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Gender-Based Crimes and the Colombian Special Jurisdiction for Peace
No full textThe Special Jurisdiction for Peace ( JEP ), created as part of Colombia\u27s historic 2016 Peace Agreement, has been hailed as a novel, restorative justice-oriented mechanism for addressing gross human rights violations at the domestic level. Commentators point to the JEP as a potential model for other jurisdictions looking to address mass atrocities. The success or failure of this model hinges on the JEP\u27s ability to effectively address an issue of great concern to the International Criminal Court as well as to Colombian civil society: gender-based crimes. This Article is the first to examine comprehensively the JEP\u27s progress on this vital issue, more than halfway through its ten-year mandate.
Based on months of research in Colombia, this Article explores key developments related to gender-based crimes at the JEP and the various forces promoting and complicating the pursuit of justice for victims of sexual and gender-based violence in Colombia. It derives some lessons for other jurisdictions considering the Colombian model, in particular: the importance of clarity on the investigative mandate of the court, particularly for historically under-investigated crimes like gender-based ones; an analysis of the benefits and challenges of the restorative justice approach in the context of gendered violence; and the need for caution in the use of macrocriminal patterns
The Corporate Governance of the Biggest Corporations You’ve Never Heard Of
No full textWhen Congress passed the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) in 1971, it directed the creation of twelve regional and over two hundred village corporations chartered under Alaska state law. ANCSA subjected these corporations to Alaska’s corporate governance framework, including the laws and regulations governing corporate elections. This Article examines the statutory and regulatory requirements applicable to ANCSA corporations, including the various requirements around ANCSA corporation annual shareholder meetings. It also analyzes relevant state and federal case law interpreting and applying these requirements. Finally, the Article explores the rights and responsibilities of corporate directors and officers, as well as the role of shareholders in ANCSA corporate governance
Opening the Channels and Speeding the Game: A Short History of Transactional Forms
No full textCitators, digests, annotated codes. These standard legal research tools, developed by generations of lawyers and now adapted for the online era, tend to be the province of litigators. Transactional lawyers may also occasionally use these tools, but for the practitioner making and documenting commercial, corporate, real estate, or securities deals, legal forms are often a more useful tool. Used judiciously, these sample documents make drafting more efficient, guide junior business lawyers through unfamiliar transactions, and help identify legal issues to be researched.
For today’s dealmakers, online transactional forms are essential research and drafting tools in their own right, but examining the print origins of these digital resources is also instructive. As we will see, the proliferation and increasing specialization of transactional forms sources reflect broader themes in legal publishing and in the development of the American legal profession. Historical forms sources are also an entertaining read, revealing the preoccupations of their times (many of which still resonate today) and vividly capturing the peculiar and sometimes funny voices of their authors
Volume 109, Number 1 (2025)
No full texthttps://scholarship.law.duke.edu/judicature/1032/thumbnail.jp
The Savings Mirage
No full textIn the past, we did not worry much about elderly poverty because retirement was short for most Americans – a brief jaunt of post-work life was soon met with death. But with the 100-year life becoming a reality for more Americans, an elderly poverty crisis looms. The American dream of abundant retirement savings remains elusive for many, particularly low-wage workers. While government initiatives emphasize individual responsibility and financial education as a way toward retirement success, the reality is that governmental policies are barriers, including asset limitations that prevent those who receive public benefits from saving. This chapter urges reform in order to ensure the financial stability of the elderly. If we want to focus on individual responsibility for savings, we should repeal asset limitations while providing benefits and structures, early and often, that allow even our lowest-wage workers to save and at a rate that would support them in retirement. Or, social security could be reformed to be truly progressive so that all workers are secure in their golden years. Ultimately, change is needed to circumvent an elderly poverty epidemic
Personal Jurisdiction and the Declaration of Independence
No full textThe Declaration of Independence accuses King George III of having obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers. But despite the seemingly natural resonance of this particular charge with the legal profession, legal scholars have given remarkably little attention to the controversy that provoked this particular complaint. This Article traces the colonists\u27 complaint to a somewhat surprising and unexpected source—a dispute about personal jurisdiction.
During the late eighteenth century, administrative officials responsible for overseeing Britain\u27s North American possessions sought to eliminate the use of the custom of foreign attachment by colonial court systems. This device, which had proliferated throughout the colonies, provided a mechanism by which local courts could exercise jurisdiction over suits against non-resident defendants by attaching the defendants\u27 property within the colony. The elected representatives of the colony of North Carolina pushed back against the Crown\u27s efforts to deprive them of their privilege of foreign attachment by refusing the governor\u27s insistence that a provision authorizing the procedure be stricken from a bill renewing authorization for the colony\u27s court system. The resulting impasse effectively terminated judicial authority in North Carolina and left the residents of the colony without a fully functioning court system for more than three years. The Declaration of Independence, drafted amidst the North Carolinians\u27 showdown over foreign attachment, incorporated their complaint as one of the twenty-eight charges of royal abuse that the colonists claimed justified their separation and independence.
Two recent trends in the Supreme Court\u27s personal jurisdiction doctrine may render the Revolutionary-era showdown over the territorial reach of North Carolina\u27s courts newly relevant to assessing the permissible scope of state-court jurisdiction. First, in a series of decisions stretching back to the early 2010s, the Supreme Court has limited the reach of state jurisdiction to levels not seen since the early portion of the twentieth century. Second, over the same period, at least some Justices have expressed reservations about the current state of the Court\u27s doctrine and a potential openness to steering personal jurisdiction in a more originalist-oriented direction. Against this backdrop, the North Carolinians\u27 struggle to determine for themselves the jurisdictional reach of their local courts may hold important lessons for the proper understanding of state sovereignty and its connection to the constitutional standards governing state court jurisdiction
The Credit Markets Go Dark
No full textOver the past generation, conflicting trends have reshaped the ownership of corporate equity on the one hand and corporate debt on the other. In equity, the two great trends have been the shift from public markets to private ownership and the consolidation of American companies’ stock in the hands of powerful investment funds. In debt, by contrast, the great trends have been a shift from private loans to quasi-public markets and dispersed ownership.
In this Article, we chronicle the recent and dramatic reversal of these trends in the debt markets. Private investment funds executing a “private credit” strategy have become increasingly important corporate lenders, bringing into corporate debt the same forces of privatization, concentration, and illiquidity that have been reshaping the equity markets. We offer new data that illustrate the meteoric rise of the now $1.5 trillion private credit industry, and we explore the allure and implications of private credit. For many corporate borrowers, private credit offers a faster, more efficient, and more accessible source of financing than either banks or the public (and quasi-public) debt markets. Yet the transition from bank-intermediated finance to private credit will transform not only corporate finance, but also firm behavior and economic activity more generally. First, as the corporate debt markets follow the equity markets in going dark, information about many large firms will be lost to the investing public. For better or worse, these firms will act with unprecedented discretion—having been shielded from the discipline and scrutiny of regulators, the trading markets, and the general public. Second, corporate debt—like corporate equity—will become the dominion of investment funds, some of which are already unimaginably large. These funds will influence everything from firm operations and strategy to corporate distress, with uncertain consequences
CAMA at 50: The Coastal Area Management Act\u27s Establishment, Implementation, and Future
No full textTechnologies of Violence: Law, Markets, and Innovation for Gun Safety
No full textViolence in the United States is distinctive in many ways, perhaps none more visceral and fundamental than the technologies with which it is practiced. American violence disproportionately involves guns, and because guns are such an effective tool of violence, confrontations involving them are disproportionately deadly. Decades of research confirm this instrumentality effect, and it is reflected in the broad, bipartisan agreement that the nation has a gun violence problem. The deep disagreement, of course, remains about how to address it, with most of the debate focused on regulating who can carry which guns, where, and how.
But fully understanding, let alone addressing, the problem of violence requires accounting for not only regulation but the economic and legal forces shaping the instruments that inflict and resist it-what we call the technologies of violence. Just as violence itself can be permissible and even desirable (as in cases of justified self-defense) or not (as in cases of criminal misuse), innovations in violence technology can simultaneously improve and threaten public safety. As the most prominent form of that technology, guns illustrate the point particularly clearly. Historically, innovation has made guns more lethal-a change whose overall impact on public safety is contested but it also has the potential to make them safer, for example through better reliability, safety switches, smart gun technology, microstamping, and other technological enhancements.
In this Article, we identify and evaluate the complex and intertwined roles of markets and law in driving and in some cases deterring gun safety innovation. For a variety of reasons, legal efforts to incentivize certain safety innovations have failed, even as markets have taken off for innovations designed to cope with gun violence, such as gun detection cameras and bulletproof backpacks. At the same time, statutory and constitutional law stifle and in some cases forbid safety innovations, for example by broadly immunizing gun manufacturers from regulatory and tort liability and through Second Amendment doctrines that protect increasingly powerful weapons while limiting government\u27s ability to enact new rules regulating them.
We hope that bringing together previously separate scholarly discourses on innovation and public law can help generate new insights into their complex interactions, as well as possible solutions to the problem of American gun violence. We conclude with some possibilities for reform that could facilitate the role of markets and innovation in providing public safety