Standard of Review (State & Federal): A Primer

This Article will define standard of review, trace its origins and evolution, and discuss how the appropriate standard of review is determined. A brief discussion of each standard will follow the general discussion. Finally, suggestions will be made for analyzing standard of review problems. The main point is that standards of review are and should be flexible. Courts must recognize this and must look to the policies behind a standard when they select and apply it in a particular case

A Legal Practitioner’s Guide to Indian and Tribal Law Research

This article is a guide to legal research with the specific goal of assisting practitioners. The typical practitioner would be an attorney, but many professionals who work within the arena of Indian and tribal law may not have the formal legal training that attorneys do. The article is a discussion of the resources available to research the law, the issues that often arise in the area, and the approaches to take in applying the resources to the issues. It is not a classic bibliography listing resources (often alphabetically), and is not intended to be comprehensive in the resources mentioned. Acknowledging the rural location of many Indian lands, the article discusses not only the best overall sources for researching Indian law issues, but also attempts to provide suggested alternatives for practitioners who may not have access to commercial databases or nearby law libraries. Part I of the article introduces the reader to the legal topic of the article and also introduces a type of research tool called “Boolean” searching. Part II describes federal Indian law and the treaties, statutes, cases, compacts, and secondary sources that cover this area of law and how to research them. Part III explains tribal law, why this area of law differs from federal Indian law, and why research in this area is equally important. Finally, Part IV states the conclusion and what the reader should have taken away from reading the article

Diogenes Wanders the Superhighway: A Proposal for Authentication of Publicly Disseminated Documents on the Internet

On the national level, there are proposals to make the Internet the primary, and even the exclusive, means of disseminating certain government information. Concurrently, corporations and other private organizations may adopt a similar approach for their reports and other documents. Intertwined with these official and quasi-official documents are innumerable others created by individuals around the world. With so many documents, there is potential for dissemination of false, biased, and even fraudulent information. This is the source of the authentication problem

Tip Jars at the Law Library Reference Desk

Kelly Kunsch humorously argues for law reference librarians\u27 right to accept tips for their service to the law school community

The Way We Were and What We “B”

This article describes the changes over the past 20 years in the job of reference librarian. Using typical reference questions and quotes from leading law librarians in the early \u2780s, the author compares current practice and explains the differences in the time, place, and manner of legal reference. Although answering questions may be done today more quickly and efficiently than 20 years ago, the increase in demand and expectations make the job more challenging than ever

The Effects of the Environment and Corporate Governance on Illegal Cartel Activity

Illegal corporate activity, including the price fixing activity of two or more firms through cartels, costs the global economy billions of dollars a year, yet its causes are neither well studied nor well understood in organizational literature. This thesis explores possible external and internal antecedents of illegal cartel activity through the management lenses of resource dependency theory and agency theory and the criminological theory of anomie in the examination of the research question “Why do corporations engage in illegal activity?” I posit that illegal international cartel activity is influenced by the environment in which the organization finds itself, moderated by corporate governance mechanisms of the firm, namely Board scanning. In tandem, I consider potential internal drivers of illicit corporate behaviour, suggesting that illegal activity, undertaken as a result of a gap between organizational goals and the inability to achieve them through legal means (anomie), is impacted by the control mechanisms that the owners of corporations and their agents impose on the CEO and managers of the organization. I explore these proposed antecedents of illegal cartel activity both quantitatively and qualitatively. For the quantitative analysis, I create a matched sample of 296 observations of international firms, covering illegal cartel activity that spans 40 years drawn from a proprietary database containing information on all known international cartels from 1990 to 2008. The qualitative analysis includes first-person, semi-structured interviews with international experts in the area of illegal cartel activity. I take a realist approach, comparing the interview data obtained from each individual with responses elicited from other interviewees, linking the qualitative data directly to the constructs used in the quantitative data analysis. I find support in the environmental analysis for the Board scanning moderated effects of industry profits and dynamism on illegal cartel activity. The analysis of the internal variables demonstrate that while Board level variables such as control method and percentage of outside directors predict illegal corporate activity and CEO control methods, CEO level variables do not predict illegal corporate activity, nor do they mediate Board control as it pertains to illegal corporate activity. My research highlights the impact of the scanning and control mechanisms at the highest levels of the organization on illegal corporate behaviour. In so doing, I find that the influence of the Board on the organization’s environment is subtle, yet palpable and produces within the organization the conditions where innovation to achieve the perceived wants of the shareholders is implicitly encouraged. I put forward this research as a first step in considering illegal corporate activity in a way that encompasses external influences and internal organizational control mechanisms in a new and innovative manner and as a tool to help both researchers and practitioners better understand how organizational deviance, as manifested through illegal corporate activity, can be prevented