Digital Commons Network^™

What The Free-Roaming Cats Dragged In: Regulatory Concerns With Privatized Local Services, Jonathan Korger

Northwestern University Law Review

The United States entrusts local governments to provide citizens with a wide range of public services, and animal control makes up a small but essential piece of these local responsibilities. In recent years, American localities have largely privatized how they manage the nation’s growing free-roaming cat population, relying primarily on animal-loving volunteers and a controversial practice called trap-neuter-return (TNR). Academics have long debated the merits of privatization, but TNR raises a novel question: how should local governments think about regulating a privatized public service when altruism, instead of profits, motivates the service deliverer? This Note argues that TNR demonstrates the …

America Has A Problem: How The Student Criminalization Nexus Helps Maintain America's Modern Caste System, Kaela Allen

Northwestern Law Journal des Refusés

No abstract provided.

Impurity And Immigration: The Case Of Pro-Biafran Igbo Activists In Japan, Nnamdi M. Jogwe

Northwestern Law Journal des Refusés

No abstract provided.

Engineered For Surveillance: Public Safety, Roadway Science, And The Fourth Amendment, Trayce Hockstad, Steven Jones

Idaho Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Executive’S Takeover Of Independent Agencies: How Institutional Design Gave Way To Political Will, Neal Devins

Pepperdine Law Review

The anticipated demise of the independent agency is a saga that implicates Congress as much as it does the President or the Supreme Court. By capitulating to presidential initiatives and failing to defend their institutional prerogatives, Congress has facilitated presidential control of the administrative state. Indeed, irrespective of whether the Court formally repudiates Humphrey’s Executor, Congress has largely acquiesced to a regime whereby presidents essentially control independent agencies. By highlighting the competing incentives of Congress and the White House, this Essay explains the rise of presidential unilateralism vis-à-vis independent agencies. This Essay also casts light on a critically important but …

The Conundrum Of Industrial Policy: Incompatibility With The Rules Of International Trade Law, Yong-Shik Lee

Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business

Since the end of World War II, successful developing countries such as South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and, more recently China, have leveraged industrial policies—notably trade measures and subsidies—to achieve economic development. However, these industrial policy tools often conflict with the rules of international trade established under the World Trade Organization (WTO law), which aims to minimize government interference and reduce trade distortions. Paradoxically, such regulatory constraints hinder the development aspirations of many countries. Meanwhile, major global economies, including the United States, China, and the European Union, have revived industrial policies to support their key industries, such as semiconductors and electric …

Head Shot, Joanmarie Ilaria Davoli

Mercer Law Review

The prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment in the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution requires that execution methods avoid “superadding pain.” The U.S. Supreme Court has held that the imposition of a death sentence should include no additional pain beyond that needed to kill. That means, for example, that while pain may be inherent in the method of killing, torture is prohibited. As concerns about the pain involved in lethal injections has increased, states have begun executions by shooting inmates in the heart and by suffocation through gas mask. These methods have been used despite evidence that they superadd …

When The Weeds Strike Back: Rethinking Aphis's Regulation Of Genetically Engineered Plants Post-National Family Farm Coalition V. Vilsack, Reagan Powers

Celebrating WCL Student Authors

No abstract provided.

Article Iii's Constraints On The Legislative Power, Elizabeth Beske

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Article III’s heightened concreteness standard for statutory harms takes federal judges deep into legislative terrain, jeopardizing statutory damage provisions and confining Congress to post hoc solutions rather than preemptive strikes. The Supreme Court has insisted that creating a cause of action is a legislative function. At the same time, its recent standing cases instruct lower federal courts to permit suit on statutory injuries only when they find actual harm that bears a tight connection to injuries recognized at common law. This new harm requirement rests uneasily with countless statutes featuring statutory damage provisions that are in place precisely because damages …

Guns, Guardians, & Guilt: Analyzing Family Liability In Mass Shooting Cases, Alex Robinson

University of Baltimore Law Review

No abstract provided.

Jurisdiction Fiction: Is International Shoe Due For A Pennoyer Moment? Part I, Peter B. Rutledge, E. Reed Lemasters, Caleb Z. Morris

Missouri Law Review

Personal jurisdiction doctrine is a mess. In an attempt to clarify personal jurisdiction doctrine, the Supreme Court has routinely obscured its underlying rationale. That rationale predates the Court’s landmark decision in Pennoyer v. Neff and continues to loom in the background of the most recent post-International Shoe cases. Instead of laying bare that rationale, the doctrine has devolved into a string of proxies built upon proxies—all laboring mightily to avoid stating the obvious: State authority lies at the heart of all personal jurisdiction inquiries. From “physical presence” to “minimum contacts” to “targeting” to “effects” to “relatedness,” all fictions strive to …

Navigating Sustainable Burial In Southern Nevada, Kristen Gibson

Calvert Undergraduate Research Awards

Navigating Sustainable Burial in Southern Nevada investigates the accessibility of environmentally conscious end-of-life options for individuals throughout the region. Sustainable burial practices, including green burial, water cremation, and natural organic reduction, provide alternatives to traditional burial and cremation methods. Research was conducted through an analysis of Nevada statutes, local reporting, funeral service resources, and public discussions related to sustainable burial. The research revealed that although Nevada expanded legal recognition of sustainable burial by legalizing natural organic reduction, public access to clear information and available services remains limited. These findings informed the creation of a choose-your-own-adventure booklet designed to translate legal …

The Living Architecture Of Law, Joseph R. Goodwin

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Last Human Question: Generative Ai's Existential Threat To Consensus And Law, Joshua Fairfield

West Virginia Law Review

The true risk of artificial intelligence (“AI”) is not that the toasters will rise up. It is that AI will be competent to perform human tasks and indifferent to human welfare. The risk is that we will be outcompeted by generative automated processes that create output similar to ours (although never the same, as this Article explains), but which need none of the outputs of the economy for food, shelter, or human flourishing. Further, a more precise and existential description of the threat is that generative AI will disrupt and crowd out humanity’s evolutionary superpower, our ability to generate agreement …

The Energy And Environmental Footprint Of Ai, Michael P. Vandenbergh, Ethan I. Thorpe, Jonathan M. Gilligan

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to create major economic and social benefits, but also to rapidly escalate electricity demand and its associated environmental impacts. Information availability has been a cornerstone of environmental law for half a century, and this Article argues that providing information to individual, corporate, and other users about the electricity demand and environmental impacts of AI can reduce those impacts without delaying development of the technology. Little is known about how different large language models (LLMs) compare on these metrics, though. To address whether users have access to the information necessary to address this shortcoming, the …

Expressive And Acquisitive Norms Of Property In The Municipal And Private Contexts: Guerrilla Gardening And Property Reform, Anna Benham

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

There exists a type of expressive property outlaw—the guerrilla gardener. Guerrilla gardening is the practice of gardening without the legal right to do so. The practice of guerrilla gardening can sometimes take on rooted permanence, and as a result, progressively higher stakes. Guerrilla gardeners can operate over years, planting plots of greenery in areas where their hard work can be removed, quite literally, overnight. Many guerrilla gardeners operate with the implicit consent of their neighbors—consent that can be revoked at any time. However, when one bends away from the light insurrections of nonoffensive trespass and examines the other end of …

A Guide To The Best Reading Of Environmental Law: Presumptions For Stability In Statutory Interpretation, Sanne H. Knudsen

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

Administrative law is in flux and its doctrines flexible. Recent doctrinal shifts—like the ousting of Chevron and the introduction of the major questions doctrine—raise significant questions about how courts will determine the best reading of statutes and carve out a role for agency expertise in statutory interpretation. For environmental law, a field that relies heavily on federal agencies for implementation, the flux and flexibility of administrative law presents challenges. But they also present opportunities.

On the one hand, the recent changes to administrative law pose a destabilizing and deregulatory risk for environmental law unless courts develop a consistent methodology for …

“Loophole Of The Century”: Routine Use And The Privacy Act Of 1974, Joslynn Jensen

Brigham Young University Prelaw Review

This Note examines structural weaknesses in the Privacy Act of 1974 and argues that the statute no longer provides meaningful safeguards for personal information held by federal agencies. Enacted in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, the Act was designed to ensure transparency, accountability, and individual control over government recordkeeping systems. However, two core features—the routine-use exception and the Act’s narrow remedial structure—have undermined these protections. The routine-use provision permits agencies to disclose personal records without individualized consent so long as the disclosure is deemed “compatible” with the purpose of collection and published in the Federal Register, a form of …

How Many Supreme Court Justices Can Stand On The Point Of A Needle? Originalist Scholarship, Political Neutrality, And Other Constitutional Nonsense, Stephen M. Feldman

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

In the 1935 article, "Transcendental Nonsense and the Functional Approach," Felix Cohen compared formalist legal reasoning, as practiced by traditional legal scholars and Lochner-era Supreme Court justices, to the philosophical musings of scholastic theologians. Unconnected to empirical reality, formalist legal reasoning was as nonsensical as a disquisition on “‘[h]ow many angels can stand on the point of a needle?’” Nowadays, originalist scholars are similarly engaged in nonsense. These scholars defend, refine, and practice originalist methods of constitutional interpretation as if the Supreme Court justices truly decided cases in accordance with the theory. Regardless, the justices—even the avowed originalists—do not consistently …

Before The Last Breath: How Alabama’S Nitrogen Execution Adoption Created A Procedural Crisis On Death Row, Caroline E. Penfield

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

In 2024 and 2025, Alabama executed eleven people. During this time and in the years leading up to it, the State botched multiple lethal injections. Seeking an ostensibly constitutional way to continue carrying out executions, Alabama introduced death by nitrogen gas suffocation. The problems with lethal injection are not unique to Alabama, but Alabama was the first to adopt and use the novel nitrogen gas method, despite concerns from medical professionals, the public, and inmates themselves. Alabama put little to no protocol in place for inmates to exercise their statutory right to elect this method, leading to confusion and harm. …

The Pennsylvania Bar Association Quarterly: A 10-Year History Volumes 87-96 (2016-2025), Joel Fishman

Law Faculty Publications

This article is the second supplement to my previous two articles covering the history of The Pennsylvania Bar Association Quarterly.² For the period of this article, Robert E. Rains, Professor Emeritus, Penn State Dickinson Law, has been the editor, replacing Professor Louis Del Duca, who had served as editor for an amazing 47 years. The January 2016 issue appropriately began with two articles in homage to Prof. Del Duca.³

Salmonella In Poultry: Tackling An Age-Old Issue In An Evolving Era Of Agency Scrutiny, Samantha Girschick

Georgia State University Law Review

The Supreme Court’s decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo marks the end of Chevron deference and fundamentally reshapes the administrative law landscape. In its wake, agencies must now defend regulatory action without the benefit of the judiciary’s longstanding presumption in favor of that agency’s statutory interpretations. Against this backdrop, the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) attempted to classify certain strains and quantities of Salmonella as adulterants under the Poultry Products Inspection Act (PPIA)—an interpretation that marked a sharp departure from decades of prior agency position. Although the proposed rule was withdrawn before finalization by the Trump Administration, unresolved …

Rethinking Objectivity: The Problem Of Pretext In The Fourth Amendment, Monu S. Bedi

Indiana Law Journal

Pretextual encounters continue to erode the legitimacy of the Supreme Court’s Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. Simply put, a police officer can act on personal bias or animus as long as the search or seizure is deemed “objectively reasonable.” Numerous scholars (e.g., Bennett Capers, Gabriel Chin, and David Harris) have critiqued this objective standard, contending it perpetuates discriminatory practices, particularly against communities of color. The late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg herself suggested that the Court might need to reconsider the legal precedent she helped establish. More recently, Orin Kerr has also argued that the Court’s reliance on objective determinations is inconsistent with …

The Nondiscrimination Principle, Zephyr Teachout

Fordham Law Review

No abstract provided.

Don't Go Near The Water: How Pfas Regulation In North Carolina Is Falling Drastically Short, And How Technology Can Bridge The Gap, Madison Kate Williams

North Carolina Journal of Law & Technology

No abstract provided.

The Trust Transfer Problem, David Horton, Reid Kress Weisbord, Christopher J. Ryan Jr.

North Carolina Law Review

No abstract provided.

Algorithmic Armor: Rethinking Section 230'S Protection Of Platform Design, Amelia Christian Walker

North Carolina Law Review

No abstract provided.

Long Live The Good King: A Niebuhrian Analysis Of Arthur’S Ethical Kingship In The Once And Future King, Camille Bewley

Tenor of Our Times

The classic The Once and Future King, written by T.H. White, is a selection of four fantasy novels with one, linear plot: the story of Arthur, the mythological King of England. Reinhold Niebuhr’s book Moral Man and Immoral Society details the Christian realism of a world in need of justice without the ability to achieve perfect application. Through good education, Arthur is well endowed with Niebuhr’s requirements for a functional society: knowledge, honor, wisdom, and compassion. Such king-like qualities make him one of the most influential mythological characters in history, and a grand exemplar for maintaining ethical goals and personal …

Life, Liberty, And The Pursuit Of A Sustainable Catch: Using Maine's Right To Food To Encourage Sustainability In The Lobster Industry, Emma Rodgers

William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review

Every year, millions of sharks, turtles, whales, and other marine life are swept up in fishing gear never meant for them. This collateral damage, known as by-catch, is a persistent and deadly problem in the fishing industry. The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) estimates that around 38 million tonnes of global marine catch each year—40% of all fish pulled from the ocean—is unintended by-catch. Unfortunately, the WWF approximation of annual by-catch likely underestimates the proper amount of by-catch because their estimation includes little information on large marine animals, such as turtles and cetaceans which are also caught in the by-catch process. …

The Resilience Of What, Exactly, To What, Exactly, Along The Coast? Adapting To More Than Just Human Migration, Robin Kundis Craig

William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review

The world’s coastlines are changing as a result of climate change and ocean acidification, creating drivers of human adaptation efforts— efforts that may increasingly include migration inland. Rising sea levels tend to get most of the attention as coastal migration drivers, because they represent the force most likely to physically push residents away from the coast through inundation, coastal erosion, and/or destruction of coastal water supplies.

However, climate change and ocean acidification are also changing the world’s coasts ecologically, and these ecological changes also drive coastal adaptation, testing the adaptative capacity and ecological resilience of coastal communities. This Article examines …