Source: https://ylpr.yale.edu/volumesissues/volume-36-issue-2
Timestamp: 2019-04-23 14:01:01+00:00

Document:
The world is in the throes of a clean energy revolution. This revolution has led to the ongoing demise of coal, and a shift towards clean and efficient energy sources like wind and solar. Despite these advances, the process of producing food for human energy remains extraordinarily dirty and inefficient. This Essay explores what it would look like to graft clean energy policy onto the human food system. It discusses what is wrong with the standards by which we currently evaluate food policy and how we might apply a clean human energy or “clean food” standard instead. It concludes that building a clean food grid should be the next clean energy revolution.
Since the American Revolution, mortgage foreclosures have consisted of a public auction of the mortgaged property. Judges and state legislators at the time believed that an auction was the best way to obtain a fair price for the land. Though that belief soon proved to be mistaken, the sale method remains unchanged.
Before the real estate and mortgage markets crashed in 2007, only two significant empirical studies of foreclosure sales existed, and they involved small numbers of foreclosures. Because the crash resulted in millions of home foreclosures, it has provided a rich data source. As a result, economists, social scientists, and others have produced a wealth of empirical studies on foreclosure sales and their effects both before and after the crash. Three lines of research now clearly establish that foreclosure by public auction is seriously flawed. These studies first prove that, in this country, even a voluntary real estate auction normally produces a lower sale price than a private sale. A second line of studies shows that foreclosure usually is harmful not just for the land owner, but also for the lender, neighboring property owners, and the community. The third line of studies proves that property sells for more when, rather than foreclosing after default, a lender allows a private sale of the property. These studies make a very powerful case for foreclosure reform.
Fortunately, an established and effective method for selling foreclosed land already exists—listing it for sale with a real estate agent. Currently, the lender conducts a foreclosure, frequently purchases at the sale, and then lists the property for sale with a real estate agent. This process is time consuming, expensive, and harmful. Initially listing the property for sale with a real estate agent, rather than first auctioning it, eliminates these problems, and the success of the process has been proven. England, Ireland, Wales, and some Canadian provinces use this method very effectively, and it could readily be implemented in the United States.
Given the overlapping interests between child welfare and education, one might expect federal laws and policies in these two areas to work in tandem. But in the United States, they have not. With food, nutrition, and early childhood programs among the few exceptions, welfare and education laws have largely been embodied in separate statutes and administered by different agencies. Since their advent and evolution from the 1900s to the present, welfare laws have become increasingly and predominantly concerned with regulating mothers and families, while education laws have become increasingly and predominantly concerned with regulating teachers and schools. Neither area of law has prioritized children as its direct beneficiaries. This Article argues that this misdirected attention is responsible for why these two areas remain disconnected: both welfare and education laws have ignored the immediate needs of children, while focusing instead on regulating the institutions surrounding them. If children were placed at the center of public benefits, the importance of linking adequate child welfare and education systems would become more obvious, as it has been for the food, nutrition, and early childhood programs that buck this trend. After analyzing the gap between these two areas of law, this Article proposes a reconceptualization and unification of child welfare and education laws and policies to better serve socioeconomically disadvantaged children and their families.
In today’s economically vibrant and high-cost cities like New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., housing growth and housing affordability are a function of two variables: zoning and politics. This Article focuses on both in an edge case—New York City’s three fastest-growing ethnic and immigrant enclaves, where larger households, lower incomes, and greater place-dependence raise the stakes of the zoning game.
First, are Hasidic Jewish communities, who employ a “Voice” strategy. By virtue of numbers, spatial dominance within their enclaves, and bloc voting patterns, the Hasidic Jews of Brooklyn have successfully advocated for rezonings and special rules that have enabled them to densify and expand their enclaves over time.
Second, are Chinese communities, who employ an “Exit” strategy. When Manhattan Chinatown became too crowded and expensive, satellite Chinatowns emerged in lower-density and lower-cost, outer-borough neighborhoods with shrinking white populations and good transit connections to Chinatown.
Third, are Bangladeshi, Indo-Caribbean, and other ethnically South Asian communities, who employ an “Underground” strategy. Lacking political clout or anywhere else to go in an increasingly housing-constrained city, these most recent arrivals rode the subprime mortgage market to lower density outer-borough neighborhoods. There, they resorted to unauthorized conversions and accessory dwellings that in many neighborhoods amount to nothing less than guerrilla rezonings—and that resulted in a spate of “defensive downzonings” as incumbent residents fought back.
Drawing from these three case studies, this Article identifies the formal and informal strategies for effecting land use change in high-density urban areas, and illustrates when these strategies are employed and why they meet with varying degrees of success. In doing so, this Article provides guidance for practitioners facing the daunting challenge of expanding access to housing in high-cost, supply-constrained cities.
Section 939A of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act requires federal agencies to identify, remove, and replace all references to credit ratings in their regulations. It responds to longstanding concerns—heightened by the recent financial crisis—that investors place undue reliance on the opinions of a small number of eminently fallible (and perhaps fundamentally conflicted) credit rating agencies. At first blush, the approach adopted in § 939A appears commonsense: if one wishes to reduce reliance on credit ratings, amending regulations that compel investors to consult credit ratings seems like a straightforward place to start. This Note reconsiders: what appears straightforward in principle has proved to be anything but in practice.
As a targeted critique of § 939A of Dodd-Frank, the Note contend that there is a fundamental mismatch between Congress’s diagnosis and prescription. The diagnosis was, inter alia, investor overreliance on credit ratings. Section 939A’s prescription, however, was the removal of “any” reference to credit ratings. Separating the two is Congress’s failure to recognize that overreliance necessarily implies that some level of dependence on credit ratings remains appropriate. The upshot of Congress’s blunt mandate has been a haphazard (and ongoing) process of regulatory reform that, where not facially non-compliant with § 939A, rarely upholds anything more than its letter. As a broader criticism of federal securities regulation, the Note argues that this outcome should not be surprising. Section 939A is afflicted not just by its mismatch between diagnosis and prescription, but also by a flawed motivating ideal best understood as “mandatory self-reliance,” or the belief that independence can be compelled.
The Crime of “Causing Traffic”: Can the Criminal Civil Rights Statutes Target Public Corruption?
An unlikely statutory candidate has recently emerged to aid the federal prosecution of state and local public corruption: the criminal civil rights statutes. In the wake of newly placed limitations on other sources of criminal liability in this area, the government’s reliance on these statutes may increase in the future. Given the contentious nature of the debate concerning the Justice Department’s role in prosecuting both public corruption and civil rights crimes, the potential employment of this old statutory tool in a new area deserves more considerable attention.
While a great deal of scholarship focuses on the qualified immunity doctrine surrounding 18 U.S.C. § 1983, very little study has been devoted to its criminal cousins, 28 U.S.C. §§ 242 and 241. This essay canvasses the rare but storied employment of the criminal civil rights statutes in a variety of contexts, and the doctrinal confusion surrounding them. It ultimately answers the questioned posed in its title in both the affirmative and the negative. While § 242 might present a viable candidate for targeting public corruption, § 241 presents substantial constitutional concerns if used in this context.

References: § 939
 § 939
 § 939
 § 1983
 § 242
 § 241