Judicial and scholarly descriptions of the deterrent power of civil rights damages actions rely heavily on the assumption that government officials have enough information about lawsuits alleging misconduct by police officers that they can weigh the costs and benefits of maintaining the status quo. But no one has looked to see if that assumption is true. Drawing on extensive documentary evidence...
Melville B. Nimmer Memorial Lecture: Facts and the First Amendment
Each year, the UCLA School of Law hosts the Melville B. Nimmer Memorial Lecture. Since 1986, the lecture series has served as a forum for leading scholars in the fields of copyright and First Amendment law. In recent years, the lecture has been presented by many distinguished scholars. The UCLA Law Review has published these lectures and proudly continues that tradition by publishing an Article...
Revising the Revision: Procedural Alternatives to the Arbitration Fairness Act
In the past decade, debate on the fairness of pre-dispute agreements to arbitrate has intensified. Recently, Congress has joined the chorus of opposition to these agreements and is attempting to outlaw them via the proposed Arbitration Fairness Act (AFA). Both proponents and critics of the AFA, including certain members of Congress, take hard-line stances on the perceived ills or benefits of...
Case Note: Constitutional Law - Free Speech - Ninth Circuit Upholds City Council's Ejection of Audience Member Based on Nazi Salute Norse v. City of Santa Cruz
An irony of American free speech law is that it provides more protection for ranting on a street corner than speaking out at a public meeting. This is partly a quirk of the United States Supreme Court’s complicated First Amendment jurisprudence and partly a recognition that such meetings are venues for administrative business and not just citizen engagement. And yet all across the country, city...
False Profits: Reviving the Corporation’s Public Purpose
For much of the twentieth century, corporations pursued a simple strategy: maximize shareholder wealth. This strategy led to significant gains for shareholders, but too often came at the expense of the public. This dynamic was on display in the past two years, as high-risk financial instruments brought down the global economy. These instruments, including credit default swaps and mortgage-backed...
Portraits of Resistance: Lawyer Responses to Unjust Proceedings
This Article considers a question rarely addressed: What is the role of the lawyer in a manifestly unjust procedural regime? Many excellent studies have considered the role of the judge in unjust regimes, but the lawyer’s role has been largely ignored. The analysis in this Article draws on two case studies: that of lawyers representing civil rights leaders during protests in Alabama in the 1950s...
A “Standard Clause Analysis” of the Frustration Doctrine and the Material Adverse Change Clause
In the darkest depths of a corporate merger agreement lies the MAC clause, a term that permits the acquirer to walk away from a transaction if, between signing and closing, the target company experiences a “Material Adverse Change.” Multibillion-dollar deals rise or fall based on the anticipated interpretation of a MAC clause, and invocation of the clause in a sensitive transaction could trigger...
Coercive Discovery and the First Amendment: Towards a Heightened Discoverability Standard
This Comment addresses whether the First Amendment restricts a litigant’s or the government’s ability to compel disclosure of information about protected First Amendment activities. In evaluating whether such speech-related information may be subpoenaed, courts have struggled to balance a speaker’s right to anonymous or confidential speech with the evidentiary needs of prosecutors or plaintiffs...