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Lawful Permanent Residency: A Potential Solution for Temporary Protected Status Holders in the Eastern District of New York
Debt in Just Societies: A General Framework for Regulating Credit
Debt presents a dilemma to societies: successful societies benefit from a substantial infrastructure of consumer, commercial, corporate, and sovereign debt but debt can cause substantial private and social harm. Pre- and post-crisis solutions have seesawed between subsidizing and restricting debt, between leveraging and deleveraging. A consensus exists among governments and international financial institutions that financial stability is the fundamental normative principle underlying financial regulation. Financial stability, however, is insensitive to equality concerns and can produce morally impermissible aggregations in which the least advantaged in a society are made worse off. Solutions based only on financial stability can restrict debt without accounting for the risk of harm to persons least able to bear the risk, worsen pre-existing inequalities, destroy or impair the net worth of households, and impose unfavorable distributive consequences. This article offers a new approach to assist policymakers in developing and evaluating regulation to take criteria in addition to financial stability into account, but which do not undermine the aim of financial stability. It calls for a luck egalitarian approach, offering policymakers options to take the debtor’s choices into account while still accounting for cognitive mistakes people often make in debt decision making. It offers a general framework for the underlying principles for the regulation of debt: its focus is not on any particular forms of debt or its regulation but in structuring debt regulation more generally. It offers a set of recommendations on how regulators can take concerns about luck and equality into account in regulatory design
Diploma Privilege and the Constitution
The COVID-19 pandemic and resulting shutdowns are affecting every aspect of society. The legal profession and the justice system have been profoundly disrupted at precisely the time when there is an unprecedented need for legal services to deal with a host of legal issues generated by the pandemic, including disaster relief, health law, insurance, labor law, criminal justice, domestic violence, and civil rights. The need for lawyers to address these issues is great but the prospect of licensing new lawyers is challenging due to the serious health consequences of administering the bar examination during the pandemic.
State Supreme Courts are actively considering alternative paths to licensure. One such alternative is the diploma privilege, a path to licensure currently used only in Wisconsin. Wisconsin’s privilege, limited to graduates of its two in-state schools, has triggered constitutional challenges never fully resolved by the lower courts. As states consider emergency diploma privileges to address the pandemic, they will face these unresolved constitutional issues.
This Article explores those constitutional challenges and concludes that a diploma privilege limited to graduates of in-state schools raises serious Dormant Commerce Clause questions that will require the state to tie the privilege to the particular competencies in-state students develop and avenues they have to demonstrate those competencies to the state’s practicing bar over three years. Meeting that standard will be particularly difficult if a state adopts an in-state privilege on an emergency basis. States should consider other options, including privileges that do not prefer in-state schools. The analysis is important both for states considering emergency measures and for those that might restructure their licensing after the pandemic