Law Commons^™

Arkansas Practice Materials: A Selective Annotated Bibliography, Jessie Wallace Burchfield, Melissa Serfass

Faculty Scholarship

Whether you are a legal professional or a novice legal researcher, this annotated bibliography of Arkansas practice materials provides current and relevant state-specific information about available resources. The bibliography integrates online and print resources, grouped by topic rather than format. Each source is annotated with helpful information.

Detailed information about primary legal materials such as court cases, statutes and administrative regulations is included. Information about secondary sources such as treatises, practice manuals, forms, and websites, is also covered.

It is organized in five main sections: Primary Materials, Government Resources, State Specific Resources, General Jurisprudence, and Practice Materials by Topic.

Trauma, André Douglas Pond Cummings

Faculty Scholarship

Meek Mill’s life and career have been punctuated by trauma. From childhood through his current adulthood, Mill has experienced excruciating trauma even as a well-known hip hop artist. In 2018’s track of that name Trauma, Mill describes in illuminating prose just how these traumatic experiences harmed and impacted him personally describing the very same harms that impact so many similarly situated young black people in the United States. Meek Mill, as a child, witnessed violent death and experienced poverty while as a young man he was arrested and incarcerated (wrongly). Despite his star turn as a true hip hop icon, …

Racial Captialism And Race Massacres: Tulsa's Black Wall Street And Elaine's Sharecroppers, André Douglas Pond Cummings, Kalvin Graham

Faculty Scholarship

United States history is marked and checkered with grievous race massacres dating back to the end of slavery. These race “riots,” as they are benignly referred to in some quarters, occurred infamously in Tulsa, Elaine, Rosewood, Chicago, Detroit, and so many other lesser remembered cities. The starkest period of race massacres in the United States, including each of those just mentioned, occurred in the early 1900s, between 1919 and 1923 when Black Americans, newly empowered by service in a world war and having gained available land grants in territories where indigenous peoples were forced to abandon, began finding economic and …

Meek Mill’S Trauma: Brutal Policing As An Adverse Childhood Experience, Todd J. Clark, Caleb Gregory Conrad, André Douglas Pond Cummings, Amy Dunn Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

Meek Mill’s life and career have been punctuated by trauma, from his childhood lived on the streets of Philadelphia, through his rise to fame and eventual arrival as one of hip hop’s household names. his 2018 track "Trauma," Meek Mill describes, in revealing prose, just how the traumatic experiences he endured personally impacted and harmed him. He also embodies a role as narrator in describing the same traumas and harms that impact the daily lives of countless similarly situated young Black people in the United States. As a child, Mill’s lived experience was one of pervasive poverty and fear, as …

Mass Shootings, Mental "Illness," And Tarasoff, J. Thomas Sullivan

Faculty Scholarship

The continuing public attention focused on acts of mass violence, including mass shootings, has understandably created significant concerns over the ability to protect individuals from death and injury attributable to these acts. At least two generalized explanations for this kind of violence have been put forward, based on the nature of the acts and apparent motivation of the perpetrators, who are often killed in the process by themselves or law enforcement officers. Many acts of mass violence are committed by individuals confirmed to be terrorists, acting with political or religious-political motivations. Others are assumed to be committed by individuals acting …

Book Review Of Law In The Time Of Covid-19, Jessie Wallace Burchfield

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Contract Interpretation Policy Debate: A Primer, Joshua M. Silverstein

Faculty Scholarship

Contract interpretation is one of the most significant areas of commercial law. As a result, there is an extensive academic and judicial debate over the optimal method for construing agreements. Throughout this exchange, scholars and courts have advanced a wide array of conceptual, theoretical, and empirical arguments in support of the two primary schools of interpretation— textualism and contextualism—as well as various hybrid positions. This Essay is intended to serve as a primer on those arguments.

Think Again: The Thought Crime Doctrine And The Limits Of Criminal Law, Jordan Wallace-Wolf

Faculty Scholarship

According to the thought crime doctrine, neither beliefs nor intentions may be subject to criminal punishment. The doctrine is widely endorsed, but puzzling in its scope. Beliefs have a free speech credential: they play a straightforward role in the sincere exchange of ideas. Moreover, they are harmless, in the specific sense that they do not aim at action and so not at lawbreaking. But intentions are otherwise. They do not necessarily further the exchange of ideas and they may aim at wrongful, illegal conduct.

So why should the thought crime doctrine categorically protect them in addition to beliefs? Why not …

Tomorrow's Law Libraries: Academic Law Librarians Forging The Way To The Future In The New World Of Legal Education, Jessie Wallace Burchfield

Faculty Scholarship

This article briefly discusses the historical development of academic law libraries and reviews observations, analyses, and predictions of leading law librarians, examining recent changes and continuing trends. It examines academic law libraries in light of two of the drivers of change identified by Susskind: the “more-for-less” challenge and information technology. It briefly discusses one academic law library's experience with these drivers of change and gives a few examples of academic law librarians who are technology leaders. It notes the initial effects of an ongoing global pandemic that changed the face of public school, undergraduate, and postgraduate education–including legal education–in a …

Amicus Curiae Brief: Private For Profit Incarceration Violates The 13th Amendment Of The United States Constitution, André Douglas Pond Cummings, Zoë Harris, Casey Bates, Natasha Cornell

Faculty Scholarship

The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution outlawed chattel slavery in the United States following a violent Civil War and a chilling era of slavery conducted primarily in the nation’s southern states. In passing this Amendment, Congress included a clause that excepted a certain population from this general prohibition, namely, prisoners. In what has become known as the “punishment clause,” Section I of the Thirteenth Amendment states explicitly “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their …