In January 2002, for the first time, the Olympic Torch Relay
visited Alaska on its way to the Winter Games. When the relay
runner and accompanying camera cars passed Juneau-Douglas High
School, ...senior Joseph Frederick and several friends unfurled a
fourteen-foot banner reading "BONG HiTS 4 JESUS."
An in-depth look at student rights within a public high school,
this book chronicles the events that followed: Frederick's
suspension, the subsequent suit against the school district, and,
ultimately, the escalation of a local conflict into a federal case.
Brought to life through interviews with the principal figures in
the case, Bong Hits 4 Jesus is a gripping tale of the
boundaries of free speech in an American high school.
If at First You Don’t Succeed Ganguly, Geetanjali; Setzer, Joana; Heyvaert, Veerle
Oxford journal of legal studies,
12/2018, Letnik:
38, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
This article discusses the history and the future prospects of private climate litigation, which seeks to hold private entities legally accountable for climate change-related damage or threats of ...damage. It argues that, following failed attempts to clear judicial thresholds with regard to standing, proof of harm and causation, a new wave of private climate change lawsuits can be identified, and it is by no means doomed to failure. This is because climate change litigation takes place in a rapidly evolving scientific, discursive and constitutional context, which generates new opportunities for judges to rethink the interpretation of existing legal and evidentiary requirements and apply them in a way that will enhance the accountability of major private carbon producers. Moreover, even unsuccessful cases can contribute to articulating climate change as a legal and financial risk, which may help to guide climate change-responsive adjudication in the longer term.
As schools have ratcheted up their online remote instruction, questions about student privacy have become more significant. Robert Kim discusses current litigation related to the Children’s Online ...Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and the use of education technology. Cases against Google have alleged that the company improperly collected student data without consent. Other cases have been brought against schools that use technology to monitor student activity at home.
MDL as category Clopton, Zachary D
Cornell law review,
01/2020, Letnik:
105, Številka:
5
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Multidistrict litigation (MDL) dominates the federal civil docket. MDL has been used to consolidate hundreds of thousands of cases, including with respect to asbestos, the BP oil spill, Johnson and ...Johnson baby powder, NFL concussions, opioids, and more. In recent years, MDL has attracted the attention of reformers and scholars, who have offered proposals for rules or practices that would apply to all MDLs, and to only MDLs.
These proposals are premised on a fundamental error about what MDL is. Using quantitative and qualitative data, case studies, and interviews with judges, this Article demonstrates that reformers and scholars have made a mistake about what defines the category "MDL." MDL is not a uniform category of large civil cases demanding one-size-fits-all procedure. Recent proposals for MDL-specific rules, therefore, are misguided. Indeed, because such proposals would create incentives for parties to "procedure shop" into or out of MDL, they imperil horizontal equity and invite abuse. Proposals for MDL-specific rules thus risk exacerbating existing problems in MDL and creating new problems that were not there before.
That said, MDL is a coherent category with respect to the way MDLs are created. Every MDL is created by the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation (JPML), a group of seven judges hand picked by the Chief Justice, who have the nearly unconstrained authority to decide whether to consolidate cases and to which federal judge to assign them. Yet despite this unusual and highly consequential procedure, reformers and scholars have paid scant attention to the JPML. Having dispensed with the initial MDL categorization error, this Article also examines the understudied role of the JPML and offers suggestions for JPML reform consistent with a clearer description of what MDL is.
This paper examines the formation of litigation intentions among e-commerce customers under the privacy breach due to the influence of antecedents such as vulnerability, social risk, privacy ...dispositions, effectiveness privacy policy, awareness of data management and moderators such as privacy control beliefs, efficacy in coping and litigation complexity. A structural equation modelling analysis revealed that reasons for privacy breach perceptions are customer dispositions about privacy, anticipated vulnerability due to privacy breach, and social risk related to personal information disclosure. The control beliefs and coping skills of customers under privacy threat positively moderate litigation intentions. Similarly, the task complexity of litigation significantly reduces litigation intentions.
This study investigates whether audit litigants act as if they believe jurors will associate auditor-provided nonaudit services (NAS) with impaired auditor independence, and thus substandard auditor ...performance. Using GAAP-based financial statement restatements disclosed from 2001–2007 as an indicator for audit failure, I find that the amount of NAS fees and the ratio of NAS fees to total fees is positively associated with the likelihood that a restatement results in audit litigation. I also find that when plaintiff attorneys argue that auditor independence was impaired due to dependence on client fees and, in particular, NAS fees, restatement-related audit litigation is more likely to result in an auditor settlement and a larger amount of settlement. These results suggest that audit litigants act as if they believe NAS fees will strengthen the case against the auditor, and thus affect the court resolution if the lawsuit is taken to verdict.
We examine the issue of auditor independence in a unique setting. Specifically, we test for auditor independence impairment among (1) private client firms, for which the risk of auditor reputation ...loss is lower than for publicly traded firms, and (2) in a low litigation environment (i.e., Norway) that further reduces the expected costs to the auditor associated with independence impairment. We have thus chosen a setting that gives independence impairment its best chance of being detected if it exists. Using a large sample of private Norwegian firms, we analyze whether auditors who receive higher fees are less likely to issue modified opinions. Despite the low litigation risk and the reduced reputation risk, our empirical results provide no evidence that auditors compromise their independence through fee dependence. These results are robust to controlling for the expected portion of fees, to different sample specifications, to the use of both levels and changes specifications, and to a number of sensitivity analyses.
The Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse (http://clearinghouse.net) solves a significant information deficit related to civil rights litigation by posting information about thousands of ongoing and ...closed large-scale civil rights cases. Documents are OCR’d and searchable; cases are searchable by metadata tags as well as full-text searching. Each case has a litigation summary by a law student. We live in a civil rights era—a time when people are using the courts, among other strategies, to fight for civil rights. The Clearinghouse posts the records of those fights, the stories of civil rights cases—across topics, across regions, across organizations—and makes them searchable, usable, and available to everybody.
Index funds own an increasingly large proportion of American public companies. The stewardship decisions of index fund managers—how they monitor, vote, and engage with their portfolio companies—can ...be expected to have a profound impact on the governance and performance of public companies and the economy. Understanding index fund stewardship, and how policymaking can improve it, is thus critical for corporate law scholarship. In this Article we contribute to such understanding by providing a comprehensive theoretical, empirical, and policy analysis of index fund stewardship.
We begin by putting forward an agency-costs theory of index fund incentives. Stewardship decisions by index funds depend not just on the interests of index fund investors but also on the incentives of index fund managers. Our agency-costs analysis shows that index fund managers have strong incentives to (i) underinvest in stewardship and (ii) defer excessively to the preferences and positions of corporate managers.
We then provide an empirical analysis of the full range of stewardship activities that index funds do and do not undertake, focusing on the three largest index fund managers, which we collectively refer to as the “Big Three.” We analyze four dimensions of the Big Three’s stewardship activities: the limited personnel time they devote to stewardship regarding most of their portfolio companies; the small minority of portfolio companies with which they have any private communications; their focus on divergences from governance principles and their limited attention to other issues that could be significant for their investors; and their pro-management voting patterns.
We also empirically investigate five ways in which the Big Three could fail to undertake adequate stewardship: the limited attention they pay to financial underperformance; their lack of involvement in the selection of directors and lack of attention to important director characteristics; their failure to take actions that would bring about governance changes that are desirable according to their own governance principles; their decision to stay on the sidelines regarding corporate governance reforms; and their avoidance of involvement in consequential securities litigation. We show that this body of evidence is, on the whole, consistent with the incentive problems that our agency-costs framework identifies.
Finally, we put forward a set of reforms that policymakers should consider in order to address the incentives of index fund managers to underinvest in stewardship, their incentives to be excessively deferential to corporate managers, and the continuing rise of index investing. We also discuss how our analysis should reorient important ongoing debates regarding common ownership and hedge fund activism.
The policy measures we put forward, and the beneficial role of hedge fund activism, can partly but not fully address the incentive problems that we analyze and document. These problems are expected to remain a significant aspect of the corporate governance landscape and should be the subject of close attention by policymakers, market participants, and scholars.
Climate litigation against companies has increased significantly in the past couple of years. At the same time, regulation with respect to climate change is developing rapidly, such that it may be ...difficult for companies to identify which laws apply to them and how they should address the legal risks relating to climate change and climate litigation. This paper discusses court rulings which could be considered 'landmark cases' since they are the first to assess questions around the responsibility for climate-related damages and the curbing of CO
2
emissions, and highlights climate litigation proceedings that are still pending, illustrating the types of claims which may be expected going forward. It then outlines the risks for companies or their boards of directors to be sued for alleged damages relating to climate change or greenwashing, illustrated by an analysis under Swiss laws, and provides concrete measures for boards of directors and the management of companies to minimise these risks.
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