Artificial intelligence (“AI”) is increasingly influencing critical sectors such as housing and finance, and raising concerns about fairness, bias, and regulatory compliance. This Essay explores the policy considerations essential for operationalizing AI fairness, particularly in regulated industries. Continue reading
Despite the promise of the Fair Housing Act and other civil rights laws, racial gaps in wealth, homeownership, and mortgage lending persist today. Our nation’s biggest banks deny mortgage loan applications to Black and Brown consumers at a rate higher than the rest of the industry, often claiming that lending to historically marginalized consumers is too risky. Instead, these lending institutions focus on providing highly profitable financial services to wealthy consumers. Continue reading
All sorts of landlords—governmental landlords, cooperatives, large-scale corporate landlords, and mom-and-pops—engage in slumlording to some degree. Despite that fact, some of the most popular proposed solutions to the problem focus on a property owner’s size and corporate form, rather than its property management practices. Continue reading
The prevalence of default judgments in eviction cases affects housing stability and raises concerns about access to procedural justice for tenants. There is substantial variation across states in the rules governing default judgments that may contribute to variation in the frequency of eviction cases ending in defaults. Continue reading
In Martin v. City of Boise, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit relied on the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause of the Eighth Amendment to rule that a class of involuntarily unhoused individuals may not be criminally punished for sleeping on public property in the absence of “sufficient alternatives” for all unhoused people. In Johnson v. City of Grants Pass, the Ninth Circuit elaborated that civil schemes which lead to criminal punishment are unconstitutional as well. Continue reading
Coercive control is a pervasive form of domestic violence in which one partner engages in a prolonged and multifaceted campaign of abuse in order to gain and maintain dominance over the other partner. While some coercively controlling partners employ physical violence to ensure compliance with their demands, others use exclusively non-violent tactics. In co-parenting relationships, coercive control not only inflicts severe harm on the targeted parent but also affects children as co-victims of both direct and indirect abuse. As a result, co-victim children suffer significant emotional, developmental, and social harm, and adverse health outcomes, even in the absence of physical abuse. Yet legal frameworks addressing domestic violence typically focus on discrete acts of physical violence, adhering to what scholars term the “violent incident model.” Continue reading
Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act grants the Secretary of Energy a sweeping authority to exempt electric generation and transmission facilities from any federal, state, or local environmental laws. When Congress first adopted § 202(c) in 1935, it designed the provision as an emergency power that federal regulators could use to force fractious utilities to work together to preserve electricity reliability in times of war or natural disaster. But in the last decade things changed.
This Article, drawing on a novel catalog of all § 202(c) emergencies from the provision’s nearly ninety-year history, is the first to comprehensively describe § 202(c). The Article shows that new pressures on the reliability of the American electrical grid, along with an obscure 2015 amendment to the Federal Power Act, transformed § 202(c). No longer is it used to nudge reluctant utilities into action. Instead, starting in the first Trump administration and continuing in the Biden administration, grid operators facing impending blackouts used § 202(c) orders to allow them to run power plants in excess of Clean Air and Clean Water Act pollution limits. And § 202(c) is set to become even more important. Both the Trump and Biden administrations leaned on the provision in proposed policies for the electrical grid—the former to hinder the energy transition and the latter to push it along. This Article tells § 202(c)’s history, describes its transformation, and critically examines some methods for supervising the Department of Energy’s use of § 202(c).
Copyright law requires courts deciding music infringement cases to locate two copyrights within a single song: one in the “musical work” and another in the “sound recording.” But songs do not naturally divide into such pieces. Instead, judges untrained in music must parse from a unified song the musical elements belonging to each copyright and to whom those copyrights belong. They have historically approached the task as a simple matter of identifying elements notated on a score as belonging to the musical work and placing “everything else” on the sound recording, but such a formalistic approach does not suit the modern popular music at the center of most infringement lawsuits. Continue reading
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, policymakers faced a seemingly difficult choice. On the one hand, health considerations required imposing restrictions on face-to-face meetings. On the other, intuition suggested that switching to video conferencing might lead to information loss. As the pandemic progressed, in-person meetings largely turned digital, including court hearings, lawyer-client consultations, board meetings, and more. But did this turn actually cause an information loss? Continue reading
The market for socially responsible investing—commonly referred to as ESG
(environmental, social, and governance) investing—is experiencing rapid growth.
Yet a crucial question, that could shape this market’s potential to better our world,
remains unresolved: can institutional investors consider ESG factors when making
investment decisions? These investors hold a significant portion of global
corporate equity, currently valued in the trillions of dollars. Consequently, they
stand in a unique position from which they can influence the actions of
corporations. Continue reading