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The Walmart Effect: Testing Private Interventions to Reduce Gun Suicide
No full textAfter the Parkland massacre in 2018, some large retailers voluntarily restricted their own gun sales. Dick’s Sporting Goods has removed all guns from over 100 stores and pledged to remove them from hundreds more locations.1 Walmart has been especially pro-active in its efforts to responsibly market firearms over the past three decades — instituting a number of self-imposed restrictions, including a refusal to sell handguns, military assault rifles, high capacity magazines, and bump stocks, as well as videotaping firearm sales, “allowing only select associates who have passed a criminal background check to sell firearms,” and refusing to sell to people younger than 21 years old.
The question looms: can corporate policies reduce the toll of gun violence?
It is too early to empirically assess post-Parkland events, but there is a long history of corporate policy changes in gun sales. Despite all of its restrictions on firearms sales, Walmart is the largest gun retailer in the country.A1 In 1994, Walmart stopped selling handguns at all of its locations in every state except for Alaska. In 2006, Walmart stopped selling firearms altogether in more than half of its stores. As shown in Figure 1, the number of Walmart Federal Firearm Licensees (FFLs) dropped from 2,900 to less than
1,300 for several years before the company reversed course in 2011 and began increasing the number of stores selling rifles and shotguns
Democracy and Health: Situating Health Rights within a Republic of Reasons
No full textPatterns of population health are keen reflections of structural inequities in societies, yet they are rarely subject to the requirements of democratic justification that other systemic inequalities provoke. Nor are health systems generally subject to societal scrutiny regarding fidelity to normative commitments of dignity and equality. Increased recognition of social determinants of health has challenged the narrow biomedical view of health as a stochastic phenomenon. More recently the sweeping devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare structural injustices across many democracies, which contributed to widely disparate rates of infection and mortality
The Due Process of Bail
No full textThe Due Process Clause is a central tenet of criminal law's constitutional canon. Yet defining precisely what process is due a defendant is a deceptively complex proposition. Nowhere is this more true than in the context of pretrial detention, where the Court has relied on due process safeguards to preserve the constitutionality of bail provisions. This Article considers the lay of the bail due process landscape through the lens of the district court's opinion in ODonnell v. Harris County and the often convoluted
historical description of pretrial due process. Even as the ODonnell court failed to characterize pretrial process as a substantive due process right - as countless courts before it had the case offers a compelling possibility that such a charactization is in fact appropriate in defining due process in a pretrial setting. And so, this Article concludes by reimagining pretrial due process as procedural and substantive in nature
“Contrived”: The Voting Rights Act Pretext for the Trump Administration’s Failed Attempt to Add a Citizenship Question to the 2020 Census
No full textA Pretext . . . For What? In March 2018, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross announced that the Trump Administration would add a question to the 2020 census asking the citizenship status of all persons in the United States. The question, Secretary Ross asserted, would generate “complete and accurate [citizenship] data” that the Department of Justice (DOJ) could use to better enforce Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA)—a law that sometimes requires states and localities to draw districts in which voters of color make up a majority of the voting age population (so-called “majority-minority” districts)
Financing Failure: Bankruptcy Lending, Credit Market Conditions, and the Financial Crisis
No full textWhen contemplating Chapter 11, firms often need to seek financing for their continuing operations in bankruptcy. Because such financing would otherwise be hard to find, the Bankruptcy Code authorizes debtors to offer sweeteners to debtor-in-possession (DIP) lenders. These inducements can be effective in attracting financing, but because they are thought to come at the expense of other stakeholders, the Code permits these inducements only if no less generous a package would have been sufficient to obtain the loan. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the use of certain controversial inducements—I focus on roll-ups and milestones—has skyrocketed in recent years, leading critics to question whether DIP lenders were abusing their power. Lenders, however, respond that DIP loan terms simply reflect economic conditions: when credit is tight, as it was in recent years because of the Financial Crisis, more sweeteners are needed to induce lending
Revolutionary Constitutions Symposium, Afterword: Multiple Identities
No full textIn writing Revolutionary Constitutions, I wasn't aiming to provide innovative "solutions" to the EU's current crisis. I was trying
to ask new questions - questions that could provoke a conversation permitting constitutionalists to frame more constructive proposals for reform over the coming decades. I hope that the dynamic conversation begun in this Symposium is a harbinger of further engagement with the issues raised by my "three pathways" approach.
To further encourage debate, these closing remarks invite my readers to reflect on a fundamental limitation of the "three pathways"
framework. In response to this limitation, I will introduce a second perspective that can help compensate for that deficiency.
I will call it "multiple identities" analysis. I suggest that, in future work, it should complement the "three pathways" approach
that served as the basis for this Symposium
Not Everything Is About Investors: The Case for Mandatory Stakeholder Disclosure
No full textCorporations are required to disclose specific types of information to the public, but only the federal securities laws impose generalized disclosure obligations that produce a holistic overview of corporate operations. While these disclosures are intended to benefit investors, they are accessible to anyone, and thus have long been relied upon by regulators, competitors, employees, and local communities to provide a working portrait of the country’s economic life. Today, that system is breaking down. Congress and the SEC have made it easier for companies to raise capital without triggering securities reporting obligations, allowing modern businesses to grow to enormous proportions while leaving the public in the dark about their operations. Meanwhile, investors’ governmentally conferred informational advantage allows them to tilt managers’ behavior in their favor, at the expense of consumers, employees, and other corporate stakeholders. As a result, securities disclosures do not provide the comprehensive picture necessary to maintain social control over corporate behavior
Finalist - Pumaya
No full textPumaya by Solomon Akesseh was one of the five finalists in the 2019 Yale Law School short story contest
Eddie Murphy and the Dangers of Counterfactual Causal Thinking About Detecting Racial Discrimination
No full textThe model of discrimination animating some of the most common approaches to detecting discrimination in both law and social
science-the counterfactual causal model-is wrong. In that model, racial discrimination is detected by measuring the "treatment effect of race," where the treatment is conceptualized as manipulating the raced status of otherwise identical units (e.g., a person, a neighborhood, a school). Most objections to talking about race as a cause in the counterfactual model have been raised in terms of manipulability. If we cannot manipulate a person's race at the moment of a police stop, traffic encounter, or prosecutorial charging
decision, then it is impossible to detect if the person's race was the sole cause of an unfavorable outcome. But this debate has proceeded on the wrong terms. The counterfactual causal model of discrimination is not wrong because we can't work around the practical limits of manipulation, as evidenced by both Eddie Murphy's comic genius in the Saturday Night Live skit "White Like Me" and the entire genre of audit and correspondence studies. It is wrong because to fit the rigor of the counterfactual model of a
clearly defined treatment on otherwise identical units, we must reduce race to only the signs of the category, meaning we must think race is skin color, or phenotype, or other ways we identify group status. And that is a concept mistake if one subscribes to a constructivist, as opposed to a biological or genetic, conception of race. The counterfactual causal model of discrimination is based on a flawed theory of what the category of race references, how it produces effects in the world, and what is meant when we
say it is wrong to make decisions of import because of race. I argue that DISCRIMINATION is a thick ethical concept that at once describes and evaluates the actions to which it is applied, and therefore, we cannot detect actions as discriminatory by identifying a relation of counterfactual causality; we can do so only by reasoning about the action's distinctive wrongfulness by referencing what constitutes the very categories that are the objects of concern. An adequate theory of discrimination must rest upon (1)
an account of the system of social meanings or practices that constitute the categories at issue and (2) a moral theory of what is fair and just in various state and private arenas given what the categories are
Algorithmic Transparency for the Smart City
No full textAs artificial intelligence and big data analytics increasingly replace human decision making, questions about algorithmic ethics become more pressing. Many are concerned that an algorithmic society is too opaque to be accountable for its behavior. An individual can be denied parole or credit, fired, or not hired for reasons that she will never know and which cannot be articulated. In the public sector, the opacity of algorithmic decision making is particularly problematic, both because governmental decisions may be especially weighty and because democratically elected governments have special duties of accountability