Category: Past Issues

By Spencer Shockness. From air fryers and Apple watches to Ziploc bags and zero-gravity chairs, consumers can purchase everything on Amazon.com—as famously indicated by Amazon’s A-to-Z logo. The “online-everything store” accounts for roughly 37–49% of all online commerce in the United States. This suggests an immense number of consumers interact with Amazon.com for various purchasing needs on a daily basis. One unique aspect of Amazon’s operations is that it only manufactures a minority of the products sold on its website. Products manufactured by third parties make up 58% of sales on Amazon.com. So if consumers purchase products from Amazon.com that a third party manufactured, who is responsible if the product is defective? The obvious answer is the manufacturer because it placed the product in the marketplace. However, an individual consumer may…

By Claire Newfeld. Since their founding, the United States, Canadian, and other governments have purported to act as the “protectors” of Indigenous peoples. While modern federal Indian policy favors self-determination and the preservation of Native culture and land, the vast majority of pre-1960s “protective” policies interpreted the Native way of life as inferior and savage, aiming to forcibly assimilate Native communities into white American society. In a cruel example of this policy, these governments implemented a comprehensive “re-education” effort throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that forcibly removed Indigenous children from their tribal homes and placed them in boarding schools to become “Americanized." In the summer of 2021, North America was forced to reckon with the cruelty and inhumanity of these efforts when at least 1,308 suspected graves containing Indigenous children were…

By Dr. Mark Leinauer. Psychologists have long known that gay male sexuality elicits feelings of disgust in a sizeable portion of the general population, and that individuals highly sensitive to disgust tend to evaluate gay males more harshly than individuals lowly sensitive to disgust. But while prior experimental studies have shown that this bias impacts support for LGBTQ+ related policies in the political arena, its impact on judicial decision making has not been fully explored. I focus on the judicial evaluation of gay male fathers during custody disputes, and I conduct a randomized controlled experiment, an observational case law analysis and semi-structured interviews to examine the issue. I conclude that disgust bias significantly threatens the parental rights of gay male fathers during custody adjudications. Specifically, I argue that judges highly sensitivity…

By Mugambi Jouet. Gun violence in modern America persists in the face of irreconcilable views on gun control and the right to bear arms. Yet one area of agreement between Democrats and Republicans has received insufficient attention: punitiveness as a means of gun control. The United States has gravitated toward a peculiar social model combining extremely loose regulations on guns and extremely harsh penalties on gun crime. If someone possesses a gun illegally or carries one when committing another crime, such as burglary or drug dealing, draconian mandatory minimums can apply. These circumstances exemplify root causes of mass incarceration: overreliance on prisons in reaction to social problems and unforgiving punishments for those labeled as “violent” criminals. Contrary to widespread misconceptions, mass incarceration does not primarily stem from locking up petty, nonviolent…

By Adam Crepelle & Thomas Stratmann. In 2013, Congress reaffirmed tribes’ inherent authority to prosecute all persons who commit dating violence, domestic violence, or violate a protective order against Indian women on tribal land in the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act (VAWA). Congress required tribes to comply with strict procedural safeguards to implement VAWA. Although VAWA was not designed to stimulate tribal economies, its due process provisions may be considered judicial improvements. Stronger judiciaries have been consistently linked to greater economic performance. Accordingly, we test whether implementing VAWA improved tribal economies. This analysis compares the income growth of VAWA-implementing tribes in Arizona to neighboring non-implementing tribes. Our findings show that incomes grew faster for VAWA-implementing tribes than for non-implementing tribes in Arizona. Full Article.

By Madison Condon. A growing number of investors, insurers, financial services providers, and nonprofits rely on information about localized physical climate risks, like floods, hurricanes, and wildfires. The outcomes of these risk projections have significant consequences in the economy, including allocating investment capital, impacting housing prices and demographic shifts, and prioritizing adaptation infrastructure projects. The climate risk information available to individual citizens and municipalities, however, is limited and expensive to access. Further, many providers of climate services use black box models that make overseeing the scientific rigor of their methodologies impossible— a concern given scientific critiques that many may be obfuscating the uncertainty in their projections. Municipalities that want to challenge insurance and bond rating determinations must rally significant resources for modeling and data, a scattershot policing method at best. And…

By Or Cohen-Sasson & Ofer Tur-Sinai. In recent years, the scientific community has faced a considerable problem—the replication crisis. Replication is the process of verifying scientific findings by repeating a published study. It is considered a cornerstone of the scientific enterprise, contributing to the credibility of research findings. Over the past two decades, however, replication has become increasingly difficult; in fact, in some disciplines the nonreplicability rate is over 50%. A major factor accounting for this is diminished access to research materials required for replication (replication materials). This problem is particularly acute in computational studies, where the code, software documentation, datasets, and other information are often not shared. In this Article, we address the replication crisis from the perspective of intellectual property (IP) law . . . Full Article.

By Gilat Juli Bachar. Are tort victims ever obligated to disclose the wrongdoing they suffered? This unanswered question demands our prompt attention given two recent trends: the prevalence of non-disclosure agreements concealing injustices such as sexual wrongdoing and police misconduct; and a new wave of sunshine-in-litigation laws attempting to curb confidentiality in at least a dozen states, from Tennessee to California. Such laws have sought to prioritize the public interest in information regarding certain harmful behavior over the interests of individual litigants. But, to date, scholars and policymakers have failed to identify one of the key justifications for curtailing the widespread practice of confidentiality in tort settlements. This Article is the first to fill this crucial gap, conceptualizing and delineating a disclosure duty owed by tort victims to others . .…

By Andrew D. Appleby & Tomer S. Stein. The binary legislative choice between state and federal regulation of a firm’s internal affairs is deeply entrenched in the existing literature and policy discussions. Alas, this regulatory menu contains a false and distortive dichotomy. The state-federal dichotomy is false because multistate formation and regulation of business entities are possible as well. This dichotomy is distortive because it deprives policymakers of the advantages of multistate corporations and other business entities. In this Article, we demonstrate that a multistate business entities regime can resolve multiple predicaments that presently bring about unfairness and inefficiencies in both business entities law and business entities taxation . . . Full Article.

By Sandra B. Zellmer & Robert L. Glicksman. We have been here before. In 1964, Congress proclaimed that “the public land laws of the United States . . . may be inadequate to meet the current and future needs of the American people.” To address those inadequacies, Congress established a Public Land Law Review Commission to study existing statutes, regulations, policies, and practices concerning management and use of the public lands, compile data necessary to determine future demands on the public lands, and recommend modifications that would best serve the policy of managing the public lands in ways that provide “the maximum benefit for the general public.”The Commission issued its iconic report to the President and Congress— One Third of the Nation’s Land—in 1970. On the first page of its report,…