CategoryPrint

On December 17, 2010, a young Tunisian street vendor protesting an abusive police official set off a wave of democratic uprisings throughout the Arab world.  In rising up against their governments, the peoples of the Arab countries were confronting an age-old problem in political theory: When is it acceptable to rise up against an unjust authority?  This question is not only of great importance...

As banking has evolved over the last three decades, banks have become increasingly interconnected.  This Article draws attention to an effect of this development that has important policy ramifications yet remains largely unexamined—a dramatic rise in interbank discipline.  The Article demonstrates that today’s large, complex banks have financial incentives to monitor risk taking at other banks. ...

The Vienna Convention on Consular Relations (Vienna Convention), to which the United States is a party, requires signatories to notify the consulates of and to grant consular officers physical access to foreign criminal defendants.  While the treaty has mostly functioned well for its states parties, the United States has recently encountered substantial problems—and international ill will—for its...

Urban bias shapes social perceptions about sexual minorities. Predominant cultural narratives geographically situate sexual minorities in urban gay communities, dictate the contours of how to be a modern gay person, and urge sexual minorities to come out and assimilate into gay communities and culture. This Article contests the urban presumption commonly applied to all sexual minorities and...

After the financial crisis, Congress directed regulators to enact new rules on CEO pay at public companies. The rules would address the possibility that directors of public companies put managers’ interests ahead of shareholders’ when setting executive pay. Yet little is known about how CEOs are paid in companies whose directors have undivided loyalty to shareholders. These directors can be found...

A sea change is happening in finance. Machines appear to be on the rise and humans on the decline. Human endeavors have become unmanned endeavors. Human thought and human deliberation have been replaced by computerized analysis and mathematical models. Technological advances have made finance faster, larger, more global, more interconnected, and less human. Modern finance is becoming an industry...

The passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) brought vast changes to the world of health insurance. Although much of the focus has been on the individual mandate provision’s constitutionality, this Comment explores a less- mentioned but equally important implication of PPACA: a change to the rationales behind the common law collateral source rule. The collateral source...

This Comment contributes to the legal scholarship on the gay panic defense by proposing that, in light of social science research on implicit bias and the foundational clinical data on gay panic as a psychological phenomenon, prosecutors highlight the inconsistencies between the psychology underlying gay panic and gay panic as a legal claim in the presence of the jury. This Comment recognizes...

Public colleges and universities or state governments often ban the possession of firearms on public university or college property. These bans typically extend to student housing. While much has been written about campus bans on the carrying of concealed firearms, the topic of gun bans in the student housing context has been largely unaddressed in Second Amendment literature. This Comment seeks...

This Comment challenges the assumption that actions associated with drug addiction can be easily classified as either voluntary or involuntary. As an alternative to this black-and-white distinction, this Comment advances the concept of a semi-voluntary act category to describe more accurately a drug addict’s choice to use drugs. When limited appropriately to drug addicts rather than all drug...

Last term in Golan v. Holder, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of section 514 of the Uruguay Round Agreements Act, which extended copyright protection to millions of foreign works of art, literature, and music previously in the public domain. This decision will likely have a deleterious impact on America’s faltering symphony orchestras. By removing important staples of the...

In the years since the September 11 attacks, scholars and commentators have criticized the emergence of both legal developments and policy rhetoric that blur the lines between war and terrorism. Unrecognized, but equally as damaging to democratic ideals—and potentially more devastating in practical effect—is the expansion of this trend beyond the context of terrorism to a much wider field of...

There are several reasons to find rape shield laws troubling. From the point of view of many defense lawyers and civil libertarians, rape shield laws, by curtailing a defendant’s ability to offer evidence of an accuser’s prior sexual conduct, unfairly circumscribe a defendant’s right to confront witnesses and present relevant evidence in his defense. By contrast, rape shield proponents argue that...

The international tax system is in the midst of a contest between automatic information reporting and anonymous withholding models for ensuring that nations have the ability to tax offshore accounts. At stake is the extent of many countries’ capacity to tax investment income of individuals and profits of closely held businesses through an income tax in an increasingly financially integrated world...