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NIL Speeds Ahead While Title IX Trails Behind: Finding Room for Title IX in the Evolving NIL Landscape
Full text linkTitle IX was enacted to eliminate sex-based discrimination in educational programs receiving federal funding, including intercollegiate athletics. While the law has successfully increased female participation in sports, disparities in the treatment of male and female athletes persist, particularly in the context of publicity and promotional resources. The rise of name, image, and likeness (NIL) opportunities has further widened this gap, as universities and their affiliated collectives disproportionately promote male athletes, enhancing their marketability and NIL earning potential. Schroeder et al. v. University of Oregon presents a novel legal issue—whether Title IX applies to NIL deals when universities provide unequal publicity resources to male and female student athletes. This Note examines how Title IX’s equal treatment mandate extends to NIL promotional efforts, arguing that when institutions directly or indirectly facilitate NIL opportunities in a manner that disproportionately benefits male athletes, they risk violating federal law. Furthermore, the entanglement between universities and NIL collectives raises critical questions of agency law, suggesting that collectives function as promotional arms of institutions rather than independent third parties. Without regulatory intervention, these inequities will continue to undermine Title IX’s purpose
Judicial Enforcement of Evidence Law
No full textThe truth matters. At least it should. In the courtroom, truth can serve as the cornerstone of justice, liberating the innocent, vindicating victims, and holding the guilty to account. Indeed, truth is such a normative imperative that an entire legal discipline now focuses on fostering its discovery at trial— evidence law. By regulating both the reliability of proof and the rationality of cognitive inferences, evidence law seeks to help factfinders discern truth and reach an accurate verdict. And given the importance of that role, one might naturally assume that the strict enforcement of evidence law would be a legal mandate of the utmost importance. But that assumption is wrong. Our legal system’s commitment to truth is overshadowed by a near-religious commitment to the adversarial process. And far from prioritizing verdict accuracy, the adversarial process actively subverts the discovery of truth. Adversarialism, for instance, dictates that evidentiary rules have no force absent ad hoc objections by a party. Moreover, in the absence of an objection, judges typically hold their tongues and admit misleading and prejudicial evidence by rote. Predictably, fetishizing adversarialism in this way has proven problematic. Attorney enforcement of evidence law has produced a deeply disturbing record of incompetence, dishonesty, and discriminatory animus. Reform is therefore essential. This Article reveals that, despite its modern ubiquity, evidentiary adversarialism rests on a tenuous foundation. History offers no compelling justification for its initial emergence, and contemporary legal authority fails to explain its continued prominence. Close scrutiny thus demonstrates that compulsory evidentiary adversarialism is a myth, an errant assumption that has calcified into a deleterious norm. The Article therefore proposes a better path forward. Because evidentiary adversarialism’s legal basis is illusory, the judiciary should enforce evidence law sua sponte, an inquisitorial intervention that is both precedented and justified. Complementary judicial enforcement of evidence law would improve verdict accuracy, combat systemic inequities, and reaffirm our legal system’s commitment to the truth
Will This Too Pass? How The Criminalization And Derogation Of Unhoused People Is One Mark Of Our Descent Into Fascism
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Artificial Intellectual Property
No full textThe year is 2031. You just got up. Your smartwatch has registered the movement, and the coffee maker is on. After your shower, you pick up your phone or read the latest news on the New York Times app on your VR goggles or palm. Except for a few remaining columnists, the news is all written by AI machines. At work, you are responsible for a report on a new product for your company, and you use Al to design the product and prepare the pitch, including the visuals and text of your presentation to the C-suite. The Al system has already applied for an international design patent. It is Wednes- day, and everyone is in the office. On your way home in a self-driving Uber, you listen to music created and curated by Al based on your preferences. After dinner (delivered by an AI-powered drone), you sit down to watch the latest AI-created series on Netflix, now the second-largest company in the world, on a big screen (what people used to call a TV). After the movie, you chat with Al and read a book in bed. The book is a Swedish-style thriller written by Al. Maybe for you, this is Al bliss, a short version of utopia. To me, it smacks of arrested human development, new ideas just regurgitated amalgams of old ones, sterile more of the same culture. So, am I a human exceptionalist who favors discrimination against the machines? I reject both labels. The notion of human exceptionalism refers to the belief that humans are unique and superior to all other animals. It revolves around the notion of sentience, which machines do not possess, at least in my opinion
Reading American Anarchy as a Legal History of Immigrants: Forum on Willrich\u27s American Anarchy Forum: Willrich\u27s American Anarchy
No full textMichael Willrich’s American Anarchy is at once an extraordinary history of ideas about anarchism and the rule of law, a history of lawyering, and a history of the simultaneous emergence of a capacious administrative state alongside a robust set of judicially protected civil liberties. While Willrich tells a rich and intricate story of illiberal border administration, American Anarchy also shows radical immigrants at work over decades in New York, with the border and its oppressive administrative apparatus little more than a dim memory. This essay explores how the book is more than a history of the border—it’s a history of immigrants, of how people and their ideas become distinctively American, a process that happens not through the formal rules of immigration law, but through a host of other legal processes—through contract and labor, through paying rents and acquiring property, through discrimination and the formal and informal rules of race, and through political participation, expression, and assembly. With Beth Lew-Williams and others, Willrich is part of a new wave of legal historians who are looking beyond the border to understand not just the administrative processes of immigration but its substantive transformations, and ultimately the role of law in shaping American identity
Shareholder Litigation in Delaware: An Empirical Investigation
Full text linkThe empirical study of shareholder litigation in state courts is a seriously underexamined subject. To remedy this gap, we collected data on all 4,741 fiduciary duty complaints filed in the Delaware Court of Chancery over a sixteen-year period, from January 1, 2004, to December 31, 2019. After removing the duplicative cases consolidated into a lead complaint, the number of unique complaints was reduced to 2,958 in our dataset. In our coding, we examined over one hundred variables (with many variables being further subdivided into as many as eight subvariables) for each of these cases, including information about the parties, claims, motions, fees, outcomes of each motion filed, and final disposition of the case.
We begin this overview of our study by focusing closely on differences our data shows exist among the three forms that such suits take: class actions, derivative suits, and individual suits. We analyze how experiences with such suits vary depending on a range of variables, such as the form of the suit, the nature of the suit’s plaintiff, whether the suit involves a public company (and, if so, the public company’s relative size), whether the suit involves an acquisition, and the suit’s final disposition (e.g., dismissed, settled, adjudged). In this inquiry, nearly one-quarter of the suits in our dataset involve purely independent claims, which provide a ready reference to assess whether representative suits (i.e., class and derivative claims) reflect long-feared agency costs from their counsel. Commentators have long asserted class and derivative suits suffer such costs because the suit’s representative plaintiff is a mere figurehead and the plaintiff’s counsel is the one with true skin in the game.
This study also provides a time-series analysis that allows us to analyze evolving trends in the data. To do this, we first divide our database into acquisition-related cases (52% of the sample) and non-acquisition-related cases (48% of the sample). We next separate acquisition cases into three time periods that are distinctly impacted by economic and legal developments. For example, one of our time periods enables us to observe the full impact of a trilogy of important Delaware court decisions: Kahn v. M&F Worldwide Corp., Corwin v. KKR Financial Holdings LLC, and In re Trulia, Inc. Stockholder Litigation.
Finally, our data provides a rich backdrop against which the social value of shareholder litigation can be assessed. Not only do we present extensive data on the final dispositions of the cases filed during our sixteen-year study period, but we also combine that information with data bearing on attorney effort during the course of litigation, fees awarded, and the outcomes of the suit. In this context, we gather information on frequent-filing attorneys and law firms. One important finding of our study is that while a small handful of attorneys garner significant fee awards, this cohort of attorneys does not overlap the short list of attorneys and firms that constitute about half of all complaint filings, which we refer to as “frequent filers.