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Chinese Eurasians: Mixed Families and Dependent Citizenship During the Era of Chinese Exclusion
No full texthttps://scholarship.law.bu.edu/clark_speakers/1083/thumbnail.jp
Distinguishing Households from Families
Get PDFThe study of the relationship between all families, whether marital or non-marital, and households, is underdeveloped, despite extensive study of the mismatch between family law, which is still focused on marriage and parenthood, and family practices. Often, in an effort to update the discourse, discussions of non-marital families seem to deploy households or living arrangements as a substitute classification in the place of the old marital family. This Article argues that we need to resist the tendency to substitute the idea of “household” when the boundaries of legal family fail us, because households are not necessarily familial, and because core familial ties exist across multiple households. Household membership is characterized by churn, both because of changes in intimate attachments and because of life cycle changes. This Article argues that housing design and housing policy should accommodate that churn in a way that minimizes disruption to individuals’ attachment to building, neighborhood, community, and family members living in separate households. It should offer options for stability that are economically realistic for people whose households will change. No single policy intervention can resolve the disruptions associated with fluctuating household membership. Rather, properly understanding the needs of families as distinct from households provides a lens for evaluating particular attributes of housing policy. Two housing principles in particular would better serve the needs of today’s households. First, housing policy should prioritize the family ties of non-householders to a household. As family members exit a housing unit, housing policy should seek to stabilize their ties with the household, particularly valuing proximity. Second, the design of the unit itself should reflect the inevitable expansion and contraction in household membership. This means that the unit would allow for proximity with privacy for linked households. This Article seeks to marry insights from the emerging literature on multi- generational household design, accessory dwelling units, and micro-units, with insights from the literature on the new normative family, in the hopes of producing an improved housing policy lens
Regulation of the Sharing Economy: Uber and Beyond
Get PDFOn January 8, 2016, the Section held a program entitled “Regulation of the Sharing Economy: Uber and Beyond.” I served as moderator of the program, which included four excellent speakers, Nicole Benincasa, Attorney for Uber Technologies, Inc., Bernard N. Block, Managing Principal, Alvin W. Block & Associates, Chicago, Illinois, Randy May, Founder and President, Free State Foundation (and long-time active member of the Section) and Peter Mazer, General Counsel to the Metropolitan Taxicab Board of Trade and former General Counsel to the New York City Taxicab Licensing Commission.
The program began by asking general questions about regulatory issues concerning the new “sharing economy” including vacation rental operations like Airbnb and ride-sharing companies like Uber and Lyft. It then focused on the regulatory environment surrounding ride-sharing and the economic and social effects that the development of ride-sharing companies like Uber have had. The panel and the audience engaged in a wide-ranging discussion of the regulatory challenges facing industry and government in the face of evolving technology and consumer behavior
Enforce Existing Laws to Combat Online Threats
No full textWhen it comes to threats of physical violence, there are applicable laws on the books. Under federal and state law, it is a crime to threaten bodily injury to another person, regardless of whether it is threatened over the internet
FDA\u27s Troubling Failures to Use Its Authority to Regulate Genetically Modified Foods
Get PDFThis Article concerns the particular regulatory responsibilities only of FDA. It sets to one side the possible regulatory authority of agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency ( EPA ) or the U.S. Department of Agriculture ( USDA ). This approach risks replicating the regulatory fracture introduced during the Reagan Administration and criticized by some scholars,15 but there is a great deal to say about current FDA practices. Out of similar considerations of space and focus, this Article also sets to one side many other important issues that surround GM foods: intellectual property rights; rights to free speech or commercial speech; fair trade practice law and unfair competition law; warranty law; and the panoply of state and federal consumer product safety and consumer protection statutes, among others.
We should also note at the outset one further limit of the scope of this article. Our aim is to show that FDA has construed its authority too narrowly. As we discuss below, this includes FDA\u27s understanding of its authority to prescribe the content of food labels. We do not propose a particular form that labels should take, including whether all GM foods should be labeled as such. Rather, our argument is that given the current state of FDA oversight and the importance of transparency to consumers, examination of the labeling issue is within FDA\u27s purview.
In what follows, we argue that FDA is misconstruing the limits of its regulatory authority over GM foods in three important ways. First, it has been too deferential in the scientific scrutiny required for pre-market approval of new GM crops. Second, it delineates risks in an unjustifiably constricted manner in construing the extent of its regulatory authority. Finally, and relatedly, it construes its authority to require labeling of GM foods too narrowly, thus potentially depriving consumers of the opportunity to make choices that may be important to them. We begin with FDA\u27s scientific scrutiny of GM crops
Reducing Wasteful Incarcerations
Get PDFPrisons are essential to a safe and civil society. Prisons are also costly for the taxpayers whose government houses, feeds, medicates, and supervises millions of people underlock and key.This expense is compounded by errors in the u.S. legal system that produces both false guilty verdicts and overly harsh penalties. It’stime forthe united States to take a closer look at these unnecessary incarcerations. By working to release prisoners who don’t belong in prison, we can lower the costs of the prison system—not to mention restore freedom to people who are wrongly being deprived of it. unfortunately, it is difficult to identify which prisoners are wrongly incarcerated, and itwould take an enormousinvestment of professional expertise and money to produce that information. However, we could make valuable progress on this issue by offering appropriate incentives for attorneys to identify some of these wasteful incarcerations, thus saving public money and and serving the ends of liberty
Mock Juror and Jury Assessments of Blinded Expert Witnesses
No full textExpert witnesses\u27 findings may be biased because of partisan affiliation with the client who has hired them and because of financial incentives to offer an opinion favorable to this party. Blinding expert witnesses to which party is requesting their opinion is one solution to this problem. Previous research has shown that using a blinded expert in a mock medical malpractice trial increases mock jurors\u27 assessment of the expert\u27s credibility and results in more juror votes favoring the party employing this expert. The studies in this chapter extend prior research by examining the effects of blinded experts on civil mock jury deliberations and criminal mock juror verdicts. We found that blinding of experts had very substantial effects on jury deliberations, causing blinded experts to be viewed as more credible. Nonetheless, other case facts and competing cultural values were also very salient during deliberations. In addition, we demonstrated that use of blinded experts increased the likelihood of a not guilty verdict for the defense in a criminal trial, but did not have a similar effect for the prosecution
“Government by Injunction,” Legal Elites, and the Making of the Modern Federal Courts
Get PDFThe tendency of legal discourse to obscure the processes by which social and political forces shape the law’s development is well known, but the field of federal courts in American constitutional law may provide a particularly clear example of this phenomenon. According to conventional accounts, Congress’s authority to regulate the lower federal courts’ “jurisdiction”—generally understood to include their power to issue injunctions— has been a durable feature of American constitutional law since the founding. By contrast, the story I tell in this essay is one of change. During the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, many jurists considered the federal courts’ power to issue and enforce equitable decrees to be an essential, constitutionally endowed dimension of the judicial function. Charting the demise of that theory over the first four decades of the twentieth century, this essay highlights the roles of social movements and, especially, of legal elites in forging and canonizing a new understanding of judicial power, and in normalizing debate over “who decides” as a routine dimension of ideologically divisive socio-legal disagreements in American political life
Divorce Lies and Litigation: Curbing Both with Evidentiary Hearings
No full textNo-fault divorce turned 40 in Massachusetts last year — 45, in its California birthplace — but two of the ills it sought to cure still linger in contested divorces: falsehoods and excess litigiousness
VAT Fraud Mutation, Part 3: Pull Missing Trader Fraud and Deutsche Bank
Get PDFCO2 MTIC fraud is an exceedingly fast moving, quickly mutating fraud. Litigation has moved rapidly from the UK to Germany. The litigation line stretches from Dosanjh’s £39m (€41,039,261) fraud in the first three months of 2009 to CITIBank’s £9,893,821 fraud in July 2009, and then jumps to Germany with Deutsche Bank’s €220,000,000 fraud from September 2009 through February 2010. This cross-border fraud has met cross-border enforcement. HMRC directly participated in German enforcement by identifying fraud chains in the UK that completed German carousels and funneled CO2 permits back to Germany after passing through the UK.
This part looks at the Deutsche Bank case. The zero-rating of CO2 permits (August 1, 2009) by the UK blocked CO2 fraud in the UK. In response Deutsche Bank reversed its plumbing. Instead of having permits flow out of the UK (producing extraordinary UK reclaims), permits now flowed into the UK from Germany (producing extraordinary German reclaims). The UK fraud moved to Germany.
The German CO2 landscape differed from that in the UK. Adapting to this difference solidified the MTIC mutation this paper examines. Two elements coalesce to solidify it: (a) there was neither a Dosanjh nor an SVS Securities in Germany ready to provide large volumes of underpriced CO2 to Deutsche Bank, and (b) the Deutsche Bank CO2 trading desk realized that it did not need to have dedicated suppliers of CO2 if it establish control over an underpriced CO2 marketplace. It could easily do this by setting a firm (below market) price for CO2 each morning, and making the price available to a limited number of preferred customers. In this way Deutsche Bank established economic control. An internal mastermind exercised it. The control is indirect, but it is no less effective than the control Dosanjh had