This article is adapted from a presentation at the Legal Writing In-stitute One-Day Workshop at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law, December 5, 2015. The conference addressed the topic of “Taking it to the Next Level: Your Course, Your Program, Your Career.” Parts of this article derive from an article in the LWI publication The Sec…[Read more]

Legal claims are inherently disruptive. Plaintiffs’ suits invariably seek to
unsettle the status quo. On occasion, the remedies to legal claims can be so
disruptive-that is, impossible to enforce or implement in a fair and equitable
manner-that courts simply will not issue them. In the area of federal
Indian law, American Indian tribal claims…[Read more]

For Animal Law’s twenty-fifth anniversary edition, David S. Favre is
back with an update on the state of animal law in the United States. This
piece covers the new, the changeless, the good, and the bad of the animal
legal landscape in the past five years, since Animal Law last asked Favre to
write a review of animal law. An overview of new…[Read more]

This article explores competing views on Michael Milken in order to draw insights about American law and culture. Milken has been described as a genius, a thief, an
industrial revolutionary, a rapacious predator, and the person you would want your children to be when they grow up. Some praise Milken for inspiring the use of high
yield debt to…[Read more]

Most scholars have missed the role of property in the U.S. regulation of insider
trading. Decades of scholarship have grappled with whether future iterations of
the regulation would be improved by treating insider trading as a property issue.1
Some scholarship relies on economic analysis aimed at determining which
allocation of rights in…[Read more]

Until recently, intellectual property (IP) scholars agreed that
patents were the prime innovation tool to aggregate decentralized
information. This case for the property approach, which argues patents
are appropriate when information about possible inventions and the
social value of inventions are hidden, is now also under pressure in…[Read more]

Kent v. United States required trial courts to conduct an individualized
assessment before transferring a juvenile defendant to criminal jurisdiction.
Several decades later, in Miller v. Alabama, the Supreme Court prohibited
imposing life without parole sentences upon youth offenders without first
conducting an individualized assessment. The…[Read more]

The school-to-prison pipeline too often places young people into a
hamster’s spinning wheel. According to the Department of Justice,
suspension from school diminishes a student’s chance to graduate from high
school and increases a student’s chance at entering the juvenile justice
system. The rollercoaster halts only when interrupted by a young…[Read more]

Over the last decade, the Supreme Court pieced together a clear
doctrine related to sentencing juvenile offenders transferred to adult criminal
courts: convicted persons eighteen years of age or younger may not receive
the death penalty, may not receive life without parole for nonhomicide
offenses, and may not be sentenced under mandatory life…[Read more]

Three landmark decisions drastically changed the sentencing standards
for juvenile offenders. In Roper v. Simmons’ and Miller v. Alabama,
2 the Supreme Court held that states may not impose the death
penalty and mandatory life without parole sentences in cases with juvenile
defendants. These cases vanquished the most severe consequences
for…[Read more]

This Article develops how the judiciary should play an instrumental part in
amplifying the parent’s voice as a citizenship broker for their child. The Supreme
Court scrutinizes school-board actions with little consideration of parents’ substantive due process right to control their child’s education through the political process. Through…[Read more]

The hundredth anniversary of Dodge v. Ford marks an occasion to reflect
upon what, if anything, has changed about shareholder primacy in a century.
Seizing this opportunity, in this Article I analyze new local laws and
ordinances that promote stakeholder governance and engagement, which seek
to protect the interests of non-shareholder…[Read more]

For-profit art galleries are making news for the donations they are providing to
nonprofit art organizations to support exhibitions by artists these galleries represent (part of a broader practice I term “crayola, ” in reference to payola, the word invented to describe a similar practice of paying for airtime on radio and television). Yet…[Read more]

“It is not my fault; it is my brain implant which made me do it.” Some
scholars have argued that this could become a common strategy:
defendants might argue that as the result of a defective brain implant, an
autonomous brain implant, or someone hacking into their implant, they
should not be held responsible, or at least not fully…[Read more]

The lone scientist, toiling away over a Bunsen burner at midnight or
huddled in the comer of his garage with a few tools, has long held a
place in the American psyche. As tempting as this noble image is, the
truth is often much more mundane. Scientists typically work in groups,
with ideas flowing among members of the group in an…[Read more]

The modern agricultural biotechnology industry developed from a small cottage industry based on selective crop breeding into a multi-billion dollar industry based on the isolation and insertion of genes that code for commercially valuable crop
traits. As it grew, the industry relied on patent protection to recoup its investment into new research…[Read more]

The American penal system is racist, degrading, and inefficient.
Nonetheless, we cannot give up on punishment entirely, for social peace
and cooperation depend on the deterrent threat of the criminal
sanction. The question-central to determining the degree to which
punishment is justified-is why society’s need for general deterrence is
an…[Read more]

There are two well-worn arguments against a severe punishment like
long-term incarceration: it is disproportionate to the offender’s wrongdoing
and an inefficient use of state resources. This Article considers a third
response, one which penal reformers and theorists have radically neglected,
even though it is recognized in the law: the…[Read more]

Hundreds of thousands of Americans are serving decades-long prison sentences.
While scholars have established that these sentences are both economically inefficient and destructive of minority communities, a fundamental question remains: Is long term incarceration ever morally permissible? Understandably, the economists and sociologists of prison…[Read more]

This nomination is about more than who occupies one seat on the
Supreme Court. It is about more than the legal status of Roe v. Wade1
and reproductive rights and autonomy,2 the constitutionality of
Obamacare,3 the recognition of LGBTQ+ rights,4 or the future of
unions and the labor rights movement.s It is about more than the
adherence and…[Read more]