Law Commons^™

Fiction In The Code: Reading Legislation As Literature, Thomas J. Mcsweeney

Georgia State University Law Review

One of the major branches of the field of law and literature is often described as “law as literature.” Scholars of law as literature examine the law using the tools of literary analysis. The scholarship in this subfield is dominated by the discussion of narrative texts: confessions, victim-impact statements, and, above all, the judicial opinion. This article will argue that we can use some of the same tools to help us understand non-narrative texts, such as law codes and statutes.

Genres create expectations. We do not expect a law code to be literary. Indeed, we tend to dissociate the law …

Too Clever By Half: Commanding The Nonuse Of State Authority To Regulate Health Benefits In The Aca, Michael F. Ryan

University of Massachusetts Law Review

Prior to the enactment of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), state legislatures routinely passed laws requiring health insurance carriers to cover certain health care services or providers. At the behest of the insurance industry, Congress attempted to use the health reform law as a vehicle to reign in state-specific “mandated benefit” laws. That being said, the ACA does not prevent states from enacting mandated benefit laws; in fact, the statute expressly permits states to enact such laws. Instead, Congress created a significant barrier to continued state-specific regulation of health insurance benefits. Specifically, 42 U.S.C. § 18031(d)(3)(B)(ii) (Section …

Going To The Clerk’S Office And We’Re Not Going To Get Married, Alicia F. Blanchard

University of Massachusetts Law Review

Same-sex marriage is a controversial topic subject to great debate. The Supreme Court in 2015 federally recognized the legality of same-sex marriages in Obergefell v. Hodges. Despite this ruling, some people looked for any reason to denounce the holding. Perhaps none were more vocal than those who rejected same-sex marriage on the basis of their religious tenets. Miller v. Davis provided people who were morally opposed to same-sex marriage a platform to support their concerns grounded in a First Amendment right to freedom of religion. The question is how far does one’s freedom of religion extend? Does freedom of religion …