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Exemplary Legal Writing 2018: Four Recommendations
Get PDFIn an age of mass incarceration, it is not so easy to find good in the U.S. criminal justice system. But The Secret Barrister makes you appreciate the better aspects of our system by showing just how dysfunctional the corresponding English system has become. The book — written by an anonymous junior barrister — is a devastating, sometimes hilarious, and frequently heart-breaking account of how the criminal justice system in England and Wales is not only broke financially but broken in its ability to deliver justice, whether to prosecutors, defendants, victims, or the public
This Is the Moment of Truth
Get PDFWhile everyone is taking their seats, I wanted to quickly just thank the prior panelists today and bring it full circle, back to Mustafa’s opening keynote, where he asked, “Who is fighting these fights? Who is doing this work in fighting for justice?” He pointed out that many of the people fighting these fights, many of the advocates, are people who look like you and are also the same age as you. That is why we have this panel. What can you, as students, do to get involved in the environmental justice or social justice movements?
My name is Roger Lin. I am one of the attorneys in Berkeley Law’s Environmental Law Clinic. We do environmental health and environmental justice cases.
We have fantastic panelists who are going to dive into the question: What can students do right now for the environmental or social justice movements? I will let them introduce themselves. I have had the immense privilege of working alongside some of them
How Lawyers Can Help Save the Planet
Get PDFScientific reports, coming in a steady stream, are highlighting the urgency of reducing greenhouse gas emissions so as to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. Already, hurricanes, coastal and inland flooding, wildfires, heat waves and other extreme weather events are causing severe economic damage and loss of life, and their increasing severity has been attributed to climate change. The decades to come promise to be even worse
U.S. Climate Change Litigation in the Age of Trump: Year Two
Get PDFMore than two and a half years into the Trump Administration, no climate change-related regulatory rollback brought before the courts has yet survived legal challenge. Nevertheless, climate change is one arena where the Trump Administration’s regulatory rollbacks have been both visible and real. The Administration has delayed and initiated the reversal of rules that reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from stationary and mobile sources; sought to expedite fossil fuel development, including in previously protected areas; delayed or reversed energy efficiency standards; undermined consideration of climate change in environmental review and other decisionmaking; and hindered adaptation to the impacts of climate change. However, the Trump Administration’s efforts have met with constant resistance, with those committed to climate protections bringing legal challenges to many, if not most, of the rollbacks.
This paper seeks to provide a landscape level view of how litigation is shaping climate change law and policy during the Trump Administration. To this end, it categorizes and reviews dozens of climate change cases filed during 2017 and 2018 to shed light on how litigation is counterbalancing – and at times complementing – the Trump Administration’s efforts to undermine climate change protections. The analysis focuses specifically on “climate change cases,” defined as cases that raise climate change as an issue of fact or law. From the U.S. Climate Change Litigation database, maintained by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law and Arnold & Porter, this analysis identified 159 climate change cases from 2017 and 2018 pertaining to federal climate change policy
Tempesta Map of Rome
Get PDFIn the late 1580s, Florentine painter and printmaker Antonio Tempesta (1555-1630), having thrived under the earlier Pope Gregory XIII, found himself on the ebbing end of the next Pope, Sixtus V\u27s patronage. Tempesta\u27s commissions to fresco churches or residences had fallen off, but the burgeoning print market offered new opportunities. Printed images of Rome proved increasingly popular with pilgrims, particularly in anticipation of the Jubilee of 1600. Moreover, Rome\u27s urban transformation under Sixtus V refocused attention from the ruined glories of the imperial past to the grandiose design of new thoroughfares, piazzas, fountains, and edifices. The newly mastered engineering feat of transporting obelisks symbolized the passage of grandeur from Roman emperors to Popes — obelisks displaced from their pagan settings now rose throughout the city, facing churches and ecclesiastical palaces. An immense bird\u27s-eye view depiction of the city, greater in size and detail than any predecessor, would celebrate the new Rome, and would advertise Tempesta\u27s representational accomplishments to prospective papal patrons and other benefactors. It would also enhance his reputation as a printmaker.
Tempesta may have perceived even greater need for alternative sources of income as the early demise of Sixtus V, and the fleeting reigns of his immediate successors — three popes in two of the years during which Tempesta would have been developing his map — rendered the prospect of papal patronage ever more precarious. When Tempesta completed his map, Clement VIII, a fellow-Florentine, was in the second year of an eventual 13-year papacy. By this point, however, if Tempesta was still hoping for lucrative work as a painter of large-scale frescos, he was also extensively exploiting the print market. Wary, it seems, of papal inconstancy in largess or longevity, Tempesta dedicated his map not to Clement VIII, but to Jacobo Bosio, the representative of the Knights of Malta to the Holy See. The map was monumental in every sense — it measured 103.5 x 244 cm, and gave a comprehensive coverage of imposing new buildings as well as ordinary dwellings — and it set a new standard for visual representations of contemporary Rome
Open Plurilateral Agreements, International Regulatory Cooperation and the WTO
Get PDFSustained high growth in many developing countries (‘the rise of the rest’) combined with long-standing WTO working practices hampers the ability of the WTO to perform its routine functions and paralyzes efforts to adapt to new circumstances. Preferential trade agreements have taken up some of the slack in addressing differences in domestic regulation of product safety, environmental and social conditions, but are exclusionary and inefficient from a global perspective. In this paper, we argue that a new type of agreement based on open plurilateral cooperation offers better prospects for groups of countries to explore and develop their potential common interests on regulatory matters, while safeguarding core aspects of their national regulatory sovereignty and in-creasing the possibility of regenerating the WTO from within
Reforming Institutions: The Judicial Function in Bankruptcy and Public Law Litigation
Get PDFPublic law litigation (PLL) is among the most important and controversial types of dispute that courts face. These civil class actions seek to reform public agencies such as police departments, prison systems, and child welfare agencies that have failed to meet basic statutory or constitutional obligations. They are controversial because critics assume that judicial intervention is categorically undemocratic or beyond judicial expertise.
This Article reveals flaws in these criticisms by comparing the judicial function in PLL to that in corporate bankruptcy, where the value and legitimacy of judicial intervention are better understood and more accepted. Our comparison shows that judicial intervention in both spheres responds to coordination problems that make individual stakeholder action ineffective, and it explains how courts in both spheres can require and channel major organizational change without administering the organizations themselves or inefficiently constricting the discretion of managers. The comparison takes on greater urgency in light of the Trump administration’s vow to “deconstruct the administrative state,” a promise which, if kept, will likely increase demand for PLL
The Architecture of Property
Get PDFAvoiding the reduction of property to a bundle or rights or to the working out of a single master principle, the architectural theory of property sees property as an integrated system or structure anchored in certain unifying principles. Because our world is neither chaotic nor additiviely simple, property law and institutions must achieve their plural ends in a fashion that manages the inherent complexity of the interaction of valued resource attributes and human actions. In managing complexity, some of the law’s structures receive functional explanations and justifications, which can be different from the explanations and justifications that apply to the system as a whole. In working as a whole, the system exhibits a number of tightly interwoven design principles, including the centrality of things, rights to exclude and possession, hybrids of exclusion and governance, modularity, differential formalism, standardization and the numerus clausus, and “property rule” protection and equity. The architectural approach allows us to revsit some basic questions in property theory and to capture the dyanamic realtiy of property law and institutions
Trial Monitoring of People v. Cansu Pişkin (Turkey 2019)
Get PDFBetween March and May 2019, TrialWatch monitors under the supervision of theColumbia Law School Human Rights Clinic monitored the trial of Cansu Pişkin, ajournalist for the Turkish daily paper, Evrensel, in Istanbul, Turkey. Pişkin was charged with “making a public servant into a target for terrorist organizations” in violation of Section 6(1) of Law No. 3713, otherwise known as the Anti-Terror Law, for publishing the prosecutor’s name in her April 5, 2018 article, “Special Prosecutor for the Bosphorus Students.” On May 7, 2019, the Court convicted Pişkin and sentenced her to 10 months’ imprisonment (with the sentence pronouncement deferred for a period of five years)
Fiduciary Law in Financial Regulation
Get PDFThis chapter explores the application of fiduciary duties to regulated financial firms and financial services. At first blush, the need for such a chapter might strike some as surprising in that fiduciary duties and systems of financial regulation can be conceptualized as governing distinctive and nonoverlapping spheres: fiduciary duties police private activity through open-ended, judicially defined standards imposed on an ex post basis, whereas financial regulations set largely mandatory, ex ante obligations for regulated entities under supervisory systems established in legislation and implemented through expert administrative agencies. Yet, as the chapter documents, fiduciary duties often do overlap with systems of financial regulation. In many regulatory contexts, fiduciary duties arise as a complement to, or sometimes substitute for, other mechanisms of financial regulation. Moreover, the interactions between fiduciary duties and systems of financial regulation generate a host of recurring and challenging interpretative issues. The chapter explores the reasons fiduciary duties arise so frequently in the field of financial regulation and provides a structured account of how the principles of fiduciary duties interact with the more rule-based legal requirements that characterize financial regulation. As grist for this undertaking the chapter focuses on a set of roughly two dozen judicial decisions and administrative rulings to illustrate its claims