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Dean\u27s Perspective: The Bar Exam: It\u27s Time for Indiana to Adopt a Uniform Bar Exam
Get PDFFor most of us, the Bar Exam conjures up memories of grueling prep courses, intensive studying, and a couple of long days of exhaustive tests. In a way, the exam is the final rite of passage from law student to law practitioner. The exam is intended to test minimal professional competency, evaluating an applicant\u27s legal reasoning and ability to apply general legal principles to various fact patterns.
Recently, bar exams throughout the United States have come under scrutiny. Nationwide pass rates have declined significantly. The same has been true for Indiana. Even though pass rates for first-time takers at the Maurer School of Law have continued to hover between 85-95%, the average Indiana pass rate has declined from 82% in 1979-2000 to 72.8% in 2001-2016. In July 2019, the first time pass rate for the Indiana bar exam was 76%, and the overall pass rate was 65%. These declines have spurred states to scrutinize their bar exams, driven by concerns over whether would-be good lawyers were being kept from the practice..
Maximizing the Value of America’s Newest Resource, Low- Altitude Airspace: An Economic Analysis of Aerial Trespass and Drones
Get PDFRecognizing that tort law is a unique area of law that was judicially created by rational human beings with an innate sense of economic justice, this Note seeks to apply positive economic theory—derived from ex post analyses of tort cases—to an ex ante analysis to predict how and to what extent the existing and proposed aerial trespass rules will further economic efficiency in the context of drones and airspace rights. Part I will provide (1) an overview of the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) current regulatory framework and the development of the common law aerial trespass doctrine and (2) an overview of the debate surrounding landowners’ property rights and drones by discussing the ULC’s proposed per se aerial trespass rule and the reactions of various stakeholders that led to the proposal of the two alternative rules mentioned above. Part II will attempt to clarify the property rights of landowners to the airspace above their land and argue that the ULC’s proposal is premised on a flawed assumption that aerial trespass should be treated as trespass to land. Part III will compare the economic efficiency of these proposed rules with the existing doctrine in place by applying an ex ante positive economic analysis to show that the common law doctrine of aerial trespass is economically superior to the ULC’s per se and alternative aerial trespass rules
The International Law of Rabble Rousing
Get PDFThis Essay offers an account of rabble-rousing, a novel information warfare operation worthy of its own classification, and explores the extent to which contemporary international law and available technologies are capable of addressing the threat that this tactic poses to public world order.
This Essay proceeds as follows. Part I provides a definition of rabblerousing strategies, highlighting the ways by which they are uniquely defined from other forms of information warfare. It then proceeds to highlight the dangers associated with the practice.
Part II moves to examine whether rabble-rousing can be recognized as an internationally wrongful act under the traditional paradigms of public international law. It looks at the prohibitions on coercive intervention, transboundary harm, and subversive propaganda as well as the principle of sovereignty and the human rights to self-determination and freedom of expression in order to determine the legality of rabble-rousing operations under international law. This Part highlights the limits of traditional interpretations of the above legal regimes and proposes how certain adaptations to the law could potentially better capture the examined phenomenon.
Part III assesses current technological capabilities and proposes policy solutions, which will be necessary for States to practically defend against this activity regardless of whether or not wrongfulness can be established. Part IV concludes the argument.
Ultimately, we hope that this Essay will serve as a call-to-action for scholars and practitioners to expand on their existing taxonomies of the informational theater of conflict, and to promote nuanced solutions that take all considerations into account
The Dangers of Humanitarian Intervention and the Responsibility to Protect Doctrine, and a Partial Solution
Get PDFWhen the United Nations (UN) was formed, one of its most important goals was to render war obsolete. The UN Charter states as a goal the hope to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt first described his vision for a post-World War II international organization, he envisioned an organization that would promote and facilitate international cooperation . . . to consider and deal with the problem of world relations. He also wanted a council that would concern itself with peaceful settlement of international disputes. The UN Charter itself took the then-unprecedented step of outlawing war, stating that all Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means, and that all Members shall refrain . . . from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.
However, the UN Charter does not address the important potential exception of humanitarian intervention. This lack of clarity has led to a robust debate that continues to this day-can a state legitimately use force for humanitarian purposes? Today, many countries have embraced the responsibility to protect doctrine, which allows countries to intervene in a humanitarian crisis if five criteria are met. One is that of reasonable prospects which asks, is there a reasonable chance of the military action being successful in meeting the threat in question, and are the consequences of action not likely to be worse than the consequences of inaction? * Unfortunately, this level of scrutiny needs to be revised; instead, it should be more rigorous to account for world leaders\u27 consistent inability to estimate the effects of their intervention. Additionally, cultural disruption should be considered as one of the negative effects in this balancing test to address concerns about the use of humanitarian intervention as a pretext for colonialism.
In this article, I intend to offer a potential solution to address these concerns. In Part I, I will examine the development of the doctrine of humanitarian intervention and its transformation into the Responsibility to Protect. In Part II, I will discuss two of the potential problems with the Responsibility to Protect doctrine. The first problem is countries using humanitarian excuses as a pretext to advance national aims. The second problem is countries not accurately assessing the consequences of intervention. In Part III, I will discuss my potential solution to address these problems - heightening the balance of consequences test. This will be used to determine whether humanitarian intervention should be attempted and requiring countries to consider the desires and culture of the country that is the object of the intervention before intervening
The Violence of Nosy Questions
Get PDFThis Essay examines a little-studied aspect of police procedure: police officers’ unfettered power to ask questions of motorists. The questions officers ask after they have stopped a car can run the gamut from questions about the nature of the motorist’s travel plans to nosy personal questions. Such questions are often intrusive, and drivers report feeling degraded by having to answer them. This Essay argues that these questions should be regulated because giving officers complete control over what they ask motorists provides a significant space for racial discrimination in policing, creates resentment, and encourages minorities to distrust the police
Small Pool for Big Data: Researching for Sustainable Data Focused on Open Government Data (OGD) Movement
Get PDFWhen Sir Isaac Newton said his famous statement standing on the shoulders of giants, it was a modest phrase and explained the necessity of sharing knowledge or information to make the next intellectual progress. The data industry is now the fastest developing area, but many ambiguities are a subject in law. The protection of data is a fascinating and still unsolved challenge for intellectual property law. Data is essential in the matter of new industry and our lifestyle at individual, corporate, and institutional levels. And the legal protection needs to work to offer vivid transactions of data for creative interactions. However, many enterprises consider data an asset for business profit as the data industry grows vast and fast. Data raises diverse policy debates that arise in the better-known intellectual property areas, for instance, copyrights, unfair competition, and trade secret. The vague aspects of data implicate a number of intellectual property approaches. It also extends to the economic problem \u27tragedy of anti-commons\u27 that fragmented ownership is disrupting sound usage.
In this regard, Open Governmental Data (OGD) is one way to resolve inefficiency in the data industry. The government collects massive personal data and reproduces datasets in the process of administration. Many governments give back the public data for private sectors anticipating the data works for new enterprise seed money.
This work looks at three considerations about the legal aspects of data. At first, we will see the necessity of big data in current and reasons for the government to pay attention to open data to the public. The data industry market\u27s inefficiency discourages cumulative innovation in our society and approaches the benefits of sharing data in the private economy or OGD movement. Second, the paper conducts principles of OGD and takes a functional approach in analyzing the related IP laws in database protection and public accessibility. Interestingly various governments are opening data that compares various OGD models from different countries led by other stakeholders, including government, large companies, small to medium enterprises ( SMEs ), and how they work as a member of OGD. Finally, it critiques the current OGD movement and suggests that corporate OGD strategies granting autonomous would help resolve the anti-commons of IP in the big data industry
Strategic Nonconformity to the TCJA, Part I: Personal Income Taxes
Get PDFThe dire revenue situation that COVID-19 has created for state and local governments is a well documented and looming reality for state legislatures. We and others have explored a variety of ways that states should respond to this crisis in prior articles as a part of Project SAFE (State Action in Fiscal Emergencies), an academic effort to help states weather the fiscal crisis by providing policy recommendations backed by research. We think, as do many others, that in the absence of sufficient federal action, the states should prioritize raising revenue through targeted taxes on economic actors that are best enduring the crisis, rather than cutting services needed to protect state economies or state residents suffering more from the crisis.
With those background goals, this article focuses on the ways that states could raise revenue by rethinking whether and how they conform to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. This article is the first in a planned two-part series, with this article focusing on strategic nonconformity with the TCJA for state-level personal income taxes, and with the planned second article in the series to then focus on strategic nonconformity with the TCJA for state-level corporate income taxes