Faculty in the News

After noticing an increasing trend of controversial national injunctions, the University of Colorado Law School faculty decided it was time to unpack major issues surrounding immigration, health care and custody of children at the U.S.-Mexico border. The Byron White Center for Constitutional Law at CU Law School hosts the yearly Ira C. Rothgerber Conference, which covers various issues surrounding breaches of civil liberties and constitutional rights. This year, the theme was injunctions.

Associate Professor Scott Skinner-Thompson wrote a review for Slate about two new books that argue for an LGBTQ movement that benefits queer people beyond marriage, money, and family.

The steady drumbeat of warnings over the surge in risky corporate borrowing is growing louder and louder. Time and again, regulators in the U.S. and Europe have pointed to the hazards of businesses taking on too much debt. . . Some say regulators aren’t doing nearly enough to fix their blind spots. “I am not confident that regulators have or share among themselves the high-quality information that they need,” Erik F. Gerding, who specializes in financial regulation at University of Colorado Law School, said at a congressional hearing on leveraged loans on June 4. “We cannot wait until it is time to man the lifeboats to fully fund the iceberg patrol.”

Under the new policy, the attorney general must get written consent from tribes before taking certain actions that affect them. That's something few have put into practice, experts say. . . Yet federal agencies, as well as countries around the world, have been slow to implement policies to obtain tribes’ consent, even after endorsing the broad language of the U.N.’s 2007 declaration, said Carla Fredericks, director of the American Indian Law Clinic at the University of Colorado Law School. In a 2017 paper, Fredericks wrote that free, prior and informed consent is “currently an emerging norm and seen as an aspirational goal, rather than binding international law.” . . . Kristen Carpenter, a University of Colorado law professor who is a member of the United Nations’ Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, agreed that the policy announced by Washington’s attorney general last month “is much more specific than anything else I’ve seen around the world.” It may very well be the first time a state attorney general has adopted such a policy.