important book, A History of Securities Law in the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court was initially skeptical of agency power, jeopardizing Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR)’s ambitious New Deal plan. The Court’s acceptance …

The Sec, The Supreme Court, And The Administrative State, Paul G. Mahoney

Seattle University Law Review

Pritchard and Thompson have given those of us who study the SEC and the securities laws much food for thought. Their methodological focus is on the internal dynamics of the Court’s deliberations, on which they have done detailed and valuable work. The Court did not, however, operate in a vacuum. Intellectual trends in economics and law over the past century can also help us understand the SEC’s fortunes in the federal courts and make predictions about its future.

A Hard Pill To Swallow: The Abysmal Mental Health Standards Of Detained Immigrant Children In The United States, Rama Bankesly

Seattle University Law Review

After setting foot into the U.S., unaccompanied children must learn to navigate academic and legal systems while receiving little support and carrying the heavy burden of effects of trauma on their mental health. They need access to mental health care from qualified professionals, but as this Comment will explain, they systematically fail to receive care, as can be seen in cases like Doe v. Shenandoah Valley Juv. Ctr. Comm’n. In Shenandoah, an unaccompanied child arrived in the U.S. and was placed in a facility that failed to provide remotely adequate mental health care and in fact was subjected …

Students For Fair Admissions: Affirming Affirmative Action And Shapeshifting Towards Cognitive Diversity?, Steven A. Ramirez

Seattle University Law Review

The Roberts Court holds a well-earned reputation for overturning Supreme Court precedent regardless of the long-standing nature of the case. The Roberts Court knows how to overrule precedent. In Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (SFFA), the Court’s majority opinion never intimates that it overrules Grutter v. Bollinger, the Court’s leading opinion permitting race-based affirmative action in college admissions. Instead, the Roberts Court applied Grutter as authoritative to hold certain affirmative action programs entailing racial preferences violative of the Constitution. These programs did not provide an end point, nor did they require assessment, review, periodic expiration, or revision for greater …

Anglo-Saxon Res Judicata Culture For Civil Law Systems, Cesare Cavallini

Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business

One traditional aspect distinguishing the common law system from the civil law one lies in the perceived disparities in the inspiration of the law-making process. The Anglo-Saxon system typically grounds its rules in explicit and discernible policies spanning social, anthropological, and economic realms directly relevant to the circumstances. In contrast, the civil law tradition frequently necessitates a fixed conceptual framework, sometimes detached from the practical needs of society. Or, at least, this dynamic persisted until recent changes prompted by the “doing business” model, which has timidly ascended to the forefront of the State agenda, particularly across Europe, notably in Italy. …

Request For An Advisory Opinion On Climate Emergency And Human Rights By The Republic Of Colombia And The Republic Of Chile, Diane A. Desierto, Francisco Urbina, Aníbal Pérez-Liñán, Nicolas Buitrago Rey, Faisal Yamil Meneses, Garrett Pacholl

Court Briefs

The Notre Dame Law School Human Rights Clinic (NDLS GHRC) in collaboration with the Notre Dame Reparations Design and Compliance Lab (ND Reparations Lab)

From the Introduction

Noting the request of the Republic of Colombia and the Republic of Chile for this Honorable Court to "provide guidance towards human rights-based solutions with an intersectional perspective," this Expert Opinion deliberately draws on interdisciplinary methods that weave international law, international human rights law, jurisprudence, quantitative tools of political science, and qualitative tools of social science research to assist this Honorable Court in its task of addressing the manifold questions brought by the …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

Twenty Years After Krieger V Law Society Of Alberta: Law Society Discipline Of Crown Prosecutors And Government Lawyers, Andrew Flavelle Martin

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Krieger v. Law Society of Alberta held that provincial and territorial law societies have disciplinary jurisdiction over Crown prosecutors for conduct outside of prosecutorial discretion. The reasoning in Krieger would also apply to government lawyers. The apparent consensus is that law societies rarely exercise that jurisdiction. But in those rare instances, what conduct do Canadian law societies discipline Crown prosecutors and government lawyers for? In this article, I canvass reported disciplinary decisions to demonstrate that, while law societies sometimes discipline Crown prosecutors for violations unique to those lawyers, they often do so for violations applicable to all lawyers — particularly …

Schrödinger’S Cat: A Constitutional Alien In Australia?, Benjamen Franklen Gussen

Brigham Young University Journal of Public Law

No abstract provided.

African Courts And International Human Rights Law, John Mukum Mbaku

Brooklyn Journal of International Law

The UN General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and since then, the international community, with the help of the United Nations, has adopted other international human rights instruments designed to recognize and protect human rights. Since international human rights instruments do not automatically confer rights that are justiciable in domestic courts, each African country must domesticate these instruments in order to create rights that are justiciable in its domestic courts. Given the fact that many African countries have not yet domesticated the core international human rights instruments, international human rights law’s ability to positively impact …

The Dark Matter Of Federal Indian Law: The Duty Of Protection, Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Maine Law Review

The United States and every federally recognized tribal nation originally entered into a sovereign-to-sovereign relationship highlighted by the duty of protection, an international customary law doctrine in which a larger, stronger sovereign, America in this case, agrees to “protect” the small, weaker sovereign, in this case, tribal nations. America agreed to this in exchange for massive, occasionally unquantifiable amounts of land and resources, as well as the power to control the external sovereign relations of the protected sovereign. The smaller sovereigns received protected reservation lands, hunting and fishing rights, small cash infusions, and the vague promise of protection. What tribal …

Proportionality V. Categorization: The Issue Of Judicial Balancing Of Rights, Akram Mohamed

Theses and Dissertations

The fact that there is a constant conflict between individual rights and state or social interests has historically provoked the question of how to balance or harmonize such conflicting interests? On what basis shall the legislator or the judge decide in favor of this or that right in his legislation or judgement? Where shall we, for example, draw the line between the right to freedom of expression and the right to protect one’s honor and reputation? How could the legislator find the compromise between the state duty to protect fetus life and its obligation not to interfere with woman’s right …

Neil Cohen’S Contribution To Uniform Secured Finance Law, Spyridon V. Bazinas

Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law

This Article discusses Neil Cohen’s contribution to uniform secured finance law and, in particular, to the UNCITRAL Model Law on Secured Transactions. It does so by focusing on the misgivings Neil Cohen had expressed before, and his reflections on those misgivings after, the preparation of the Model Law. The discussion presents Neil Cohen as is generally known, as a distinguished scholar, but also as he is known to his friends and colleagues, as a person with rare qualities.

Reforming The Law Reform Ecosystem, Timothy Schnabel

Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law

This Article outlines a series of reforms that would make global law reform efforts more effective and efficient. These efforts currently occur primarily in three multilateral organizations (UNCITRAL, UNIDROIT, and the Hague Conference). The member states of these organizations could easily increase coordination—even to the point of de facto consolidation of the organizations’ work—and could increase the attention given to selecting projects and promoting instruments. Additionally, the U.S. government could organize plurilateral law reform efforts outside these organizations and draw on U.S. domestic law reform efforts to identify new topics for work. Finally, non-government actors could themselves coordinate across the …

Commercial Law Harmonization: The Role Of The United States, Hal Burman

Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law

The modern field of transnational commercial law harmonization began in the United States in the mid-1960s; the international basis of that began in the mid-1940s. Before that, a limited number of areas of private international law (PIL) had active participation of US interests, such as maritime law. US participation internationally effectively began in the middle 1960s. Developments parallel to commercial law have been significant in the areas of applicable law, jurisdiction, commercial arbitration, family law, and other fields – all important areas of transnational law, but beyond the scope of this symposium. Each of these areas of law, while affecting …

Power And Persuasion In The Courtroom: The Force Of Law And The Settlement Dynamics Of Judges, Hadas Cohen, Michal Alberstein

Cardozo International & Comparative Law Review

This Article seeks to describe the shift in the legitimation of judicial authority in the age of the "vanishing trial," in circumstances where adjudication on the merits of the case in question has been replaced by the promotion ofjudicial settlement. Based on data collected during a five-year study funded by the European Research Council ("ERC") and drawing from studies in social psychology and conflict resolution, we analyze the judicial conflict resolution practices used in Israel's Magistrate Court in Tel Aviv to promote settlement, and from this depict a new taxonomy of power relations in the courtroom. This move, from adjudication …

Invisibility And Dis-Identification Of Algerian Women: Feminist Jurisprudence Eyes On The Legal Provisions Related To Personal Status And Criminal, Sophia Lina Meziane

Theses and Dissertations

Much of the debate around women’s rights in legal systems focuses on the increase of protection as a legal mechanism for approaching and guaranteeing gender equality. Yet, what extensive or comprehensive analysis has been done on how effective such laws are when applied? This thesis discusses the extent to which a feminist legal theory, separate and distinct from the patriarchal legal system, can demonstrate how an Islamic or Napoleonic order is conceptually another male rationality. While one could possibly identify inefficiencies of laws proclaiming equality and protection for women, the context of the question is inevitably entrenched in the very …

Kepastian Hukum Kantor Perwakilan Badan Usaha Jasa Konstruksi Asing Dalam Melakukan Kegiatan Usaha Di Indonesia, Emy Mutia Zahrina

"Dharmasisya” Jurnal Program Magister Hukum FHUI

Representative offices are present in Indonesia in order to meet the needs of global economic growth in all countries. Multinational companies expand their business to other countries through relocation policies. The aim is none other than an effort to reduce production costs through a number of comparative advantages possessed by Indonesia as well as seizing such a large market for these products, and through this way multinational companies benefit. The presence of representative offices in Indonesia is regulated by Presidential Decree Number 90 of 2000 concerning Representative Offices of Foreign Companies. Through the Presidential Decree, the government limits the scope …

Cross-Border Transfer Pricing Sebagai Tindakan Tax Avoidance, Elleanor Rigby Bangun

"Dharmasisya” Jurnal Program Magister Hukum FHUI

Transfer Pricing refers to pricing transaction within and between enterprises situated in different countries and belong to the same multinational group. Cross-border transaction inevitably affects international taxation, especially when multinational enterprises encounter two or more countries that apply different tax collection systems. Consequently, a Tax Treaty (Perjanjian Penghindaran Pajak Berganda/P3B) is made to resolve issues involving double taxation. However, since the Tax Treaty’s benefits vary by country, the investors or companies tend to abuse the agreement in order to gain the most profitable benefits or incentives. Abusing the benefits of Tax Treaty (P3B) could be categorized as an act against …

Resentralisasi Kewenagan Pengelolaan Pertambangan Mineral Dan Batura, Muhammad Salman Al Farisi

"Dharmasisya” Jurnal Program Magister Hukum FHUI

Amendments to Law No. 4 of 2009 became Law No. 4 of 2009 withdrawing almost all local government authority into central authority. Leaving room for delegation of some of the authority of the Central Government to provincial regional governments for the issuance of IPR and SIPB, even district-city governments no longer have space for authority over coal mineral mining matters. the authority of provincial or district/city regional governments in mining affairs, is a concurrent matter which in its handling involves the central government and regional governments, withdraws most of the authority and does not involve regional governments, of course it …