CURRENT ISSUE

Volume 62, Issue 3

ARTICLES

How the Poor Got Cut Out of Banking

Mehrsa Baradaran 

62 Emory L.J. 483 (2013)

The United States currently has two banking systems—one for the rich, one for the poor. It was not always this way. In the past, the U.S. government has enlisted certain banking institutions to serve the needs of the poor and offer low-cost credit to enable low-income Americans to escape poverty. This Article tracks the neglected history of government-sponsored institutions designed to offer credit to the indigent and explains how each abandoned its initial purpose. In doing so, the Article highlights the shifts in modern banking that rapidly increased competition among banks and caused homogenization in form. This Article proposes the reestablishment of government-sponsored banks to serve the poor. Options include redesigning existing government measures and a novel proposal to use the existing Postal Service branches to offer low-cost, short-term credit to the low-income. [Continue reading]

The Law of the Body

Meredith M. Render

62 Emory L.J. 549 (2013)

This Article posits that a “law of the body” is overdue. In the absence of clarity about the legal status of the human body, courts have constructed a collection of circumstantially defined categories for resolving the question of human body ownership and use. This patchwork approach is awkward, unwieldy, incoherent, and, by many lights, ultimately unjust. Many able minds have been applied to critiquing the distributive consequences of a regime in which we cannot—at any point in our lives—“own” our own bodies (or its constituent parts), but other people can and do. But what has been missing from these conversations is a conceptual foundation for understanding the living human body as property. This Article supplies that piece of this byzantine puzzle. Specifically, the thesis presented here holds that by employing a property framework to understanding the legal status of the human body we can explain with coherence and consilience our existing legal commitments concerning the treatment of the human body. [Continue reading]

COMMENTS

The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and Corporate Charity: Rethinking the Regulations

Francesca M. Pisano

62 Emory L.J. 607 (2013)

American companies bring U.S. innovation and capital to all corners of the globe. The U.S. corporate presence abroad is seen not only in oil rigs and factories, but also in corporate development projects and humanitarian relief efforts. This Comment analyzes the application of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act to international corporate charity. It shows how the FCPA’s ambiguity has the unfortunate effect of being both over- and under-inclusive, discouraging bona fide charity while at the same time failing to capture corrupt donations. This Comment proposes a modification to FCPA enforcement: the creation of a safe harbor option. This will offer businesses the opportunity to “buy” a rebuttable presumption of legitimacy for their charitable donations by publically disclosing the payments, projects, and recipients of their philanthropy. [Continue reading]

Between Judgment and Law: Full Faith and Credit, Public Policy, and State Records

Elizabeth Redpath

62 Emory L.J. 639 (2013)

Although the Full Faith and Credit Clause was intended to solidify the Union by requiring states to give appropriate respect to the official acts of other states, the application of the Clause has been controversial and analytically challenging. Full faith and credit caselaw has developed along diverging paths: one path requiring “exacting” faith and credit for final judgments and the other path severely limiting the faith and credit given to legislative acts through the creation of a public policy exception. State records that are not a close fit within the two paradigms of “judgment” and “law” have been largely neglected in the Supreme Court’s treatment of full faith and credit. This Comment argues that because the Full Faith and Credit Clause is a rule of evidence designed to facilitate interstate comity without infringing on the sovereignty of the states, states are obliged, by virtue of res judicata, to “recognize” most out-of-state records. However, states can refuse, by virtue of the public policy exception, to “enforce” those same records. [Continue reading]