State and Local Government Law Commons^™

Overdose: The Public Health Policies That Caused The Opioid Crisis, Benjamin T. Suslavich

Cleveland State Law Review

Recently, local governments have successfully sued pharmaceutical manufacturers for damages related to the opioid crisis in the United States under the theory that these pharmaceuticals were responsible for causing addictions and deaths across the nation. However, the opioid crisis was, in fact, caused by the creation of national public health policies which compelled the prescription of opioid analgesics. The dogma of the "pain movement," which spearheaded public health policies, was adopted in some form by nearly every healthcare regulator in the country. With unchecked power and influence on the U.S. healthcare system, healthcare regulators mutated slightly misleading advertising by pharmaceutical …

Rolling The Dice On The Legality Of Gambling Devices: Why "Purpose" Has A Purpose, Stevie Holbrook

Cleveland State Law Review

Section 1955 of the United States Code (“Section 1955”), the federal law detailing prohibition on illegal gambling businesses, renders a defendant susceptible to prosecution if they are found to have violated the respective state’s gambling law and have a certain amount of people involved for a certain length of time. Today, the Sixth Circuit has identified Section 1955 as a general intent statute where it need not be shown that a defendant acted willfully in terms of intentionally violating state law. However, Ohio’s state gambling law has been interpreted as a specific intent statute that requires a purposeful act and, …

Reclaiming The Right To Consent: Judicial Bypass Mechanism As A Way For Persons With Disabilities To Lawfully Consent To Sexual Activity In Ohio, Melissa S. Obodzinski

Cleveland State Law Review

In Ohio, it is a criminal offense to engage in sexual conduct with another when his or her ability to consent is “substantially impaired” because of a mental or physical condition. There is no mechanism for persons with intellectual and/or developmental disabilities to receive judicial notice of whether their ability to consent is “substantially impaired” prior to criminal adjudication, nor is there a way for them to affirmatively prove that they have the capacity to consent to sexual activity. Thus, under Ohio law, intellectually and/or developmentally disabled individuals may be functionally and irrevocably barred from engaging in sexual intimacy for …

Late To The Crowd: How Ohio's Crowdfunding Bill Fails To Achieve Inclusiveness And Efficiency, Nathan E. Hill

Cleveland State Law Review

Almost half of all small and medium sized businesses within the United States fail within the first five years. One of the main contributing factors to that failure is the inability to raise enough money to operate. While there are many ways for businesses to raise operating capital, the most accessible and sometimes the most efficient way is through a process called equity-based crowdfunding—the offering of shares in exchange for an investment raised through an online portal. In 2012, after seeing the success of equity-based crowdfunding in other countries, the United States passed the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act (JOBS …

Ending The Economic War Among States, Nathan Altstadt

Cleveland State Law Review

The United States is under siege; however, the cause is not a foreign adversary. Rather, infighting among states to attract and retain big businesses is jeopardizing the Nation’s economic prosperity.

States compete for businesses, using tax incentives, hoping to capitalize on the benefits these businesses represent. Benefits include improved job growth numbers, a future increase in tax revenue, or, simply, elevated political clout. While competition can lead to a more efficient use of resources, unregulated competition between states for businesses does not illustrate this theory. A national auction for a business, where states are blind to rival offers, may, and …

Reforming State Electoral College Laws To Depolarize American Politics, M. Akram Faizer

Cleveland State Law Review

Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee involved the Supreme Court gutting the remaining vestiges of the Voting Rights Act (VRA), such that jurisdictions will have free rein to impose partisan burdens on franchise rights that have a disproportionate negative effect on racial minority voters who, based on racial political polarization, prefer Democratic Party candidates over their Republican opponents. Brnovich follows the highly divisive 2020 presidential election that Joe Biden won against former President Trump based on very narrow margins in highly contested swing states, notwithstanding a nationwide popular margin of more than 8 million votes. This blurring of the lines between …

A Constitutional Theory Of Territoriality: The Case Of Puerto Rico, Joel Colón-Ríos, Yaniv Roznai

Cleveland State Law Review

This Article offers an analysis of the relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States that, unlike most of the existing literature, goes beyond discussions of the jurisprudence of U.S. courts and avoids providing merely descriptive or justificatory accounts. Using the tools of constitutional theory, we seek to describe the nature of what we call the “basic structure of territoriality,” the way that structure reproduces itself, and the possibility of its replacement. The basic structure of territoriality, we argue, is comprised by ten fundamental legal rules and five principles. Although those principles are not legally enforceable, they inform in important …