Note: In Deep Water: A Common Law Solution to the Bulk Water Export Problem
By Elise L. Larson. Full text here. An American company recently entered into a contract with the town of Sitka, Alaska to export 2.9 billion gallons of freshwater per year from the Blue Lake Reservoir to an unannounced water hub on the west coast of India. If the venture is successful, the company will become the…
Continue ReadingNote: Federalism in Bankruptcy: Relocating the Doctrine of Substantive Consolidation
By R. Benjamin Hanna. Full text here. Substantive consolidation is a process in corporate bankruptcy in which the assets of related debtor entities are placed into a single vehicle subject to the undifferentiated claims of all the creditors. Doing so resolves inter-debtor claims and vindicates the interests of creditors who thought they were transacting with a…
Continue ReadingNote: Tortured Language: "Individuals," Corporate Liability, and the Torture Victim Protection Act
By Brad Emmons. Full text here. The Torture Victim Protection Act (TVPA) allows persons who have been subjected to torture or extrajudicial killing to pursue a tort action against “individual[s]” who have committed such actions “under actual or apparent authority, or color of law, of any foreign nation.” In the past decade, activists and human rights…
Continue ReadingConundrum
By Derek E. Bambauer. Full text here. Cybersecurity is a conundrum. Despite a decade of sustained attention from scholars, legislators, military officials, popular media, and successive presidential administrations, little, if any, progress has been made in augmenting Internet security. Current scholarship on cybersecurity is bound to ill-fitting doctrinal models; it addresses cybersecurity based upon identification of…
Continue ReadingJudicial Review of Judicial Lawmaking
By Amnon Lehavi. Full text here. “It would be absurd to allow a State to do by judicial decree what the Takings Clause forbids it to do by legislative fiat . . . . [T]he particular state actor is irrelevant.” – Stop the Beach Renourishment, Inc. v. Fla. Dep’t of Envtl. Prot., 130 S. Ct. 2592, 2601–02 (2010). Justice Scalia’s…
Continue ReadingRegulating Reproduction: The Problem with Best Interests
By I. Glenn Cohen. Full text here. Should the State permit anonymous sperm donation? Should brother-sister incest between adults be made criminal? Should individuals over the age of fifty be allowed access to reproductive technologies? Should the State fund abstinence education? One common form of justification that is offered to answer these and a myriad of…
Continue ReadingSuccessor Liability
By John H. Matheson. Full text here. The phrase mergers and acquisitions, or M&A for short, signifies both the business activity of growing (or divesting) corporate operations and the legal rules surrounding that activity. One typical acquisition technique is the purchase of business assets by one company from another. Asset sales transactions have various benefits, one…
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