Reclaiming Reclamation: Rule Changes Proposed To Ensure Coal Companies Fund Mandatory Clean-Ups
By Taylor Mayhall. Full text here. More than fifty U.S. coal mining companies have gone bankrupt since 2012. When a coal mining company goes bankrupt, its ability to clean up, or reclaim, its mines becomes questionable, and the burden may end up falling on taxpayers. This Note addresses the struggle to hold U.S. coal mining…
Continue ReadingThe Most Integrated Setting: Olmstead, Fry, and Segregated Public Schools for Students with Disabilities
By Trevor Matthews. Full text here. Can school districts force students with disabilities to attend schools that segregate them from their peers without disabilities? Case law resulting from federal special education law, particularly the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), has generally indicated that the answer to this question is yes. In fact, in 2015, almost…
Continue ReadingSolving the Problem of Problem-Solving Justice: Rebalancing Federal Court Investment in Reentry and Pretrial Diversion Programs
By Devin T. Driscoll. Full text here. This Note explores the creation of so-called problem-solving courts, including state drug courts and federal reentry courts, as well as the future of this kind of reform within the federal criminal justice system. It traces the development of problem-solving courts, beginning first with state drug courts in the…
Continue ReadingSocial Influences on Policy Preferences: Conformity and Reactance
By Meirav Furth-Matzkin & Cass R. Sunstein. Full text here. Social norms have been used to nudge people toward specified outcomes in various domains. But can people be nudged to support, or to reject, proposed government policies? How do people’s views change when they learn that the majority approves of a particular policy, or that…
Continue ReadingBehavioral Claim Construction
By Jeremy W. Bock. Full text here. Existing proposals for enhancing predictability in patent claim interpretation focus primarily on the process of adjudication and doctrinal issues, while rarely delving into the underlying psychological and environmental factors that might influence different readers to interpret the same claim very differently. Drawing on lessons from behavioral economics and cognitive…
Continue ReadingGlobalization Without a Safety Net: The Challenge of Protecting Cross-Border Funding of NGOs
By Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer. Full text here. More than fifty countries around the world have sharply increased legal restrictions on domestic nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that receive funding from outside their home country and the foreign NGOs that provide such funding. These restrictions include requiring advance government approval before a domestic NGO can accept cross-border funding, requiring…
Continue ReadingCategorizing Student Speech
By Alexander Tsesis. Full text here. Primary and secondary school student speech cases raise a variety of conflicting concerns about civic growth, intellectual development, school discipline, and judicial discretion. This Article explains how courts should address the internal conflict within jurisprudence that, on the one hand, recognizes students retain their First Amendment rights, and, on the…
Continue ReadingAdmissions of Guilt in Civil Enforcement
By Verity Winship & Jennifer K. Robbennolt. Full text here. Should agencies require admissions of wrongdoing from the targets of civil enforcement? Administrative agencies rely heavily on settlement as a key enforcement tool. Admissions of wrongdoing—or, more commonly, declarations that nothing is admitted—form part of these settlement agreements and the underlying negotiations. The Securities and…
Continue ReadingProspective Grandfathering: Anticipating the Energy Transition Problem
By Christopher Serkin & Michael P. Vandenbergh. Full text here. Legal change has the potential to disrupt settled expectations and property rights. The Takings Clause protects some expectations by requiring compensation for the most significant costs of changes in the law. However, threats of takings claims and related claims of unfairness in political debates can discourage…
Continue Reading