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 Human thought and human deliberation have been replaced by computerized analysis and mathematical models.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...
The current system of administration of the Bankruptcy Code is highly anomalous. It stands as one of the few major federal civil statutory regimes administered almost exclusively through adjudication in the courts—not through a federal regulatory agency. This means that rather than fitting bankruptcy into a regulatory model, the U.S. Congress has chosen to give the courts primary interpretive...
One of medicine’s open secrets is that patients routinely refuse or demand medical treatment based on the assigned physician’s racial identity, and hospitals typically yield to patients’ racial preferences. This widely practiced, if rarely acknowledged, phenomenon—about which there is new empirical evidence—poses a fundamental dilemma for law, medicine, and ethics. It also raises difficult...
The U.S. Supreme Court’s Johnson v. California decision creates a new legal context for gender equal protection claims in the prison context. Johnson’s language and justifications create a space in prison jurisprudence where the deferential norms of Turner v. Safley are inapposite, and where deference rationales have no place. This Comment argues that this change is significant, and that it...
The Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees all criminal defendants the right to trial by an impartial jury—a jury that is free of bias and that decides the case solely on the evidence before it. If even one juror is biased or prejudiced, the defendant is denied this fundamental right. Federal Rule of Evidence 606(b) generally prohibits jurors from testifying as to what occurred...
Cuisine exists in intellectual property law’s “negative space”: It is relatively unprotected by formal intellectual property (IP) laws, yet creativity and innovation flourish. This runs contrary to the given economic wisdom that propertization is required to incentivize creation. Community norms and the first-mover advantage help to explain how cuisine thrives in this low-IP equilibrium. However...