Note: Treating Adults Like Children: Re-Sentencing Adult Juvenile Lifers After Miller v. Alabama
By Brianna H. Boone. Full text here. Miller v. Alabama continued the trend in Supreme Court cases finding that juvenile criminal offenders are less culpable than adult offenders, by holding that states cannot sentence juvenile offenders to mandatory life without parole. The Court held that it is cruel and unusual punishment to sentence a juvenile to…
Continue ReadingNote: When Volunteers Become Employees: Using a Threshold-Remuneration Test Informed by the Fair Labor Standards Act To Distinguish Employees from Volunteers
By Emily Bodtke. Full text here. Despite the recognized importance of determining who is an “employee” for purposes of legal coverage, the concept remains unsettled. The confusion over how to define “employee” is now spreading to upset the boundary between employees and volunteers. As voluntarily unpaid workers increasingly bring lawsuits alleging discrimination under federal statutes, a…
Continue ReadingChoice-of-Law as Non-Constitutional Federal Law
By Mark D. Rosen. Full text here. Domestic choice-of-law is widely bemoaned for being a chaotic mess, with states using a half dozen different approaches. But if we praise ‘our federalism’ for allowing states to adopt divergent laws that best reflect their citizens’ distinctive values, why are different tort and family laws across states normatively acceptable…
Continue ReadingThe Green Option
By Gideon Parchomovsky & Endre Stavang. Full text here. In this Article, we introduce an innovative market-based mechanism designed for the advancement of environmental goals. We propose enacting legislation that would empower (but not force) green firms to transfer a call option over a block of their shares to a publicly traded company of their choice.…
Continue ReadingReconceptualizing Non-Article III Tribunals
By Jaime Dodge. Full text here. The Supreme Court’s Article III doctrine is built upon an explicit assumption that Article III must accommodate non-Article III tribunals in order to allow Congress to “innovate” by creating new procedural structures to further its substantive regulatory goals. In this Article, I challenge that fundamental assumption. I argue that each…
Continue ReadingThe Constitutional Limit of Zero Tolerance in Schools
By Derek W. Black. Full text here. With the introduction of modern zero tolerance policies and harsh approaches to discipline, schools now punish much more behavior than they ever have before. The underlying problem is that not all behavior for which schools are expelling and suspending students is bad or serious. Schools have expelled the…
Continue ReadingNote: Fine-Tuning the Tax Whistleblower Statute: Why Qui-tam Is Not a Solution
By Sung Woo “Matt” Hu. Full text here. Under the Internal Revenue Code, tax whistleblowers can be rewarded up to thirty percent of the collected proceeds when the IRS successfully collects delinquent amounts from tax evaders based on the information provided by those whistleblowers. However, whistleblowers are left with no remedy if the IRS decides not…
Continue ReadingNote: Treating the Disease or Punishing the Criminal? Effectively Using Drug Court Sanctions To Treat Substance Use Disorder and Decrease Criminal Conduct
By Caitlinrose Fisher. Full text here. Drug courts have been on the rise for the past few decades, providing an alternative criminal supervision system for individuals struggling with addiction and drug dependence. Drug courts provide an intensive supervision model by responding swiftly to probation violations with a series of graduated sanctions. Assuming that drug courts are…
Continue ReadingNote: Your Local Solar Panel Store: Developing State Laws To Encourage Third-Party Power Purchase Agreements and Distributed Generation
By Sam D. Bolstad. Full text here. Solar panels’ high upfront capital costs are the primary hurdle to widespread installation by homeowners and towns. Solar panel companies are addressing this challenge through third-party power purchase agreements (PPAs), wherein a company pays for these costs when it installs the solar panels on-site at the customer’s location.…
Continue ReadingUnpacking Patent Assertion Entities (PAEs)
By Christopher A. Cotropia, Jay P. Kesan, & David L. Schwartz. Full text here. There is tremendous interest in a certain type of patent litigant—the often-called patent assertion entity (PAE), non-practicing entity (NPE), patent monetization entity (PME), or simply patent troll. These PAEs are the subject of a recent Government Accountability Office report, a possible Federal…
Continue Reading