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Tim Kaye, Rights Gone Wrong: The Failure of Fundamentalist Tort Theory, 78 Miss. L.J. 931 (2010)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
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Paul Boudreaux, Time Machine: Emma’s Legal Education, 59 J. Legal Educ. 454 (2010)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
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Ellen S. Podgor, Intangible Rights – A Déjà Vu, 63 Vand. L. Rev. En Banc 73 (2010)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
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Royal C. Gardner, International Environmental Law, 44 Int'l Law. 503 (2010)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
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Kirsten K. Davis, Extending the Vision: An Empowerment Identity Approach to Work-Family Regulation as Applied to School Involvement Leave Statutes, 16 Wm. & Mary J. Women & L. 613 (2010)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
Using school leave legislation as the focus for analysis, this article proposes 'empowerment identity' approach to work-family legislation as an alternative or complement to the commonly used accomodation and antidiscrimination approaches. In many households, working parents struggle to meet routine demands of parenting, such as caring for a sick child or attending a child's school activity. Interestingly, one of the most common forms of state-level legislation designed to address the routine demands of parenting is school involvement leave legislation. Although state school involvement leave statutes vary widely in how and for what reasons they permit time away from work for parents to attend a child's school functions, they represent the common view that the purpose of work-family legislation is to (1) accomodate episodic parenting needs when those needs interfere with work obligations or (2) prohibit discrimination by an employer when a worker-parent requires time away from work to attend to those caregiving needs.
After analyzing exisiting school involvement leave legislation and demonstrating that this legislation takes both accomodation and antidiscrimination approaches to regulating school involvement leave, this article suggests that an alternative approach to critiquing and crafting work-family legislation, particularly school involvement leave legislation, is the empowerment identity approach. An empowerment identity apprach, adapted from organizational communication theory, frames legislation as a discursive structure in which worker-parents should be empowered to construct individualized worker-parent identities through language related action. Accordingly, after explaining the empowerment identity approach, this article concludes that school involvement leave statutes, fall short of full empowerment but have the potential to empower parents to accomplish plural, individualized, and authentic identities as both worker-parents and as important stewards of their children's educations.
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Ellen S. Podgor, With Bases Loaded, Alito Hits a Home Run, 63 Vand. L. Rev. En Banc 73 (2010)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
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Grant Christensen, Creating Bright-Line Rules for Tribal Court Jurisdiction over Non-Indians: The Case of Trespass to Real Property, 35 American Indian Law Review 527 (2010)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
The 2010 passage of the Tribal Law and Order Act will invest significantly more resources in tribal courts. As tribal courts expand, conflicts between sovereignties – tribal, state, and federal – are likely to occur with much greater frequency. Tribal court civil jurisdiction over non-Indians will be among the issues most frequently appealed into federal courts. I offer this piece to propose a new and novel solution; that tribal courts be extended civil jurisdiction in a piecemeal process that vests absolute tribal court jurisdiction over non-Indians for those civil offenses over which tribes have the greatest interest. This article takes one of the most common jurisdictional questions, tribal court jurisdiction over non-Indians in cases of trespass to land, and argues that a bright-line rule favoring tribal court jurisdiction in this instance is legally mandated, will pragmatically conserve judicial resources, and recognizes the broad tribal sovereignty recently reaffirmed by Congress.
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Jaclyn Lopez, BP’s Well Evaded Environmental Review: Categorical Exclusion Policy Remains Unchanged, 37 Ecology Law Currents 93 (2010)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
Even before the BP oil spill, the federal agency responsible for regulating and monitoring oil and gas extraction, the Minerals Management Service, had come under attack for its regulation of oil and gas leasing and drilling in tax-payer owned public waters.' After a series of investigations, Congress found that the agency was plagued with moral misdeeds and conflicts of interest. Then newly appointed Secretary of the Department of the Interior, Ken Salazar, promised that as "the new sheriff in town" he would clean up the misguided agency and restore order. However, nothing really changed. There is much speculation that between the sex and drug parties and the much deeper relationship between the Louisiana oil industry and the regulatory agency, the MMS' management of oil and gas exploration and production in the Gulf of Mexico ranged from complacent to negligent. Despite the on again-off again moratorium, lawsuits, and international attention MMS' behavior has attracted, MMS has not yet revoked its policy of exempting drilling activities in the Gulf of Mexico from full environmental review. This Article examines the history of the policy of excluding drilling plans from environmental review in the Gulf of Mexico, explains how this contributed to the BP oil spill, and why the Obama administration must take immediate steps to revoke this policy.
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Jaclyn Lopez, Endocrine-Disrupting Chemical Pollution: Why the EPA Should Regulate These Chemicals Under the Clean Water Act, 10 Sustainable Development Law & Policy (2010)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences ("NIEHS") defines endocrine disruptors as "chemicals that may interfere with the body's endocrine system and produce adverse developmental, reproductive, neurological, and immune effects in both humans and wildlife." It notes that a wide variety of substances, including pharmaceuticals, dioxins, polychlorinated biphenyls ("PCBs"), dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane ("DDT") and other pesticides, and plasticizers such as bisphenol A (commonly known as "BpA") can cause endocrine disruption.
Endocrine disruptors, also known as endocrine-disrupting chemicals ("EDCs"), exist throughout our environment and work in a variety of nefarious ways. They can mimic naturally occurring hormones like estrogens and androgens, thereby causing overstimulation of the endocrine system. EDCs can bind to receptors within cells and block endogenous hormones from binding, causing interference with the production or control of natural hormones and their receptors. The latest scientific knowledge indicates that EDCs persist throughout the environment, including in our nation's waters, and are having profound effects on fish, wildlife, and humans.
Yet, the U.S. federal government has done very little to protect human health or the environment from these harms. A patchwork of regulatory mechanisms exist-through the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act; Safe Drinking Water Act; Toxic Substances Control Act; Resource Conservation and Recovery Act; Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act; and the Clean Water Act. However, as currently implemented, these mechanisms at best provide a regulatory net full of holes whereby EDCs enter and pervade our environment and have astonishing effects. Perhaps the most promising of all existing frameworks is the Clean Water Act ("Act"), which if implemented fully could both limit human exposure to waterborne EDC pollution, as well as protect aquatic environments and species from EDC harm.
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Royal C. Gardner and Theresa J. Pulley Radwan, Corporate Shell Games: LLPs, LLCs, and Responsibility for Mitigation Sites, 31 Nat'l Wetlands Newsletter 6 (2009)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
Determining who is legally responsible for a wetland mitigation site is not always a straight-forward process. A wetland regulator provided us a portion of a mitigation bank application that referred to a corporation and its officers, an LLP and two LLCs. This article explains what LLPs and LLCs are, and why many mitigation bank operators opt for these business forms. We then walk through the mitigation bank document itself to try to unravel which entity actually would be responsible for the mitigation bank site. The article concludes with recommendations that wetland regulators should consider when evaluating mitigation proposals involving LLPs and LLCs, whether affiliated with a mitigation bank or not. While there is no particular reason to be worried about LLPs and LLCs as compared to traditional corporations, regulators should consider requiring notice for any changes in the ownership and management of these entities. Regulators should also ensure that financial assurances such as letters of credit and performance bonds expressly cover the entity (whether LLP, LLC, or another form) responsible for the mitigation site.