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Full-Text Articles in Law

From Publius To Santos: Congressional Expulsion And The Enforcement Of Legislative Virtue, Matthew A. Edwards Sep 2024

From Publius To Santos: Congressional Expulsion And The Enforcement Of Legislative Virtue, Matthew A. Edwards

Emory Law Journal Online

On December 1, 2023, in a historic decision, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to expel Congressperson George Santos. Prior to Santos’s expulsion, only two members of the House had been expelled since the Civil War. In fact, although he was under indictment, Santos was the first member to be expelled from the House without first being convicted of a federal crime or supporting the Confederacy. Santos presented an unusual case, however. By the time that he was expelled, Santos was nationally reviled for fabricating nearly every aspect of his personal biography. Although it is difficult to know what the …


We Are The Ai Problem, Tonja Jacobi, Matthew Sag Aug 2024

We Are The Ai Problem, Tonja Jacobi, Matthew Sag

Emory Law Journal Online

This Essay describes what we call “the Black Nazi Problem,” a shorthand for the sometimes-jarring text and images produced by AI, from the incongruous—such as female Indian popes—to the outrageous—such as depicting minorities as their own historical oppressors, including Black Nazis. These images were the result of overzealous efforts by AI developers to correct for a lack of diverse representation in the training data used to create Generative AI models. The overrepresentation of white, fully-abled, Western men in images of high status categories, and the invisibility of women, people of color, and the disabled, except in low status categories, and …


Clearing The Path: Improving Implementation Of Georgia’S Pathways To Coverage Program, Nicholas Smith Apr 2024

Clearing The Path: Improving Implementation Of Georgia’S Pathways To Coverage Program, Nicholas Smith

Emory Law Journal Online

Georgia’s Medicaid program is in flux. The State recently launched Pathways to Coverage, a partial Medicaid expansion program for non-disabled adults in households under 100% of the Federal Poverty Line, with eligibility contingent on reporting 80 hours of work per month. Pathways’ rollout coincides with Medicaid “unwinding,” an ongoing post-COVID redetermination process in which thousands of Georgians have already lost coverage. As such, Pathways could play an important role in offsetting the unwinding’s disenrollment effects. But Pathways may also serve as a test case for conservative lawmakers hoping to institute (or reinstitute) work requirements to restrict Medicaid coverage in their …


Bad Attempts, Andrew Jensen Kerr Feb 2024

Bad Attempts, Andrew Jensen Kerr

Emory Law Journal Online

We assume that legal concepts are generic and indifferent to facts. But bad attempts at crime (something always unlawful) and bad attempts at art (something almost always lawful) are potentially treated very differently in many U.S. jurisdictions. Surprisingly, the bad attempt at art might be more likely to result in punishment. I draw on notions of capacity and responsibility to suggest why the amateur rapper should be excused for genuine aesthetic attempts that are perceived as threatening. In doing so, I comment on form and formalism in public law, and how principles of criminal law can help to maintain the …


Artificial Intelligence Regulation, Minimum Viable Products, And Partitive Innovation, Matthew R. Gaske Sep 2023

Artificial Intelligence Regulation, Minimum Viable Products, And Partitive Innovation, Matthew R. Gaske

Emory Law Journal Online

This Essay identifies entrepreneurs’ experimentation with minimum viable products (“MVPs”) as a means for proposed AI-specific regulation to constrain innovation in other markets. To that end, the Essay coins the term “partitive innovation” to describe a business’s perspective when it uses a domain-agnostic, highly generalizable technology to introduce a product to a particular market, thereby eliciting overbroad domain-specific regulations that impair alternative innovative uses of the underlying technology. This process is unfolding with AI, as broadly constructed proposed regulation can restrict innovation in adjacent fields by shifting software MVPs’ mainly ex post regulatory regime to one with recurring duties or …


The Sec’S Spac Solution, Karen Woody, Lidia Kurganova Aug 2023

The Sec’S Spac Solution, Karen Woody, Lidia Kurganova

Emory Law Journal Online

The SPAC craze has ebbed and flowed over the past few years, creating fortunes and ruining others. The SEC stepped into the mix in 2022 and proposed rules governing SPACs. The proposed rules artfully balance the interests of investor protection while retaining some of the featured characteristics of SPACs as innovative ways to take companies public. This Article details the history of SPACs, including their benefits and risks, and analyzes the SEC’s proposed rules, arguing that the SEC is well within its Congressional authority to regulate SPACs, and that the proposed rules are both well-tailored and necessary.


Status, Subject, And Agency In Innovation, Kali Murray Jan 2023

Status, Subject, And Agency In Innovation, Kali Murray

Emory Law Journal Online

The Inequalities of Innovation will be rightly understood as a major scholarly assessment in intellectual property and innovation law for its naming of three key inequalities: the inequality of wealth and income, the inequality of opportunity to innovate, and the inequality of access to innovation. This Essay complicates the triadic framework discussed in The Inequalities of Innovation by interrogating its relationship to status harm and social identity and its relationship to broader discussions of social identities such as race and the law.


Retiring Social Security’S (Non)Payment At Death After Eight Decades, Alberto B. Lopez Jan 2022

Retiring Social Security’S (Non)Payment At Death After Eight Decades, Alberto B. Lopez

Emory Law Journal Online

Section 202 of the Social Security Act, which originated in the 1939 Amendments to the 1935 Social Security Act, authorizes monthly benefits payments to an eligible person until the month prior to the month of death. Under this rule, an individual who dies on November 30th at 11:59 pm is not eligible to receive a check for benefits accrued during November because the individual failed to survive one additional minute; eligibility for payment ended on October 31st. After a beneficiary’s death, the Social Security Administration (“SSA”) either prevents deposit of a check for month-of-death benefits or mandates …


Unlimited Medical Liability?, Jessica L. Roberts, Leah R. Fowler, Paul S. Appelbaum Jan 2022

Unlimited Medical Liability?, Jessica L. Roberts, Leah R. Fowler, Paul S. Appelbaum

Emory Law Journal Online

No abstract provided.


Ford Motor Company V. Montana Eighth Judicial District Court: Lots Of Questions, Some Answers, Patrick J. Borchers, Richard D. Freer, Thomas C. Arthur Sep 2021

Ford Motor Company V. Montana Eighth Judicial District Court: Lots Of Questions, Some Answers, Patrick J. Borchers, Richard D. Freer, Thomas C. Arthur

Emory Law Journal Online

In Ford Motor Company v. Montana Eighth Judicial District Court, the Supreme Court handed down its seventh personal jurisdiction decision in the last ten years. Ford—involving two consolidated state-court products liability suits alleging defects in the defendants’ cars that injured forum-state residents in their home states—is the only case in the Supreme Court’s decade-long spate of jurisdictional decisions to find the minimum contacts test satisfied. In this Article, we examine all three opinions of the case. Ford is a welcome return to serious consideration of the fairness of the assertion of jurisdiction. Unlike its six immediate predecessors, Ford …


Localizing The Green Energy Revolution, Hannah J. Wiseman Jan 2021

Localizing The Green Energy Revolution, Hannah J. Wiseman

Emory Law Journal Online

The United States is on the verge of a new industrial revolution. Renewable energy could replace more than 60% of our current energy generation infrastructure in fifteen years. This change is critical, yet it risks failure. The renewable generation already built in the United States consists primarily of large-scale projects connected to transmission lines in rural areas. The expansive new generation needed to reduce carbon emissions must also be predominantly large-scale, and rural, for reasons of efficiency. But a revolution that focuses nearly exclusively on “big energy” is likely to encounter obstacles, and it has downsides that could be mitigated …


Compensating Victims Of Police Violence, Valena E. Beety Jan 2021

Compensating Victims Of Police Violence, Valena E. Beety

Emory Law Journal Online

Victims of police violence suffer physical trauma and their families suffer mental trauma “born from the violation of a certain social trust.” Their losses are also financial, including medical expenses and mental health treatment, as well as lost income. While scholars and citizens have advocated for accountability and justice, this is the first essay to advocate for the simple act of victims’ compensation for victims of police violence. To be considered for compensation, victims must first prove that they cooperated with law enforcement and were “innocent” of wrongdoing. Yet, victims of police violence are inordinately and openly blamed for their …


Regulating Competition, Both The Forest And The Trees, David B. Spence Jan 2021

Regulating Competition, Both The Forest And The Trees, David B. Spence

Emory Law Journal Online

At the heart of the ideological conflict between the American political parties lies a fundamental disagreement about regulation and the proper relationship between government and markets. That conflict is partly about the substance of regulatory policy and partly about the scope of regulatory policymaking discretion. Both of these dimensions are implicated in a series of relatively obscure disputes recently before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). The central question in these cases is whether it is fair and constitutional for FERC to enforce Federal Power Act prohibitions against energy market manipulation against the defendants, given that the trading at issue …


The Dead Hand Revisited, Andrew Coan Aug 2020

The Dead Hand Revisited, Andrew Coan

Emory Law Journal Online

Perhaps the oldest and most central question in constitutional theory is what gives the Constitution its special status as fundamental law. One of the oldest answers, and the answer many originalists still give today, is that the Constitution is the command of the sovereign people. Originalism, in its canonical form, may be seen as a corollary of this view. Yet almost before this argument was made, it attracted a powerful criticism, most commonly associated with Thomas Jefferson, who declared: “[T]he earth belongs in usufruct to the living. The dead have neither powers nor rights over it.” This is the famous …


Tam Through The Lens Of Brunetti: The Slants, Fuct, Ilhyung Lee Aug 2019

Tam Through The Lens Of Brunetti: The Slants, Fuct, Ilhyung Lee

Emory Law Journal Online

In Matal v. Tam, the Supreme Court upheld a party’s constitutional right to register a racial slur as a trademark (“THE SLANTS” for a band). On First Amendment grounds, the Court struck down a provision of the Lanham Act that prohibits the registration of a mark that “disparage[s]” persons. After the decision, the Patent and Trademark Office received registration applications for marks containing other racial slurs and began approving them, except for one. For this slur, the agency suspended its decision pending the outcome in another trademark case before the Court, involving a related provision of the Act that prohibits …