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The Business of Abortion: Access to Capital Post Dobbs
Get PDFAccess to credit—that is, the ability to receive financial leverage that could help jump-start businesses—is one of the most significant barriers preventing millions of American women from opening new businesses. Congress has attempted to address this issue since the 1970s, with legislation like the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA). Nevertheless, studies continue to show a persistent gender gap in access to credit. Scholars have offered a host of explanations for this gap, focusing on both the supply and demand sides of the equation.
This Article contributes to this growing scholarly exploration by offering a new, overlooked explanation for this gap: namely, it links access to reproductive care—particularly the right to abortion—with access to credit. To investigate this connection, this Article adopts a three-stage novel empirical methodology that utilizes the enactment of Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers (“TRAP Laws”) as proxies for abortion restrictions. We find consistent evidence that restrictions on access to reproductive care reduce women’s ability to raise capital and leverage their business endeavors. As such, these restrictions widen the gender gap in entrepreneurship and diminish potential economic growth.
This Article thus explores an impact that seems to have slipped under the radar of scholars and policymakers evaluating the negative impact of the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization on women’s equality. Given the potential expansion of abortion restrictions across the nation, these findings are particularly noteworthy.
Legislative efforts, like the ECOA, seem insufficient to overcome the additional barriers that laws restricting access to reproductive rights create. Accordingly, to overcome the gender gap in access to credit, legislative and policy efforts must address more deeply entrenched discriminatory patterns and cultural norms. To that end, this Article proposes three modes of action that could potentially mitigate the devastating effects on women’s equal participation in the economy in a post-Dobbs era: (1) government-led action; (2) civil society-led efforts; and (3) business owners-led initiatives
The Racial Triangulation of Asian American Achievement
Get PDFThis Essay employs Professor Claire Jean Kim’s racial triangulation framework to examine how Asian Americans are racialized via academic achievement. It argues that there are two components to the racial triangulation of Asian American achievement. On one hand, Asian Americans are valorized as a “model minority”. We are praised for our achievement and cast as a model for other groups of people of color to follow. This ignores both the different histories of oppression that various groups of color have faced and the vast diversity of experiences among Asian Americans. But on the other hand, Asian Americans are also viewed as a threat to White dominance precisely because of our high achievement. For many privileged White Americans, we become a “peril of the mind”—a menacing foreign presence in elite educational spaces. This Essay focuses mainly on the peril of the mind phenomenon, which is much less widely acknowledged and theorized than the model minority. It examines peril of the mind in both higher education and K-12 education, examining affirmative action, admissions controversies, and the “new White flight”. It argues that conservatives have thus far acknowledged and addressed animus against Asian American achievement more than progressives, and that they have used both model minority and peril of the mind stereotypes to attack affirmative action and racial equity initiatives. Ultimately, the Essay is a call for progressive advocates of these initiatives to be more vigilant in recognizing that Asian Americans are not weaponized as model minorities, but that we are also viewed as a threat because of our achievement
The Inadmissibility of Victim Impact Evidence
Get PDFCurrently, 41% of inmates on death row in the United States are Black, even though Black people make up only 13.6% of the total population in the country. Additionally, the data has repeatedly shown that states that do not have the death penalty have lower murder rates than states that do. Despite these disparities, more than half of states in the United States continue to allow capital punishment in some form as an alternative to a life sentence. These disparities were further exacerbated by the Supreme Court’s decision in Payne v. Tennessee, which allowed prosecutors to introduce victim impact evidence in the sentencing phase of death penalty proceedings. Due to the widespread implementation of the death penalty across the states in this country, it is unlikely that the Court would abolish the death penalty in the near future. Thus, a compromise to alleviate some of the inequalities in capital punishment, without removing it in its entirety, is for the Supreme Court to reverse its decision in Payne and hold that admission of victim impact evidence is unconstitutional under the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendment. The central aim of this paper is to demonstrate that victim impact evidence has no place in death penalty sentencing proceedings because it has no bearing on the defendant’s culpability and moreover it has a prejudicial effect on the defendant’s verdict. First, I will argue that victim impact evidence is irrelevant for a juror’s determination of a defendant’s culpability for three reasons (1) the evidence shifts the jury’s attention from the defendant’s background to the victim’s background; (2) a defendant is often unaware of their victim’s personal circumstances; and (3) a defendant’s introduction of victim impact evidence to show the victim’s less favorable characteristics often does not influence a defendant’s culpability. Next, I will demonstrate that victim impact evidence has a prejudicial effect on the defendant because of the arbitrariness of several factors including (1) whether the victim’s family can articulate their emotions in a way that resonates with the jury; (2) jurors’ lack of cultural competence; and (3) viewpoint and racial bias in jury selection. Thus, to reduce some of the disparities in a criminal system that is already unequal, it is imperative for the Court to prohibit victim impact evidence in death penalty proceedings
The Legal Metaverse and Comparative Taxonomy: A Reappraisal
Get PDFThe present Article revisits my “Three Patterns of Law: Taxonomy and Change in the World’s Legal Systems”—published in this very Journal a quarter century ago—which acknowledged the ideological nature of the law versus politics distinction and posited taxonomy as a means for understanding law. The original article classified law into professional law, political law, and traditional law, and heralded the tentative and dynamic natures of such classification. The two purposes of the present Article are to (i) reflect on legal transformations that have since occurred as reactions to global geopolitical, technological, and economic changes, and (ii) interrogate whether epistemological assumptions that produced the Three Patterns of Law hypothesis still hold. The question the present Article poses is whether a fourth pattern of law is now necessary to capture the new technological state of affairs and the new geopolitical balances of power: in particular, should a rule of smart law be introduced? This Article surveys some of the relevant legal transformations capable of impacting the mapping of each legal pattern to a given geography. Because the Internet (like law, religion, tradition, or language) is an informative-normative system that has produced a new frontier of development, and because of its ubiquity, I have used it as a test for the current viability of the hypothesis. I conclude that it is too early to add a fourth pattern of law; but it is, perhaps, too late to avoid a pattern of no law taking over global hegemony by substituting algorithms for lawyers