Law and Society Commons^™

Foreword: Reflections On Our Founding, Guy-Uriel Charles, Luis E. Fuentes-Rohwer

Faculty Scholarship

Law Journals have been under heavy criticism for as long as we can remember. The criticisms come from all quarters, including judges, law professors, and even commentators at large. In an address at the Fourth Circuit Judicial Conference almost a decade ago, for example, Chief Justice Roberts complained about the “disconnect between the academy and the profession.” More pointedly, he continued, “[p]ick up a copy of any law review that you see, and the first article is likely to be, you know, the influence of Immanuel Kant on evidentiary approaches in 18th Century Bulgaria, or something, which I’m sure was …

Protection From Harassment Act 2014: Offences And Remedies, Man Yip

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

5 January 2015 marked the Opening of the Legal Year 2015. From the speeches made by the Attorney-General, the President of the Law Society, and the Chief Justice, the 50th year of Singapore’s independence is going to be a glorious year of pushing boundaries.

Separations Of Wealth: Inequality And The Erosion Of Checks And Balances, Kate Andrias

Faculty Scholarship

American government is dysfunctional: Gridlock, filibusters, and expanding presidential power, everyone seems to agree, threaten our basic system of constitutional governance. Who, or what, is to blame? In the standard account, the fault lies with the increasing polarization of our political parties. That standard story, however, ignores an important culprit: Concentrated wealth and its organization to achieve political ends. The only way to understand our current constitutional predicament – and to rectify it – is to pay more attention to the role that organized wealth plays in our system of checks and balances.

This Article shows that the increasing concentration …

The Future Of Direct Finance: The Diverging Paths Of Peer-To-Peer Lending And Kickstarter, Kathryn Judge

Faculty Scholarship

For centuries, the trend has been toward longer and more complex intermediation chains in a wide array of contexts. The growing length and complexity of intermediation chains were both the by-products and drivers of ever-greater globalization and specialization. In recent years, however, there has been a shift in the opposite direction. In a variety of markets, suppliers and consumers increasingly transact directly with one another. Many of these developments have arisen from technological innovations that reduce search costs and other hurdles to transacting, like verifying information and negotiating the terms of a transaction. Airbnb, Etsy, and their kin, for example, …

Wealth And Democracy, Jedediah Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

The renewed debate over inequality has highlighted a set of deficits in much of the last fifty-plus years of thinking on the topic. The late twentieth-century tradition of thinking about distributive justice largely assumed (1) that market dynamics would produce stable and tolerable levels of inequality; and (2) that a relatively powerful, competent, and legitimate state could effectively redistribute to mitigate what inequality did arise. What was largely overlooked in this thought and has since risen to central attention is the prospect that (1) accelerating levels of market-produced inequality will (2) undermine the legitimacy and efficacy of the state and …

Markets, Morals, And Limits In The Exchange Of Human Eggs, Kimberly D. Krawiec

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Transnationalizing Comparative Law, Ralf Michaels

Faculty Scholarship

Comparative law will not die in the 21st century, but nor can it remain unchanged. Comparative law as we have it today still retains its roots in 1900: it is focused on states, on positive law, and on a scientific approach. Comparative law in the age of transnationalism will have to transnationalize: it must move beyond the state, it must move beyond positive law, and it must endorse cultural approaches. We must retain our critique of legal nationalism, but we must add our critique of uncritical legal universalism.

Less Enforcement, More Compliance: Rethinking Unauthorized Migration, Emily Ryo

Faculty Scholarship

A common assumption underlying the current public discourse and legal treatment of unauthorized immigrants is that unauthorized immigrants are lawless individuals who will break the law—any law—in search of economic gain. This notion persists despite substantial empirical evidence to the contrary. Drawing on original empirical data, this Article examines unauthorized immigrants and their relationship to the law from a novel perspective to make two major contributions. First, I demonstrate that unauthorized immigrants view themselves and their noncompliance with U.S. immigration law in a manner that is strikingly different from the prevalent view of criminality and lawlessness found in popular and …

The Politics Of Chinese Land: Partial Reform, Vested Interests And Small Property, Shitong Qiao

Faculty Scholarship

This paper investigates the evolution of the Chinese land regime in the past three decades and focus on one question: why has the land use reform succeeded in the urban area, but not in the rural area? Through asking this question, it presents a holistic view of Chinese land reform, rather than the conventional "rural land rights conflict" picture. This paper argues that the so­called rural land problem is the consequence of China's partial land use reform. In 1988, the Chinese government chose to conduct land use reform sequentially: first urban and then rural. It was a pragmatic move because …

A Quantum Congress, Jorge R. Roig

Scholarly Works

This article tries to address the problem of a corrupt and broken electoral system that has been captured by special interests through big money spending in political campaigns, while at the same time preserving the spirit of the Free Speech Clause of our Constitution. In doing so, this article first reviews and summarizes the different alternatives proposed as potential fixes for the campaign finance problem. It then explains why none of the proposed alternatives can accomplish the dual goals set out above. Finally, the article briefly sketches a proposal for a fundamental reworking of our representative democracy by substituting legislative …

Habermas, The Public Sphere, And The Creation Of A Racial Counterpublic, Luis Fuentes-Rohwer, Guy-Uriel E. Charles

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

The Implementation Of The Food Safety Modernization Act And The Strength Of The Sustainable Agriculture Movement, Samuel R. Wiseman

Scholarly Publications

In the wake of growing public concerns over salmonella outbreaks and other highly publicized food safety issues, Congress passed the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act in 2011, which placed more stringent standards on food growing and packaging operations. In negotiations preceding the Act's passage, farmers of local, sustainable food argued that these rules would unduly burden local agricultural operations or, at the extreme, drive them out of business by creating overly burdensome rules. These objections culminated in the addition of the Tester-Hagan Amendment to the Food Safety Modernization Act, which created certain exemptions for small farms. Proposed Food and Drug …

The Procedural Aspect Of The Rule Of Law: India As A Case Study For Distinguishing Concept From Conception, Karina T. Hwang

CMC Senior Theses

In this thesis, the concept of the procedural aspect of the Rule of Law will be distinguished from what I argue are conceptions that are falsely promulgated as concept. The different aspects of the Rule of Law—form, substance, and procedure— are helpful in making the distinction between concept and conception. Examining procedure within the Rule of Law is particularly important, and I define a broader set of requirements of the concept of the procedural aspect of the Rule of Law. This concept is applied to understand the Indian conception of the Rule of Law, a particularly interesting case that brings …