In recent years, activist hedge funds have been experimenting with a novel practice in corporate governance: offering their candidates for the board of directors millions of dollars in bonus pay through a device known as a “golden leash.” Such arrangements, which are highly controversial, award directors for accomplishing activist objectives. An emerging body of work views the golden leash...
The Constitution of Police Violence
Police force is again under scrutiny in the United States. Several recent killings of black men by police officers have prompted an array of reform proposals, most of which seem to assume that these recent killings were not (or should not be) authorized and legal. Our constitutional doctrine suggests otherwise. From the 1960s to the present, federal courts have persistently endorsed a very...
Melville B. Nimmer Memorial Lecture: Fair Use by Design
Each year, the UCLA School of Law hosts the Melville B. Nimmer Memorial Lecture. Since 1986, the lecture series has served as a forum for leading scholars in the fields of copyright and First Amendment law. In recent years, the lecture has been presented by many distinguished scholars. The UCLA Law Review has published these lectures and proudly continues that tradition by publishing an Article...
Westernized Women? The Construction of Muslim Women's Dissent in U.S. Asylum Law
This Comment examines a group of asylum cases in which the applicants, women of Muslim heritage, were portrayed or understood as Westernized because of their beliefs in gender equality. This Comment utilizes the work of female scholars of Muslim heritage, whose work on gender, Islam, and Orientalism has provided critical insights which can help us understand how women of Muslim heritage are...
Retaliatory Arrests and the First Amendment: The Chilling Effects of Hartman v. Moore on the Freedom of Speech in the Age of Civilian Vigilance
In the age of civilian vigilance, smartphone technology and social media have enabled individuals to record and share videos of police interactions with citizens at an unprecedented rate, sometimes providing indisputable evidence of police misconduct for the world to see instantly. The probative value and public shock factor of some of these videos have also opened the door to retaliatory arrests...
Contagion Without Relief: Democratic Experimentalism and Regulating the Use of Antibiotics in Food-Producing Animals
We are progressing toward a post-antibiotic world: Antibiotic drugs that could once treat basic infections are losing their effectiveness at an accelerating rate. If this trend continues, common illnesses will become potentially deadly, and more complex procedures—chemotherapy, surgeries, dialysis—will carry much more significant risk. The modern industrial agricultural system may have...
Too Big to Disclose: Firm Size and Materiality Blindspots in Securities Regulation
This Article argues that the securities disclosure regime contains previously unexamined structural deficiencies that pertain to the information provided by the largest public companies. These deficiencies arise from the operation of the materiality standard, a core element of the disclosure regime that is used in a number of SEC disclosure rules. The materiality standard is designed to limit...
The Stream Of Violence: A New Approach to Domestic Violence Personal Jurisdiction
There is a split among state courts about whether personal jurisdiction over an alleged domestic violence perpetrator is required in order to obtain a civil protection order preventing the defendant from contacting the victim. Some courts have held that such orders interfere with the defendant’s liberty interests, and therefore the Due Process Clause requires personal jurisdiction for the...
Rethinking Misdemeanor Neglect
Millions of criminal defendants, most of them indigent, are convicted of misdemeanor offenses every year. Many are constitutionally entitled to free legal counsel, yet in practice the quality of that counsel depends on how public defender agencies allocate attorneys between misdemeanor and felony defendants. Attorney experience is a limited, if not scarce, resource, and public defenders will...
Thirty Years After Al-Khazraji: Revisiting Employment Discrimination Under Section 1981
Many scholars have written about the racialization process experienced by people of Southwest Asia and North African (SWANA) descent, emphasizing the increased discrimination experienced by those perceived as Middle Eastern or SWANA. There is very little scholarship, however, concentrating specifically on employment discrimination faced by those of SWANA descent in the United States. Although...
Reverse Passing
Throughout American history untold numbers of people have concealed their true racial identities and assumed a white racial identity in order to reap the economic, political, and social benefits associated with whiteness. This phenomenon is known as passing. While legal scholars have thoroughly investigated passing in its conventional form, the corollary process of reverse passing—the process in...
When a Promise Is Not a Promise: Chicago-Style Pensions
Cities and states around the country have promised their workers—most often teachers, police officers, and firefighters—retirement benefits, but have in many cases failed to set aside adequate assets to fund those benefits. Several of these pension plans are predicted to become insolvent within the next decade and innumerable additional plans appear headed for insolvency in the decade that...
Regulating Gun Rentals
A machine gun overpowers a nine-year-old girl, erratically spraying bullets and accidentally killing her instructor; a perturbed mother slays her son and then takes her own life; a convicted felon circumvents federal prohibitions to access a firearm to commit suicide; and, perhaps most notably, Navy SEAL war veteran Chris Kyle, focus of the movie American Sniper, is murdered while attempting to...
Can a Tailor Mend the Analytical Hole? A Framework for Understanding Corporate Constitutional Rights
The Supreme Court’s decisions relating to corporate constitutional rights are a conceptual quagmire. While the Court has grappled with the proper scope of corporate rights for more than two centuries, it has failed to articulate a consistent approach to determine which rights corporations should receive and how those rights should be delineated. As a result, the Court has issued a long line of...