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Pressing Charges: Crook County: Racism and Injustice in America’s Largest Criminal Court
No full textThere is a prosecutor in Manhattan Criminal Court who wears a Black Lives Matter button on the job. One day, a group of public defenders, myself included, found him alone in a courtroom where only quality of life offenses are heard, authorizing plea bargains more lenient than the standard recommendations of the New York County District Attorney’s office: reducing fines, reducing community service, even avoiding convictions. The button seemed a puzzling appropriation for a prosecutor. At the height of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2015, after all, public defenders had worn the same pins in court only to face hostile looks and defensive questioning from court and police officers.
Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve would probably roll her eyes at this surprise, arguing that public defenders scarcely have higher moral standing than prosecutors. In her new book Crook County: Racism and Injustice in America’s Largest Criminal Court, Van Cleve examines the criminal courts in Chicago’s Cook County. She finds that all lawyers working in the criminal courts are complicit in the propagation of America’s caste system. Crook County exposes how the gritty daily rhythms of the criminal process methodically put people through the mill of mass incarceration and reproduce twenty-first-century racism
The Poverty of Privacy Rights
No full textThe Poverty of Privacy Rights makes a simple, controversial argument: Poor mothers in America have been deprived of the right to privacy. The U.S. Constitution is supposed to bestow rights equally. Yet the poor are subject to invasions of privacy that can be perceived as gross demonstrations of governmental power without limits. Courts have routinely upheld the constitutionality of privacy invasions on the poor, and legal scholars typically understand marginalized populations to have weak versions of the privacy rights everyone else enjoys. Khiara M. Bridges investigates poor mothers\u27 experiences with the state―both when they receive public assistance and when they do not. Presenting a holistic view of just how the state intervenes in all facets of poor mothers\u27 privacy, Bridges shows how the Constitution has not been interpreted to bestow these women with family, informational, and reproductive privacy rights. Bridges seeks to turn popular thinking on its head: Poor mothers\u27 lack of privacy is not a function of their reliance on government assistance―rather it is a function of their not bearing any privacy rights in the first place. Until we disrupt the cultural narratives that equate poverty with immorality, poor mothers will continue to be denied this right.https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/books/1006/thumbnail.jp
Extending the Normativity of the Extended Family: Reflections on Moore v. City of East Cleveland
Get PDFPart I of this Article briefly recounts the plurality decision in Moore before analyzing Justice Brennan’s concurring opinion and detailing how the concurrence affirms, rather than deconstructs, the notion of African American deviance in families. Next, Part II specifies the ways in which Justice Brennan could have truly uplifted African American families and other families of color by identifying and explicating the strengths of extended or multigenerational family forms among people of color and by showing how such family forms can be a model, or even the model (if one must be chosen), for all families. Then, Part III concludes by enumerating how Justice Brennan missed a key opportunity to explore and expose the intricacies and complications of both race and racial discrimination when he chose not to address the intraracial dynamics involved in the case. After all, the City of East Cleveland that targeted and prosecuted Inez Moore, the African American plaintiff in the case, was a majority-African-American city with an African American City Manager and African American City Commission. Such an exploration of the case’s intraracial undercurrents not only could have disrupted societal understandings of the nuclear family as the normative ideal but also would have laid bare the pressures that African Americans have faced, both in history and at that time, to conform to the nuclear family structure. Further, it would have revealed the internalization of myths about African American familial deviance by the black middle class in East Cleveland and would have shown the damaging consequences of such pressures and internalization
Anti-bullying Policies and Disparities in Bullying: A State-Level Analysis
Get PDFRecent research suggests that anti-bullying laws may be effective in reducing risk of bullying victimization among youth, but no research has determined whether these laws are also effective in reducing disparities in bullying. The aim of this paper was to evaluate the effectiveness of anti-bullying legislation in reducing disparities in sex- and weight-based bullying and cyberbullying victimization
Tallinn, Hacking, and Customary International Law
Get PDFTallinn 2.0 grapples with the application of general international law principles through various hypothetical fact patterns addressed by its experts. In doing so, its commentary sections provide a nonbinding framework for thinking about sovereignty, raising important considerations for states as they begin to articulate norms to resolve the question of precisely what kinds of nonconsensual cyber activities violate well-established international laws — a question that will likely be the focus of international lawyers in this area for some time to come. This essay focuses on one area of state practice where states are already dealing with these issues: the use of hacking techniques by law enforcement agencies to collect evidence stored on foreign-located computers whose location is unknown at the time of the search. It shows how the resulting cross-border cyber-exfiltration operations are in tension with international legal norms, and face a greater risk of public exposure than those conducted by military or intelligence agencies. It then argues that, for the United States, these potential drawbacks may present an opportunity, by providing a specific context for the articulation of norms in cyberspace
Comment on Error and Regulatory Risk in Financial Institution Regulation
Get PDFI agree with just about everything Jonathan Macey (2017) says in his symposium contribution. His claim that bureaucratic tendencies toward regularity—specifically, treating like cases alike—generate errors in categorization seems appropriate to me. His explanations of the pathologies in financial regulation should fall in the category of essential or required reading for anyone who chooses to write on the topic. Where I differ from Macey is in the choice of framework, or perspective from which to view the pathologies. Whereas Macey adopts an “error cost” framework, which is clearly appropriate for this symposium, I would build explicitly on a “public choice” framework
Do Economic Conditions Drive DIP Lending?: Evidence from the Financial Crisis
Get PDFWhen contemplating Chapter 11, the first step for many firms is to seek financing for their continuing operations in bankruptcy. Because such financing would otherwise be hard to find, the Bankruptcy Code authorizes debtors to offer sweeteners to debtor-in-possession (DIP) lenders. These inducements can be highly effective in attracting financing. But because these sweeteners are thought to come at the expense of other stakeholders, the Code permits these inducements only if the judge determines that no less generous a package would have been sufficient to obtain the loan.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that the use of certain controversial inducements—I focus on roll-ups and milestones—skyrocketed in recent years, leading critics to question whether DIP lenders were abusing their power. DIP lenders, however, respond that DIP loan terms simply reflect economic conditions: When credit is tight, as it was in recent years because of the Financial Crisis, more sweeteners are needed to induce lending.
In this Article, I examine the relationship between economic conditions and DIP loan terms. Using a hand-collected dataset reflecting contractual detail in DIP loans, I study changes in DIP terms during the Crisis. As one might expect, I find that ordinary loan provisions like pricing and reporting covenants are sensitive to economic conditions. By contrast, I also find that so-called “extraordinary provisions,” often justified as necessary to induce DIP lending, have no statistically meaningful relationship with economic conditions. These findings have important implications for bankruptcy policymakers and judges struggling to evaluate whether the sweeteners extracted by DIP lenders are really necessary to induce lending
Federal Taxation of Corporations and Corporate Transactions
No full textFederal Taxation of Corporations and Corporate Transactions by Bradley Borden and Steven Dean provides a comprehensive examination of tax principles with a unique practice-oriented approach to help students become practice ready with skills that they have developed in a setting that reflects practice in the real world.
The casebook introduces students not only to transactional tax practice and the federal tax penalty regime, but also to the rules of professional ethics and the specific rules that govern professionals who practice tax law. It features an array of Deal Downloads that breathe life into complex material, presenting high profile transactions involving Amazon, Apple, Ford and others.
This first edition will have a separately sold Client File supplement, which provides memoranda that require students to analyze the Deal Download transactions and to employ them as precedents to structure acquisitions, investments, and distributions for a hypothetical client.
Key Features: Client files that are designed to help students learn the law in a practice-like setting. Extensive commentary about tax principles and cites to statutes, cases, regulations, and rulings that the students must study to fully learn the material. Chapter 9, where students will learn about the transaction that heralded the return of Steve Jobs to Apple in the 1990s and paved the way for the company’s subsequent dominant run. An examination of issues posed by classic cases, by focusing on the language of the underlying deal documents, and by learning how to solve clients’ problems before they are set in stone. A teachers’ manual that will guide professors through the Client File problems and the materials students will use to provide answers to their hypothetical client.https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/books/1352/thumbnail.jp
Citizen Scientists, Data Transparency, and the Mining Industry
Get PDFWhat happens when a community feels that the standards imposed by state and federal laws are insufficient to protect its health and environment? Or when the responsible government agencies lack the funding, competency, or political will for full enforcement of the law? One of the greatest hurdles facing citizen environmental advocates in these situations is a lack of access to environmental monitoring data. All routes available for policing industry—whether it be rallying community support for protest, petitioning a government agency for enforcement action, or bringing a citizen suit—require, as a first step, an understanding of whether and what pollution has been released. This article looks at a few examples of how citizen organizing, combined with changes in technology, have successfully empowered communities to take environmental monitoring and enforcement of the mining industry into their own hands