Legal Studies Commons^™

Adult Complicity In The Dis-Education Of The Black Male High School Athlete & Societal Failures To Remedy His Plight, Kimberly Jade Norwood

Scholarship@WashULaw

This Article focuses on the educational hurdles facing many Black male student athletes in urban high schools. Academic rigor is rarely expected of these students. They are part of an active form of dis-education. By dis-education, I mean the active failure to educate. Our learning institutions have become so accustomed to excusing these students from academic rigor that doing so simply does not spark a sense of outrage or any notion that we are doing something wrong when it comes to our expectations of these students. No one really questions them when they do poorly on class work and tests. …

The Utility Of Opacity In Judicial Selection, Rafael I. Pardo

Scholarship@WashULaw

Does too much transparency in the selection of judges undermine the independence of the judiciary? This Essay seeks to provide insight into answering this question by focusing on the opaque process by which federal bankruptcy judges are selected. Part I begins with an account that anchors the concepts of judicial independence and judicial accountability to the concept of judicial quality. It proceeds to situate within this account the selection process, suggesting that the process can function as a form of judicial accountability, albeit one that diminishes judicial quality in those instances where the process becomes politicized. A brief discussion follows …

Eliminating The Judicial Function In Consumer Bankruptcy, Rafael I. Pardo

Scholarship@WashULaw

The centerpiece of the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 has been the means test, a formulaic statutory directive pursuant to which courts are to presume abuse of the bankruptcy system by Chapter 7 debtors who have an ability to repay past debts with future income. This Essay provides a new insight into means testing by arguing that, more than anything else, it has brought about a significant change in the institutional design of bankruptcy courts: namely, the increased blurring of administrative and judicial functions. The Essay concludes that this development should be cause for concern as …

Securities Underwriters In Public Capital Markets: The Existence, Parameters And Consequences Of The Fiduciary Obligation To Avoid Conflicts, Andrew F. Tuch

Scholarship@WashULaw

This article considers whether an investment bank, when acting as underwriter of a public securities offering, owes the issuing company the fiduciary obligation to avoid conflicts of interest. The question has not arisen for final judicial determination and has been overlooked by scholars and regulators. The highly lucrative and visible nature of underwriting work creates powerful incentives for investment banks to accept instructions in the face of this duty. At the same time, the web of loyalties that these institutions owe, by virtue of their broad and diverse range of products and services, creates intractable practical difficulties for compliance with …

Normativity In The "New" Schools: Assessing The Legitimacy Of International Legal Norms Created By Domestic Courts, Melissa A. Waters

Scholarship@WashULaw

One of the great legacies of the New Haven School was its early recognition of the tremendous dynamism and complexity of the international lawmaking process. Its proponents wisely rejected both Austinian positivism and the traditional conception of "law" as a dichotomy of "national" and "international" legal rules. Instead, the policy-oriented jurisprudence of the New Haven School recognized and embraced the interactivity of a multiplicity of decisionmakers in shaping the international legal regime. Moreover, in defining law as an iterative process of authoritative decisionmaking, the New Haven School recognized that authoritative decisions need not necessarily come from official bodies such as …

On The Effective Communication Of The Results Of Empirical Studies, Part Ii, Christina L. Boyd, Lee Epstein, Andrew D. Martin

Scholarship@WashULaw

While law professors are increasingly making use of data in their scholarship and while the data work housed in their studies is (generally) of a high quality, they have been less effective at communicating the products of their labor. A strong devotion to tabular, rather than graphical, displays, and claims about "statistical significance" rather than substantive importance, are just two areas requiring improvement. Here, as in Part I, we attempt to adapt a burgeoning literature in the social and statistical sciences to the unique interests of legal scholars. Our proposals are many in number, but none is particularly difficult to …

The Scientific Study Of Judicial Activism, Stefanie A. Lindquist, Frank B. Cross

Scholarship@WashULaw

Claims of judicial activism are common, from both the right and the left, but they are seldom scrutinized closely. Prior tests of judicial activism have involved simply counting the number of cases in which justices vote to invalidate statutes. This data provides a rough guide but omits any consideration of the judicial legitimacy of the statute - a decision to strike down a plainly unconstitutional statute is appropriate judicial behavior. To provide a better test, we adjust the count of statutory invalidations for each justice of the Burger Court, based upon the degree to which the votes show a consistent …

Creeping Monism: The Judicial Trend Toward Interpretive Incorporation Of Human Rights Treaties, Melissa A. Waters

Scholarship@WashULaw

This Article offers a narrow lens analysis of a key debate over the role of foreign authority in U.S. courts: the use of international human rights treaties in interpreting domestic law. Professor Waters argues that recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions (including Roper v. Simmons) should be viewed as part of a transnational trend among common law courts, a trend that she calls creeping monism. Common law judges are increasingly abandoning their traditional dualist orientation to treaties and are beginning to utilize human rights treaties despite the absence of implementing legislation giving domestic legal effect to the treaties. By developing a …

Research Guide To Export Control And Wmd Nonproliferation Law, Wei Luo

Scholarship@WashULaw

This research guide is to guide would-be researchers to the primary sources (statutes, cases, regulations, and international treaties) and the websites of major governmental agencies in charge of export controls and the International organizations promoting non-proliferation.

Using Human Rights Treaties To Resolve Ambiguity: The Advent Of A Rights-Conscious Charming Betsy Canon, Melissa A. Waters

Scholarship@WashULaw

This article considers the role of international human rights law in the domestic context, and examines in particular the use of what the author calls a "rights­-conscious Charming Betsy canon", whereby judges in New Zealand, Canada, the United States and Australia have interpreted statutory provisions (focusing on the case study of immigration law) so as to be consistent with international human rights norms. The author also considers the more radical use of the canon, proposed in particular by the High Court of Australia's Justice Kirby, which proposes that even constitutional texts may be interpreted to be consistent with international law, …

Lower Court Discretion, Pauline Kim

Scholarship@WashULaw

Empirical scholars typically model the judicial hierarchy in terms of a principal-agent relationship in which the Supreme Court, the principal, sets policy and the lower federal courts, as agents, must implement that policy faithfully. The law is a signal - the means by which the Court communicates its preferences. This article argues instead for recognizing the law as an independent normative force. Empirical scholars fail to take seriously the role of law because they reject as implausible formalistic accounts of its operation. This article advances a more nuanced account of how law shapes the decision-making environment, one that focuses on …

Privacy's Other Path: Recovering The Law Of Confidentiality, Neil M. Richards, Daniel J. Solove

Scholarship@WashULaw

The familiar legend of privacy law holds that Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis invented the right to privacy in 1890, and that William Prosser aided its development by recognizing four privacy torts in 1960. In this article, Professors Richards and Solove contend that Warren, Brandeis, and Prosser did not invent privacy law, but took it down a new path. Well before 1890, a considerable body of Anglo-American law protected confidentiality, which safeguards the information people share with others. Warren, Brandeis, and later Prosser turned away from the law of confidentiality to create a new conception of privacy based on the …

Blackthink's™ Acting White Stigma In Education And How It Fosters Academic Paralysis In Black Youth, Kimberly Jade Norwood

Scholarship@WashULaw

Black students who attend school regularly, participate in the classroom experience — by either participating in class and/or turning in homework, take “AP” classes, and who perform well on tests are, not uncommonly, accused of “acting white.” This happened to me as a child, it has happened to my children and it has happened to black youth I have interviewed throughout the country. This Article explores the practice within the black community of blacks who attack — verbally and sometimes physically — other blacks simply because the latter perform well in school. The Article explores the ironies of this attack …

Treaty Dialogue In Sanchez-Llamas: Is Chief Justice Roberts A Transnationalist, After All?, Melissa A. Waters

Scholarship@WashULaw

Chief Justice John Roberts is generally considered to be a “nationalist” with respect to transnational judicial dialogue: for example, he has expressed skepticism as to the value of foreign authority in constitutional interpretation. In his majority opinion in Sanchez-Llamas v. Oregon, however, Roberts eagerly engages in treaty dialogue, by considering foreign and international sources in interpreting U.S. treaty obligations. This Essay examines Roberts’ use of both “direct” and “indirect” treaty dialogue in interpreting the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. By engaging in dialogue with both treaty partners and the International Court of Justice, Roberts allows foreign precedent and practice to …

The Adventure(S) Of Blackness In Western Culture: An Epistolary Exchange On Old And New Identity Wars, Adrienne D. Davis, Robert S. Chang

Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies Faculty Research

Through a series of letters, Professors Robert Chang and Adrienne Davis examine the politics of positionality in law and literary criticism. They use the scholarly debates and conversations around critical race theory and feminist legal theory as a starting point to formulate some thoughts about Critical Race Feminism ("CRF") and its future. The authors use the epistolary form as a literary device to allow them to collaborate on this project while maintaining their own voices. Thus, the letters are not dated.

The letters pay particular attention to various border crossings: male attempts to engage in feminist literary criticism, white attempts …

Investment Banking: Immediate Challenges And Future Directions, Andrew F. Tuch

Scholarship@WashULaw

This article discusses the organizational nature of the integrated (or full-service) investment bank, the incidence of conflicts of interest in the financial services industry and the role and effectiveness of information barriers such as Chinese walls as an arrangement for managing conflicts. The paper also describes the growing importance to investment banks of proprietary trading and principal investing, the conflicts of interest that they can produce, and the recent responses of financial regulators to these developments.

The paper was presented at a discussion forum involving senior investment bankers, lawyers and scholars in August 2006, organized against the backdrop of litigation …

Contemporary Challenges In Takeovers: Avoiding Conflicts, Preserving Confidences And Taming The Commercial Imperative, Andrew F. Tuch

Scholarship@WashULaw

This article discusses contemporary legal, commercial, ethical and other issues that arise in the context of corporate takeover transactions. Due to their complexity and the numerous parties - including deal advisers - they involve, the loyalties of company directors and advisers are frequently tangled, creating legion opportunities for conflicted interests and breached confidences. At the same time, the high status of advising on takeovers and the financial lure they provide produce powerful incentives that inevitably inform the application of legal principles to these issues. The article adopts a hypothetical case study approach to focus on the challenges confronting these parties …

Obligations Of Financial Advisers In Change-Of-Control Transactions: Fiduciary And Other Questions, Andrew F. Tuch

Scholarship@WashULaw

Outside the United States, financial regulators have recently focused their attention on whether a financial adviser to a party in a change-of-control transaction (such as a takeover) is obliged to avoid being in positions of conflict with the interests of that party. Because financial advisers in these transactions are typically investment banks, the integrated structure of which may make conflicts of interest inevitable, such an obligation is likely to pose difficult challenges for the investment banking industry. The question is complicated by two apparently inconsistent standards being applied: the fiduciary obligation to avoid conflicts and the statutory obligation in many …

Collective And Individual Approaches To Protecting Employee Privacy: The Experience With Workplace Drug Testing, Pauline Kim

Scholarship@WashULaw

This contribution to a symposium on workplace privacy asks what difference it makes to think about workers' rights under a collective as opposed to an individual rights model in a particular context: that of protecting employee privacy. More specifically, it undertakes an examination of the range of disputes between employers and employees over workplace drug testing in the late 1980's and the 1990's, focusing on the differences between cases brought with union involvement and those brought by individual workers acting alone. In doing so, it asks how collective forms of disputing about drug testing differed from individual approaches, and whether …

The Information Privacy Law Project, Neil M. Richards

Scholarship@WashULaw

One of the most interesting developments in privacy law literature over the past few decades has been the emergence of The Information Privacy Law Project, a group of scholars focused on the legal issues raised by the increasing collection, use, and disclosure of personal information made possible by evolving digital technologies. These scholars have sought to establish information privacy law as a field of study distinct from the constitutional right to decisional privacy. This Essay uses the recent publication of a major work by Daniel J. Solove, "The Digital Person: Privacy and Technology in the Digital Age", as a lens …

Undue Hardship In The Bankruptcy Courts: An Empirical Assessment Of The Discharge Of Educational Debt, Rafael I. Pardo, Michelle R. Lacey

Scholarship@WashULaw

The discharge in bankruptcy embodies the policy that relief should be granted to an individual who has ceased to be economically productive by virtue of burdensome debt obligations (the fresh start policy). Once the debtor has been deemed eligible for discharge, forgiveness of debt is automatic, accomplished through legislative rule and its judicial enforcement. With regard to the discharge of educational debt, however, Congress has devolved the exercise of debt relief to courts. An obligation to repay such debt will be discharged if a debtor establishes that undue hardship would be suffered in the absence of its discharge. A court …

Investment Banks As Fiduciaries: Implications For Conflicts Of Interest, Andrew F. Tuch

Scholarship@WashULaw

Investment banks play an intermediary role in the financial system that is integral to its efficient operation. A core, and highly visible, part of their work involves providing financial advisory services to institutional clients on transactions that have strategic importance, such as mergers and acquisitions. As these services are but one aspect of the broad and diverse range of financial services that investment banks typically provide, challenges such as conflicts of interest inevitably arise. Somewhat anomalously, the question of whether these firms owe fiduciary duties to their clients when providing financial advisory services has received little regulatory, judicial or scholarly …

Reconciling Data Privacy And The First Amendment, Neil M. Richards

Scholarship@WashULaw

This article challenges the First Amendment critique of data privacy regulation–the claim that data privacy rules restrict the dissemination of truthful information and thus violate the First Amendment. The critique, which is ascendant in privacy discourse, warps legislative and judicial processes by constitutionalizing information policy. Rejection of the First Amendment critique is justified on three grounds. First, the critique mistakenly equates privacy regulation with speech regulation. Building on scholarship examining the boundaries of First Amendment protection, this article suggests that speech restrictions in a wide variety of commercial contexts have never been thought to trigger heightened First Amendment scrutiny, refuting …

Disclosure As A Strategy In The Patent Race, Scott Baker, Claudio Mezzetti

Scholarship@WashULaw

Research firms disclose a surprisingly large amount of information to the patent office through “targeted” disclosures, that is, disclosures intended to make the patent office aware of potentially patentable information. Conventional wisdom holds that these disclosures are made for defensive purposes; the disclosing firm does not itself plan to pursue patents related to the disclosed information, so the firm discloses to create prior art that might stop rivals from patenting. But firms have an incentive to disclose even if they intend to pursue patent protection. The reason is that, by making it more difficult to patent, disclosure extends the patent …

Empirically Testing Dworkin's Chain Novel Theory: Studying The Path Of Precedent, Stefanie A. Lindquist, Frank B. Cross

Scholarship@WashULaw

In this article, Professors Lindquist and Cross empirically study the effect of precedent on judicial decision-making. The framework for their analysis is Ronald Dworkin’s “chain novel” metaphor, an influential theory of the role of precedent whose validity has not previously been empirically tested. The chain novel metaphor suggests that the judicial use of precedent can be likened to a group of authors writing a novel seriatim, in which the accumulation of chapters increasingly constrains the choices and freedom of subsequent writers. Precedent is one of the most important areas of legal research, but currently there is no dominant working theory, …

Mediating Norms And Identity: The Role Of Transnational Judicial Dialogue In Creating And Enforcing International Law, Melissa A. Waters

Scholarship@WashULaw

This article proposes a new theory for understanding the emerging transnational judicial dialogue among the world's domestic courts, as well as U.S. courts' potential participation in that dialogue. Existing scholarship has focused almost exclusively on the role of domestic courts in internalizing international legal norms into domestic legal systems. I argue that the relationship between international and domestic legal norms is in fact a co-constitutive, or synergistic, relationship in which domestic courts are becoming active participants in the dynamic process of developing international law. Under this view, transnational judicial dialogue is the engine by which domestic courts collectively engage in …

On Proof Of Preferential Effect, Rafael I. Pardo

Scholarship@WashULaw

This Article presents a comprehensive analysis of the manner in which the trustee of a debtor's estate may satisfy his burden of proof to demonstrate the preferential effect of a prebankruptcy transfer from a debtor to a creditor. The proposed framework, if adhered to by courts, will create a uniformity that gives preference law its proper reach and thereby reinforces its primary goal: equal treatment of similarly situated creditors (the equality principle). After examining the historical developments that have made a trustee's evidentiary burden administratively less complex, the Article discusses the Ninth Circuit's decision in Batlan v. TransAmerica Commercial Finance …

The Virulence Of Blackthink™ And How Its Threat Of Ostracism Shackles Those Deemed Not Black Enough, Kimberly Jade Norwood

Scholarship@WashULaw

This Article explores a non-traditional form of discrimination based on color. In the United States we are accustomed to hearing about discrimination in the context of historic injustices the black community has faced for no other reason but that they were born black or African-American. This Article deals with another form of discrimination against black people based on skin color: discrimination based on not being black enough. Blacks who do not fit a particular expectation about what it means to be black are often marginalized or even ostracized from their communities. They are vilified as Sells-Outs, Oreos and Uncle Toms. …

Justice Scalia On The Use Of Foreign Law In Constitutional Interpretation: Unidirectional Monologue Or Co-Constitutive Dialogue, Melissa A. Waters

Scholarship@WashULaw

This short essay explores Justice Antonin Scalia's conservative alternative approach to recent efforts by other Justices to utilize foreign and international legal sources in the Supreme Court's jurisprudence. It discusses Justice Scalia's writings and remarks over the course of the 2003-2004 Supreme Court Term: On the one hand, Justice Scalia consistently denounced the use of foreign legal sources in constitutional interpretation, both in his concurring opinion in Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain and in his keynote address at the Annual Meeting of the American Society of International Law. On the other hand, in his dissent in Olympic Airways v. Husain, Justice Scalia …

The Political Delinquent: Crime, Deviance, And Resistance In Black America, Trevor George Gardner

Scholarship@WashULaw

This Article is largely an argument that the pervasive sense of cultural resistance in the African American community must be considered by criminal theorists as, at least, a partial explanation of “criminality” within the African American community. Woven into the fabric of African American culture is a vital oppositional element. This element, spoken of in many circles as “oppositional culture” constitutes a bold and calculated rejection of destructive mainstream values that have perpetuated social inequalities and power imbalances. African American resistance culture is captured by novelist John Edgar Wideman in his account of his brother ’s criminal lifestyle and the …