Equitable Self-Ownership for Animals

This Article proposes a new use of existing property law concepts to change the juristic personhood status of animals. Presently, animals are classified as personal property, which gives them no status or standing in the legal system for the protection or promotion of their interests. Professor Favre suggest that it is possible and appropriate to divide living property into its legal and equitable components, and then to transfer the equitable title of an animal from the legal title holder to the animal herself. This would create a new, limited form of self-ownership in an animal, an equitably self-owned animal. Such a new status would have two primary impacts. First, the animal would have access to the legal system, at least in what has historically been the realm of equity, for the protection and assertion of his or her interests. Secondly, the human holder of legal title will, like a traditional trustee, have obligations to the equitable owner of the animal, that is the animal himself. As the subject matter of this trust-like relationship would be a living being, not money or wealth, the legal owner would best be characterized as a guardian, rather than by the traditional category of trustee. The Article concludes with a short discussion of the use of anti-cruelty law and human guardianship concepts as providing a context for the further development of this new concept of equitable self-ownership

A New Strategy for Pursuing Racial and Ethnic Equality in Public Schools

Article published in the Duke Forum for Law & Social Change

Bylaw Governance

This article argues that Delaware corporate law permits shareholders to use bylaws to circumscribe the managerial authority of the board of directors. While shareholders cannot mandate action by the board, they can enact specific prohibitions on its behavior, so long as the board retains enough discretion to implement—in practice, not merely in theory—its managerial policies by other means. The use of such circumscribing bylaws to discourage shirking (or analogous managerial abuses) by the directors or officers resembles the use of negative covenants in debt contracts that seek to prevent the debtor from squandering assets. Bylaw governance thus subtly but significantly reallocates governance power within the corporation, so as to reduce the agency costs of management. Its legal validity should also prompt courts and scholars alike to focus less on the quantity of power wielded by the shareholders, and more on the ways that power can be configured to produce managerial efficiencies

Entering the Mainstream: Making Children Matter in Immigration Law

Article published in the Fordham Urban Law Journal

Intellectual Property and Opportunities for Food Security in the Philippines

By 2050, the Philippine population is projected to increase by as much as 41 percent, from 99.9 million to nearly 153 million people. Producing enough food for such an expanding population and achieving food security remain a challenge for the Philippine government. This paper argued that intellectual property rights (IPR) can play a key role in achieving the nation’s current goal to be food-secure and provided examples to illustrate that the presence of sound intellectual property (IP) helps foster research, development, and deployment of agricultural innovations. This paper also offered key recommendations about how the IP system can be further leveraged to enable access, creation, and commercialization of new and innovative agricultural practices and technologies to enhance the nation’s agricultural productivity, meet rice self-sufficiency, and sustain food security

Race Ipsa Loquitur

The goal of this Article is to make the existence of invidious racial discrimination in the United States so palpable that it can no longer be denied. Part I argues that racial inequality is so pervasive, unconscious, and structural that it has simply become an assumed fixture of United States and is rarely even noticed. Section I.A describes the history of racial subordination in the United States. Section I.B invokes the concept of disparate impact to illustrate the continuing manifestations of invidious discrimination in contemporary culture. Part II describes the manner in which the culture nevertheless chooses to deny the existence of continuing racial discrimination, even in the face of such stark racial disparities. Section II. A attributes this denial to cultural biases that can be conscious, blatant, implicit, or structural. Section II.B describes the way in which the Supreme Court has invoked the doctrinal distractions of intent and racial balance to sanitize the culture’s commitment to racial stratification and divert attention from the Court’s de facto protection of white privilege. The Article concludes that meaningful racial reconciliation could be achieved in the United States only if United States culture were willing to act on a truth about its racial values that it is unlikely ever to admit

Rights and the Religion Clauses

Article published in the Duke Journal of Constitutional Law & Public Policy

The New Face of School Desegregation

Article published in the Duke Law Journal

The Perfect Crime? FIFA and the Absence of Accountability in Switzerland

Article published in the Md. J. International Law

Performance Indicators for Natural Resource and Environmental Policy: Contributions from American Institutional Law and Economics

Article published in the Duke Environmental Law & Policy Forum