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Constitutional law

The University of Akron

2024

Articles 1 - 7 of 7

Full-Text Articles in Law

The Story Of New York Times V. Sullivan: How Free Speech Rights Were Intertwined With The Civil Rights Movement, Samantha Barbas Mar 2024

The Story Of New York Times V. Sullivan: How Free Speech Rights Were Intertwined With The Civil Rights Movement, Samantha Barbas

ConLawNOW

This essay, delivered to the Law Library of Congress as the 2023 Constitution Day Lecture, tells the story of New York Times v. Sullivan, widely regarded as one the most important First Amendment decisions of all time. It is a decision that has profoundly affected the workings of the press and shaped the contours of public discourse in the United States. And it is a decision that continues to raise controversy because of the broad protections it gives to freedom of speech at the expense of other rights such as reputation and privacy. The essay summarizes the author’s work …


Symposium: Gender, Health And The Constitution: The Misalignment Of Medical Capacity And Legal Competence For Perinatal People With Serious Mental Illness, Melisa Olgun, Carlos Larrauri, Sonja Castaneda-Cudney, Elyn Saks Mar 2024

Symposium: Gender, Health And The Constitution: The Misalignment Of Medical Capacity And Legal Competence For Perinatal People With Serious Mental Illness, Melisa Olgun, Carlos Larrauri, Sonja Castaneda-Cudney, Elyn Saks

ConLawNOW

This Article evaluates the misalignment of medical capacity and legal competence for perinatal people with serious medical illnesses (SMI), an issue that has had limited discourse in legal academia. It delineates the contours of these concepts, dissecting their theoretical underpinnings and practical applications. While medical capacity is often considered an iterative, context-specific determination, legal competence is typically treated as a rigid, binary legal categorization. It then illustrates how the disparate scope and aims of capacity and competence lead to a precarious misalignment for people with fluctuating mental states, particularly perinatal people with SMI. The Article proposes solutions to harmonize the …


Symposium: Gender, Health, And The Constitution: Gender-Affirming Care And Children's Liberty, Dara E. Purvis Mar 2024

Symposium: Gender, Health, And The Constitution: Gender-Affirming Care And Children's Liberty, Dara E. Purvis

ConLawNOW

This essay addresses the wave of statutes banning gender-affirming care for transgender and gender-diverse minors passed in states across the country over the last three years. It argues that an underdeveloped understanding of children’s rights makes it more difficult to explain how harmful gender-affirming care bans are and to challenge them in court. After explaining the nature of gender-affirming care, the essay discusses the grounds underlying existing challenges to gender-affirming care bans, highlighting the emphasis on equal protection and parental rights. It concludes by reframing the children’s liberty argument and exploring what the broader consequences of courts recognizing such a …


Beyond The Ban: One Major Challenge Facing The Ftc Non-Compete Rule, Brendan Mohan Mar 2024

Beyond The Ban: One Major Challenge Facing The Ftc Non-Compete Rule, Brendan Mohan

ConLawNOW

This article analyzes the implications of President Biden's Executive Order 14036 and the subsequent notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to ban non-compete agreements. It examines the legal basis for the NPRM, including Sections 5 and 6(g) of the FTC Act, and anticipates potential challenges to its implementation, most notably under the major questions doctrine. It explores the broader ramifications of the NPRM for labor and employment law, emphasizing its potential to reshape administrative agency regulation and the regulatory landscape. It concludes by analyzing the rule under the major questions doctrine and the possible outcomes …


Symposium: Gender, Health And The Constitution: More Than Merely "Two-Legged Wombs": Lessons On Metaphor And Body Politics From Atwood's The Handmaiden's Tale (1985), Rachel Conrad Bracken Mar 2024

Symposium: Gender, Health And The Constitution: More Than Merely "Two-Legged Wombs": Lessons On Metaphor And Body Politics From Atwood's The Handmaiden's Tale (1985), Rachel Conrad Bracken

ConLawNOW

This essay explores the dehumanizing potential of metaphors used to describe women’s reproductive biology through literary analysis of Margaret Atwood’s canonical feminist novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). Attending to the rhetoric that both justifies and contests ritualized rape and forced surrogacy in Atwood’s novel, this essay begins by interrogating the ubiquitous cultural and biomedical metaphors that reduce women and pregnant people to their bodies’ reproductive potential. The first section draws from scholarship in medical anthropology, medical rhetoric, and literary studies to illuminate how gendered stereotypes pervade biomedical, cultural, and legal representations of reproduction, reifying the conflation of women and people …


Symposium; Gender, Health, And The Constitution: Hysteria Redux: Gaslighting In The Age Of Covid, Jane Campbell Moriarty Mar 2024

Symposium; Gender, Health, And The Constitution: Hysteria Redux: Gaslighting In The Age Of Covid, Jane Campbell Moriarty

ConLawNOW

This article addresses the relationship among hysteria, gaslighting, and gender during the Covid pandemic in the political and public-health messaging about Covid. It analyzes the U.S. public health messaging in the age of Covid, explaining how individualism, gender, and gaslighting have shaped the public response to the virus and negatively affected public health. In explaining the poor U.S. public health outcomes during Covid, the article evaluates the role of disinformation about vaccines, the “feminization” of masking, and the “vax and relax” public mantra, which suggested that those who did not relax were perhaps a bit hysterical. Finally, the article considers …


Symposium: Gender, Health, And The Constitution: The New Gender Panic In Sport: Why State Laws Banning Transgender Athletes Are Unconstitutional, Deborah L. Brake Jan 2024

Symposium: Gender, Health, And The Constitution: The New Gender Panic In Sport: Why State Laws Banning Transgender Athletes Are Unconstitutional, Deborah L. Brake

ConLawNOW

This essay considers the role of sport in the new gender panic of legislative activity targeting transgender individuals, which now extends into health and family governance. Sport was one of the first settings—the gateway—to ignite the current culture war on transgender youth. This analysis examines how Title IX of the Education Act of 1972, the popular law responsible for the growth of opportunities for girls and women in sports, has been mobilized in service of a broader gender agenda. Far from providing a persuasive justification for the state laws banning transgender girls from girls’ sports, Title IX, properly understood, supports …