Law Commons^™

Labeling Energy Drinks: Tackling A Monster Of A Problem, Meredith P. Mulhern, Michael S. Sinha

All Faculty Scholarship

Energy drinks first rose to popularity in the 1980s. Red Bull energy drinks were the first of its kind, opening the door to a new consumer and regulatory landscape. Since Red Bull first launched, multiple companies have released countless new energy drink products. Some energy drinks, like Red Bull, contain less than 100 mg of caffeine per 8 oz can. However, other energy drinks contain much higher amounts of caffeine. A 12 oz can of Celsius contains 200 mg of caffeine, and up until recently, Celsius offered a product called Celsius Heat, a 12 oz can containing 300 mg of …

I’M Not Lovin’ It: Re-Thinking Fast Food Advertising, Brody Shea, Michael S. Sinha

All Faculty Scholarship

In 1971, the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) and the Food and Drug Administration (“FDA”) agreed to prevent injury and deception to the consumer in advertising, detailing their respective roles in a Memorandum of Understanding (“MOU”).¹ The MOU proscribes that the FTC regulates truth in advertising relating to foods, drugs, devices and cosmetics while the FDA controls labeling and the misbranding of foods, drugs, devices, and cosmetics shipped in interstate commerce.² The MOU has been amended and an addendum added since 1971, but the material provisions have remained consistent for over a half-century.³

Importantly, the FDA and the …

Immunity Through Bankruptcy For The Sackler Family, Daniel G. Aaron, Michael S. Sinha

All Faculty Scholarship

In August 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court temporarily blocked one of the largest public health settlements in history: that of Purdue Pharma, L.P., reached in bankruptcy court. The negotiated bankruptcy settlement approved by the court would give a golden parachute to the very people thought to have ignited the opioid crisis: the Sackler family. As the Supreme Court considers the propriety of immunity through bankruptcy, the case has raised fundamental questions about whether bankruptcy is a proper refuge from tort liability and whether law checks power or law serves power.

Of course, bankruptcy courts often limit liability against a distressed …

Mississippi's Contribution To Informing The Push For Federal Legislation, Nolan G. Forthaus

SLU Law Journal Online

The NIL (Name, Image, and Likeness) legislation landscape is rapidly evolving, affecting how college athletes can profit from their NIL. While college athletes nationwide can now benefit from their NIL, state laws play a crucial role. Under the interim policy, college athletes attending schools in states with active NIL laws must comply with those state laws and any institutional and conference policies. The interim policy remains in effect until federal legislation or new NCAA rules are adopted. The state laws of Mississippi can help inform the federal push for a NIL bill.

“White Collar Crime” Is A Euphemism To Abandon, Anthony J. Meyer

SLU Law Journal Online

Although the phrase “white collar crime” is ubiquitous among lawyers, it is a euphemism that creates an arbitrary distinction among crimes and perpetuates an upper-class bias for certain types of criminal conduct while simultaneously denigrating others. The phrase further performs a problematic social signaling function, including by expressly invoking “whiteness.” On balance, the phrase should be abandoned and replaced with one that either creates a meaningful distinction or leads to more inclusiveness in the legal practice.

The Misguided Use Of The Harvard/Unc Ruling To Thwart Law Firm And Other Private Employer Dei Efforts, Ronald A. Norwood

SLU Law Journal Online

This article explores the Harvard/UNC ruling and what, in the author’s view, is the misguided efforts by certain political and well-financed private actors to use that ruling to justify the eradication of private employers and law firm DEI efforts. It is the author’s firm belief that because the Supreme Court’s holding is limited to an analysis of the Constitution’s Equal Protection clause (limited to state actors) and Title VI (covering private actions receiving federal funding), that ruling should not be used by courts to quash DEI programs designed to level the employment playing field for minorities, women and other protected …

Walking The Tightrope: Protecting Research From Foreign Exploitation While Fostering Relationships With Foreign Scientists, C. John Cox

SLU Law Journal Online

In response to extensive foreign efforts to take advantage of U.S. scientific research, especially by the People’s Republic of China, the United States has taken steps to protect its scientific and technology efforts. Although steps to prevent foreign government exploitation of U.S. research are reasonable and justified, the United States should be cognizant of these actions' impact on collaboration with foreign scientists. It is in the interest of the United States to effect policy that fosters relationships with foreign scientists rather than push them away.

Unpatenting Product Hops, Michael S. Sinha

All Faculty Scholarship

On July 9, 2021, President Joseph R. Biden signed Executive Order 14036 (“Promoting Competition in the American Economy”), which directed the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to collaborate on new approaches to increasing competition and lowering prices in the pharmaceutical marketplace. In response, the USPTO outlined several new initiatives, among them an intent to improve the robustness and reliability of issued patents.

A major impetus for the Executive Order was the pervasive nature of pharmaceutical product hopping, which occurs when manufacturers introduce new follow-on versions of lucrative pharmaceutical products to the …

Reproductive Rights And Medico-Legal Education Post-Dobbs: A Fireside Chat, Michael S. Sinha, Anna Krotinger, Maya A. Phan, Louise P. King

All Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was a pivotal moment that reshaped the landscape of abortion policy and delivery of abortion care in the United States. To create a space for critical reflection on the implications of Dobbs for the teaching and learning of abortion care in both medical and legal education, the authors engage in a dialogue highlighting the varied perspectives of professionals and professionals-in-training in both the medical and legal professions. As new attacks on reproductive autonomy continue at both state and federal levels, we foreshadow a tumultuous landscape for abortion policy …

International Efforts To Collect Evidence Related To Russia’S Aggression Against Ukraine, Steven Hill

Saint Louis University Law Journal

International law has been at the very center of the global response to Russia’s aggression against Ukraine since February 2022. Evidence collection has become one of the core elements of this international law response. The April 2023 keynote address on which this article is based focused on international efforts to collect evidence related to Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. Specifically, this article focuses on responses in Ukraine, the United States, the European Union, and other jurisdictions on behalf of governments, international organizations, and civil society organizations to collect evidence related to war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, and aggression by all …

Context Matters For Deep Knowledge: What Cognitive Science Can Teach Us About Legal Writing, Anna F. Connolly

Saint Louis University Law Journal

Many law school graduates are entering the workforce unable to write well. The legal field requires so much writing, yet law schools emphasize neither writing nor practical skills. We need not overhaul law school curricula to address the problem. Cognitive science teaches us that students internalize material when they understand the context. Without context, even the best planned lessons will remain only “shallow knowledge.” To create “deep knowledge,” we must provide context: students must know why they are writing. For example, a student asked to write a motion to dismiss the complaint has the best chance of success if they …

Better Together: Building Community In The Lrw Classroom, Olympia Duhart

Saint Louis University Law Journal

Better Together: Building Community in the LRW Classroom emphasizes the importance of building a strong community within the Legal Research and Writing (“LRW”) classroom. A robust LRW community helps mitigate the stress associated with the course and equips students to manage the rigorous demands of law school. Given the challenges facing today’s law students and the unique challenges that characterize LRW, developing community in the LRW classroom should be a primary focus of effective law school training. This Article highlights the work of Thomas Hawk and Paul Lyons, who have studied the concept of “pedagogical caring” in higher education. The …

Ai Renaissance: Pharmaceuticals And Diagnostic Medicine, Ty J. Feeney, Michael S. Sinha

All Faculty Scholarship

The explosive growth of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the modern era has led to significant advancements in the world of medicine. In drug discovery, AI technology is used to classify proteins as drug targets or non-targets for specific diseases, more accurately interpret and describe pharmacology in a quantitative fashion, and predict protein structures based on only a protein sequence for input. AI methods are used in drug development to generate predictive models for drug screening purposes, refine and modify candidate structures of drugs to optimize compounds, and predict a drug’s physiochemical properties, bioactivity, and toxicity. For medical devices, the advancement …

Foreword, Afonso Seixas-Nunes S.J.

Saint Louis University Law Journal

On February 24, 2022, the Russian Federation invaded Ukraine. After more than two years, this conflict has caused an uncountable number of victims and more than six million Ukrainian refugees are spread around the world begging for protection and safe harbour. This ongoing conflict and the increasing level of force, the questionable nature of means and methods of warfare used begs the question whether international institutions in general, and International Law in particular, are still effective means “to maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to …

War Crimes As Vocabulary Shaping The Visible, Rebecca Mignot-Mahdavi

Saint Louis University Law Journal

The traditional exclusion of sexual violence and rape from the ambit of international humanitarian law stems from the long-established masculinist perception of war and the exacerbated invisibility of women and girls in that context. International criminal law tried to recognize this traditionally invisible suffering and pain in armed conflicts by characterizing rape and sexual violence as war crimes. This contribution explores the effect of the recognition of rape and sexual violence as war crimes on conflicts and societies as a case study to explore the use of war crimes and international criminal law—rather than International Humanitarian Law (“IHL”) norms—as a …

The Use Of Force Against Terrorist Attacks: The Two Facets Of Self-Defence, Nicholas Tsagourias

Saint Louis University Law Journal

This article considers the legality of the use of defensive force by a state against terrorists on the territory of a third state from where terrorists launched the attack. It first considers justifications based on attribution and on the “unable and unwilling” test. It concludes that these constructions leave many legal, factual, and conceptual questions unsettled. It thus goes on to put forward a construction based on the two facets of self-defence: a primary rule and substantive right which justifies the use of force against terrorist attacks; and a circumstance precluding wrongfulness (CPW) which excuses responsibility for the incidental breach …

The Demanding Idea Of Consent To International Law, Jean D'Aspremont

Saint Louis University Law Journal

The concept of consenting to international law is no simple idea. It rests on sophisticated discursive moves. This article seeks to unpack five of the main discursive moves witnessed in literature and case-law discussing consent to international law. This article argues that these five specific discursive moves are performed, as is claimed here, by almost anyone analyzing the question of consent to international law, be such engagement on the more orthodox side or a critique from the argumentative side of the spectrum. These five discursive moves are (1) the reproduction of a very modernist understanding of authority, (2) the constitution …

Adapting A Human Rights-Based Framework To Inform Militaries’ Artificial Intelligence Decision-Making Processes, Daragh Murray

Saint Louis University Law Journal

Key global powers are engaged in the development of artificial intelligence (“AI”) for military purposes, and it is widely accepted that the development and deployment of AI tools will lead to a revolution in military strategy and the practice of warfighting. The question is whether these tools can be designed, developed, and deployed in a manner that facilitates compliance with international legal obligations—in particular the law of armed conflict and international human rights law—and if so, how. To date, this question has not been answered satisfactorily. This article examines how concepts and procedures derived from international human rights law can …

How Can Sovereign States Embrace Hospitality? A Study Of The Ius Gentium Tradition And Expulsions Of Immigrants At The Border, Pedro Rodríguez-Ponga

Saint Louis University Law Journal

Migration management reflects the inescapable dialectic between immigrants’ human rights and the rights of sovereign states to control their arrival. This article focuses on two disciplines to shed some light on the dialectic: philosophy and law. The first section presents the primary authors within the ius gentium tradition that dealt with the arrival of strangers to a political community. The lens through which this article analyses these authors’ contribution is hospitality, calling for the adequate treatment the stranger deserves while considering the host community’s moral value. The second section examines the cutting-edge issue of pushback practices at the European external …

Embodied Ecologies And Legal Wars: The Use Of Force, Ukraine, And Feminist Perspectives On International Law, Gina Heathcote

Saint Louis University Law Journal

In this article, I examine the international law on the use of force alongside a feminist analysis of the ongoing Russian aggression in Ukraine. I draw on records of mushroom foraging to evidence how everyday practices of communities are destroyed by military aggression that disrupts the embodied ecologies reproduced in intergenerational human and nonhuman encounters. The mushrooms foraged in Ukraine, the mushrooms destroyed during military encounters, and the mushrooms growing beside land mines provide an aperture for shifting both feminist and international legal accounts of armed conflict. I argue that ecologies of harm produce means to understand the gendered violence …

Masthead

Saint Louis University Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Refugee Identities At The Mercy Of Legal Determination, Rosário Frada

Saint Louis University Law Journal

The Refugee Status Determination process bears immediate repercussions not only on the formulation of refugee narrative identities, but on how asylum-seekers construct their very sense of self alongside their relationship to their past and future. Yet, International Refugee Law provides no guidance over status determination procedures, establishing a legal void that confers disproportionate power to State discretion. In an epoch characterized by exclusionary non-entrée regimes propelled by a post-9/11 securitization logic, the myopic fixation on border control has generated a dehumanizing surveillance machinery that transformed the asylum system into a threatening opponent of refugee protection, eliminating individual subjectivity and undermining …

Table Of Contents

Saint Louis University Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Doing Less—Reflections On Cognitive Load And Hard Choices In Teaching First-Year Legal Writing, Ellie Margolis

Saint Louis University Law Journal

The evolving landscape of legal research and writing (LRW) education requires LRW professors to balance a multitude of expectations and demands in the process of teaching foundational skills and ensuring that students are “practice-ready.” This essay argues that attempting to cover too wide an array of skills and competencies often leads to ineffective learning outcomes and suggests that a “less is more” approach may be more beneficial. It explores the challenges faced by LRW professors in teaching a comprehensive set of skills while ensuring students can transfer their learning to new contexts. Drawing on research and personal teaching experiences, the …

The Adaptable Legal Writer, Katrina Lee

Saint Louis University Law Journal

Today, more than ever, lawyers must constantly adapt—quickly and with deliberateness. This Article shines a light on the need to teach law students adaptability in law practice, and the central role of the legal writing professor in that endeavor. Part II explores the need for adaptability in a lawyer’s career. Part III provides an overview of three adaptability approaches from the legal writing pedagogy literature: information literacy, genre discovery, and the contextual case method. Part IV closes with a reflection on key features of adaptability pedagogy in legal writing—curiosity, inquisitiveness, and ethicality—and its general application in legal education. At heart …

Table Of Contents

Saint Louis University Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Flattening The Learning Curve For International J.D. Students, Sylvia Lett

Saint Louis University Law Journal

Non-U.S. lawyers entering U.S. law schools in accelerated J.D. degree programs (known as the “AJD” – Advanced Juris Doctor Program at Arizona Law) face particular challenges adapting to 1L legal research, analysis, and communication classes. First, English is not the typical lingua franca for AJD students, many of whom come from civil law countries and are faced with the challenge of learning legal writing methods for an American common-law legal system. Second, AJD students earn a U.S. J.D. degree in only two years because these accelerated programs give one year of “credit” for their non-U.S. law degrees. As a consequence, …

Teamwork Makes A Dream Work: Collaboration In The Legal Writing, Brenda D. Gibson

Saint Louis University Law Journal

This essay provides insights into the benefits (and some of the challenges) encountered when two relatively seasoned legal writing professors decided to collaborate in their first-year legal writing courses. The essay, in self-deprecating candor, describes how my colleague and I leveraged our individual strengths to improve our legal writing students’ learning experience. Along the way, a friendship, born of deep respect, was formed.

Collaboration defined simply is no more than “a process of working with others to accomplish something.”[1] To that end, collaborative teaching, i.e., team teaching is typically two or more faculty members working together to develop instructional …

Collaborative Creac Drafting: Co-Creating An Example In Context, Julie E. Zink

Saint Louis University Law Journal

The quickest way to a student’s mind is through engagement. As legal writing professors, we can assign pages on how to organize an analysis, provide helpful examples, and orally describe the process. However, some students need a more hands-on approach. In this article, I explain my process of actively engaging students to draft their first CREAC together. By collaboratively working together to assemble this ungraded CREAC over a series of classes, the students develop an understanding of how to properly organize their analysis of a discrete issue based on the assigned facts and law. For each part of the CREAC …

And The Results Are In … Reviewing The Results Of The First Year Larc Research Exam Wherein Some Of The Questions Were Redesigned To Meet The Expectations Of The Next Gen Bar Exam Format, Christine E. Rollins

Saint Louis University Law Journal

In 2010, the faculty of St. Louis University School of Law implemented a research exam to test student competencies after their first year of law school. Since its creation, the exam has helped students feel more secure starting their first legal internships, allowed faculty to identify areas of decreased competency, and helped faculty find “better” ways to teach legal research and writing material. In anticipation of the implementation of the NextGen Bar exam in July 2026, the faculty determined that it was necessary to make some changes to the research exam in order to both gather data on students’ responses …