Date of Publication:
Peter Lake, The Rights And Responsibilities Of The Modern University: The Rise Of The Facilitator University (2nd ed., Carolina Academic Press, 2013)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
Date of Publication:
Will Bunting et al., The War on Marijuana in Black and White, (2013)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
This report is the first to examine marijuana possession arrest rates by race for all 50 states (and the District of Columbia) and their respective counties from 2001 to 2010. The report relies on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program and the United States Census’ annual county population estimates to document arrest rates by race per 100,000 for marijuana possession. The report finds that between 2001 and 2010, there were over 8 million marijuana arrests in the United States, 88% of which were for possession. Marijuana arrests have increased between 2001 and 2010 and now account for over half (52%) of all drug arrests in the United States, and marijuana possession arrests account for nearly half (46%) of all drug arrests. In 2010, there was one marijuana arrest every 37 seconds, and states spent combined over $3.6 billion enforcing marijuana possession laws.
The report also finds that, on average, a Black person is 3.73 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than a white person, even though Blacks and whites use marijuana at similar rates. Such racial disparities in marijuana possession arrests exist in all regions of the country, in counties large and small, urban and rural, wealthy and poor, and with large and small Black populations. Indeed, in over 96% of counties with more than 30,000 people in which at least 2% of the residents are Black, Blacks are arrested at higher rates than whites for marijuana possession.
Date of Publication:
Lance Long and William F. Christensen, When Justices (Subconsciously) Attack: The Theory of Argumentative Threat and the Supreme, 91 Or. L. Rev. 933 (2013)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
This paper is the third and final article in a series that discusses research performed over the past four years regarding the effect of certain language usages in appellate briefs and opinions. The first two articles, "Does the Readability of Your Brief Affect Your Chance of Winning on Appeal?" and “Clearly Using Intensifiers is Very Bad — Or Is It?”, were published in the Journal of Appellate Practice & Process and The Idaho Law Review, respectively. This article (in the Oregon Law Review), proposes a theory of "argumentative threat" which hypothesizes that when faced with an argument that a legal writer believes — or knows — she is likely to lose, the writer will tend to write in a style that uses more intensifiers. There is also some evidence (not statistically significant) that longer sentences and longer words may be associated with a defensive style of writing. The article illustrates its point by using recent majority and dissenting opinions of the U.S. Supreme Court. The article also suggests that the “conservative” Justices use more intensifiers in their dissenting opinions than their “liberal” counterparts.
Date of Publication:
Peter Lake, Time for Tenure for SSAOs, NASPA's Leadership Exchange (2013)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
Date of Publication:
Joseph F. Morrissey, A Contractarian Critique of Citizens United, 15 U. Pa. J. Const. L. 765 (2013)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
In Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, a 5-4 majority overturned a congressional enactment limiting corporate electioneering. Decided in 2010, the Citizens United opinion has already been harshly criticized by a broad spectrum of people, ranging from President Obama to Ben & Jerry. A group of senators has even called for a constitutional amendment to undo the results of that decision.
In this article, I criticize the majority opinion in Citizens United for ignoring the prevailing contractarian view of a corporation. In so doing, the majority arrived at the false conclusion that corporations should be entitled to the constitutional protections of individual citizens. This article presents a new way of using the contractarian paradigm as a defense of corporation regulation.
Under the contractarian paradigm, corporations are understood as a nexus of contracts among the corporation’s constituents. The contractarians typically draw the normative conclusion that since parties freely enter into those contracts, parties should be at liberty to set whatever terms they like without government regulation.
My article argues for the opposite normative conclusion, that exactly because the contracts at stake are often not in fact bargained for freely or fairly, as the theoreticians argue, that there is need for government regulation to make sure that the contracting process and the resulting bargains are fair. I use contract law jurisprudence to show that defenses to contract enforcement ex post, can justify government regulation of corporations ex ante. Further, I develop this idea into a general analytical framework for assessing whether and when regulation of a corporation is both constitutional and prudential. I then illustrate how to use this paradigm by applying it to the Citizens United decision and to proposed regulatory responses to that decision.
This reconceived contractarian paradigm should empower both judicial and legislative bodies to appropriately regulate and even limit the activities of corporations. It is my hope that this article might encourage jurists and legislators to do just that.
Date of Publication:
Luz Estella Nagle, The IBA Global Financial Crisis Project Dublin Conference: The Presidential Priority Sessions, in Poverty, Justice, and the Rule of Law (2013)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.