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Farm and Food Policies for a Sustainable Future
Get PDFUnited States government policies have incentivized and supported the unsustainable agri-food system of the present and fundamental changes in farm and food policies will be necessary for a sustainable future. US farm policies, initiated in the 1930s, were designed to ensure long run domestic food security by ensuring the economic viability of independent family farms. New mechanical, chemical, and biological technologies of the 1950s made it possible to increase agricultural productivity by applying industrial production strategies to farming. A shift in farm policy during the 1960s made the shift from family farms to industrial agriculture inevitable
Weathering State and Local Budget Storms: Fiscal Federalism with an Uncooperative Congress
No full textThroughout most of 2020, state and local governments faced severe budget crises as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Increased demand for state welfare services and rising state expenses related to controlling the spread of COVID-19 stretched state and local budgets to their breaking points. At the same time, layoffs, business closures, and social distancing measures reduced states’ primary sources of tax revenues. The traditional practice of American fiscal federalism is for the federal government to step in to provide aid during a national emergency of this magnitude, because state and local governments lack the federal government’s monetary and fiscal powers. But during the 2020 national emergency, the majority coalition in control of Congress was skeptical of this traditional practice, leaving federal aid limited and insufficient.
Late in the day, and after a change of Presidents and in partisan control of the Senate, the federal government did eventually step in to provide substantial aid to state and local governments at the beginning of 2021. But, during 2020, it was not at all clear that this would occur. Regardless, due to heightened partisan polarization and related factors, it seems highly likely that future national emergencies will occur during times in which the federal government is again controlled by a majority coalition skeptical of the federal government’s traditional role of providing aid to state and local governments during downturns.
This Article thus proposes a series of innovative state tax reform measures and other related reform proposals for modernizing states’ outdated tax bases and crisis-proofing American institutions of fiscal federalism. These proposals were initially designed as reforms to mitigate the harmful state and local budget consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. But a central role of legal scholarship should be to develop law reform solutions for legislatures and for other policymakers to prepare for future emergencies when those solutions may be urgently needed. To that end, this Article elaborates on and memorializes proposals initially developed for the 2020 crises, so that these proposals might be further developed to be ready as potential responses for future crises in which the federal government might once again prove unwilling to act sufficiently
Liability Insurance and Contractual Aspects of Settlement
Get PDFMost civil litigation settles. Many settlements are paid by liability insurers following the negotiation of settlement agreements by the parties’ lawyers. Settlement agreements are contracts, and their interpretation and enforcement are therefore governed by contract law principles. The essential elements of a contract are offer, acceptance, and consideration. In the liability insurance context as elsewhere, contract disputes connected to settlements typically center on either offer or acceptance. To be valid, a settlement offer must be capable of acceptance. The offer must be definite, and its material terms must be reasonably certain. When it comes to accepting a settlement offer, the “mirror image” rule applies in this context as it does in other contract formation scenarios. Under this rule, an attempted acceptance that does not mirror the settlement offer in material respects becomes a counteroffer. If the claimant declines the counteroffer, there is no settlement. This turn of events can be enormously consequential if the insured’s potential liability exceeds its policy limits and litigation ensues
Risky Business: Breakfast Sandwiches, Course of Employment, and Revisiting Missouri Workers’ Compensation Law
Get PDFSince its inception, the Missouri Workers’ Compensation scheme has presented interesting and complex problems regarding workplace risk allocation. To avoid workplace injuries, employees and employers engage in significant preventative behaviors. One such action by employers is employee monitoring. Clearly, however, constant workplace monitoring is not feasible. This inherent limitation leads to this Note’s initial inquiry: at what point do the actions of employees taken out of sight of their employers create compensable claims under the existing Missouri Workers’ Compensation system, and what inefficiencies may result from requiring that employers provide compensation for the injuries that arise from such actions? Boothe v. DISH Network, Inc. provided a new perspective on this question while evaluating an employee’s claim deriving from a vehicular accident
Blown Whistle Falls on Deaf Ears: The Eighth Circuit Interprets MAP-21’s Whistleblower Provision
Get PDFIn recent years, whistleblowers have been praised as heroes by onlookers and in the media for bravely unveiling wrongdoing by their employers, but whistleblowers have not always enjoyed this white-hat status. These private employees expose themselves to serious risks of backlash and retaliation from their employers, historically without any guaranteed protection from Congress or their respective state legislatures. Decades-old social norms and corporate culture prioritized loyalty from employees. They allowed employers to fire employees who spoke out against the company and even blackball them from their respective industries. With blind loyalty or termination being the only options for employees witnessing wrongdoing within their company, silence was the norm. Over the last few decades, Congress has increasingly recognized the public importance of protecting these whistleblowers and has enacted more than two dozen statutes mandating protection from retaliation in a wide variety of industries, with more than half the states following suit
Born-Again RFRA: Will the Military Backslide on its Religious Conversion?
Get PDFThis Article details the importance of religious freedom in the United States and its armed forces, as well as the unfortunate history of non-accommodation that has plagued the Department of Defense (DoD) until recent years. It reviews the jurisprudence surrounding military service member free-exercise claims before and after the landmark Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) of 1993, and it analyzes how courts have addressed those claims within the military. It proposes an analysis for handing religious accommodation claims under RFRA in the military, and examines a series of hypotheticals that demonstrate the issues the DoD must confront and accommodate if it is to value its members’ religious liberty
Not Quite “Justice for All”: How Provisions of Victims’ Rights Legislation Can Harm Plea Negotiations
Get PDFUndoubtedly, the history of our criminal justice system has been unkind to victims of crime. This demographic, if acknowledged at all, would historically sit in our nation’s courtrooms and watch as the criminal justice system happened to them. Congress fundamentally altered the role of victims in 2015 when it enacted a statute granting victims a plethora of new rights. Victims suddenly could confer with the state’s attorney and rely on protections from the government against the accused. Interspersed within victims’ newfound rights is the right to be reasonably heard at any plea proceeding and the ability to reopen a plea if the defendant did not plead to the highest offense charged
A Confusing Clarification: How the Bad-Faith Exception in 28 U.S.C. § 1446(c) Costs More Than It Is Worth
Get PDFIt matters where a case is heard. Venue and jurisdiction are not solely dry, esoteric matters—they impact the course of litigation and litigants’ rights. In general, plaintiffs prefer to litigate in state court, while defendants prefer federal court. Unfortunately for defendants, federal courts have limited jurisdiction. To remove an action from state to federal court, defendants must plausibly characterize an action as fitting within a particular jurisdictional grant. As attentive civil procedure students remember from World-Wide Volkswagen Corp. v. Woodson, defendants go to extraordinary lengths to avoid plaintiff-friendly jurisdictions
