Labor and employment laws are systematically underenforced in low-wage, franchised workplaces. Union contracts, and the benefits and protections they provide, are nonexistent. The Fight for Fifteen movement has brought attention to the low wages, systemic violations of workers’ rights, and lack of collective representation in fast-food franchises. Given that franchisees can be judgment-proof and cannot […]
Profiting From Our Pain: Privileged Access to Social Impact Investing
Social impacting investing has become the latest trend to permeate the financial markets. With massive anticipated funding gaps for sustainable development goals, and a millennial-driven thirst for doing good while doing well, this trend is likely to continue in the coming decades. This burgeoning industry is poised to experience yet an additional boost, since it […]
Represented by a Racist: Why Courts Rarely Grant Relief to Clients of Racist Lawyers
Courts usually don’t grant habeas claims for criminal defendants who allege that their lawyer’s racism prejudiced their defense unless the racial animus is obvious on the cold trial record. In Ellis v. Harrison, the Ninth Circuit had the opportunity to relax this standard and grant habeas relief to a client of a known racist lawyer, […]
Broadening the Escape Clause: How the UCCJEA Can Protect Female Survivors of Domestic Violence
Under the Uniform Child Custody Jurisdiction and Enforcement Act (UCCJEA), U.S. courts must enforce a custody order from an international court unless the custody laws of that country constitute a “fundamental violation of human rights.” Historically, U.S. courts have rarely invoked this “escape clause.” However, this Note argues that this narrow construction of the escape […]
Visible Policing: Technology, Transparency, and Democratic Control
Law enforcement has an opacity problem. Police use sophisticated technologies to monitor individuals, surveil communities, and predict behaviors in increasingly intrusive ways. But legal institutions have struggled to understand—let alone set limits on—new investigative methods and techniques for two major reasons. First, new surveillance technology tends to operate in opaque and unaccountable ways, augmenting police […]
Originality’s Other Path
Although the U.S. Supreme Court has famously spoken of a “historic kinship” between patent and copyright doctrine, the family resemblance is sometimes hard to see. One of the biggest differences between them today is how much ingenuity they require for earning protection. Obtaining a patent requires an invention so innovative that it would not have […]
Capital Controls as Migrant Controls
The disparate treatment of capital and labor reflects one of globalization’s central asymmetries: the law often allows financial capital, but not people, to move freely across borders. Yet scholars have largely neglected the intersection of these two regimes, the legal restrictions on migrants’ capital, particularly when the migrants themselves are deemed illegal. These restrictions on […]
The Law of Energy Exports
The fossil fuel industry has filed an increasing number of dormant Commerce Clause lawsuits against coastal states and cities that have rejected proposals for new coal and oil export facilities in their jurisdictions. These lawsuits are creating a wholly new “law of energy exports” that to date has been underexplored in the academic literature, even […]
Online Appendix—The Future of Felon Disenfranchisement Reform: Evidence from the Campaign to Restore Voting Rights in Florida
This is the appendix to The Future of Felon Disenfranchisement Reform: Evidence from the Campaign to Restore Voting Rights in Florida. Suggested Appendix Citation: Michael Morse, The Future of Felon Disenfranchisement Reform: Evidence from the Campaign to Restore Voting Rights in Florida, 109 Calif. L. Rev. 1143 app. (2021). I. Campaign Finance […]
The Future of Felon Disenfranchisement Reform: Evidence from the Campaign to Restore Voting Rights in Florida
This Article offers an empirical account of felon disenfranchisement and legal financial obligations in the era of mass incarceration. It focuses on a 2018 ballot initiative, known as Amendment 4, which sought to end lifetime disenfranchisement in Florida. At the time, the Republican controlled state accounted for more than a quarter of the six million […]