7184 research outputs found
Sort by
Vindicating Retirees
Full text linkThrough ERISA, Congress prioritized the competent management of retirement plans held in trust for Americans, codifying strict fiduciary obligations and providing broad relief to those injured by fiduciaries failing to execute those duties. Specifically, ERISA provides retirement plan participants and beneficiaries, along with plans themselves and the Secretary of Labor, an inherent, substantive right to seek plan-wide monetary and equitable redress for injuries resulting from fiduciary mismanagement. Today, retirement plans hold more than $10 trillion and constitute a substantial portion of the funds Americans will subsist on in retirement. Despite their vital import, particularly for women and members of minority communities, funds are not always well managed. The forum in which a breaching fiduciary is held accountable and the relief available often turn on an arbitration agreement, and the results of efforts to compel arbitration are inconsistent. These divergent outcomes starkly contrast with Congress’s intent to develop uniform results protecting plans, participants, and beneficiaries.
This Article contributes by evaluating whether plan participants who assert statutory fiduciary breach claims seeking plan-wide relief can be compelled to arbitration. By surveying the circuit split on this question and the bases for varying outcomes of such disputes, this Article also reveals that, despite scholarly consensus that the Supreme Court gutted the effective vindication doctrine, lower courts regularly apply the doctrine to these disputes. This Article further contributes by identifying pleading, contractual, strategic, and policy considerations affecting the outcomes of motions to compel arbitration of ERISA fiduciary breach claims. It concludes that substantive rights ERISA grants cannot be prospectively waived via an arbitration agreement. The Supreme Court should resolve the circuit split by reinvigorating and applying the effective vindication doctrine. Failing that, Congress should enact the Employee and Retiree Access to Justice Act
Introduction
Full text linkThis article provides an introduction to the Journal of Comparative Urban Law & Policy, the Study Space Program offered by Georgia State University College of Law, and the articles resulting from the Study Space Rio de Janeiro Program held in June 2024
Envisioning Atlanta: Critical Commentary on the City\u27s Efforts to Amend Its Comprehensive Development Plan
No full textIntegrating Healing Justice Into Worker Cooperative Counseling
No full textUnaddressed trauma among workers negatively impacts their experience in the workplace, including the cooperative workplace. While lawyers who counsel worker cooperatives may develop conflict resolution tools, they far less commonly provide resources for responding to worker trauma that can, and often does, lead to conflict in the first place. Trauma has become an increasingly pervasive topic in the post-COVID-19 workplace. However, the legal literature and practice inadequately address how attorneys advising worker cooperatives rooted in a solidarity economy can help clients productively respond to trauma. The healing justice framework offers one meaningful source for intervention, and its ties to anti-capitalist economic justice movements rooted in solidarity make worker cooperatives a reasonable space for experimentation. However, lawyers advising and developers incubating solidaristic worker cooperatives have underexplored the utility of healing justice in the formation process. As a result, countless worker cooperatives may have folded due to unnoticed member-owner trauma and the resulting conflict that arises from it. *882 This Article argues that lawyers advising worker cooperatives, specifically those rooted in the solidarity economy, can better support client sustainability by introducing clients and developers to resources and strategies inspired by the healing justice framework (1) pre-formation, (2) during entity formation, and (3) post-formation. Specifically, this Article describes the utility of lawyers exposing their clients and developers to (a) healing justice training; (b) membership trauma assessments; (c) governance and operational tools rooted in healing justice; and (d) healing justice practitioner databases as crucial interventions. These offerings do not require lawyers to take on a new skillset as healing justice practitioners but instead require lawyers to build networks and familiarity with healing justice theory, tools, and resources. The hope is that, with these tools in hand, worker cooperatives can better navigate the inevitable conflicts that will arise in building a new economy
Sex and Control in Redeemer Georgia
Full text linkThis Essay explores the interplay of history, law, and morality behind the first abortion law in Georgia. Examining the philosophical underpinnings of liberty and equality as articulated in Georgia’s constitutional history through time, this Essay highlights the moral contradictions inherent in the legal frameworks of Reconstruction Georgia. The origin of Georgia’s 1876 abortion law contains multitudes—rooted in race-based contestations for political power, the sociological evolution of medical practice, and evolving attitudes on individual rights. At times, White elites used abortion to attack Yankee culture and stir up racist fears about moral contagion associated with Radical Republicans. To this end, when read against political time, the campaign to regulate motherhood and criminalize reproductive choice was not simply grounded in morality claims about protecting fetal life—a significant theme in the mid-nineteenth century campaign against abortion nationally—but also about enforcing other race and sex crimes and controlling the freedperson labor force in an era of political uncertainty and constitutional upheaval. Abortion surfaced as a political issue in Georgia at a time and in a manner that makes it inextricably linked to the politics of Reconstruction and Redemption
Manufacturing False Convictions: Lies and the Corrupt Use of Jailhouse Informants
No full textThrough the combined efforts of the innocence bar, conviction integrity units, and an expanding cohort of multidisciplinary scholars, new data about the mechanisms underlying wrongful convictions is rapidly accumulating. Jailhouse informants--jail inmates who testify against fellow prisoners in exchange for charge and sentence reductions and other rewards--have long been identified as significant contributors to false convictions. The new data demonstrates with fresh clarity the extent to which reliance on incentivized jailhouse (and other) witnesses poses severe hazards to the integrity of the criminal legal system. Indeed, the new data reveals overwhelming evidence of the link between the use of jailhouse informants and patterns of corruption and misconduct. This Study draws on recent exoneration data, taken from the National Registry of Exonerations (“NRE”), consisting of cases in which innocent individuals were wrongfully convicted based, in whole or in part, on false testimony from jailhouse informants. This Study examines these cases to identify commonalities and patterns. Its primary finding, and one confirming prior research, is that there is a powerful link between law enforcement misconduct and the use of jailhouse informants and other incentivized witnesses. The Study also provides further insight into the specific pathways by which this misconduct tends to manifest, revealing how false jailhouse informant testimony is induced, generated, and *132 insulated from close inspection or challenge. Another important finding of the Study is a significant correlation between the incidence of false confessions and false testimony from jailhouse informants. This correlation helps to further build the profile of what likely wrongful convictions look like, and can be used by concerned prosecutors, judges, and innocence lawyers to help identify cases that call for closer scrutiny. It also provides the basis for reform measures to further limit the damage done to the truth-seeking process through the use of jailhouse informants and other incentivized witnesses
Public Utilities and Public Transportation - Generation and Distribution of Electricity
Full text linkThe Act establishes requirements for solar power facility agreements executed or renewed after July 1, 2024, including the grantee’s responsibility to decommission and remove solar power equipment upon lease termination. The Act specifies decommissioning procedures, allows for landowner requests, and requires the grantee to provide financial assurance for removal costs. It also prohibits local governments from imposing additional financial assurance requirement