Transnational Private Environmental Regulation: Are States Striking Back?

To be published in Research Handbook on Environmental Regulation, David Williamson, Gary Lynch-Wood & Agne Prochorskaite, eds.https://digitalcommons.law.buffalo.edu/book_sections/1470/thumbnail.jp

When “The Right to Life” Forgoes Quality of Life: Examining the Public Policy Impacts of Mississippi’s Abortion Ban on Women Post-Dobbs

On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court eliminated the right to abortion. Its ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Org. overturned Roe v. Wade and was the culmination of a decades-long attack on abortion rights and accessibility. Without a federal abortion standard, it is now up to each state to determine women’s access to abortion. This system will produce a tiered structure of abortion access, causing significant health and socioeconomic burdens for women generally and reinforcing fundamental social inequities. Women of means will find ways around the Dobbs decision; others, who lack finances, childcare, or the ability to travel for services, will not be so fortunate. In this new reality, low-income women and women of color will suffer the most. This article begins by offering contextual backgrounds to three seminal cases in the abortion rights movement. Part II examines how Mississippi’s near total abortion ban will cause unique and painful harm to its marginalized women and will have negative public policy outcomes generally. Finally, Part III discusses beneficial policy initiatives in the post-Roe landscape

Cake-and-Eat-It-Too Clauses

Imagine this: You have signed on the dotted line to purchase a home for $500,000. You have put down an earnest money deposit of$25,000. Right before closing, you find out that your bank will not provide the financing you thought you had secured. You can no longer afford to purchase your dream home. You are coming to grips with the reality that you are going to lose $25,000, which comprises the bulk of your life savings. Then you hear from the seller, telling you that they are going to come after you for$100,000 in “actual damages”—the amount the house depreciated between the time you signed the purchase and sale agreement and the time you breached the contract. How is this possible? It is bad enough that you are going to lose $25,000. How can you be on the hook for even more? It is because of a little- known clause in your purchase and sale agreement that provides the seller with the option of retaining the deposit as liquidated damages or suing for actual damages instead. These clauses have a variety of names: election clauses, election of remedies clauses, optional liquidated damages clauses, or cake-and-eat-it-too clauses. A surprising number of courts are prepared to give effect to these clauses, reasoning that they represent the parties’ intent, and that freedom of contract demands that they be enforced. This Article argues that courts are getting it wrong: liquidated damages clauses cannot be reconciled with election clauses. No amount of freedom of contract logic can get around the fact that the two clauses are legally incompatible. This Article examines the two different contexts in which liquidated damages clauses and election clauses intersect. First, a buyer may seek a return of his earnest money deposit, arguing that the presence of an election clause renders the liquidated damages a penalty. Second, a buyer may seek to foreclose a seller from pursuing actual damages under an election clause, reasoning that such a clause is fundamentally at odds with a liquidated damages clause. In the first scenario, the buyer seeks to invalidate the liquidated damages clause; in the second, he seeks to invalidate the election clause. This Article encourages courts to prohibit liquidated damages clauses and election clauses from coexisting in contracts. A seller who attempts to have his cake and eat it too should be relegated to the lesser of the two amounts

A Right to Be Left Dead

Technology forces us to contemplate a counterpart to the right of privacy—Brandeis and Warren’s “right to be let alone”—for the age of artificial intelligence: the right to be left dead. Traditionally, it has been presumed that even if Brandeis and Warren’s right constitutes “the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men,” it does not apply to the dead. The question is whether we need a new approach at a time when technology can reanimate anyone and make them behave in a manner indistinguishable from their living presence. This Article interrogates the need for a right to be left dead and takes some preliminary steps towards defining its contours, chief among them an awareness that an individual right to prevent unauthorized reanimations of the dead must look very different than the existing privacy, consumer protection, and property laws marshalled against unauthorized invocations of the living. A new right to be left dead can serve important social goals, but it must be narrowly construed, yielding to the critical interests of the living when necessary. To the extent legislatures and courts are beginning to grapple with the nascent problem of digital reanimation, they have failed to account for the most fundamental dividing line in existence—the line between life and death

The Attorney-Client Privilege Goes to Washington

Reviewing David Rapallo, House Rules: Congress and the Attorney Client Privilege, 100 WASH. U. L. REV. 455 (2022)