Law and Society Commons^™

Health And Welfare Preempted: How National Meat Association V. Harris Undermines Federalism, Food Safety, And Animal Protection, Marya Torrez

Journal of Food Law & Policy

In 2008, the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) released an undercover video filmed at the Hallmark Meat Packing Company and Westland Meat Company (Hallmark/Westland) in Chino, California. "The footage depicted nonambulatory cows being kicked, dragged, electrocuted, jammed with forklifts and sprayed in the nostrils with water to simulate drowning - in an effort to get them to stand up and walk to their slaughter." At least five inspectors from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) - the federal agency tasked with ensuring that food safety and animal welfare guidelines are followed - were present at the time. The …

Corporate Sociability: Analysing Motivations For Collaborative Regulation, Mark Findlay

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The article explores the features and charts the principle theorizing of regulatory sociability from collaboration rather than intervention, whatever the interest-based motivation behind transforming crisis, toward orderliness. A key theme is the role played by corporations in facilitating and benefiting from sociability. A particular explanatory focus on the way in which corporate culture can change from predatory jurisdiction shopping to embracing mutuality of interests in the context of environmental sustainability is employed. The article concludes with a discussion of how, as compulsory discipline increases, it may produce compliance but at costs for regulatory sociability. The alternative regulatory paradigm is one …

The Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Divide, Christopher W. Schmidt

All Faculty Scholarship

Contemporary legal discourse differentiates “civil rights” from “civil liberties.” The former are generally understood as protections against discriminatory treatment, the latter as freedom from oppressive government authority. This Essay explains how this differentiation arose and considers its consequences.

Although there is a certain inherent logic to the civil rights-civil liberties divide, it in fact is the product of the unique circumstances of a particular moment in history. In the early years of the Cold War, liberal anticommunists sought to distinguish their incipient interest in the cause of racial equality from their belief that national security required limitations on the speech …

Drones, Henry H. Perritt Jr., Eliot O. Sprague

All Faculty Scholarship

Abstract

Drone technology is evolving rapidly. Microdrones—what the FAA calls “sUAS”—already on the market at the $1,000 level, have the capability to supplement manned helicopters in support of public safety operations, news reporting, and powerline and pipeline patrol, when manned helicopter support is infeasible, untimely, or unsafe.

Larger drones–"machodrones”–are not yet available outside battlefield and counterterrorism spaces. Approximating the size of manned helicopters, but without pilots, or with human pilots being optional, their design is still in its infancy as designers await greater clarity in the regulatory requirements that will drive airworthiness certification.

This article evaluates drone technology and design …

Debt-Buyer Lawsuits And Inaccurate Data, Peter A. Holland

Faculty Scholarship

Pursuant to secret purchase and sale agreements (also known as forward flow agreements), the accounts that banks sell to debt buyers are often sold “as is,” with explicit and emphatic disclaimers that the debts may not be owed, the amounts claimed may not be accurate, and documentation may be missing. Despite their full knowledge that the accuracy and completeness of the data has been specifically disclaimed by the bank, when they sue consumers, debt buyers tell courts that the information obtained from the bank is inherently reliable and accurate. In order to avoid a fraud on the courts, the contents …

Capital Rigidities, Latent Externalities, Shi-Ling Hsu

Scholarly Publications

Capital, one of two fundamental inputs to production, is critical to economic growth. As such, legal rules and institutions generally seek to create more of it, and they also seek to protect existing capital from policy changes. However, capital is often durable, and during its natural life, information may emerge pointing to negative externalities resulting from operation of that capital. Legal rules and institutions, in seeking to stimulate and sustain economic growth by promoting and protecting capital, thus tend to induce the creation of excess capital. This abundance of capital creates excess resistance to new regulation or policy reform, as …

The Origin Of Parental Rights: Labor, Intent, And Fathers, Dara E. Purvis

Florida State University Law Review

Most theories of parentage fail to explain the genesis of the right to parent—for example, why does a biological relationship generate parental rights? This Article shows that the law of parental rights mirrors theories of acquiring property, and that the law has shifted over time, from favoring a property right based in genetics to a Lockean theory of property rights earned through labor. The growth of Lockean labor-based theories is epitomized in reforms to parentage laws that incorporate functional theories of parenting, meaning that adults who perform caretaking work that creates a significant relationship with children are recognized as legal …

Men And Boys And The Ethical Demand For Social Justice, 20 Wash. & Lee J. Civil Rts. & Soc. Just. 507 (2014), Samuel Vincent Jones

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

This essay makes what some might consider a bold and novel assertion. Relying on fact-based analysis of present day social conditions, it argues that the female-oppression-male-culprit paradigm is antiquated and injurious to both men and women. It claims that existing conceptions of American society in which the vast majority of the nation's men and boys are victimless and empowered, and the core of the nation's women and girls are victims and disempowered, cannot be fundamentally or morally justified. It will demonstrate that today's regimented imperative for addressing gender discrimination and social injustice by allocating legal rights and entitlements exclusively to …

Retaining Color, Veronica Root

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

It is no secret that large law firms are struggling in their efforts to retain attorneys of color. This is despite two decades of aggressive tracking of demographic rates, mandates from clients to improve demographic diversity, and the implementation of a variety of diversity efforts within large law firms. In part, law firm retention efforts are stymied by the reality that elite, large law firms require some level of attrition to function properly under the predominant business model. This reality, however, does not explain why firms have so much difficulty retaining attorneys of color — in particular black and Hispanic …

A Cost-Benefit Analysis Of Sugary Drink Regulation In New York City, Shi-Ling Hsu

Scholarly Publications

No abstract provided.

Dissenting In And Dissenting Out, Nancy Leong

Chicago-Kent Law Review

The intense legal and social preoccupation with the appearance of diversity and nondiscrimination both reflects and reinforces a process I call “identity capitalism.” Through that process, ingroup individuals and ingroup-dominated institutions derive value from outgroup identity. This process results in the commodification of outgroup identity, with negative consequences for both outgroup members and society. Outgroup members actively participate in the process of identity capitalism in various ways. In particular, they leverage their outgroup membership to derive social and economic value for themselves. I call such outgroup participants “identity entrepreneurs.” In this essay, I apply the framework of identity entrepreneurship to …

Managing Systemic Risk In Legal Systems, J. B. Ruhl

Indiana Law Journal

The American legal system has proven remarkably robust even in the face of vast and often tumultuous political, social, economic, and technological change. Yet our system of law is not unlike other complex social, biological, and physical systems in exhibiting local fragility in the midst of its global robustness. Understanding how this “robust yet fragile” (RYF) dilemma operates in legal systems is important to the extent law is expected to assist in managing systemic risk—the risk of large local or even system-wide failures—in other social systems. Indeed, legal system failures have been blamed as partly responsible for disasters such as …

Globally Speaking - Honoring The Victims' Stories: Matsuda's Human Rights Praxis, Berta E. Hernández-Truyol

UF Law Faculty Publications

Globally speaking, international law and the vast majority of domestic legal systems strive to protect the right to freedom of expression. The United States’ First Amendment provides an early historical protection of speech—a safeguard now embraced around the world. The extent of this protection, however, varies among states.

The United States stands alone in excluding countervailing considerations of equality, dignitary, or privacy interests that would favor restrictions on speech. The gravamen of the argument supporting such American exceptionalism is that free expression is necessary in a democracy. Totalitarianism, the libertarian narrative goes, thrives on government control of information to the …

Remaking Mexico: Law Reform As Foreign Policy, Deborah M. Weissman

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Ideology, Qualifications, And Covert Senate Obstruction Of Federal Court Nominations, Ryan J. Owens, Daniel E. Walters, Ryan C. Black, Anthony Madonna

Faculty Scholarship

Scholars, policymakers, and journalists have bemoaned the emphasis on ideology over qualifications and party over performance in the judicial appointment process. Though, for years, the acrimony between the two parties and between the Senate and President remained limited to appointments to the United States Supreme Court, the modern era of judicial appointments has seen the so-called “appointments rigor mortis” spread throughout all levels of judicial appointments. A host of studies have examined the causes and consequences of the growing acrimony and obstruction of lower federal court appointments, but few rely on archival data and empirical evidence to examine the underlying …

Diverging Destinies Redux, Amy L. Wax

Michigan Law Review

My recent “where to live” conversation with a newly hired colleague yielded an unsurprising list of “possibles”: selected blocks of Mount Airy and Germantown, plus the Main Line towns of Bryn Mawr, Ardmore, Haverford, Villanova, Gladwyne, and so forth. Despite my colleague’s professed open mind about potential neighborhoods, Jenkintown — my own somewhat obscure and distinctly unfashionable (but much more affordable) suburb — drew a blank stare, as did a dozen other solidly middleclass areas I mentioned. By my calculation, there are over 400 zip codes within a thirty-mile radius of Rittenhouse Square, which is in the center of downtown …

Law Reform For Dummies (3rd Edition), Roderick A. Macdonald

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

Legal pluralist law reform engages citizens in dialogue through which they gain richer insight into their normative lives and learn to manage everyday interactions with each other. Noting that first- and second-generation law reform commissions have been critiqued for their narrow vision and goal of modifying individual legal rules, this article shifts the focus to the general public as a key player in the enterprise. This is how law reform responds to public concerns and engages the public’s assumptions about the reform process. The true ambition of law reform is to find opportunities for Canadians to examine their assumptions about …

What Is Access To Justice?, Trevor C. W. Farrow

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

Access to justice is the most pressing justice issue today. It has become the major focus of essentially all stakeholders in the legal community—governments, regulators, bar associations, researchers, and educators. It now needs to become an increasing topic of attention for those who use the system: the public. With all of this attention, what does the phrase “access to justice” really mean, particularly from the perspective of the public? In addition to reviewing the access to justice literature and policy initiatives, this article develops a public centered understanding of access to justice. It does so primarily by reporting on a …

Brief For Professors At Unm School Of Law As Amicus Curiae, Fry V. Lopez, George Bach

Faculty Scholarship

Argument:

This Court should reject the application of the death sentence to Robert Fry and Tim Allen for statutory and constitutional reasons. First, H.B. 285, 49th Leg., 1st Sess. (N.M. 2009) repealed the statutory authority governing execution of the death sentence. Without statutory authority, the Corrections Department cannot act. In addition, in light of the repeal of the death sentence in New Mexico, the application of the death sentence to Mr. Fry and Mr. Allen would violate the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause and the Equal Protection Clause of the New Mexico Constitution. An alternative basis for precluding the use …

Of Secrecy And Punishment, Lauren Sudeall Lucas

Faculty Publications By Year

No abstract provided.