State and Local Government Law Commons^™

Against Court Packing, Or A Plea To Formally Amend The Constitution, Jill M. Fraley

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Legalizing Undocumented Work, Jennifer J. Lee

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Role Of Justice In The Constitution: The Case For Social And Economic Rights In Comparative Perspective, Michel Rosenfeld

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Freedom From Thirst: A Right To Basic Household Water, Martha F. Davis

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

"And The Oscar Goes To . . .": Why The Academy Awards May Create Antitrust Drama With Proposed Eligibility Rule Changes, Armando Marin Iii

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Here Stood My Dreaming Tree: A Proposal To Reform Non-Lpr Cancellation Of Removal To Bring Undocumented Immigrants Out Of The Shadows, Andrea Barrientos

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

The note advocates for expanding nonLPR (non-Lawful Permanent Resident) cancellation of removal as a pathway to lawful status for undocumented immigrants. It critiques the current system’s restrictive eligibility criteria, annual caps, and high hardship standards, arguing that these limitations exclude many deserving applicants. The proposed reforms aim to eliminate the 4,000-person cap, convert the relief into an affirmative process, and lower the hardship standard to align immigration policy with U.S. values of fairness and inclusion. By doing so, the reforms would stabilize families, reduce marginalization, and bring undocumented immigrants out of the shadows.

California's Autonomy Under The Clean Air Act: Does Epa Have The Authority To Withdraw An Emissions Standards Waiver?, Ethan Siegel

Cardozo International & Comparative Law Review

The note argues that the EPA lacks the authority to unilaterally revoke the 2013 Clean Air Act (CAA) waiver granted to California. It contends that the EPA must rely on preemption under the Energy Policy and Conservation Act (EPCA) rather than asserting inherent authority or reinterpretation of the CAA text to justify revocation.

Counterterrorism 2.0, Deborah Pearlstein

Articles

Are there any lessons to be gleaned for combatting the rising threat of white nationalist terrorism today from the U.S. response to the attacks of 9/11 twenty years on? This symposium reflection suggests that among the most important lessons may be in avoiding the conceptually defining characteristics of the early U.S. response in 2001. Detainee torture and abuse, the embrace of trial by newly formed military commission, and other misguided policies and practices whose effects are still felt today were set in motion in the first few weeks after the attacks, driven by the instinct to do something, bolstered by …

Courts Beyond Judging, Michael C. Pollack

Articles

Across all fifty states, a woefully understudied institution of government is responsible for a broad range of administrative, legislative, law enforcement, and judicial functions. That important institution is the state courts. While the literature has examined the federal courts and federal judges from innumerable angles, study of the state courts as institutions of state government — and not merely as sources of doctrine and resolvers of disputes — has languished. This Article remedies that oversight by drawing attention for the first time to the wide array of roles state courts serve, and by evaluating the suitability of both the allocation …

Should They Stay, Or Should They Go? Statue Politics In Shifting Societies: The Permissibility Of Peacetime Removal, Alteration And Destruction Of Problematic Political Monuments In The United States, Adrienne Liebenberg Nel

Cardozo International & Comparative Law Review

The note argues that Confederate monuments in the U.S. are often protected by outdated preservationist laws that hinder efforts to remove or alter them, despite their association with systemic racism and oppression. It advocates for legal reform to allow local governments to address these problematic symbols, drawing on international examples and emphasizing the need for a balanced approach that respects history while promoting inclusivity.

Arbitrating With The Mafia: Why Civil Rico Statutes Are Improperly Used And How Class Action Arbitration May Provide Just Compensation For Forgotten Victims, Max Steinberg

Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution

From the nineteenth century onward, the United States has been overwhelmed by the rise of organized crime. For generations, criminal organizations have "infiltrated the social and economic fabric" of society and committed heinous crimes in almost every way imaginable. For decades, pop culture and Hollywood have been infatuated with criminal organizations. Movies, television shows, books, and podcasts have portrayed these organizations as interesting and complex entities. In most cinematic programs, the leaders of these mob organizations are the protagonists. Hollywood may portray fictional mob bosses as such, but in reality, their organizations often contain ruthless murderers. What seems to get …

Critical Developments In Housing Policy, Kat Meyers, Cheryl Gonzales, Edward Josephson, Andrew Scherer, Michael Pollack

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

The symposium discusses the New York Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act of 2019, highlighting its role in enhancing tenant protections by limiting rent increases and eviction practices, thereby addressing the housing crisis in NYC.

Going Bare In The Law Of Assignments: When Is An Assignment Champertous?, Anthony J. Sebok

Articles

The article critiques the legal distinction between champerty and assignment, arguing that the focus should be on the assignor's motives rather than the assignee's identity. It challenges Dr. David Capper's approach to defining "bare assignments" and proposes that assignments should not be prohibited based solely on the assignee's identity unless they facilitate abus

The Role Of State And Federal Law In Energy Condemnations, Stewart E. Sterk

Articles

When an energy provider condemns fee interests or easements to permit construction of transmission lines, what roles do state and federal law play in determining the "just compensation" available to affected landowners? That question has arisen in a number of different factual contexts. Usually, condemnors seek to avoid state law rules that provide for compensation beyond what they believe represents the market value of the property they seek to acquire. For instance, condemnors may seek an offset for benefits the condemnation generates for neighboring land owned by the condemnee. Condemnors may also seek to avoid state rules that entitle condemnees …

Federal Land Use Intervention As Market Restoration, Stewart E. Sterk

Articles

Although most land-use regulation in the United States remains local, the federal government has played an increasing role. Some federal intervention, particularly in the environmental area, has involved affirmative federal regulation superimposed on the local regulatory scheme. But other federal intervention operates differently by overriding local regulation to permit markets to operate. In addition to the Takings Clause, examples include the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, the Telecommunications Act, the Fair Housing Act, and the First Amendment's adult-use jurisprudence. In each of these areas, local regulation survives only if it leaves intact a sufficiently thick market for the …

We The People: These United Divided States, Catherine Powell

Cardozo Law Review

In the wake of President Trump's announcement that he will withdraw the United States from the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, then-California Governor Jerry Brown called on the President to fight climate change or to "get out of the way" while the rest of the world works to reduce emissions and invest in clean energy. Similarly, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg-now a United Nations (U.N.) Special Envoy for Cities and Climate Change-said, "If Washington won't lead, then mayors and governors will." Indeed, Trump's threat to withdraw has not only been met with widespread criticism and derision abroad …

The Peculiar Case Of State Network Neutrality Regulation, Thomas B. Nachbar

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

In the wake of the FCC's recent decision to rescind federal network neutrality rules, several states have implemented their own network neutrality regulations, some in the form of procurement conditions on state contracts and others affirmative mandates requiring broadband Internet service providers to observe neutrality in providing service. The federal government and industry trade associations have challenged the state network neutrality laws as both preempted and unconstitutional under the "dormant Commerce Clause" doctrine.

This paper analyzes those state restrictions as a matter of constitutional law. The Court has recently changed dormant Commerce Clause law, liberalizing those limits with regard to …

The Impact Of Law On The State Pension Crisis, Elizabeth S. Goldman, Stewart E. Sterk

Articles

While some state and municipal pension plans have funds sufficient to meet obligations to retirees without imposing onerous obligations on current and future taxpayers, underfunding of plans in other states has reached disastrous proportions, raising the possibility of default on pension obligations, cuts in public services, steep tax increases, or some combination of the three. The substantial differential in pension funding might be attributed to divergent political pressures, different responses to uncertainty about investment returns, or other factors. Our examination of pension funding law in ten states-five with the best-funded plans and five with the worst-funded plans-highlights the role of …

Abolish Ice . . . And Then What?, Peter L. Markowitz

Articles

In recent years, activists and then politicians began calling for the abolition of the United States’s interior immigration-enforcement agency: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Many people have misinterpreted the call to “Abolish ICE” as merely a spontaneous rhetorical device used to express outrage at the current Administration’s brutal immigration policies. In fact, abolishing ICE is the natural extension of years of thoughtful organizing by a loose coalition of grassroots immigrant-rights groups. These organizations are serious, not only about their literal goal to eliminate the agency, but also about not replacing it with another dedicated agency of immigration police. Accordingly, …

Maintaining Condominiums And Homeowner Associations: How Much Of A Priority?, Stewart E. Sterk

Articles

During the recent real estate crisis, competition for scarce dollars pitted the holders of defaulted mortgages against condominiums and homeowner associations seeking to collect maintenance assessments. Statutes providing mortgagees with lien priority threatened association ability to provide services, and imposed a disproportionate burden on non-defaulting unit owners. Statutes enacted in other states gave associations a “super priority” lien for six months of assessments, but left uncertainty about the meaning of that super priority in an environment in which foreclosure delays became the norm.

The last five years have brought a spate of litigation over the relative rights of associations and …

Qualified Immunity At Trial, Alexander A. Reinert

Articles

Qualified immunity doctrine is complex and important, and for many years it was assumed to have an outsize impact on civil rights cases by imposing significant barriers to success for plaintiffs. Recent empirical work has cast that assumption into doubt, at least as to the impact qualified immunity has at pretrial stages of litigation. This Essay adds to this empirical work by evaluating the impact of qualified immunity at trial, a subject that to date has not been empirically tested. The results reported here suggest that juries are rarely asked to answer questions that bear on the qualified immunity defense. …

Municipal Wi-Fi And The Third-Party Doctrine: Rethinking An Antiquated Framework, David Forrest

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Law And Legislation In Municipal Bankruptcy, Vincent S.J. Buccola

Cardozo Law Review

Corporate and consumer bankruptcy are defined by two principal features: a compulsory process and an identifiable set of priorities to debtor property. These "rule of law"features reduce borrowing costs ex ante by, among other things, discouraging rent-seeking ex post. Municipal bankruptcy, by contrast, despite apparent similarities, embodies a radically different vision of debt adjustment. Substantive priorities in Chapter 9 are riddled with uncertainty, and the very invocation of bankruptcy is subject to veto by multiple actors. Consequently, this Article contends that familiar models of bankruptcy are inadequate to explain the existing regime of municipal debt adjustment. What Chapter 9 creates …

The Wealth In Waste: America's Ability To Enter The Waste To Energy Market By Embracing European Landfill Diversion, Waste Framework, And Renewable Energy Laws And Waste To Energy Initiatives, Emilio Lamanna

Cardozo Journal of International and Comparative Law

The note argues that the United States should adopt European Union (EU) strategies for waste management, particularly landfill diversion and waste-to-energy (WtE) technologies, to address its significant environmental and economic challenges. The EU's success in reducing landfill use and increasing renewable energy production through directives and portfolio standards serves as a model for the U.S. The author proposes that the U.S. implement a Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) Portfolio Standard and a national Renewable Energy Portfolio Standard (RPS) to promote WtE and reduce reliance on landfills.

Does "Precrime" Mesh With The Ideals Of U.S. Justice?: Implications For The Future Of Predictive Policing, Jackson Polansky, Henry F. Fradella

Cardozo Public Law, Policy & Ethics Journal

Both the short story and film Minority Report are premised on a Precrime unit that relies on the psychic abilities of human mutants who can predict the commission of crimes before they occur. Advances in technology suggest that the science fiction depicted in Minority Report may one day become a reality. This paper summarizes the ways in which the criminal justice system currently derives crime predictions and extrapolates from these methods how technology might one day allow police to intervene before crimes are committed with great regularity and accuracy. The paper contemplates how an actual precrime system would struggle to …

Shifting The Landscape On Access To Justice, Jonathan Lippman

Cardozo Law Review

The essay emphasizes the critical need to address the justice gap faced by the poor and vulnerable, advocating for proactive measures by the judiciary, legal profession, and academia. It highlights initiatives in New York, such as increased public funding, expanded pro bono efforts, and innovative programs, to ensure equal access to justice, potentially leading to a right to counsel in civil cases.

The Costs Of Trumped-Up Immigration Enforcement Measures, Kari Hong

Cardozo Law Review de•novo

Currently, our country spends $18 billion each year on immigration enforcement, which is nearly $4 billion more than the combined budgets of the FBI, DEA, Secret Service, and ATF. President Trump hopes to substantially increase that annual number with his proposed heightened enforcement measures that result in more arrests, more ICE officers roaming our streets, airports, and courtrooms, more detentions, more deportations, and more wall. This essay begins by examining each of these measures that were outlined in the new executive orders and concludes that all are expensive, ineffective, unnecessary, and inhumane.

Reasonable Standards For Contract Interpretations Under The Cisg, Donald J. Smythe

Cardozo Journal of International and Comparative Law

The United Nations ("UN") Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Good ("CISG") offers the promise of harmonizing international sales law and facilitating international trade and global commerce. But there is a "homeward trend bias" that may encourage domestic courts to construe the gaps in the CISG broadly and fill them with non-uniform domestic legal rules. Questions about contract interpretation under the CISG raise the same concerns about a homeward trend bias as questions about the interpretation of express CISG provisions. The CISG has express provisions governing contract interpretation but their application may not provide an unambiguous interpretation. This …

Sharing Risk In The Sharing Economy: Insurance Regulation In The Age Of Uber, Alexander B. Traum

Cardozo Public Law, Policy & Ethics Journal

No abstract provided.

Broken Windows Policing And Community Courts: An Unholy Alliance, Robin Steinberg, Skylar Albertson

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.