Digital Commons Network^™

The Class Of Injuries Test: A Unifying Proposal To Determining Duty, Proximate Cause, And Superseding Cause In Negligence Claims, Judge Leonard J. Feldman, Julia Doherty

Seattle University Law Review

While there seems to be universal agreement that liability in tort cannot be unlimited, there is widespread disagreement regarding the various tests that courts utilize to limit such liability. We assume here that breach can be proven: the defendant failed to conduct themself in accordance with the salient standard of conduct (for example, failure to exercise reasonable care under all the circumstances). In the ensuing litigation, the court and jury are asked to decide several issues that each limit liability for negligence. Here, we focus on three oft-debated issues: duty, proximate cause, and superseding cause. The tests for each are …

Ai, New Technologies, And Corporate Governance: Three Phenomena, Martin Petrin

Seattle University Law Review

Artificial intelligence (AI) and other new technologies are increasingly influencing the operations, business models, and structures of companies. This Article focuses on three emerging phenomena that impact significant aspects of corporate governance and regulation: (1) perforation and blurring of firm boundaries through the ubiquitous use of externally provided AI services; (2) businesses engaging in strategic access and leveraging of critical resources held by third parties without owning them; and (3) the unusual hybrid role of online platforms between market facilitators and markets themselves. The Article explores how these phenomena challenge traditional views of firms as separate units, with technology leading …

A Meaningful Life: The Future Of Juvenile Justice In Washington After Anderson, Samuel Coren

Seattle University Law Review

Until 2022, Washington’s line of juvenile sentencing jurisprudence gave every indication of continuing along the course set by Miller v. Alabama, as Washington courts recognized that “children are different” and should not be subjected to the harshest punishments available in the criminal legal system. State v. Anderson marked a stark diversion from this course. In upholding the constitutionality of a de facto life sentence for a juvenile, the Washington Supreme Court all but rejected the well-established scientific consensus surrounding juvenile brain development and implicit racial bias. Whether this decision reflects a minor aberration or a broader trend in the court’s …

Reconciling Disjunct Cryptocurrency Securities Enforcement With Purchaser Expectations, Jacob E. Simmons

Seattle University Law Review

The Southern District of New York’s July 2023 decision in SEC v. Ripple Labs, Inc. has been touted as a monumental win for cryptocurrency purchasers and related businesses. The Ripple court held that, except institutional investor transactions, all sales of Ripple’s XRP token were not investment contracts, a class of security subject to federal securities law. The court’s ruling meant that Ripple could not be held liable for the unregistered trading of XRP beyond its sales to institutional investors. Ripple adds new insights to a pervasive policymaking dilemma addressed in this Note: is the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) regulatory …

A Blueprint To Reclaim Legal Education From External Rankers, Scott Rempell

Seattle University Law Review

The U.S. News & World Report (U.S. News) law school rankings have impacted the perceptions and behaviors of everyone in the rankings ecosystem for decades. Commentators have almost universally condemned these ordinal rankings, yet they continue to influence the legal education market, often in highly detrimental ways.

The influence of these rankings stems from legitimate market demands, for reasons that the psychology of choice literature makes clear. People want (or need) to efficiently acquire and digest information that could help them make consequential decisions. At a time when consumers of law school information did not have such choice-making assistance, U.S. …

Real-World Consequences For Online Actions: The Case For Expanding Employee Harassment Protection Via Employers’ Rights Of Action, Alexander Barnes

Seattle University Law Review

This Note argues for expanding employers’ access to legal remedies that allow them to recoup the costs of protecting their employees from swatting, doxing, and other online harassment arising from their employees’ professional activity. Part I provides a brief description and history of the online harassment problem and its potentially deadly dangers. Part II describes employers’ legal responsibility to take action to protect their employees from harassment aimed at their employees within the scope of their employment. Part III explores common legal remedies that are currently available to employers, using the state of Washington as an example. Part III also …

Foreseeability And Duty In Washington Negligence Law: Leaving The Road Less Traveled By, Leo Linder

Seattle University Law Review

Washington negligence law is a confusing labyrinth of foreseeability that not even Ariadne’s string could guide plaintiffs out of. Foreseeability is implicated in four distinct analyses, several of which overlap considerably. Doctrines that were once questions of law are now questions of fact, and vice versa. Something needs to change.

Washington has taken the novel approach of bifurcating the duty element into two parts—duty’s mere existence, which is a question of law for the court to determine; and duty’s scope, which is a question of fact handed off to the jury to determine. Foreseeability impacts both of these assessments, but …

Court Review: Journal Of The American Judges Association, Vol. 60, No. 3, Eve M. Brank, David Dreyer, David Prince

Court Review: Journal of the American Judges Association

Anniversary Year Brings a Look at Our Past, Court Review Editors

The Case of Standing Bear: 15 Years After Court Review Publication, Joe Starita

The Case of Standing Bear: Establishing Personhood under the Law, Joe Starita

Perceptions and Experiences with Judicial Security Threats: A Survey of U.S. State Court Judges, Christine M. McDermott, Evan Murphy, Patrick Grimes and John Muffler

Civil Cases in the Supreme Court’s October Term 2023, Thomas M. Fisher

Editor’s Note, David J. Dreyer

President’s Column, Catherine Carlson

His Majesty the King v. Kruk: Stereotypical Reasoning and the Death in Canada of the “Rule Against Ungrounded …

Introducing Biosimilar Competition For Cell And Gene Therapy Products, Brian Canter, Sabine Sussman, Stephen Colvill, Nitzan Arad, Elizabeth Staton, Arti Rai

Faculty Scholarship

This article provides an early analysis of the potential for creating future biosimilar competition for cell and gene therapies (CGTs) to lower prices and improve patient access, building on a unique set of interviews with relevant experts. Our discussion addressed regulatory, manufacturing, intellectual property, and market size challenges. Due to CGTs’ complexity, meeting the regulatory requirement of ‘high similarity with no clinically meaningful differences’ will be difficult. Gene therapies are likely better candidates for biosimilar development than cell therapies. Biosimilarity should be met when gene therapy biosimilars contain the same genetic sequence as a reference product, and the variability in …

“Criminalizing” Depositions In Arbitration, Mitch Zamoff

Articles

Civil litigation–style deposition practice is preventing commercial arbitration from reaching its full potential as an economical, efficient alternative to a civil lawsuit. Although there is consensus among alternative dispute resolution experts that meaningful limits must be imposed on arbitration discovery to unlock the efficiency benefits of arbitration, depositions continue to feature prominently in commercial arbitrations for at least three reasons. First, civil litigators are addicted to depositions. They reflexively propose overdone deposition practice in arbitrations that replicates their litigation experience. Second, arbitrators may hesitate to disallow deposition discovery out of fear that their awards will be vacated for failure to …

Shareholders All The Way Down: Eu Corporate Sustainability Reforms And The Structure Of Corporate Governance, Matthew Bodie

Articles

The laws and norms of corporate law are changing across the globe. Gone are the days when scholars could confidently predict that shareholder wealth maximization would be the universal metric of corporate success. Instead, corporate leaders, governments, workers, activists, and even shareholders are looking beyond simplistic models of shareholder primacy to a broader understanding of corporate responsibility. This new approach has taken its firmest hold in the European Union, where three directives over the last decade have reshaped reporting requirements and directors’ duties in significant ways, pushing for greater accountability and attention to the needs of stakeholders.

Changes to company …

Planning For Pandemic And Epidemic-Related Scarcity Of Medicines, Sapna Kumar

Articles

This chapter proposes an ex ante approach to tackling drug scarcity. Entities funding pandemic- and epidemic-related research should contractually require recipients to produce sufficient quantities of resulting medicines. The recipient would agree in the event of a future shortage to share its technology and know-how with a qualified third-party manufacturer, in exchange for compensation. Alternatively, funding entities could more broadly utilize dormant licenses, which activate in the event of a pandemic or epidemic, and which require rights holders to license out technology and know-how to alleviate shortages. Such provisions could go even further, integrating reasonable pricing assurances and ensuring access …

Presidential Investment In The Administrative State, Nicholas Bednar, David E. Lewis

Articles

In this paper, we explain how presidents strategically invest in administrative capacity, noting that presidents have few incentives to invest effort in capacity building in most agencies. We test our account with two analyses. First, we examine the time it took for the Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden Administrations to nominate individuals to appointed positions. We find that presidents prioritize appointments to policy over management positions and that nominations occur sooner in agencies that implement presidential priorities. Second, we examine the responses of federal executives to the 2020 Survey on the Future of Government Service to see whether perceptions of …

A Little Less Conversation, A Little More Action: How American Unwillingness To Escalate Emboldens Mexico’S Populist Ambitions, David Montero

American University International Law Review

Part II of this Comment will explain the history of Mexico’s relationship with trade, as well as the finer details of the dispute resolution provisions of the USMCA that are of note. Part III will analyze two key violations of the USMCA by AMLO’s administration, contrasting the American response between the two and demonstrating the cycle of violations that has largely been created as a result of the failure to act. Part IV provides a simple recommendation to the U.S. administration for how to effectively halt its southern neighbor’s decline into unfettered populism that harms U.S. trade interests: employ the …

Policing The Strait: How China’S Policing Of The Taiwan Strait Violates The U.N. Convention On The Law Of The Sea, Elizabeth C. Parker

American University International Law Review

As tensions continue to grow across the Taiwan Strait, China is using domestic maritime law to justify an expansion of police power in the international waters of the Taiwan Strait in violation of international law. This Comment will argue that the People’s Republic of China has violated the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (“UNCLOS”) by implementing non-resource-related police power in waters meant only for resource exploration and management. In comparing the language of China’s domestic maritime law with that of UNCLOS, this Comment will show that the People’s Republic of China has used domestic law to reinterpret …

After Beaver: Reviving A Unified Test For Section 24 Charter Exclusion, Chris Rudnicki

The Supreme Court Law Review: Osgoode’s Annual Constitutional Cases Conference

Exclusion under section 24(2) of the Charter is an important part of every criminal judge’s remedial toolkit. But in Beaver, the Supreme Court significantly constrained access to section 24(2) by endorsing the “fresh start” doctrine. Evidence will not be “obtained in a manner” that infringed the Charter — and thus will be put beyond the remedial reach of section 24(2) — where police conduct following a breach “severs” its temporal, contextual or causal connection to the evidence sought to be excluded. In my view, this doctrine will deprive worthy claimants of proportionate remedies. In this paper, I explore whether claimants …

The Right To Fail, Alexander Boni-Saenz

Articles

In 2013, the Department of Justice entered into a consent decree with the state of New York concerning the lives of 4,000 people with mental illness who had been segregated into group homes in the state. These group homes were overcrowded and dangerous, and New York agreed to move all but the most severely mentally ill people into supportive housing, if they desired it. This outcome was seen as vindicating the dignity of risk, a foundational value of disability rights scholarship and politics. This principle holds that it is normatively desirable for individuals to be able to make their own …

The Brussels Effect And The Extraterritoriality Of Delaware Corporate Law, William J. Moon

Faculty Scholarship

This essay explores possible shareholder claims in the United States that may arise  if and when member states of the European Union implement the proposed Directive  on Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence. As a doctrinal matter, legal compliance  obligations for corporations incorporated in Delaware extend beyond the borders of  the United States. Under Delaware law, shareholders can bring viable fiduciary suits  against directors and officers when corporations violate applicable “positive law.”  This jurisprudence, principally aimed at ascertaining whether directors and officers  betrayed shareholders by engaging in or facilitating lawbreaking, is not limited to  complying with American law. As Delaware corporations expand …

Defining 'Victim' Through Harm: Crime Victim Status In The Crime Victims' Rights Act And Other Victims' Rights Enactments, Paul Cassell, Michael Ray Morris

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Who qualifies as a “victim” is the foundational question for the Crime Victims’ Rights Act (“CVRA” or “Act”) and other crime victims’ rights laws. This article provides the first comprehensive exploration of this “victim” definition question. It traces how the CVRA (and many states) define “victim” as broadly covering anyone who has been harmed as the result of a crime. This article begins by reviewing how the definition of “victim” has evolved in the criminal justice system since the Nation’s founding. In the last several decades, as crime victims’ rights protections have proliferated, it has become necessary to define “victim” …

Abortion And The Extremism Of Bright Line Rules, Teneille R. Brown

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Rather than eliding the workability or necessity of bright-line rules in certain domains, this Essay is a rallying cry for epistemic humility regarding what biological criteria can and cannot say. Policymakers sometimes lean on the biosciences to offer “objective” solutions to thorny
moral and legal issues. But descriptive biological data cannot answer normative questions on their own. Cloaking the theoretical, normative scaffolding in biological criteria is a disingenuous but common phenomenon I refer to as the “bio-legal mismatch.”

In this Essay, I discuss various abortion-restrictive statutes and cases to elucidate the problems with the bio-legal mismatch. Specifically, I explore the …

Moral Panic And The First Amendment, Michael L. Smith

Faculty Articles

Debates over free speech in the United States frequently see advocates of strong, broad protections at odds with those who argue that unfettered free speech tends to harm society's most vulnerable. Free speech advocates invoke the marketplace of ideas and argue that the antidote to false or harmful speech is more speech. In response, critics contend that speech itself causes harm and chills counter-speech effectively excluding marginalized groups, including women and LGBTQ people, from discourse altogether. These critics support limitations on robust free speech doctrine targeting speech that harms marginalized communities.

This Article identifies a significant wrinkle in this narrative: …

Oil & Gas And Corpus Linguistics, Chad J. Pomeroy

Faculty Articles

Oil and gas law focuses on the subsurface mineral estate, which is just what it sounds like: the estate that entitles one to the subsurface, to the stuff that is underground. That, of course, includes the minerals under a given piece of property, and the value associated with that is enormous. So, it is a big deal to have the right to minerals, and, if I convey to you "the mineral estate" of Blackacre or "the minerals under Blackacre" or something similar, then I have given you something very significant, indeed. As such, it is critical to know just what …

International Economic Law And Its Histories, Valentina Vadi

Loyola University Chicago International Law Review

International economic law is best defined as the branch of public international law that governs transnational economic relations, that is, international trade, foreign direct investment, and currency exchange. It is a field that mixes and mingles law and economics. Economic theory has predominated in international economic law literature. Yet, international economic law is not just about money, trade, and capital flows. It is also about individual lives, collective destinies, and interactions among different civilizations.

The historical evolution of global economic governance remains understudied. Yet, investigating the history of international economic law is timely and important because we can learn from …

Anti-Patents, Roy Baharad, Stuart Minor Benjamin, Ehud Guttel

University of Chicago Law Review

Conventional wisdom has long perceived the patent and tort systems as separate legal entities, each tasked with a starkly different mission. Patent law rewards novel ideas; tort law deters harmful conduct. Against this backdrop, this Essay uncovers the opposing effects of patent and tort law on innovation, introducing the “injurer-innovator problem.” Patent law incentivizes injurers—often uniquely positioned to make technological breakthroughs—by allowing them to profit from licensing their inventions to competitors. Yet tort law, by imposing liability for failures to invest in care, forces injurers to incur the cost of implementing their own inventions. When the cost of self-implementation exceeds …

303 Creative Llc, Public Accomodations Law, And The Many Possible Futures Of Rights, Jacob Eisler

Scholarly Publications

No abstract provided.

Market Versus Policy Responses To Novel Occupational Risks, Robert J. Kramer, Elissa Philip Gentry, W Kip Viscusi

Scholarly Publications

The unprecedented occupational risks posed by the COVID-19 pandemic prompted employers to boost wages and federal authorities to propose hazard pay policies. This article estimates a market-based compensating differential for workers facing elevated risks through contact with the public using CPS employment data for 2019–2020 and occupational characteristic data from the US Department of Labor’s Occupational Information Network. The estimated premium for exposure was roughly $820 overall and $1000 for essential workers. These premiums fall short of those proposed—but not enacted—by the federal government and are more commensurate with estimates of the value of a statistical life than were the …

Evaluating Superfund Effectiveness And Community Engagement: Smurfit-Stone Mill Case Study, Abigail M. Sherwood

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

The Smurfit-Stone Mill operated in Frenchtown, MT from 1957 until 2010, releasing toxic pollutants into the Clark Fork River and surrounding areas. Despite environmental protests since the 1960s, substantive action to remedy environmental damage did not occur until 2015. Stakeholders including local residents, Indigenous tribes, Missoula County, and environmental non-profits have advocated for comprehensive site characterization, a timely cleanup, and robust community engagement. While residents and visitors contend with elevated toxins in fish tissue, prompting a 100-mile fish consumption advisory near the Smurfit-Stone Mill, the Environmental Protection Agency is several years away from determining the scope of a reclamation. Community …

Duties Owed To The Public, Nicolas Cornell

Book Chapters

How does private law conceptualize duties owed to the public-at-large? Are they owed to individual members of the public? This question is interstitial in two ways—it concerns both the space between public law and private law and the spaces between different fields of private law. Different areas of private law handle it in contradictory ways. Duties of public officials are regarded as owed to individual citizens for the purposes of contract law’s preexisting duty rule but as not owed to individuals as a matter of tort law’s public duty rule. Violations of public property might be enforceable through public nuisance, …

Dead Bodies As Quasi-Persons, Ela A. Leshem

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Chatgpt Wrote This Title: Redefining “Human” Authorship, The Continuation Of The Black Box Problem, Deepfakes, And Ai-Generated Content Liability, Shannon Macdonald

Suffolk Journal of Trial and Appellate Advocacy

No abstract provided.