Mitchell Hamline School of Law
Not a member yet
3445 research outputs found
Sort by
Major Questions Impede Major Progress--Rebuking the Major Questions Doctrine & West Virginia v. EPA in Minnesota
Get PDFThe Harmful Effects of Expansive Immunity Protections for Child Abuse Reporters and the Lack of Justice for Those Who Are Falsely Accused
Get PDFFacilitating Race-Conscious Targeted Purchasing Programs in the Shadow of the Trump Judiciary
Get PDFProfessor, Please Help Me Pass the Bar Exam #NextGenBar2026
No full textLegal education is faced with an industry-changing event: the complete revamping of the licensing exam law school graduates must complete to use their hard-earned J.D. to practice law. What is not known is what law schools will do in response to this news; that is, how law schools will make adjustments to prepare students who will walk the halls starting in the fall of 2022 for this monumental change.
The diverse constituents of the legal academy, from administrators to faculty, from bar-readiness professors to contracts professors, from skills programs to curriculum committees, should be abuzz with conversations about the implications of the forthcoming new bar exam and should have already started, in earnest, to think about how to adapt to prepare future generations of students to succeed on the exam for both student success and to ensure continued compliance with the ABA accreditation standards. Unfortunately, the halls of the legal academy seem eerily quiet.
This article 1) explores why, based on the tie between the curriculum and the existing bar exam, the wait-and-see approach to the NextGen bar exam is ill-advised, and 2) provides the tools needed for law schools to begin discussions that will serve as a springboard for both short- and longer-term curricular change. Section I of this article orients the reader to the debate over the existing bar exam and explores the basis for the creation of the NextGen bar exam. Section II sets out the structure of the existing bar exam. With that context in mind, Section III identifies the three emerging ways law schools seem to be adapting their curricula—or not—to prepare law students for this existing exam. Section IV introduces the NextGen bar exam, highlighting how it will differ from the existing bar exam substantively and structurally. Finally, Section V suggests a number of ways—even without a specific NextGen bar exam prototype—law schools can begin to rethink their current curricular and assessment practices in response to and in preparation for the NextGen bar exam’s forthcoming implementation
The Road to Autonomy
Get PDFScholars, activists, and advocates have long identified the “transportation gap” as a significant factor contributing to race- and class-based economic and other disparities. Carlessness correlates closely with race and poverty; meanwhile, widespread disinvestment in public transit results in low-income Black and Brown people suffering a disproportionate lack of access to opportunity and choice in almost every conceivable area of life.
State and local governments most often propose one of three solutions to correct the transportation gap: 1) renewing their investment in public transit; 2) increasing access to shared transit; and 3) making adaptations to the built environment. This Article demonstrates that these three proposals are all inadequate. Despite their many benefits, none of these solutions provide an equivalent substitute for private car ownership for individuals who need or want better transportation. Thus, any solution privileging public approaches to the exclusion of private options is doomed at the outset and will never completely suffice to close the gap.
The thinking that inspires the major public-approach proposals is in line with the current understanding of the constitutional right to travel, which judges and legal scholars contemplate as a negative right, blocking undue interference with interstate travel. A right to intrastate travel is not universally recognized, but where it is acknowledged, it is also consistently framed as a negative right.
This Article argues that, instead, advocates and lawmakers must design solutions that incorporate a positive right to autonomous mobility, allowing individual input and choice in the modes of transportation best suited to each person. The low-income, Black, and Brown people stranded in the transportation gap are not well served by top-down, one-size-fits-all solutions. Moreover, the public-approach proposals typically ignore private car ownership as a possible option, or outright discourage it, to stem the tide of the environmental and infrastructural problems associated with the popularity of driving. This dismissal imposes private burdens to solve societal problems; it yokes the most vulnerable to eliminate problems created by the most powerful.
Instead, courts, legislatures, business leaders, and the American public at large must affirm a positive right to autonomous mobility: to trust individuals to know their own needs and to meet them, even if those needs include private vehicle ownership. Only when the law expands to recognize this right and include private options can state and local governments design creative and principled solutions that have a chance of closing the transportation gap
Fezzik, Are There Rocks Ahead? Navigating the Oppression Doctrine in the Age of LLCs
Get PDFFor many decades, the law of closely held businesses was the law of closely held corporations. For entrepreneurs and attorneys, the corporate liability shield was the key desideratum, and before the advent of limited liability companies the corporation was essentially the only game in town. Unfortunately, for many decades the liability shield came with a potentially dangerous price for minority owners. The traditional corporate norms of majority rule empowered majority shareholders to “oppress” minority shareholders or defeat such shareholders’ “reasonable expectations.”
Today, in almost all U.S. jurisdictions special rules protect minority shareholders from outright expropriation; controlling share-holders must avoid abusing their co-owners; and the law recognizes what was many years ago described as an “incorporated partner-ship” —i.e., “an intimate business venture [in which] stockholders . . . occupy a position similar to that of joint adventurers and partners” and, concomitantly, have important duties inter se.
However, today the closely held corporation (“CHC”) is no longer the only game in town. Far from it—in every U.S. jurisdiction, formations of limited liability companies far exceed new incorporations, and for some jurisdictions a better verb choice might be “dwarf.” Every year, the percentage of closely held businesses formed as a limited liability company rises as the percentage for corporations falls.
As with corporations, the overwhelming majority of limited liability companies are closely held, so increasingly disputes about power abuses within closely held businesses occur in the context of limited liability companies rather than corporations. Thus, it is worth asking: (i) whether corporate-like risks of oppression exist in the context of limited liability companies; (ii) if so, whether LLC law provides protections against oppression; and (iii) if so, to what extent do those protections parallel protections under the law of close corporations and (iv) in what ways do the former category of protections differ from the latter?
As this Article briefly recaps, and the author and a few others stated almost 30 years ago, the answer to the each of the first two questions is “yes.” The answer to the third question is “substantially,” while the answer to the fourth question is “somewhat for some protections against oppression, but not much (if at all) for others.” Therefore, understanding established CHC oppression doctrine should help judges, practitioners, and others understand the still developing doctrine of LLC oppression, and this Article seeks to provide the necessary help
