Recent Print Edition:
Recent Print Edition:
Articles
Articles
Volume 110, Issue 4
Et Tu, Agent? Commission-Based Steering in Residential Real Estate
Jordan M. Barry, Will Fried & John William Hatfield
Real estate agents are required to serve their clients’ best interests. However, policymakers have long suspected that buyer agents steer their clients away from properties that offer low buyer agent commissions. . . .
Law as a Lamppost
Janet Freilich
Law produces all manner of public information: court documents, securities filings, patents, property records, and much more. This information is used in a multitude of ways—it teaches readers about individual cases, transactions, or entities, and is also aggregated to inform policymaking, set priorities, and drive predictive analytics and artificial intelligence. . . .
Decoding Land Use Discretion
John J. Infranca
The housing shortage and affordability crisis have elicited calls for a reappraisal of the allocation of zoning power between state and local governments. Although scholars have given significant attention to potential legal reforms, there has been little discussion of the local administration of zoning codes. . . .
Who Regulates Abortion Now?
Nathan G. Cortez & Joanna L. Grossman
Contrary to both conventional wisdom and recent Supreme Court pronouncements, abortion is not simply a matter of state oversight. For a quarter century now, the federal government has been intimately involved in “regulating” abortion through the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s approval and continued oversight over mifepristone and other abortion medications. . . .
Bankruptcy Fiduciaries
Christopher D. Hampson
Does social enterprise end with insolvency? Is bankruptcy all about the bottom line? . . .
Tax and the Myth of the Family Farm
Kathleen DeLaney Thomas
With income and wealth inequality at historically high levels, policymakers have looked to the tax system as a potential road to reform. Specifically, new taxes on wealth or inheritances could raise much-needed revenue and reduce intergenerational wealth disparities. . . .
Notes
Student Notes
Volume 110, Issue 4
Iowa Needs (Clean Energy) Farmers
Kegan S. Peters
Iowa is home to two land-intensive industries—agriculture and clean energy. The two industries have been in constant competition for decades, and Iowa has policies encouraging the development of both industries, without acknowledging or resolving the tension between them. . . .
When Legislative Solutions Fail: Community Problem Solving Source of Income Discrimination in Iowa
Cassidy M. Rea
The Housing Choice Voucher Program was developed by the federal government to provide low-income households with alternatives to public housing and to desegregate urban neighborhoods. The program allows low-income households to utilize a federal subsidy in privately owned housing of the household’s choosing. . . .
In Need of Paw-sitive Change: Improving Iowa’s Animal Cruelty Protections
Adele J. Raymer
Animal welfare is an important issue that must be addressed for moral reasons and to further human interests. Animal cruelty in America is regulated primarily at the state level, and various state legislatures use different strategies to promote animal welfare. . . .
Hipster Antitrust and Labor Monopsony: Why the Federal Trade Commission Should Throw a Punch at the UFC
Tyson J. Williams
Antitrust enforcement is entering a new age. It has long overlooked labor market monopsonies, instead focusing on product market monopolies. . . .
Recent Online Edition:
Recent Online Edition:
How the Supreme Court Ghosted the PHOSITA: Amgen and Legal Constructs in Patent Law
Timothy R. Holbrook & Mark D. Janis
This Essay is an invited response to The Ghost in the Patent System: An Empirical Study of Patent Law’s Elusive “Skilled Artisan,” by Professors Laura Pedraza-Fariña and Ryan Whalen. In their piece, Pedraza-Fariña and Ryan Whalen offer an empirical study and use it to argue for a new conception of the Person Having Ordinary Skill in the Art (“PHOSITA”), patent law’s nod to the “reasonable person” construct. . . .
The Game, the Players, and the Board
Bruce E. Boyden
109 Iowa L. Rev. Online 105 (2024)
Christopher Seaman and Thuan Tran’s fascinating article, Intellectual Property and Tabletop Games, raises important questions about the role of intellectual property (“IP”) in developing and distributing innovative products. The market for tabletop games, Seaman and Tran argue, is able to sustain a high level of creativity at a high up-front cost, all while protected by some but not all of the IP rights that other industries’ outputs receive. Is that evidence of IP’s necessity or its superfluousness? . . .
Interpreting Textualist Slogans
Guha Krishnamurthi
109 Iowa L. Rev. Online 15 (2023)
Slogans are a blunt instrument—they may convey something of the truth, but they rarely do so undented. So too is the case with the influential textualism slogans “the text is [the] law,” “only the text [is] the law,” and “[o]nly the written word is the law.” In his insightful Article, Professor Erik Encarnacion shows why these statements are false, as they are category errors. He then observes that these slogans are unnecessary to establishing the core theses of textualism and that these slogans misunderstand and confuse features of textualism. And he is right about all of that. . . .
Should the Recent Timbs and Dobbs Decisions Revive Interest in the Excessive Fines Clause as the Constitutional Basis . . .
N. William Hines
109 Iowa L. Rev. Online 46 (2024)
In a series of cases in the early 1990s, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment implicitly enabled federal courts to review state punitive damages awards for unconstitutional arbitrariness and excessiveness. Before settling on the Due Process Clause as the basis of federal regulation of punitive damages, in a 1989 decision the Court considered and rejected the claim that the Excessive Fines Clause of the Eighth Amendment, as incorporated into the Fourteenth Amendment, could provide the constitutional foundation for federal regulation of state punitive damages awards. . . .
The Racism of Immigration Crime Prosecution
Ingrid V. Eagly
109 Iowa L. Rev. Online 27 (2023)
Eric Fish’s Article, Race, History, and Immigration Crimes, explores the racist motivation behind the original 1929 enactment of the two most common federal immigration crimes, entry without permission and reentry after deportation. This Response engages with Fish’s archival work unearthing this unsettling history and examines how his research has informed a series of legal challenges seeking to strike down the modern federal border crossing law as violating the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. . . .
Does DARC Really Matter?: A Response to Wright & Moore
Troy A. Rule
109 Iowa L. Rev. Online 1 (2023)
Danaya Wright and Ethan Moore’s Article, DARC Matters: Repurposing Nineteenth-Century Property Law for the Twenty-First Century, is a valuable contribution to a growing body of legal academic literature focused on property law obstacles to the deployment of commercial drone technologies. Wright and Moore rightly acknowledge landowners’ long-held rights to exclude objects from the low airspace immediately above their land–rights that some major retailers have aggressively sought to weaken in recent years to facilitate drone delivery services. . . .