University of Arkansas at Little Rock
University of Arkansas at Little Rock: UALR Bowen Law RepositoryNot a member yet
1877 research outputs found
Sort by
Binding Authority: Unamendability in the United States Constitution–A Textual and Historical Analysis
Get PDFWe think of constitutional provisions as having contingent permanence—they are effective today and, barring amendment, tomorrow and the day after and so on until superseded by amendment. Once superseded, a provision is void. But are there exceptions to this default state of contingent permanence? Are there any provisions in the current United States Constitution that cannot be superseded by amendment—that are unamendable? And could a future amendment make itself or some portion of the existing Constitution unamendable?
Commentators investigating limits on constitutional amendment frequently focus on limits imposed by natural law, the democratic underpinnings of our nation, or some other combination of normative forces exterior to the Constitution. Those analyses, while both interesting and important, require injecting into the Constitution ideas and ideals outside its text. This Article analyzes what limits on amendment we may find expressed in the text of the Constitution itself.
A careful analysis of the text of the original Constitution and the history of its framing offer rewarding insights in addition to new answers to the questions posed in the opening paragraph. We learn the Framers of the U.S. Constitution understood the difficulties—logical, syntactic, and
political—inherent in unamendable constitutional provisions, and yet decided to include them
With All My Worldly Goods I Thee Endow: The Law and Statistics of Dower and Curtesy in Arkansas
Get PDFPeter Singer, Drowning Children, and Pro Bono
Get PDFThis Article uses the ethicist Peter Singer\u27s principles to examine and critique the legal profession\u27s pro bono efforts in the face of the persistent gap between the public\u27s legal needs and their ability to meet them. Singer argues that adults should jump into a pond to save a drowning child. Using the drowning child as an analogy, this Article argues that lawyers are morally obligated to (1)increase the amount of their pro bono efforts, (2) be more selective in the cases they take, and (3) be significantly more generous in their financial support for legal services providers. These obligations are especially acute for the largest, most profitable firms.
Specifically, this Article suggests that (1) pro bono be mandatory but at a lower yearly figure than is currently suggested, (2) law firms should sometimes eschew high profile pro bono cases in favor of less visible but more impactful work, and (3) extremely profitable law firms and their partners should donate significantly more money to effective legal services organizations
Establishing Best Billing Practices Through Billing Guidelines: Fostering Trust and Transparency on Legal Costs
Get PDFLord Forgive Me, But He Tried to Kill Me : Proposing Solutions to the United States’ Most Vexing Racial Challenges
Get PDFWhile great progress has been made in the United States in the past fifty years in connection with race relations, three critical issues continue to vex our nation. The United States, despite its progress, continues to struggle mightily with (a) the police killing of unarmed black men; (b) racially disproportionate mass incarceration; and (c) violent homicides of black men and boys. Nightly newscasts detail seemingly weekly killings of unarmed African American men by law enforcement officers. Mass incarceration, while plateauing in the last several years, continues to see millions of United States citizens incarcerated at rates unmatched by any other country in the world. Those incarcerated are disproportionately African American and Latino males jailed for non-violent drug and property crimes. Statistics show that African American citizens suffer 55 percent of all homicide deaths in the United States while making up just 13 percent of the population. In nearly every major city in the United States, African American males constitute 65 to 75 percent of those homicide deaths while often making up a small percentage of those cities’ populations. These homicide statistics are so dramatic, it appears that an epidemic is occurring in the U.S.
Twenty-five years ago, Ice Cube dubbed African American males an “endangered species,” and little has changed since that time to indicate that much is better. Young black men in the United States face an incredible risk of being killed, whether by law enforcement officers or each other, or if not killed, imprisoned. If a young black man is locked up, that prison bid is commonly understood to foreclose many later opportunities that upon release are necessary to lead a happy and healthy life.
Death or prison awaits an alarming number of young black men in today’s America. These dire circumstances are simply unacceptable in a developed and wealthy nation like the United States of America.
In examining and detailing the racial challenges that continue to vex the United States, it is never difficult to point to statistics and evidence that extrapolate the problem. What is difficult is proposing solutions and optimistic prognostications for what can be done to ease these racial tensions that cause our persistent racial difficulties in order to preserve and value the lives of young African American men and boys. This Article offers to do just that: propose solutions. The second section will provide evidence that we are indeed plagued by the three racial challenges articulated above. The third section will propose solutions and actions that can be taken to address and work to reverse these distressing racial realities. In proposing solutions, this Article will focus on myriad actions that can be taken, including legislative enactments, training initiatives, advocacy programs, and, in particular, local municipal programs as exemplified by the City of Fort Wayne, Indiana as engaged by the author. While not a panacea, each of the solution proposals carries with it the promise of easing and resolving many of the racial tensions and hostility that continue to plague United States citizens of color
Using the West Key Number System as a Data Collection and Coding Device for Empirical Legal Scholarship: Demonstrating the Method Via a Study of Contract Interpretation
Get PDFEmpirical research is an increasingly important type of legal scholarship. Such research generally requires the collection and coding of large quantities of data. These tasks pose critical challenges for legal scholars. Most crucially, they are often resource-intensive. The primary purpose of this article is to explain how researchers can use the West Key Number System to dramatically streamline the process of data collection and coding. The article accomplishes this, in part, through a demonstration: it employs the Key Number System to conduct an empirical study of contract interpretation.
Contract interpretation is one of the most significant areas of commercial law. And the subject has received considerable scholarly attention during the last decade. Virtually all academic work in this field is doctrinal or theoretical. But numerous contract interpretation issues cry out for empirical investigation. The secondary purpose of this article is to test one of the central claims in the judicial and academic debate over the optimal method of contract interpretation—the claim that the “contextualist” approach to interpretation results in more litigation over the meaning of contracts than does the “textualist” approach. The results of the study set forth below are inconsistent with that thesis. By thirteen of fourteen measures, there was no statistically significant difference in the amount of interpretation litigation between textualist and contextualist regimes. And for the fourteenth measure, while there was a statistically significant difference, the result was the opposite of that predicted by textualist theory: there was more litigation under textualism
