Category: Issue 2

Note

Queer Eyes Don’t Sympathize: An Empirical Investigation of LGB Identity and Judicial Decision Making

Jared Ham & Chan Tov McNamarah

This Note’s objectives are twofold. First, this Note presents the findings of the first ever empirical analysis of the voting patterns of LGB judges, as compared to heterosexual judges in the United States. Second, this Note considers what role a judge’s LGB identity may play in his or her decision making. Using social science research curated in the context of race and gender, this Note summarizes previous debates concerning other minority statuses and introduces them to the environment of sexual orientation. Informed by prior scholarship on race and gender in judicial decision making, this Note extends the conclusions and principles to consider whether LGB identity should affect decision making and how it may do so.

Jan 2020

Note

Domesticating Comity: Territorial U.S. Discovery in Violation of Foreign Privacy Laws

Corby F. Burger

This Note aims to make two contributions. First, this Note addresses a series of threshold descriptive and normative questions that are mostly unaddressed by scholars, the Restatements of Foreign Relations Law, and the courts: Is the doctrine of foreign-state compulsion available to defend against a territorial discovery order or is the foreign-state compulsion defense limited to extraterritorial acts? How have courts applied the doctrine to territorial discovery, if at all? Should the foreign-state compulsion defense be territorially limited? Second, if the foreign-state compulsion defense is available to defend against a territorial discovery order, how do courts account for the fact that the information is presently located in the United States when applying the doctrine? Should courts account for the present location of ESI, and, if so, how much weight should the present location of data be given in a court’s analysis?

Jan 2020

Article

The New Migration Law: Migrants, Refugees, and Citizens in an Anxious Age

Hiroshi Motomura, Susan Westerberg Prager Distinguished Professor of Law, School of Law, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)

Once every generation or so, entire fields of law require a full reset. We need to rethink basic premises, ask new questions, and even recast the role of law itself. This moment has come for the law governing migration. Seasoned observers of immigration and refugee law have developed answers to core questions that emerged a generation ago. But their answers often fail to engage coherently with the daunting…

Jan 2020

Article

The Six-Month List and the Unintended Consequences of Judicial Accountability

Miguel F. P. de Figueiredo, Alexandra D. Lahav & Peter Siegelman

A little-known mechanism instituted to improve judicial accountability and speed up the work of the federal judiciary has led to unintended consequences, many of them unfortunate. Federal district court judges are subject to a soft deadline known as the Six-Month List (the List). By law, every judge’s backlog (cases older than three years and motions…

Jan 2020

Article

You Might Be a Robot

Bryan Casey & Mark A. Lemley

As robots and artificial intelligence (AI) increase their influence over society, policymakers are increasingly regulating them. But to regulate these technologies, we first need to know what they are. And here we come to a problem. No one has been able to offer a decent definition of robots and AI—not even experts. What’s more, technological…

Jan 2020