The criminal and immigration systems in the United States have increasingly overlapped, adversely affecting noncitizens even distantly involved in criminal activity. Individuals without legal status who have engaged significantly with a criminal organization can cooperate with law enforcement in exchange for formal immigration benefits. There are no formal protections, however, for individuals residing in the country without legal status who have...
Note
Clarifying the extent to which existing legal regimes afford protection to climate migrants must be part of an effective and coordinated response to climate change. This Note argues that climate refugees, a group which it narrowly defines as those who meet the requirements of the 1951 Refugee Convention because they have experienced climate change–induced harm amounting to persecution, should qualify for asylum under U.S. immigration law. To...
In the context of section 10(b) securities fraud class actions, conceptualizing corporate intent is both an unnatural and a necessary exercise. Circuit courts apply a variety of different approaches to analyze the question of corporate scienter, but they typically start with agency law and impute the intentions of corporate employees to the corporation itself.
Recognizing the fraud-deterrence purpose of these class actions suggests that...
Plaintiffs in securities class actions have increasingly relied on reports published by anonymous short sellers when alleging the element of loss causation. Indeed, short-seller reports are useful for plaintiffs, as they purport to reveal negative information about a targeted company and generally cause a decline in the targeted company’s stock price. Unlike other types of corrective disclosures, however, short-seller reports are unique in that...
For the past several decades, the Supreme Court has repeatedly sought to reinterpret the meaning of “property” within federal fraud statutes to limit the degree to which federal prosecutors can regulate state official misconduct. While the Court’s renewed interest in the federal fraud statutes has drawn varying degrees of praise and criticism from different sides of the legal community, this Note seeks to assess—in an apolitical, value-neutral...
Recently, a wave of state legislatures have enacted qui tam provisions to police citizen behavior in a variety of politically and legally contentious environments. The current literature on private enforcement views qui tam as a homogenous species of private enforcement and does little to identify any distinctions within qui tam itself. This gap in the scholarship has made it difficult to assess the legitimacy of the recently adopted state qui...
Anthropogenic climate change is altering humanity’s relationship to the natural world. As extreme weather events become more frequent and biodiversity plummets, humankind has three responsibilities: lower carbon dioxide emissions, preserve what remains of the natural world, and generate new pockets of nature to slowly rebuild what we have destroyed.
Trees—particularly when grouped together in forests—are humanity’s allies. Yet while...
In criminal proceedings, courts are increasingly relying on automated decisionmaking tools that purport to measure the likelihood that a defendant will reoffend. But these technologies come with considerable risk; when trained on datasets or features that incorporate bias, criminal legal algorithms threaten to replicate discriminatory outcomes and produce overly punitive bail, sentencing, and incarceration decisions. Because regulators have failed...
The Colorado River Basin is drying up, and with it, the water supply of seven states in the American West. Historically, the West relied on consumption-based laws to fuel development despite the arid landscape. The Colorado River Compact allocated water among the states, but those allocations suffered from two basic flaws: (1) The agreed-upon water flow of the river was based on a particularly wet season in the region, and (2) the Compact was not...
This Note addresses the ever-growing series of privacy laws being enacted throughout the United States and the danger that the “opt-out” data collection system poses to many populations. There is a disparity in the level of “digital literacy” throughout the United States, and as more consumer data privacy laws emerge and continue to replicate the existing legislation, that disparity deepens.
Patterns among who does and who does not...