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The Dangers of Racial Gerrymandering in the Frontline Fight for Free and Fair Elections
Get PDFSince its founding, the United States has counted democratic elections as a fundamental tenet of democracy. Redistricting ensures that elections are free, fair, and representative of the people. This process requires that every ten years, after the national census, congressional, state, and local districts are redrawn, if necessary, to reflect changes in population to ensure that district populations are equal. What should be a simple calculation, has become step one in a political party’s bid to maintain or gain power. This has led to countless legal battles and minority populations left without adequate representation. In turn, this lack of representation perpetuates the systemic racism upon which this country was founded. Gerrymandering, particularly racial gerrymandering, is a foundational step in ensuring the exclusion of underrepresented communities from voting. The 2020 election concluded with many seat flips by a slim margin of votes, along with the record voter turn-out and resulting litigation, which suggests that the battle of redistricting following the 2020 census is bound to be an intense one. This Comment defines gerrymandering, its types, and strategies as week as lays out the legal framework for racial gerrymandering litigation. It focuses past on censuses and what can be expected out of the 2020 census results. The impact of racial gerrymandering on minority and underrepresented communities including voter suppression, systematic racism, and a lack of representation in government cannot be understated. The Comment concludes with possible solutions to prevent racial gerrymandering in the future. Ultimately, the author demonstrates that the fight for fair and free access to voting is stronger than ever
How To Protect Special Education During COVID-19: From the Courts to the Capitol
Get PDFThe COVID-19 pandemic has forced students around the country out of brick-and-mortar schools and into virtual classrooms. While the switch to remote learning has helped keep students and teachers safe from contracting the virus, students with disabilities have largely been deprived of a meaningful education and in person services mandated under federal law. This essay will explain how students have been denied a free appropriate public education (FAPE) under the Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA), how litigation has been unsuccessful in creating systemic change for these students, and how public policy by U.S. legislators can offer a solution
Star–Crossed Copyrights: The Story of How Mexico Defied Civil Law Traditions by Infusing Common Law Ideologies into its Audiovisual and Motion Picture Copyright Regulations
Get PDFThis Note was inspired by the out–of–the–ordinary, yet practical approach that Mexico chose to implement when it waived certain longstanding copyright moral rights principles in favor of the U.S. common law work–made–for–hire approach for its audiovisual and motion picture regulations. Since the inception of its copyright law, Mexico has strictly adhered to the civil law ideologies that are generally standard to civil law countries, particularly in its loyalty to the original creators of creative works through the moral rights doctrine. The United States, on the other hand, favors utilitarian ideologies that emphasize the societal importance of fostering innovation through the balance of creator rights and limitations. This Note will breakdown and analyze Mexico’s unique “hybrid law” that incorporates a work–made–for–hire exception to its moral rights ideologies through (1) the examination of each country’s traditional copyright laws, (2) the analysis of two international treaties that influenced the creation of the copyright exception, and (3) the effects of the hybrid law on the audiovisual and motion picture industries. Furthermore, this Note will discuss how the hybrid law created the flexibility to promote greater collab-oration between the United States and Mexico
The SEC\u27s Climate Disclosure Rule: Critiquing the Critics
No full textClimate change is an existential phenomenon, which entails a wide variety of physical risks as well as sizeable but underappreciated economic risks. In March 2022, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) moved to address some of the information gaps related to the effects of climate change on firms by proposing a rule that requires public companies to report detailed and standardized information about important climate-related matters for the benefit of investors and markets. Though the rule proposal was welcomed by many market participants, it was also met with a level of opposition that was unusual in both its intensity and consistency. Instead of following standard practice and engaging with the specific policy judgments made by the SEC in an effort to improve the final rule through constructive notice-and-comment rulemaking, many critics chose to attack every aspect of the rule proposal and the SEC\u27s very decision to pursue a climate disclosure rule. The critics disputed the SEC\u27s statutory authority and motivations, questioned the materiality of information about the economic impacts of climate change, and advanced certain novel administrative and constitutional law theories that had gained traction in other; unrelated contexts. Unless the SEC yields to pressure and abandons the climate disclosure project, these same arguments will serve as the basis for the widely predicted litigation against the final rule.
This Article presents an original analysis of some of the principal challenges to the SEC\u27s climate disclosure rule and, ultimately, finds them unpersuasive. A close review of the features of the traditional disclosure regime, many of them long forgotten, and of the features of the SEC\u27s rule, many of them distorted by the critics, suggests that the rule is in keeping with longstanding regulatory practice. In short, the SEC has the statutory authority to act, its motivations are neither improper nor novel, materiality, when properly understood, does not present an obstacle, and theories pertaining to major questions and compelled speech are misplaced in this context.
The Article contributes to the debate on climate-related disclosure in two ways. First, it draws attention to the flawed legal and policy arguments against the SEC\u27s climate disclosure initiative and the distracting rhetoric that has accompanied them. And, second, it highlights the rule\u27s core function, which is to put in place an information-generating framework to help capital markets and capital market participants the primary intended beneficiaries of SEC regulation with the climate-related economic challenges that lie ahead
Due Process Alignment in Mass Restructurings
Get PDFMass tort defendants have recently begun exiting multidistrict litigation by filing for bankruptcy. This new strategy ushers defendants into a far more hospitable forum that offers accelerated resolution of all state and federal claims held by both current and future victims.
Bankruptcy\u27s structural, procedural, and substantive benefits also provide defendants with unique optionality. Bankruptcy\u27s resolution promise is alluring, but the process relies on a very large assumption: that future victims can be compelled to relinquish property rights in their cause of action against the corporate defendant and others without consent or notice. Bankruptcy builds an entire resolution structure on the premise that the U.S. Bankruptcy Code\u27s untested interest-representation scheme satisfies due process strictures. This Essay questions that assumption and identifies two compromised pillars that could render bankruptcy\u27s mass tort framework unconstitutional. First, the process for selecting the fiduciary that represents future victims\u27 interests and irrevocably binds them to the agreed settlement is fundamentally broken. Second, the process by which bankruptcy courts estimate the value of thousands of mass tort claims places too much pressure on a jurist unfamiliar with personal injury claims. These compromised pillars raise the risk that the victims\u27 settlement trust will be underfunded and will fail prematurely. In this outcome, future victims would have no recourse but to argue that the restructuring process did not satisfy due process and the entire settlement should be unwound This Essay proposes that the risk of a prematurely insolvent victim\u27s trust can be reduced considerably by bolstering these two pillars. Our proposal seeks to (1) rebuild the future claimants\u27 representative role in order to ensure that future victims\u27 interests are effectively represented and (2) recalibrate the claim estimation process by facilitating coordination between the bankruptcy court and nonbankruptcy federal and state courts
Racial Trauma in Civil Rights Representation
Get PDFNarratives of trauma told by clients and communities of color have inspired an increasing number of civil rights and antiracist lawyers and academics to call for more trauma-informed training for law students and lawyers. These advocates have argued not only for greater trauma-sensitive practices and trauma-centered interventions on behalf of adversely impacted individuals and groups but also for greater awareness of the risks of secondary or vicarious trauma for lawyers who represent traumatized clients and communities. In this Article, we join this chorus of attorneys and academics. Harnessing the recent civil rights case of P.P. v. Compton Unified School District, we illustrate how trauma-informed lawyering can both advance civil rights and provide healing for affected communities and individuals. In so doing, we focus our analysis on the use of racial trauma evidence in the Compton school litigation specifically and in contemporary civil rights representation more generally. Building on our prior work on race, cultural trauma, and civil rights lawyering, we investigate the meaning of racial trauma for individual, group, and community clients and for their legal teams while detailing the importance of establishing a trauma-informed practice for today\u27s civil rights lawyers. This litigation-based investigation shows that sociolegal meaning is bound up in the struggle to accommodate community violence-centered racial trauma advocacy within traditional lawyering processes and legal ethics frameworks. Often overlooked, that ethical and professional struggle affects the form and substance of lawyer decision making and discretion in civil rights cases
The Higher-Cost Problem: How the CASE Act Addresses the History of Inequity in the American Copyright Regime
Get PDFThe legislative history of copyright law in the United States and its judicial interpretation resulted in a complex web of statutes and doctrine theoretically meant to further the constitutional goal of “promot[ing] the Progress of Science and the useful Arts.” But because of its complexity, enforcing rights against infringers in federal court became prohibitively expensive for most. The American copyright regime simultaneously allowed the music industry to unfairly profit from the creativity of the under-resourced—particularly, musicians of color.
This Note discusses the disparate impact of the American copyright regime. Then, the Note discusses the Copyright Alternatives in the Small-Claims Enforcement Act, which Congress passed to address the high costs of pursuing copyright infringement claims in federal court. Specifically, this Note addresses constitutional and practical concerns raised by scholars about the Act and how the Act might finally signal a shift in Congressional focus toward the needs of minority artists in copyright legislation