Suicide is the leading cause of death in jails, yet many jails and municipalities have insufficient policies for preventing inmate suicide. One of the ways to lead jails and municipalities to change such policies would be through financial pressure from individual lawsuits for damages resulting from an inmate’s suicide; however, due to the legal structure surrounding custodial liability, it is often difficult for inmates’ estates to successfully...
Note
For over half a century, New York City’s groundbreaking Landmarks Preservation Law has protected the city’s most significant structures and spaces. Yet today, some of New York’s most celebrated interior landmarks are closed off to the public, the very group for whose benefit the spaces have been protected. In order to receive a landmark designation, an interior must be “customarily open...
The Supreme Court’s denial of certiorari in Madden v. Midland Funding, LLC leaves a dangerous precedent standing in the Second Circuit that poses a significant risk to the consumer-credit market writ large. This Note highlights the dangers that the Madden ruling presents and in so doing cautions against the adoption of the ruling by other circuits. Moreover, given the centrality of New York in the financial economy...
Each state offers a property tax exemption to qualifying charitable organizations. Municipalities both administer these charitable exemptions and bear their economic cost. This creates an incentive for municipalities to adopt an interpretation of their state’s exemption framework that limits the exemption’s scope and preserves tax revenue. This Note focuses on community economic development (CED) organizations to explore how overly narrowed...
In its landmark Cracker Barrel no-action letter, the SEC staff announced a bright-line rule permitting exclusion of any shareholder proposal pertaining to a company’s management of its general workforce, even if focused on a significant social policy issue such as employment discrimination, under the “ordinary business operations” exclusion. The SEC reversed Cracker Barrel in 1998, returning to a case-specific approach...
In 1987, the Supreme Court held that the Constitution requires federal and state courts to retroactively apply all new federal-constitutional rules of criminal procedure to direct appeals of convictions. Since then, the Court has not addressed whether the U.S. Constitution also requires state courts to retroactively apply new criminal procedure rules derived from state law on direct review. This issue is particularly significant because state jurisdictions...
Introduction In March of 2012, in Martinez v. Ryan, the Supreme Court announced a new type of cause under the cause-and-prejudice exception to procedural default in federal habeas cases. This new type of cause allowed federal courts to review a subset of claims that had been procedurally defaulted in state habeas proceedings due to the […]
In Reed v. Town of Gilbert the Supreme Court rearticulated the standard for when regulation of speech is content based. This determination has already had a large impact on cases involving panhandling regulations and is likely to result in the invalidation of the majority of this nation’s panhandling laws.
This Note will begin with a discussion of First Amendment doctrine and how panhandling is protected speech. This Note will...
The Supreme Court’s 2014 decision in Hobby Lobby v. Burwell sent shockwaves through the legal community. While many praised its broad interpretation of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) as a milestone in protecting religious liberty, others expressed concern that it would essentially turn RFRA and similar legislation on the state level into a “license to discriminate” against LGBT individuals in areas such as...
In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, Congress significantly broadened the reach of various regulatory entities through the Dodd-Frank Act. One particular power, found in section 113 of the Act, gives the newly formed Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) the authority to designate nonbank financial institutions (NBFIs) as systemically important financial institutions...