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Royal C. Gardner, Mitigation Enforcement, Breach of Contract, and the Law of Unintended Consequences, 37 Nat'l Wetlands Newsletter 11– (2015)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
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Susan D. Rozelle, How to Eat the Elephant in the Legal Academy, 31 Columbia Journal of Gender and the Law 44 (2015)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
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Rebecca C. Morgan, An Essay on Reform: Guardianship in the United States, Festschrift in Honor of Dr. Mokoto Arai (2015)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
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Grant Christensen, Selling Stories or You Can’t Own This: Cultural Property as a Form of Collateral in a Second Transaction under the Model Tribal Secured Transactions Act, 80 Brook. L. Rev. 1219 (2015)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
The Model Tribal Secured Transactions Act was recently proposed by the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws. This article takes the position that the model act, if adopted, will encourage economic development in Indian Country by creating a set of uniform rules which both non-Indians and Indians can utilize to promote lending. Critically – before it is widely adopted, this article implores the NCCUSL to consider including in the model act – language that would protect tribal cultural property; and in the absence of such language, encourages tribes to modify the act to accomplish this protection. The stakes include the potential loss of priceless real and personal, tangible and intangible, cultural property which itself form the linchpin of both tribal identity and cultural expression for many indigenous communities in the United States and beyond.
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Brooke J. Bowman, Editor’s Note, 20 Legal Writing iii (2015)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
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Klara Van der Ploeg, State Immunity in Jurisprudence of Czech Courts, 5 Czech Yearbook of Public & Private International Law 421 (2014)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
This paper discusses the understanding and application of the doctrine of State immunity in the courts of the Czech Republic. In 2008, the Czech Supreme Court reversed its previous conceptualization of State immunity as absolute and introduced a restrictive approach. In doing so, the Court formulated the concept of so-called "functional State immunity", which comparatively sets Czech practice apart from the practice of other States, and could therefore constitute the very contribution of Czech courts to the development of the contemporary doctrine of State immunity in international law. The paper analyzes this concept and the Czech approach more generally through a comparison with other jurisdictions, as well as with jurisprudence of international courts and relevant international instruments. On balance, the Czech State immunity regime is still largely underdeveloped, and many issues remain open for judicial elaboration in future cases.
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Robyn Powell, From the Delivery Room to the Courtroom: Ensuring the Rights of Parents with Disabilities, Health Law Reporter (2014)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
This article, an adaption of the Rocking the Cradle report, provides readers with an understanding of this largely overlooked civil rights issue inherent in the discrimination faced by parents with disabilities, focusing on the legal and policy considerations. The first section provides a historical context on the parenting rights of people with disabilities. The following sections examine the four key areas wherein parents and prospective parents with disabilities face discrimination: child welfare, family law, adoption, and assisted reproductive technologies. Finally, the article concludes with a discussion on what Massachusetts is doing to remedy this unjust phenomenon and provides a call to action to Massachusetts advocates and policymakers.
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Dagmar Rita Myslinska, Racist Racism: Complicating Whiteness Through the Privilege & Discrimination of Westerners in Japan, 83 UMKC Law Review 1 (2014)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
With no anti-discrimination legislation, strong Confucian-inspired in-group mentality, and a belief in their mono-ethnicity, Japan is marred by a culture of widespread discrimination. Although it has ratified the International Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, and guarantees equality in its Constitution, all those who differ from the closely-circumscribed norm are excluded culturally, and legally. Whites’ position in this milieu is complicated because of the West’s unique historical relationship with Japan, and due to the perception of white global dominance. Although admired and arguably privileged over other outsiders, Caucasians are nevertheless mocked and discriminated against - openly, frequently, and with impunity. The concept of racism, as funneled through critical race theory’s (“CRT”) reliance on homogeneous white privilege, lacks dialectic space to address their experiences of discrimination. Yet both CRT analytical tools and desire for praxis, and Confucian respect for human dignity have much to offer in expanding discrimination discourse, exposing the concept of racism as Western-centric, supporting equality, and giving voice to victims who do not fit the victim norm. In the process, this enlarged theoretical and analytical space can help alleviate Japan’s labor shortage, prompting multi-faceted reforms, and achieving true Confucian harmony and democracy. I propose to create new discourse, situated within expanded CRT and whiteness studies, while providing analytical coverage to a group of Caucasians rarely mentioned in popular or scholarly literature. Definitions of “the other” and “white privilege” need to move away from monolithic notions of race and power, which are white-centric and racist themselves.
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Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, The Democracy We Left Behind in Greece and McCutcheon, 89 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 112 (2014)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
The U.S. Supreme Court used to regularly police the line between political and economic spheres and the line between Church and State. The Court in 2014 abandoned both posts. As evidenced by McCutcheon v. FEC, the Supreme Court is not protecting democracy from creeping oligarchy served up one campaign contribution at a time. As evidenced by Town of Greece v. Galloway, the Supreme Court is not protecting democracy from creeping theocracy served up one public prayer at a time. In both areas of First Amendment law (Free Speech and Establishment Clause), the Court feigns neutrality when it is really picking sides and the side that the Court picks is the one that already has the most power. This short essay will explore how the modern Court’s Establishment Clause jurisprudence parallels its campaign finance jurisprudence and how both have the potential to create a privileged class and a second class.
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Ciara Torres-Spelliscy et al., Running the D.C. Circuit Gauntlet on Cost-Benefit Analysis after Citizens United: Empirical Evidence from Sarbanes-Oxley and the JOBS Act, 9 Duke J. Const. L. & Pub. Pol'y 135 (2014)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
To require disclosure or not to require disclosure; that is the question faced by regulators, including the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), in light of the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which allows anew free flow of corporate money into the political system.
Pending before the SEC since 2011 is a petition by 10 law professors asking for transparency of corporate political spending. We write this article in anticipation of the SEC’s eventual promulgation of rules requiring disclosure of corporate political spending. Many of the core questions about the market’s reaction to increased regulation of listed companies that we can study now are likely to be implicated in the debate about regulation within the narrower subset of corporate political spending.
Corporations who do not want to disclose their political spending are likely to challenge any rule that the SEC issues on the subject. Such a legal challenge is destined to be heard by the D.C. Circuit Court, which examines federal regulations with an increasingly jaundiced eye. One of the ground on which the D.C. Circuit can dispose of a new regulation is by finding that the SEC did not do a sufficiently rigorous cost-benefit analysis.
This article addresses the potential hostility that the D.C. Circuit may harbor against a new SEC rule requiring greater corporate transparency in election activities and provides some data that might assist the SEC in navigating this gauntlet.
In summary, our data showed that the market reacted positively to the new regulations in SOX and reacted negatively to the deregulations embodied in the JOBS Act. In short, and as discussed more fully below, the data demonstrate that the market values transparency and distrusts opaqueness. We hope that the D.C. Circuit will find these data useful in illuminating the larger debate over what securities regulations are allowable.