Volume 36, Issue 2

Clean Food: The Next Clean Energy Revolution

Jonathan Lovvorn

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.

Fixing Foreclosure

Ann M. Burkhart

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.

The Child Welfare and Education Gap

Eric Chung

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.

Ethnic Enclaves and the Zoning Game

John Mangin

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.

Credit Ratings, Congress, and Mandatory Self Reliance

Zachary Mollengarden

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.

The Crime of “Causing Traffic”: Can the Criminal Civil Rights Statutes Target Public Corruption?

Leslie B. Arffa

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.