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Discretion and the Rule of Law: The Significance and Endurance of Vagrancy and Vagrancy-Type Laws in England, the British Empire, and the British Colonial World
Get PDFThis article explores the history of vagrancy laws in England, the British Empire, and the British colonial world, the significance of those laws, the various challenges that were made to vagrancy laws in the twentieth century, and the limits of those challenges to date. While vagrancy laws preceded the nineteenth century, the 1824 Vagrancy Act in England set a new model, which proved extremely influential around the world over the following centuries. Between the early nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, vagrancy laws were adopted or reformulated almost everywhere the British left a footprint. The laws that were adopted covered a broad range of (what the authorities considered) offenses and offensive ways of being, including impoverishment, idleness, begging, hawking, public gambling, sex work, public indecency, fortune-telling, traditional religious practices, drunkenness, homosexuality, cross-dressing, socializing across racial groups, being suspicious, and many other activities as well. They were adopted for a range of purposes: to control labor and limit workers\u27 bargaining positions, including after the abolition of slavery; to define the boundaries of civilized, industrious, and moral society; and to clean up the streets and reinforce urban boundaries. Most overarchingly, vagrancy laws served as a practical and rhetorical means through which the discretionary power of the authorities, as enforced through the police and magistracy, was expanded. Far from constituting an object of challenge for \u27rule of law\u27 advocates, expansion in such discretionary authority was closely bound up with the expansion of the rule of law in theory and practice. While vagrancy laws began to be challenged in the mid-twentieth century, including through a decades-long anti-vagrancy law campaign in the United States that had significant success, they remain part of the law of numerous states around the world. In addition, even where explicit vagrancy laws have been abolished, vagrancy-type laws—laws that have granted the police discretionary authority to commit arbitrary detention, of the poor in particular—remain deeply embedded in the criminal law regimes of all former British jurisdictions. Overcoming the vagrancy law legacy will require recognizing and taking measures to reform the arbitrary, class-discriminatory police power vagrancy laws have helped entrench in common law legal orders
Federal Income Taxation: A Law Student\u27s Guide to the Leading Cases and Concepts
No full textThis highly-acclaimed text explains the conceptual basis of federal income taxation. It is designed to help students quickly pull together the entire subject for end-of-semester review and provide perspective about where a topic fits within the federal income tax scheme. While focusing on the present income tax, the text provides an explanation of the often-discussed consumption tax and contrasts the two taxes in a note at the end of the volume. The new edition reflects developments since the fourteenth edition, including the promulgation of regulations interpreting major provisions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. It also features new or expanded discussions of several topics, including: possible legislative reconsideration of the realization requirement (in the context of billionaires\u27 tax proposals); the long-term shift from deductions to credits in the design of nonbusiness tax expenditures, and the new and used electric car credits introduced by the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/faculty_books/1030/thumbnail.jp
Law and Courts in an Age of Debt
Get PDFJudges perform very different analyses when investors ask for protection. When the petitioning party is a shareholder, the court will deploy broad equitable doctrines with an eye towards reaching a fair result. On the other hand, creditors usually find a much less sympathetic ear, as courts typically march through technical analyses such as examining whether the offending party violated a contract term, with far less concern for whether the outcome is fair. In an era where many firms are highly leveraged, the end result is that the role of the courts in regulating investor opportunism and creating boundaries for “market” conduct has been greatly diminished, with consequences for both real-world corporate behavior and the development of the law
Purpose or Profit?: The Rise of Public Benefit Corporations in the Technology Industry
Get PDFOver the last several years, the demand for socially responsible companies has exploded. Many states have responded to this demand by offering a new corporate form, the public benefit corporation (“PBC”), which arguably allows companies to prioritize social benefit in a way that traditional corporations cannot. The technology industry has adopted the PBC structure at higher rates than corporations in other industries. This Note offers reasons for the appeal of PBCs to corporations generally and to the technology sector in particular. This Note also explores why technology companies may be able to achieve the goals discussed without the need for PBCs
The Private Cost of Behavioral Interventions
Get PDFThe increasing popularity of behavioral interventions—also known as nudges—is largely due to their perceived potential to promote public and private welfare at dramatically lower costs than those of traditional regulatory instruments, such as mandates or taxes. Yet, though nudges typically involve low implementation costs, scholars and policymakers alike tend to underestimate their often-substantial private costs. Once these costs are accounted for, most nudges turn out to generate significantly lower net benefits than assumed, and some prove less efficient or less cost-effective than traditional instruments. At other times, the private costs of behavioral interventions are sufficiently large to render them socially costly and undesirable even in the absence of superior traditional instruments. Policymakers who implement nudges without considering their private costs therefore risk doing harm rather than good
Cybersecurity Policy and National Security
No full textThe panel discusses the relationship between cybersecurity policy and national security.
Moderator: Prof. Shane Stansbury, Robinson Everett Distinguished Fellow, Duke Law School
Panelists: Mr. Carl Ghattas, Senior Vice President, Booz Allen
Ms. Kate Nichols, Deputy Regional Director, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agenc
Fireside Chat: Public Service, Private Practice and National Security
No full textDiscussant: Mr. Raj De, Partner, Mayer Brown
Speaker: Ambassador John J. Sullivan, Partner, Mayer Brown; former U.S. ambassador to the Russian Federatio
Can Machines Commit Crimes Under US Antitrust Laws?
No full textGenerative artificial intelligence is being rapidly deployed for corporate tasks including pricing. Suppose one of these machines communicates with the pricing manager of a competing firm, proposes to collude, receives assent, and raises price. Is this a crime under U.S. antitrust laws, and, if so, who is liable? Based on the observed behavior of the most widely adopted large language model, we argue that this conduct is imminent, satisfies the requirements for agreement and intent under Section 1 of the Sherman Act, and could confer criminal liability to both firms as well as the pricing manager of the competing firm
Narratives of Guilt and Innocence: The Power of Storytelling in Wrongful Conviction Cases
No full textWrongful convictions have been studied primarily through the lenses of law, psychology, and the social sciences. Though scholarship has established canonical factors that help explain why the innocent are convicted, a very simple question has not been answered: How is it possible that prosecutors can convince juries and themselves of the guilt of an innocent defendant, often even against strong exculpatory evidence? Narratives of Guilt and Innocence seeks to address this crucial question by highlighting the narrative blueprint of a given criminal justice system and then how the power of narrative influences how police, prosecutors, juries, and judges construct legal reality and the evidence for it. That law and storytelling are connected is a common trope, but we know surprisingly little about the intricate role storytelling plays in criminal cases and wrongful convictions in particular.
This book questions the effectiveness of the adversarial contest between prosecutor and defense as a means to arrive at the truth and argues that narrative is an important a factor in the construction of legal reality. Wrongful convictions exemplify that narrative and truth have an uncomfortable relationship. Ralph Grunewald provides a retelling and reading of well-known miscarriages of justice, including the best-known wrongful conviction in Germany. Applying a comparative perspective shows that the narrative desire as a human trait has a universal power with a persistence that transcends the regulatory and procedural setup of a given system.
Narratives of Guilt and Innocence puts wrongful convictions into an interdisciplinary and comparative context and vividly demonstrates just how much the process of storytelling affects legal reality.https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/justin_miller_awards_books/1007/thumbnail.jp