Law Commons^™

Collaborative Constructions: Designing High School History Curriculum With The Lost & Found Game Series, Owen Gottlieb, Shawn Clybor

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This chapter addresses design research and iterative curriculum design for the Lost & Found games series. The Lost & Found card-to-mobile series is set in Fustat (Old Cairo) in the twelfth century and focuses on religious laws of the period. The first two games focus on Moses Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, a key Jewish law code. A new expansion module which was in development at the time of the fieldwork described in this article that introduces Islamic laws of the period, and a mobile prototype of the initial strategy game has been developed with support National Endowment for the Humanities. The …

A Second Look For Children Sentenced To Die In Prison, Kathryn E. Miller

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Scholars have championed “second look” statutes as a decarceral tool. Second look statutes allow certain incarcerated people to seek resentencing after having served a portion of their sentences. This Essay weighs the advantages and disadvantages of these statutes as applied to children sentenced to die in prison and argues that focusing on this small, discrete group may be a digestible entry point for more conservative states who fear widespread resentencing. Moreover, because early data indicates that children convicted of homicide and released as adults have very low recidivism rates, second look beneficiaries are likely to pose little threat to public …

The Supreme Court’S Chief Justice Of Intellectual Property Law, Bob Gomulkiewicz

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Justice Clarence Thomas is one of the most recognizable members of the United States Supreme Court. Many people recall his stormy Senate confirmation hearing and notice his fiery dissenting opinions that call on the Court to reflect the original public meaning of the Constitution. Yet observers have missed one of Justice Thomas’s most significant contributions to the Court—his intellectual property law jurisprudence. Justice Thomas has authored more majority opinions in intellectual property cases than any other Justice in the Roberts Court era and now ranks as the most prolific author of patent law opinions in the history of the Supreme …

What War Did To The Academy, What The Academy Did To War: A 20-Year Retrospective On The Effects Of The Post-9/11 Wars, Deborah Pearlstein

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The history of the legal academy’s impact on the way states fight wars is hardly one of unmixed glory. It was a law professor moonlighting for President Lincoln who authored “Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United States in the Field” during the Civil War, a code still recognized worldwide today for having laid critical groundwork for the modern law of war. It was likewise a law professor whose work came to serve as both theoretical and practical justification for the sweeping powers of the Nazi state. So it should perhaps be unsurprising that, two decades of engagement …

Reasoning V. Rhetoric: The Strange Case Of “Unconstitutional Beyond A Reasonable Doubt”, Hugh D. Spitzer

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An odd formulation has frequented American constitutional discourse for 125 years: a declaration that courts should not overturn a statute on constitutional grounds unless it is “unconstitutional beyond a reasonable doubt.” This concept has been thought of as a presumption, a standard, a doctrine, or a philosophy of coordinate branch respect and judicial restraint. Yet it has been criticized because “beyond a reasonable doubt” is at root an evidentiary standard of proof in criminal cases rather than a workable theory or standard for deciding constitutional law cases. This article discusses the history and use of “unconstitutional beyond a reasonable doubt,” …

Latcrit At Twenty-Five And Beyond - Organized Academic Activism And The Long Haul: Designing "Hybridized" Advocacy Projects For An Age Of Global Disruption, Systemic Injustice, And Bottom-Up Progress, Francisco Valdes, Steven W. Bender, Jennifer J. Hill

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On the monumental occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary celebration of LatCrit (Latina and Latino Critical Legal Theory, Inc.) as a still thriving and persevering community of critical scholars and activists, this Article offers some reflections on where we have been, where we are now, and where we might go next together as academics and organizers of long-term collective action. Against the current disruptions of a global pandemic, aggravated by planetary climate collapse, disinformation campaigns, and the organized top-down sabotage of U.S. democracy itself, our community responses going forward must be both more democratic and decentralized than ever, as well as …

The Lost Cause Of Free Speech, Mary Anne Franks

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No abstract provided.

Love In The Time Of Covid, Jeanne L. Schroeder

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A striking aspect of the current American cultural divide is divergent attitudes towards expertise, generally, and masking and vaccination to mitigate the Covid-19 pandemic, specifically. Liberal pundits profess shock that Red State America won’t just ‘trust the science’. On the right, politicians and television personalities reject mandates in the name of ‘freedom’.

Lacanian discourse theory gives insight into this. The rejection of expertise is an example of an ‘hysteric discourse’ challenging a ‘university discourse’: the regime of experts. An hysteric discourse is a critique of rules imposed by experts by the subjects-subjected-to them. Hysteria can lead, in turn, to a …

Robert Cover’S Love Of Stories: A Rumination On His Wanting To Discuss The Brothers Karamazov With Me Across Five Conversations During The Last Five Years Of His Life, With An Application To The Chauvin Murder Trial Of 2021, Richard H. Weisberg

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The field of Law and Literature, perhaps more than any other area of legal studies, has been touched deeply by Robert Cover’s life and work. My interactions with Bob over the last half dozen years of his tragically short life provide an insight, recounted in a somewhat personal vein here, into his profound engagement with stories, with the most enduring part of that revitalized inter-discipline. I specify and illustrate five conversations I had with him during conferences, family interactions, or long New Haven walks beginning in 1981 and ending the day before his untimely death in the Summer of …

Theory Matters—And Ten More Things I Learned From Martha Chamallas About Feminism, Law, And Gender, Deborah L. Brake

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This Festschrift article celebrates the scholarship of Martha Chamallas, Distinguished University Professor and Robert J. Lynn Chair in Law Emeritus of the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law, and one of the most impactful scholars of feminist legal theory and employment discrimination of her generation. Mining the insights of Chamallas’s body of work, the article identifies ten core “lessons” relating to feminism and law drawn from her scholarship and academic career. It then weaves in summaries and synthesis of her published works with discussion of subsequent legal and social developments since their publication. These lessons (e.g., feminism is plural; …