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Kirsten K. Davis, The Jr. Faculty Forum: A Venue for Emerging Scholarship, AALS New Law Professors Section Newsletter (2007)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
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Judith A.M. Scully, Seeing Color, Seeing Whiteness, Making Change: One Woman’s Journey in Teaching Race and American Law, 39 U. Tol. L. Rev. 59 (2007)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
In this article Judith Scully, a law professor, who identifies as a member of the Caribbean and African Diaspora , shares her personal and academic perspective of the experience and challenges faced in teaching Race, Racism, and American Law in a predominantly white institution. The article describes the emotional challenges of teaching this course and suggests ways to help students deconstruct their own belief/value systems. It also provides key ingredients needed in teaching this course such as empathic listening, allowing students to set the ground rules for dialogue and it includes a description of a typical first class meeting and how ground rules set the stage for an honest dialogue on race and American jurisprudence. Central to this discussion about race and American law are the legal history of the doctrine of colorblindness as established in Plessy v. Ferguson, and the concept of “white privilege” which is necessary for white students to understand when they are attempting to examine their own racial identity. This article includes a discussion of how white privilege is confounded by poverty and how the students often prefer to analyze the effect of poverty on one’s identity rather than have to wrestle with the impact that race has on one’s privilege and access to power. The article concludes that teaching a course such as this is a welcome challenge and is essential to raising race consciousness, to building sensitivity to the role of law in redressing and enforcing racial inequalities, and to examining the essential role of lawyers in both the justice system and community action initiatives.
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Rebecca C. Morgan, The Uniform Guardianship and Protective Proceedings Act of 1997 – Ten Years of Developments, 37 Stetson L. Rev. 1 (2007)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
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Kirsten K. Davis, Commenting and Conversation, 22 Second Draft 14 (2007)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
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Paul Boudreaux, A New Clean Water Act, 37 Envtl. L. Reporter News and Analysis 10171 (2007)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
The Supreme Court’s new federalism has struck its strongest blows so far on the Clean Water Act. In 2007, a sharply divided Court nearly struck down a large chunk of the Act’s protection of wetlands and other small waterways – five years after an earlier decision had narrowed the reach of the Act because of its supposed overreaching into state prerogative. Why has the Clean Water Act been the Court’s favorite target? One reason is that the statute was fatally flawed when enacted. Congress chose to cover "navigable waters," but its practical definition has never been clear. The result is a statutory and jurisprudential mess, with lessons that extend across issues of constitutional law, statutory construction, and, of course, federalism. This article proposes to jettison the Act’s reliance on the misguided term "navigable waters." Instead, the statute should directly regulate activities that substantially affect interstate commerce, such as fisheries, migratory birds, floods, and agriculture. An Act whose limits are tied to the law of the commerce power would be shielded from the federalist ax.
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Rebecca C. Morgan, Elder Law in the United States: The Intersection of The Practice and Demographics, 2 J. Int'l Aging L. & Pol'y 103 (2007)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
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Susan D. Rozelle, Daubert, Schmaubert: Criminal Defendants and the Short End of the Science Stick, 43 Tulsa L. Rev. 597 (2007)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
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Susan D. Rozelle, Fear and Loathing in Insanity Law: Explaining the Otherwise Inexplicable Clark v. Arizona, 58 Case W. Res. L. Rev. 39 (2007)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
Eric Clark believed he was battling space aliens when he shot and killed Officer Jeffrey Moritz. Charged under a first-degree murder statute that requires knowledge the victim is a police officer, Clark should have been not guilty two ways: first, by reason of insanity, and second, because he did not satisfy the mens rea requirement. Instead, he was found guilty, and the United States Supreme Court's decision upholding this result tortured insanity law jurisprudence. The only plausible explanation for the Court's decision lies in society's emotional reaction to mental illness. Fear and loathing have displaced not only care and compassion, but even logic.
This article first describes and then unpacks the irrationality of the Court's reasoning in Clark. The Court's inexplicable decisions - finding no semiotic truncation of Arizona's insanity statute, and upholding its refusal to admit evidence of mental illness on the question of mens rea - can be explained only by reference to our unconscious selves. The mentally ill frighten us, and when we are frightened, we do not think clearly. But the decisions in Clark serve only to stigmatize and marginalize even further a group that needs our help as well as our compassion. We must reexamine the criminal law's insanity jurisprudence. Our unconscious animus toward the mentally ill ill-serves them, and ill-becomes us.
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Mark D. Bauer, Give the Lady What She Wants-As Long as It’s Macy’s, 80 Temp. L. Rev. 949 (2007)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
In 2005, Federated Department Stores, which does business as Macy's and Bloomingdales, acquired May Company Department Stores for $17 billion. Federal antitrust regulators took no action against this merger and in fact released an unprecedented statement explaining the decision to permit the merger.
State antitrust regulators demanded that Federated sell approximately 20% of the former May stores, including branches of L.S. Ayres, Marshall Field, Lord & Taylor, Filenes, Hecht and Strawbridge & Clothier. In the fall of 2006, Federated sold the remaining Lord & Taylor stores to a private investment group. Substantially all of the stores remaining with Federated were converted to the Macy's nameplate; a few were converted to Bloomingdales.
The Federal Trade Commission's (FTC) decision that this merger did not substantially lessen competition under the Clayton Act raises important questions.
First, the FTC suggested there was no antitrust product market comprised of conventional department stores, or middle-market department stores. Numerous retail studies, the department stores' own market studies and the common sense experience of most consumers suggest otherwise.
Second, FTC's unusual public statement listed reasons that the merger would not substantially lessen competition. Many of these reasons do not stand up to closer scrutiny.
Third, through an empirical study created for this article that compares prices before and after the merger, Federated appears to have significantly raised prices throughout the United States.
For these reasons, it is likely that the Federated/May merger did in fact substantially lessen competition in the conventional department store market.
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Roy Balleste, Hypothetical Case Study: Creating AI Assistants in the Law Library, 26 Legal Ref. Serv. Q. 47 (2007)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.