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Using Election Forecasts to Understand the Potential Influence of Campaigns, Media, and the Law in U.S. Presidential Elections
Get PDFHow do campaigns, media, and voting laws influence the outcome of U.S. Presidential elections? Political scientists often argue that these factors influence outcomes much less than commonly thought. To illustrate this argument, we show that we can predict the presidential vote in each state with a high degree of accuracy. Specifically, between 2004 and 2016, we correctly predict 94% of all state presidential vote outcomes. Our predictions are based on a forecasting model of the Electoral College, based primarily on each state’s approval rating of the incumbent president (using almost 90,000 survey responses from June and July of election years), current economic conditions in each state, and state votes in the previous election. We use these forecasts to help establish the upper bounds of campaign and media effects. We argue that identifying the limits of these effects is a critical step when trying to estimate their impact. We also show how our forecasts can be used to test the aggregate effects of election-related laws, such as Florida’s Amendment 4—which enfranchised hundreds of thousands of Floridians who previously could not vote due to felony convictions—and voter ID laws, whose effects are notoriously difficult to study. We have made our data publicly available to facilitate further research on these topics
Regulating Mobility Limitations in the Franchise Relationship as Dependency in the Joint Employment Doctrine
Get PDFFranchisors often impose exhaustive operational standards on franchisees, and enforce those standards by restricting the mobility of their franchisees and their franchisees\u27 employees. But courts often ignore mobility limits when applying joint employer doctrine. This Article argues that courts and agencies should be more likely to find, and presume, that franchisors and their franchisees are joint employers under federal and state employment law based on proof that a franchisor restricts the mobility of franchisees or their employees. In so doing, this Article traces how the Chicago School\u27s efficiency arguments in favor of relaxing antitrust law enforcement of vertical restraints developed into a presumption that franchisors are not joint employers, despite modern antitrust law litigation showing that mobility restraints can harm workers. It concludes that preventing franchisor-imposed mobility restraints from harming workers will require courts, legislatures, and agencies to center subordinate firm dependency on lead firms in the joint employer doctrin
Challenging Domestic Injustice Through International Human Rights Advocacy: Addressing Homelessness in The United States
Get PDFThis Article explores how international human rights norms and procedures can serve as a powerful tool in addressing injustice in the United States context, using work addressing the criminalization of homelessness as a case study. Moreover, it explores how civil and political rights and negative obligations by the government can serve as an entry point for asserting a more robust understanding of rights that includes social and economic rights and affirmative obligations by government. The Article documents and analyzes original work led by the National Homelessness Law Center and other pioneering advocates, reflecting on lessons learned and next steps to make the human right to housing a legal obligation in our country
“Safe Spaces” and “Brave Spaces”: The Case for Creating Law School Classrooms That Are Both
Get PDFOver the past decade, the subject of “safe spaces” on college and university campuses has received much press. As originally conceived, the term “safe space” refers to an environment—often a physical space—in which “everyone feels comfortable expressing themselves and participating fully, without fear of attack, ridicule, or denial of experience.” And while this original conception may not seem controversial, the meaning of “safe spaces” as applied to higher education classrooms is a subject of ongoing vigorous debate. On one side of the debate are those who believe that safe spaces foster learning by making it possible for students to be exposed to diverse perspectives in an atmosphere of honesty, respect, and empathy. On the other side of the debate are those who believe that safe spaces threaten academic freedom by requiring professors and students to refrain from expressing any viewpoint or idea that might be threatening or “triggering” to others.Student demand for safe spaces has been on the rise for decades, and there is reason to believe that with the arrival of Generation Z (“Gen Z”) students on college and university campuses, the demand will increase. As a group, Gen Z students tend to be more anxious than their predecessor generations, and with the confluence of the COVID-19 pandemic and the racial unrest of 2020, they have much to be anxious about.Moreover, many Gen Z students have become accustomed to being protected from difficult situations (some refer to them as “coddled”). But at the same time, Gen Z is widely recognized as being more activist than their Millennial predecessors, on issues ranging from racial justice to human trafficking to climate change. It stands to reason that faculty, staff, and administrators in the higher education setting will need to figure out how to provide a learning environment that balances Gen Z students’ insistence on addressing difficult social issues with their desire to do so in a safe space. But what exactly is a safe space? And should creating safe spaces be a goal of institutions of higher learning?Those questions take on added weight in the law school context because of the key role of the law in shaping society. Unlike undergraduate education, legal education is specifically designed to equip students to enter the profession, where they will encounter myriad situations that require them to step out of their comfort zones. This has perhaps never been truer than in 2021, as racial and social justice issues have risen to the forefront of the American consciousness at the same time that our country has experienced unprecedented political polarization. It is in this environment that lawyers are increasingly being called on to step forward and use their legal training to effect systemic change. Thus, as legal educators train future lawyers who will serve “on the front lines,” it is critical that difficult racial and social justice issues be discussed in law school classrooms. So the question becomes, can law school classrooms ever be truly safe spaces?This Article provides one context within which law schools can examine how best to create an environment, both in and out of the classroom, that maximizes student learning in an age where it is more important than ever that difficult racial, social, and global issues be raised and discussed. The Article begins by tracing the development of the safe spaces movement and discussing how the traditional type of safe space manifests in today’s law schools. It then highlights the many and sometimes-competing understandings of the nature and role of safe spaces and identifies some of the criticisms of the safe spaces concept, especially as those criticisms relate to “intellectual safe spaces” within the law school classroom. The Article then shifts to a discussion of the relatively new concept of “brave spaces,” tracing the development of that movement and arguing that the brave space concept better describes the optimal law school classroom. Finally, the Article suggests some strategies law school administrators, professors, and students can use to begin creating classrooms that are both safe and brave spaces, able to foster the dialogue needed to equip students to become lawyers who are agents for social change.In this Article, I do not advocate doing away with safe spaces as they were originally intended to function. Rather, I suggest that law schools should be careful to balance the need for places where marginalized students can “retreat from the very real threats and demands they face by their very existence”—the true safe spaces—with the need to encourage and facilitate classrooms where students can process new and uncomfortable ideas productively—brave spaces
Buyer Beware: Who Is Paying the Home Buyer’s Real Estate Agent?
Get PDFWithin the past few years, unprecedented class action lawsuits have been filed against the National Association of Realtors (“NAR”) and major real estate brokerage firms that could have multibillion-dollar implications to homeowners across the United States. One lawsuit claims that NAR rules requiring home sellers’ brokers (“seller-broker”) to offer home buyers’ brokers’ (“buyer-broker”) compensation when listing a property on a local database of properties for sale called the Multiple Listing Service (“MLS”) have driven up costs to the seller and discouraged competition, violating the Sherman Antitrust Act. This commission structure has been upheld in the courts before, but the real estate industry has changed over the years. Technology has had the biggest impact on the real estate industry in recent years. Technology has caused real estate agents’ services to become more expedited and efficient. For example, buyers now have the ability to find property on their own due to real estate websites. Technology like the MLS and current real estate commission rules have been blamed for setting a standard commission that has inflated real estate costs, causing stifled negotiations in real estate transactions and triggering steering of clients to properties with the highest commissions for the real estate agents. However, NAR argues just the opposite of this. NAR contends that its rules and enforcement of its rules on the MLS provide sellers with an increased opportunity to sell their homes by marketing it on an industry-wide platform. The verdicts of pending recent lawsuits will not just be felt by the defendants whom could find themselves potentially liable for millions of dollars. These verdicts will have a historic impact on the entire real estate industry and all American homeowners by changing the way real estate transactions have been conducted in the United States for years. If buyers had to pay their brokers’ real estate commissions, this would discourage buyers from attaining real estate agents, which could lead to buyers entering into one of the biggest purchase of their life without a professional, potentially leading to more lawsuits. Consequently, even though sellers have various options when selling their home that do not force a standard real estate commission for the seller-broker and buyer-broker, how could current commission structures violate an act meant to prohibit restraints on trade? Although many homeowners argue that in today’s modern era buyers should pay the buyer-broker commission, this Comment explores why having sellers pay the buyer-broker commission is beneficial and supported from an antitrust, economic, and equitable perspective.
Fashion, Models, and Intellectual Property
Get PDFIn this Article, I revisit the impact of Professor Kal Raustiala and Professor Christopher Sprigman \u27s landmark article, The Piracy Paradox. Their work identified an empirical anomaly that was difficult to explain in light of the standard justification for intellectual property rights: although IP law does not grant meaningful exclusivity in novel fashion designs, the fashion industry invests significant resources developing those novel designs. To account for this anomaly, The Piracy Paradox shifted the focus from the supply side of innovation to the demand side. The standard justification emphasized that innovators face threats of copying that they cannot easily mitigate; The Piracy Paradox showed that copying itself may facilitate demand for novel fashion designs, sufficient to justify additional investments in producing those designs.
I argue that this refinement to the model underlying the standard justification pulled IP scholarship in two opposing directions. On the one hand, The Piracy Paradox provided a foundation for empirical work by exploring how industry-specific supply, demand, and exclusion dynamics could sustainably support investments in innovation and creativity. At the same time, these subsequent refinements have made it more challenging to construct coherent narratives about IP. Such narratives are valuable tools across the social sciences, serving as platforms for transmitting and developing knowledge about the world. The result is that IP scholars have a more precise understanding of how the world operates, but a diminished capacity for communicating that understanding to policymakers, newcomers to the field, and the public at large. I therefore conclude by calling for the development of simple narratives that encompass the empirical work that has been done in the wake of The Piracy Paradox