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Criminal Law - First Complaint Doctrine Applies to Defendant in a Sexual Assault Prosecution - Commonwealth v. Mayotte, 56 N.E.3D 756 (Mass. 2016
Get PDF(Communal) Life, (Religious) Liberty, and Property
Get PDFProperty rights and religious liberty seem to share little in common. Yet surprisingly similar claims have long been made on their behalf, including bold assertions that each of these two rights uniquely limits the power of the state and serves as the foundation for other rights. This Article reframes the conception of property rights and religious liberty as foundational by foregrounding communitarian aspects of each right. Property and religious freedom are a foundation for other rights, but in a different manner than traditional accounts suggest. It is not the individual exercise of these rights that provides a foundation for other rights, but rather the complementary roles these rights play in the formation of normative communities that, in turn, serve as counterweights to the state.
This Article makes three distinct contributions to existing legal literature. First, it reveals the significant similarities in historical and theoretical conceptions of the foundational status of these two rights. Second, it integrates the developing scholarly literature on the communal and institutional nature of these two rights. Third, it builds upon this literature to contend that the right to property and religious freedom can indeed provide important foundations for rights more generally, but only if we sufficiently protect and nurture, through law, the communities and institutions upon which these rights depend. The Article concludes by suggesting new approaches to assessing a diverse set of contemporary legal disputes: religious communities seeking to locate in the face of local government opposition, Native American communities challenging government actions on sacred lands, and Sanctuary churches opposing immigration enforcement by sheltering individuals on their property
What Is It Like To Be A Beetle? The Timelessness Problem In Gilson’s Value Creation Thesis
Get PDFThis is a contribution to the 2014 mini-symposium honoring the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Ronald Gilson’s seminal article Value Creation by Business Lawyers. In it, he coined two powerful metaphors: that of lawyers as “transaction cost engineers” and as beetles studied by their entomologist brethren in the legal academy. As a former lawyer-beetle and a current academic-entomologist, I am quite sure that the transaction cost economics he used to explain value creation missed something important about the subjective and real world experience of being a lawyer-beetle. In this essay, I (a) summarize two different but significantly related critiques of theory, (i) the physicist Lee Smolin’s powerful argument for the unreality and therefore timelessness of algorithmic models of the universe – i.e., why physics as generally practiced is “physics in a box,” and (ii) the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s controversial argument for the unreality of modern conceptions of utility, rights, and efficiency, (b) borrow from both critiques in order to understand the difficulties in transposing timeless economic and legal conceptions (“utility” and “rights,” respectively) to real transactions that occur in real time, (c) criticize the tendency of the legal profession, in both the academic and practicing arms, to teach and practice a scientific “law in a box,” and (d) suggest a vision of what it means for a wise business lawyer not to be so constrained
Supreme Court Strips States of Their Power Over the World\u27s Second Most Important Technology
Get PDFThe Supreme Court recently stripped 47 or the 50 the states of legal power that the states thought that they possessed over power. The Court re-etched in great relief the most important “bright line” in American law. This article analyzes every important step of how the Supreme Court arrived at the legal point to reset the architecture of American power and did so through a unanimous decision. The article charts key implications for U.S. law going forward.Recent other decisions issued by the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 7th, 8th, and D.C. Circuit Courts of Appeals — a majority of circuits — reinforce an increasingly exclusive federal architecture for certain power regulation into the future. This article analyzes a palette of decisions rendered by the Supreme Court, half of the federal Courts of Appeals, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, each of which apply and reinterpret the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution to determine the future of American power law and regulation. The result is that the states have ceded much of their assumed power in these decisions. The fulcrum of legal power has shifted fundamentally, as analyzed in detail in this article
2017 Suffolk University commencement program, Sawyer Business School
Get PDFSuffolk University commencement programs detail the location, date, order of exercises, academic honors, speakers, administration, graduates, and other related information. Unless otherwise indicated, programs cover graduate and undergraduate ceremonies for all schoolshttps://dc.suffolk.edu/comm/1190/thumbnail.jp
Equitable Access to Public Transport: Corridor Plans for Transit-Oriented Development in Soweto, South Africa and Boston, Massachusetts Compared
No full textThe article argues that municipalities should play a major role in ensuring equitable access to public transportation and in planning for transit-oriented development. It presents two case studies that illustrate the importance of these undertakings. In South Africa, apartheid spatial and racial segregation resulted in the exclusion of non-white residents from the urban core where the economy was centered. These residents, who were forced to live in a city’s outlying areas, experienced considerable difficulty in commuting to the workplace. To address the lack of transportation equity, the City of Johannesburg, with support from the national and provincial governments, embarked on the construction of transit arterial connections to link apartheid-isolated areas to other parts of the City. In 2009, the City began operating a bus rapid transit system to connect Soweto, an apartheid-affected township within Johannesburg, to its Central Business District. In Boston, Massachusetts, the Fairmount Indigo rail line, running from South Station to Readville, in the Hyde Park area of Boston, has been reactivated to provide equitable access to public transportation in areas racially segregated and in need of revitalization.The equitable new modes of transport in Johannesburg and Boston provide an opportunity for economic development in the areas surrounding the transit routes. Accordingly, both cities created transit corridors with the expectation that communities within them can be transformed through public improvements and private investment. The article compares the transit-oriented development plans of each city and highlights some of the impediments to effectuating transit-oriented development. The legal context in which the plans have been made is compared as well. The benefits of transit-oriented development are discussed including improvements to the environment that result from a decrease in traffic congestion and air pollution as commuters switch to public transit from the use of motor vehicles. The article presents views on the role cities and metropolitan governments should play in the planning and implementation of transit-oriented development corridors
Equal Liberty in Proportion
No full textoai:scholarship.law.wm.edu:wmlr-3722As federal law continues to devolve more education policy making to states, state courts will remain a primary forum for settling education rights. State fora do not inspire confidence, however, because their doctrine is so uncertain. A majority of state supreme courts do not specify a level of scrutiny and at times seem to be improvising judicial review. The resulting decisions can exhibit a troubling lack of foresight. Most notably, while federal doctrine increasingly reveals the interrelation of liberty and equality claims, state courts have failed to capitalize on that point—even though their decisions were among the first to concede it. Too often, instead, they pigeonhole education claims into one category or the other when the claims should fit in both.
This Article proposes that courts analyze the state constitutional right to education as a claim for “equal liberty” and subject it to a new standard of review. State court adjudication of the right to education over the past five decades reflects ambivalence with heightened scrutiny in favor of an ad hoc means-ends review. That review confers substantial deference to legislative judgment and has excused persistent educational disparities based on the “reasonableness” of legislative efforts. To overcome these shortcomings and lingering justiciability concerns, courts need a principled methodology for reconciling liberty and equality interests.
Against tradition calling for these interests to be “balanced,” I contend that equality and liberty can yet maintain a positive, directly proportional relationship in the law. Applying direct-proportionality review, the judicial lens should focus on whether the state’s actions advance both equality and liberty interests in tandem and whether the margin between these ends is proportional so as to protect children from the harms of educational disparities. Reviewing the proportionality of these constitutional interests is urgently needed as public schooling endures chronic inequitable and inadequate funding while our highest elected officials question its value
Closing the Legal Aid Gap One Research Question at a Time
Get PDFCurrently, two of the hot topics in legal academia are “access to justice” and experiential learning. The justice system’s failure to adequately serve all people irrespective of wealth and position has brought access to justice to the forefront. Experiential learning has made the headlines due to the recent changes in the American Bar Association standards regarding the incorporation of experiential learning into the law school curriculum. Despite being hot topics, these issues are often neglected or given short shrift in the law school curriculum, particularly in the first year. Law schools grapple with how to work towards closing the legal aid gap and helping their students become practice ready. This article discusses an exercise that the legal-writing faculty at Suffolk University Law School integrated into the first-year curriculum to address this shortfall. Specifically, legal-writing faculty partnered with a pro-bono organization to introduce students to the role that they can play in closing the legal aid gap. The exercise provided students with an opportunity to collaborate and research real-world problems under time-pressured conditions. This article explains our experience integrating real-world legal research into a legal research and writing class in a social justice context. It discusses why to incorporate the exercise as well as how to implement it. Finally, it examines the benefits and challenges involved
1L is the New Bar Prep
Get PDFLaw school graduates, in growing numbers, are failing the bar exam. This reality is all the more staggering when we consider that these graduates have been preparing for the bar exam since their first year of law school. First-year legal-writing courses teach students specific fundamental skills that are the foundation for success on the bar exam. This Article provides the perspective that the goal of passing the bar exam and teaching law students to think and write like lawyers is a symbiotic relationship. It directly analyzes the correlation between the fundamental skills associated with thinking like a lawyer and successful bar-essay writing. The question then becomes, if law schools are teaching these skills, why do students continue to struggle with the bar exam? To answer that question, this Article analyzes the challenges law students face when they are required to apply the skills learned in an earlier context to a later assignment. Without proper instruction and sustained practice, it is unrealistic to expect law students to retain the skills necessary to solve one legal problem and then later apply those same skills to solve a different problem. This Article emphasizes how law schools have a duty to bridge the gap and foster the transfer of learning from the first year of law school to bar preparation. To guide law schools in better preparing their students for passing the bar exam, this Article concludes with a comprehensive approach detailing how law faculties can facilitate the transfer of fundamental skills from the beginning to the end of law school
The Commercial Law of Bitcoin and Blockchain Transactions
Get PDFThis paper looks at some issues that may arise as Bitcoin, and its underlying blockchain technology, plays a greater role in commercial transactions. Bitcoin and other public blockchains permit identification of every transaction that has occurred. But tracing bitcoin – an issue arising in cases from fraud to secured transactions - will not be technically possible in many cases. Equitable tracing doctrines, along with information beyond the blockchain, may fill the gap. Blockchain smart contracts may provide self-help as an alternative to legal enforcement. Coding transactions, however, will not necessarily put them beyond the scope of contract law. Beyond that, some smart contracts may be functionally more like letters of credit, and so be subject to the principles of documentary credits. Smart contracts used in financing transactions may be limited by the debtor-protective principles of Article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code. Existing commercial law principles could be adapted to cryptocurrencies and the blockchain, as some have persuasively argued. Sensitivity to existing practices should guide such regulation, as discussion of relevant adaptations of the law to technological change suggest