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Forward-Looking Academic Impact Rankings for U.S. Law Schools
Get PDFAlthough the very concept of law school rankings is currently under fire, rankings abolitionism is misplaced. Given the number, diversity, and geographic dispersion of the more than 190 law schools fully accredited by the American Bar Association, rankings are essential to enable various stakeholders to make comparisons between schools. However, the current rankings landscape is dire. The U.S News law school rankings rely on poorly designed, highly subjective surveys to gauge reputational strength, rather than looking to easily available, objective citation data that is more valid and reliable. Would-be usurpers of U.S. News use better data but make other arbitrary choices that limit and distort their rankings. One flaw common to U.S. News and those who would displace it is the fetishization of minor differences in placement that do not reflect actual differences in substance. This information is worse than trivial: it is actively misleading. This Article proposes a new set of law school rankings free from all of these defects.
The Forward-Looking Academic Impact Rankings (\u27\u27FLAIR rankings\u27\u27) introduced in this Article are based on data that shows how many times law review articles by each of 5,139 individual faculty members at 191 American law schools have been cited by other law review articles in the last five years. The FLAIR rankings can be used as an objective guide to the relative academic impact of law schools, or as a component in broader objective rankings. The FLAIR rankings are based on publicly available, reliable, and objective data obtained from law school websites and the research platform HeinOnline. The FLAIR rankings include all fully ARA-accredited law schools, unlike alternative rankings of academic influence that are selective, often arbitrarily so. Moreover, the FLAIR rankings are designed to impart meaningful information by clustering schools into tiers based on their distance from the mean of all schools and deemphasizing ordinal rankings. Thus, the FLAIR rankings enable readers to make rational comparisons between law schools, rather than simply creating a hierarchy for hierarchy\u27s sake
Climatizing National Security
Get PDFIs climate change a national security issue? Human security? Ecological security? This Article addresses the growing nexus between climate change and various conceptions of security with a particular emphasis on climate change\u27s national security impacts. This Article argues that there is a growing connection between national security and climate change and a corresponding need to address the normative implications of climatizing national security. This connection can be observed through three lenses: mitigation (reducing greenhouse gas emissions from military and national security sources); adaptation (investing in climate resilient infrastructure in an effort to prepare for climate impacts), and response (addressing climate-exacerbated disasters at home and abroad). The national security response to climate change will require a greater role for the military, particularly the National Guard and U.S. Coast Guard. To be sure, climatizing national security also presents normative risks that must be acknowledged and addressed. But this Article argues that it is far better to proactively acknowledge and address climate change\u27s national security impacts today rather than waiting for catastrophe to strike. Indeed, upon closer examination, climate change is not just a complex collective action environmental problem it also is a challenging national security issue with far-reaching impacts
Anna Nicole\u27s Constitutional Estates Law Legacy
Get PDFThis Essay examines Anna Nicole\u27s surprising constitutional estates legacy in three parts. First, it overviews the bitter litigation between Anna Nicole and the estate of J. Howard Marshall II. It then turns to the pair of Supreme Court cases spawned by that litigation. Part II discusses the holding and significance of Marshall v. Marshall, a successful challenge to the scope of the wills exception to federal jurisdiction. Part III discusses the holding and significance of Stern v. Marshall, which held that Article I bankruptcy judges cannot enter final judgments on state law counterclaims. In its Conclusion, the Essay reflects on the contrast between Anna Nicole\u27s absence from cultural memory with the impact left by the cases she litigated
Derailing Democracy, Shrinking Responsibility: The New Election Law Landscape
Get PDFIn democracy jurisprudence, the Roberts Court wears two faces. Its most recent duo of cases illustrates the inconsistency. In Rucho v. Common Cause, the Court ruled that even grossly partisan gerrymanders are nonjusticiable in federal courts. Yet, in Moore v. Harper, the Court rejected granting unreviewable authority to state lawmakers to regulate federal elections—for now. This combination of rulings is not ideological moderation or judicial restraint, as the Court claims. These recent cases are emblematic of broader unpredictability and selectivity in election law. The assertions of judicial humility in Rucho stand in stark contrast to the bald activism of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission and Shelby County v. Holder, wherein the Court struck down large parts of campaign finance law and a vital part of the Voting Rights Act, respectively. Yet, the Court is consistent in two ways. In terms of outcomes, its democracy decisions favor anti-democratic maneuvering, and, in methodological terms, the claims of judicial restraint mask a general strategy of accruing power for itself while claiming judicial humility. Thus, the Court is avoiding controversy and shirking responsibility while achieving ideologically driven outcomes and promoting its own power. This Article reveals the variability and self-serving false modesty of the Court’s jurisprudence at three levels: in the two most recent cases, in the broader democracy jurisprudence of the Roberts Court, and of the Court over time. It shows that claims of judicial restraint prevent accountability and allow the Court to evade its most vital responsibility: protecting democracy
Calming the Waters: The International Atomic Energy Agency as a Viable Model to Address Water Weaponization
Get PDF“Green” is the New Black: Enforcing Consumer Protection Laws Against Greenwashing in the Fashion Industry
Get PDFAs climate change continues to relentlessly change landscapes, threaten harvests, and increase the frequency of natural disasters, legislators and regulators globally must expand upon their efforts to protect the environment and citizens from the harmful practices of corporations, some of the greatest contributors to climate change. One of the greatest perpetrators of harm to the environment is the fashion industry. The harm is further compounded by the rise of fast fashion companies. These companies utilize methods of rapid production and encourage overconsumption, resulting in a rampant storefront to landfill cycle. However, legal activists, politicians, the public, and some industry leaders have increasingly taken action to curtail the harmful effects of these fast fashion companies.
To compete for consumer attention and to protect their images in the face of increased environmental activism, fast fashion companies have begun greenwashing their products and supply chain. Through greenwashing, companies misrepresent the sustainability of their products or services, allowing the consumer to believe they are making a more environmentally friendly purchase than they really are.
This Comment outlines the current major approaches of the United States, United Kingdom, and France toward preventing greenwashing by fashion companies. This Comment looks at the successes of consumer protection laws and actions against companies accused of greenwashing to provide guidance for fashion companies and other countries that have yet to implement similar regulatory schemes. Additionally, while the United States, the United Kingdom, and France are regarded as three leaders in anti-greenwashing legislation, they each will benefit from more comprehensive and intelligible laws guiding enforcement efforts
The Rise of General Jurisdiction Over Out-of-State Enterprises in the United States
Get PDFIn June 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court continued its revision of personal jurisdiction law, in this case by refining, thereby perhaps expanding, the law of when a court may exercise general personal jurisdiction – that is, jurisdiction over all claims – over a non-resident person or an out-of-state enterprise. In Mallory v. Norfolk Southern Railway Co., it held in a 4+1:4 decision that, when a state requires a non-resident company to register to do business in the state and such registration constitutes consent to jurisdiction over all claims against it, such exercise is permitted. In reaching its conclusion, the Court applied a more than a century old (1917) precedent. The plurality of four Justices also compared the exercise of such jurisdiction to “tag jurisdiction” (general jurisdiction over persons present in the state at the time of service) and did not consider the Court’s much more recent cases on specific (claim-related) jurisdiction to be in contrast with (i.e., to overrule) the 1917 decision. The dissent disagreed and, in light of the majority’s new revision, considered specific jurisdiction now significantly deleted. Indeed, it does seem that the distinction between general and specific jurisdiction continues to become considerably blurred
The Worst Choice for School Choice: Tuition Tax Credits Are a Bad Idea and Direct Funding is Wiser
Get PDFSchool choice is on the rise, and states use various mechanisms to implement it. One prevalent mechanism is also a uniquely problematic one: the tax credit. Tax credits are deficient at equitably distributing a benefit like school choice; they are costly, and they invite fraud. Instead of using tax credits, states opting for school choice programs should use direct funding. Direct funding will more efficiently achieve the goals of school choice because it can be regulated like any other government benefit, even if it ends up subsidizing religious private schools.
Tax credits’ prevalence is not inexplicable, of course. It is based on a prior legal understanding that states were constitutionally restricted from directly funding religious schools. Historically, states that wanted to include religious private schools in their school choice programs therefore felt pushed to use tax credits as their only constitutionally viable option. However, the landscape has changed. The Supreme Court held in 2022 that direct funding of religious private schools is not only constitutionally permissible, but it is required if a state funds non-religious private schools and provides no neutral basis for excluding religious ones. The initial reason for tax credits’ popularity therefore no longer exists; both tax credits and direct funding alike are constitutionally acceptable. It is time, therefore, to revisit the merits of tax credits and ask whether, knowing what we know now, it is worth disposing of them in favor of direct funding. This Article answers that question with a resounding yes. Tax credits carry significant disadvantages—specifically, inequitable distribution and difficulties in regulation—that direct funding does not. Now that the law is clear, states choosing to sponsor school choice should discontinue their use of tax credits in favor of direct funding