| Volume 88 | 2009-2010 |
A Prolonged Slump for “Plaintiff-Pitchers”: The Narrow “Strike Zone” for Securities Plaintiffs in the Fourth Circuit
Marc I. Steinberg & Dustin L. Appel
This article focuses on the narrow “strike zone” that plaintiffs must overcome in private securities actions instituted in the Fourth Circuit. Based on empirical data generated over a fourteen-year span, there emerges a clear finding that during that time period defendants were victorious in almost all cases, either on the merits of the case... »
Revisiting Eve’s Law: Suggestions for Improving the North Carolina Anti-Gang Statute
Beverly Petersen Jennison
When state social policies and social realities conflict, state legislatures need to focus upon the problem to try to fix it. Gang activity in a community is such a problem. Since 1998, the Governor’s Crime Commission in North Carolina has studied the problem of gang proliferation and gang violence within the state.... »
The Racial Justice Act and the Long Struggle with Race and the Death Penalty in North Carolina
Seth Kotch & Robert P. Mosteller
In August 2009, the North Carolina Legislature enacted the Racial Justice Act (“RJA”), which commands that no person shall be executed “pursuant to any judgment that was sought or obtained on the basis of race.” One of the most significant features of the RJA is its use of statistical evidence to determine whether the... »
Politicizing the Courts and Undermining the Law: A Legal History of Colonial North Carolina, 1660-1775
William E. Nelson
This Article is the first monographic history of the legal output of colonial North Carolina courts. Based on an examination of voluminous manuscript court records, it concludes that a fragile legal system developed during the first half-century of the existence of an initially small colony on the banks of the Albemarle Sound. Just as... »
Coastal Federal Credit Union v. Hardiman: You Can Still “Ride-Through” the Eastern District of North Carolina
Christopher McGowan Badger
From its biblical and constitutional roots, American bankruptcy law has developed to provide important and necessary protection to financially overextended debtors. In the nineteenth-century Congress repeatedly responded to national economic difficulty by passing bankruptcy legislation. In the last quarter of the twentieth-century, Chapter 11 bankruptcies frequently prevented the disappearance of major... »
Down The Drain: How North Carolina Municipalities Lost Immunity for Storm Drains in Jennings v. Fayetteville
Trent McCotter
When a high school student falls into a city-owned drainage ditch, will the city’s prospects of facing expensive wrongful death litigation hinge on the origin of the water in the ditch? If this scenario happens in North Carolina, the answer might be yes. As the law currently stands after the North Carolina Court of... »
What’s Brewing in the Old North State: An Analysis of the Beer Distribution Laws Regulating North Carolina’s Craft Breweries
Andrew Tamayo
As North Carolina’s craft beer industry has developed and gained a national reputation, the North Carolina General Assembly has recognized the promotion of the craft brew industry as a desirable and worthy goal. Despite this recognition, many craft brewers in the state feel that the laws can be improved to better promote the growth... »
Globalization, Women’s Work, and Care Needs: The Urgency of Reconciliation Policies
Lourdes Beneria
This Address argues that the increase in women’s participation in paid work in many countries has made more manifest the tensions around balancing family and labor market work, hence making more obvious the need to solve the problems of care facing many families. First, the Address focuses on the significance of demographic changes affecting... »
Families on the Edge: Governing Home and Work in a Globalized Economy
Kerry Rittich
Scholars working in the fields of labor law, globalization, law and development, and of course gender now encounter the family at every turn. This is sometimes true even when families and households are officially absent from the debate or issue under discussion, as is often the case. Whether the topic is the transformation of... »
Globalization, Canadian Family Policy, and the Omissions of Neoliberalism
Janine Brodie
The relationship between globalization, family structures, and social policy is complex, uneven, and evolving. This Article examines social policy reform in Canada during the past two decades in order to advance three propositions about the relationship between globalization and public policy: first, the influence of globalization on social policy is neither direct nor uniform... »
Families, Human Dignity, and State Support for Caretaking: Why the United States’ Failure to Ameliorate the Work-family Conflict is a Dereliction of the Government’s Basic Responsibilities
Maxine Eichner
In the last two generations, the hours worked by American families have increased significantly as greater numbers of women have moved into the workplace. The resulting work patterns have put considerable stress on family life, particularly when it comes to accomplishing the caretaking tasks traditionally performed by women. The legal and policy responses to... »
Achieving Accountability for Migrant Domestic Worker Abuse
Janie A. Chuang
Domestic work has become increasingly commoditized in the global economy. Migrant domestic workers’ remittances constitute a rich source of revenues for their countries of origin, while their labor ameliorates the “care deficit” experienced in wealthier countries of destination. Despite the importance of their work, migrant domestic workers are some of the most exploited workers... »
Abortion Access in the Global Marketplace
Martha F. Davis
In the United States, government funding of legal abortion for low-income women has been uniquely “de-linked” from the fundamental right to an abortion. While the underlying right to an abortion has been repeatedly reaffirmed, federal courts have been unreceptive to any imposition of an affirmative governmental obligation to fund the exercise of the right.... »
Race and Market Values in Domestic Infant Adoption
Barbara Fedders
For prospective parents seeking to adopt U.S.-born babies, white infants are the most in demand and, relatively speaking, in the shortest supply. Some domestic adoption agencies have responded to this mismatch by assessing higher fees for the adoption of white infants than for infants of other races. After briefly considering the historically prominent role... »
Credit for Motherhood
Melissa B. Jacoby
This Essay builds on prior work exploring the impact of consumer lenders who sell credit products for assisted reproduction and adoption. After reviewing some basic attributes of the parenthood lending market, the Essay discusses how not-for-profit lenders promote traditional conceptions of motherhood and the division of carework in ways that credit discrimination laws were... »
A Woman’s Worth
Kimberly D. Krawiec
This Article examines three traditionally “taboo trades”: (1) the sale of sex, (2) compensated egg donation, and (3) commercial surrogacy. The Article purposely invokes examples in which the compensated provision of goods or services (primarily or exclusively by women) is legal, but in which commodification is only partially achieved or is constrained in some... »
The Very Uneasy Case Against Remittances: An Ex Ante Perspective
Adam Feibelman
Money that individual migrants send back to their home countries has become a major source of foreign exchange for many developing and emerging economies. These remittances now represent a sizable percentage of the gross domestic product for many states; for some, remittance inflows are larger than all other sources of foreign capital. In recent... »
The Effects of U.S. Deportation Policies on Immigrant Families and Communities: Cross-Border Perspectives
Jacqueline Hagan, Brianna Castro, and Nestor Rodriguez
Since the mid-1990s, the United States has enacted a series of laws that makes it easier to arrest, detain, and deport noncitizens. These laws, which have been highly criticized for the devastation they have brought to immigrant families, represent an abrupt departure from post–World War II immigration policies, which provided increasing rights to immigrants... »
Transnational Mothering: A Source of Gender Conflicts in the Family
Rhacel Salazar Parrenas
Migration destabilizes families or what we think families should “look” like, as it forces the transformation of households from nuclear to transnational structures, challenges the traditional gender division of labor, and imposes the barrier of geographical distance on marital and intergenerational relations. Looking at the case of migration from the Philippines, this Article examines... »
Disruptions, Dislocations, and Inequalities: Transnational Latino/a Families Surviving the Global Economy
Leah Schmalzbauer
This Article draws on field research with Honduran and Mexican transnational families and the transnational family literature to explore how global inequality is influencing gender and class relations within poor migrant families. This Article begins with an overview of the relationship between globalization, Latino/a migration, and transnational family formation. The Article then details and... »
Dedication to Volume 73
This issue of the North Carolina Law Review is dedicated to Professor and Chancellor Emeritus William Brantley Aycock, a man who has graced the UNC School of Law in one way or another for fifty years. Albert Coates observed that there is a special spirit here at the UNC School of Law, [...]

