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An Insidious Interstice: Understanding Cognition And Language Behaviour Through The Eyes Of Juvenile Justice Professionals, Anne M. Perrotti, Allison T. Chappell, Tancy Vandecar-Burdin

Human Movement Studies & Special Education Faculty Publications

Introduction

Despite evidence suggesting language and cognition deficits are prevalent for justice involved youth, little research explores how juvenile justice personnel experience language and cognition behaviours in the youth they serve.

Aims

This qualitative study explored how juvenile justice personnel understand language and cognition skills and deficits in justice involved youth.

Methods

Twenty-two U.S. juvenile justice professionals participated in individual, semi-structured interviews. Questions focused on individual understanding of receptive language, expressive language, social communication, and cognition (i.e., problem-solving, predicting consequences and impulsiveness) in juveniles served. Using a phenomenological lens, transcripts were coded identifying themes and sub-themes of participant responses.

Results …

Bloodstain Pattern Analysis And The Gatekeeping Role Of Canadian Courts, Sara Gordon

All Faculty Publications

Despite its long history of admission throughout North America, there appears to be no published Canadian case subjecting bloodstain pattern analysis to the special scrutiny Canadian law demands for novel or contested scientific evidence. Instead, courts have admitted the evidence based largely on the training and experience of forensic examiners, taking it for granted that the field is sufficiently reliable. However, the application of the White Burgess framework reveals that there are serious and severe concerns about the underlying scientific validity of the technique which should render it generally inadmissible. At Stage One of White Burgess, bloodstain pattern analysis fails …

Race And Racism In Canada’S Immigration Detention System, Efrat Arbel, Prasanna Balasundaram, Hanna Gros, Nana Yanful

All Faculty Publications

Race and Racism in Canada's Immigration Detention System is the first comprehensive, independent study to examine race and racism in Canada's immigration detention system. Grounded in rigorous legal analysis and qualitative research, the study draws on interviews with 50 participants, including people with lived experience of immigration detention, as well as lawyers, paralegals, and service providers who work in immigration detention. The research was guided by an advisory board of people with lived-experience in immigration detention and co-led by a collaborative research team.

Taking A “Persuade Me” Approach: Gatekeeping Forensic Firearms Comparison Evidence In Canadian Courts, Sara Gordon

All Faculty Publications

Forensic firearms comparison evidence is routinely admitted in Canadian criminal trials and is often presented as a reliable means of identifying whether fired ammunition components originated from a particular firearm. For nearly 100 years, Canadian courts have admitted this evidence based largely on examiner claims about the reliability of the technique without subjecting those claims to meaningful scrutiny or limiting examiner conclusions to those that are empirically supported. Drawing on recent scientific literature, however, this article demonstrates that existing studies of forensic firearms analysis suffer from significant methodological flaws that may systematically underestimate error rates and do not establish the …

Taking Scale Seriously In Technology Law, Mark P. Mckenna, Woodrow Hartzog

Faculty Scholarship

Issues of scale—the relationship between the amount of an activity and its associated costs and benefits—permeate discussions around law and technologies. Indeed, it’s not much of an exaggeration to say that scale is the reason for most technology regulation.

But it’s not always clear how lawmakers and judges conceptualize “scale” when approaching questions around automated technologies. Scale is often used intuitively, just to mean “more.” But scale is not always just about more—scale can introduce new harms and benefits along different dimensions, not simply costs or efficiencies of greater magnitude.

In this Article, we argue for a more sustained interrogation …

Social Science Contributions To The Global Action Plan On Antimicrobial Resistance Management, Mathieu Poirier, Jaskeerat Singh, Isaac Weldon, Clare I. R. Chandler, Daniela Corno, Laura Valtere, Pedro Henrique D Batista, Daniel Carelli, Geneviève Boily-Larouche, Sonia Lewycka, Fiona Emdin, Kathleen Liddell, Timo Minssen, Ilaria Natali, Susan Nayiga, Iruka N. Okeke, Emmanuel Olamijuwon, Kevin Outterson, Julianne Piper, Kayla Strong, Jarnail Singh Thakur, Kednapa Thavorn, Maarten Van Der Heijden, A. M. Viens, Mary Wiktorowicz, Steven J. Hoffman

Faculty Scholarship

Social science research on antimicrobial resistance has gained traction in the last decade, employing a diverse set of theoretical perspectives to better understand topics ranging from antimicrobial stewardship to political coordination.4 As the action plan commitments will be updated in 2026, an opportunity exists to employ a broader social science scope to accelerate national antimicrobial resistance interventions.

In January 2025, the Global strategy lab convened leading antimicrobial resistance social scientists from a variety of disciplines to determine which new ways of understanding antimicrobial resistance could catalyse and incentivize action. Three conceptions stood out as important to revisions of the action …

Spending Programs And The New Roberts Court, Nicole Huberfeld

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court is poised to place new limits on Congress’s spending power at the urging of states vying for regulatory dominance, particularly in health care and public health. This article is the first to highlight and catalog the throughlines of argumentation, which sparked after states successfully challenged the ACA but have grown into opposing more than Medicaid’s cooperative federalism. This means federal and state programs that heavily rely on federal spending power are at risk, so studying this pattern is imperative. The article begins with a descriptive account of increasing spending power challenges, which make use of converging factors …

Five Lessons From Ken Kersch’S Conservatives And The Constitution For The Present Moment, James E. Fleming, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny, a New York Times bestseller, has the subtitle, “Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.” Ken Kersch’s Conservatives and the Constitution: Imagining Constitutional Restoration in the Heyday of American Liberalism (2019) provides at least twenty lessons from the second half of the Twentieth Century about the development of conservative constitutional thought and activism. Although conservatism has changed in many ways since the 1954-1980 period on which Kersch’s book focuses, these lessons are relevant for understanding the present political moment, filled with concerns that the U.S., during the second Trump Administration, is lurching toward tyranny, authoritarianism, and …

The Punishment Paradox, Steven Arrigg Koh

Faculty Scholarship

What does criminal punishment do? Across centuries of criminal legal thought, a shared answer persists: punishment incapacitates the wrongdoer. And yet punishment sometimes yields its opposite. Paradoxically, punishment sometimes becomes a rallying point-expanding community identification and solidarity around the defendant. This Article shows this punishment paradox using the 2023-24 prosecutions of President Trump and recent and historical case examples-from Luigi Mangione to Karen Read to Rosa Parks. By arguing that criminal law can generate solidarity rather than stigma, the Article both rethinks foundational theories of punishment and reconsiders the role of criminal law in democratic politics. Such an approach transcends …

Gendered Words And Patent Grant Rates: A Textual Analysis, Deborah R. Gerhardt, Miriam Marcowitz-Bitton, W. Michael Schuster, Avshalom Elmalech, Omri Suissa, Moshe Mash

Faculty Publications

Text is a vehicle to convey information that reflects the writer’s linguistic style and communication patterns. By studying these attributes, we can discover latent insights about the author and their underlying message. This article uses such an approach to better understand patent applications and their inventors.

While prior research focuses on patent metadata (i.e., filing year or gendered inventor names), we employ machine learning and natural language processing to extract hidden information from the words in patent applications. Through these methods, we find that inventor gender can often be identified from textual attributes—even without knowing the inventor’s name. This ability …

Health Care Fraud And The End Of Chevron, Joan H. Krause

Faculty Publications

What do the Environmental Protection Agency’s “plantwide” definition of a “stationary” pollution source,” a National Marine Fisheries Service determination of who pays for fishing boat observers, and a Department of Health and Human Services rule governing the marketing of prescription drugs have in common? In short, a government agency’s interpretation of a federal statute. All three cases go to the heart of the administrative state: the ability of an agency, staffed by experts in the field, to interpret static statutory language to offer practical guidance to an ever-evolving industry.

The same is true of health care fraud, although it is …

Tradition Without Text?, Daniel B. Rice

Faculty Publications

This Essay critiques the Supreme Court’s emerging “history and tradition” methodology, as articulated in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, arguing that its reliance on affirmative textual recognition in historical positive law fundamentally misrepresents the nature of American liberty traditions. By insisting that unenumerated rights are constitutionally cognizable only when earlier legal sources explicitly identified them as rights, the Court adopts a truncated evidentiary framework that privileges written enactments while disregarding lived experience, social practice, and the normative assumptions that shaped earlier understandings of permissible state power. The result, the Essay contends, is a mechanized and impoverished account of …

The Trademark Bargain: Registration As Disclosure, Dustin Marlan

Faculty Publications

This Article highlights the central—and under-theorized—role that disclosure plays within trademark law. By loose analogy, the patent disclosure requirement is a cornerstone of patent law, embodying the “patent bargain” where an inventor must disclose their invention in exchange for a twenty-year monopoly. This quid pro quo is believed to stimulate the progress of science and technology, making patent disclosure the very pulse of the patent regime. However, the fundamental importance of disclosure in trademark law remains underexplored. Like patents, trademark law imposes a rigorous bargain—to obtain the enhanced rights granted by federal registration, trademark owners must first make significant disclosures …

Who's Afraid Of Copyright And Ai?, Deborah R. Gerhardt

Faculty Publications

Copyright and AI need not be a copyright no man’s land. Recent decisions by the Copyright Office have gotten so much media attention that many creators are unsure if they can secure copyright protection if they use AI as a creative tool. The proposed creative control paradigm can help us all tackle the challenge of determining when works created with the assistance of AI are copyrightable. Instead of relying on long-established nuanced precedent for protecting works generated with new technology, the Copyright Office asserts that any content generated with assistance from AI tools is unprotectable. This position is radically inconsistent …

Choice Of Law In Terrorism Cases, John F. Coyle

Faculty Publications

When an Iranian-backed terrorist group operating out of Lebanon detonates a bomb in Israel that kills a U.S. citizen domiciled in Texas, what law governs civil claims brought against Iran in the District of Columbia? Some version of this choice-of-law question has been presented to U.S. courts many times over the past two decades. Their answers have been frustratingly inconsistent. In some cases, courts have applied the law of the place of the attack. In others, they have applied the law of the plaintiff’s domicile. In still others, they have applied the law of the forum where the plaintiff brings …

Good Faith And Certainty In Contract Law, Marcus Moore

All Faculty Publications

Does a general principle of good faith create too much uncertainty in  Contract Law? This article provides in-depth consideration of the controversy around this question.Reviewing a number of common arguments and reasonswhy good faith is said to be too uncertain, and responses to these, the article finds a complex picture rather than a simple answer. Recent Canadian experience with recognising a general principle of good faith in contractual performance suggests that at least two further details are critical to the potential for uncertainty: first, whether good faith operates as a freestanding duty or instead functions as a unifying principle that …

Breaking The Cycle: Rethinking Bar Exam Scoring And Portability For Nextgen Examinees, Steven Foster, Nachman Gutowski

Scholarly Works

The development of the NextGen Bar Exam presents a crucial opportunity to address longstanding challenges in both bar exam scoring and portability concerns. The reliance on recent graduates' performance on the Uniform Bar Examination (UBE) as a baseline for setting future standards is flawed due to relative scoring and scaling. In addition to concerns regarding how the future bar exam is scored, there are also concerns regarding how the new scoring metric on the NextGen bar exam will be used for portability and, more specifically, what will happen between 2026 and 2028 as the NextGen bar exam is progressively adopted …

Legal Ethics Of Ai Snake Oil: Navigating The Hype, Harm, And Hope Of Legal Ai, Drew Simshaw

Scholarly Works

This paper argues that the legal ethics of AI extend far beyond competence and hallucinations. It shows how AI often functions as a mirror, exposing deeper ethical questions about institutional incentives, lawyer wellbeing, access to justice, and AI's broader social and environmental impacts.

Memoir: The Brain, Neuroethics, And Bioethics, Leslie C. Griffin

Scholarly Works

This Essay examines how developments in neuroscience (or brain science) affect our views of law, medicine, ethics, and religion. Part I shows how lack of clarity about brain death can lead to premature organ donation. Part II argues that health care too often provides inadequate brain care and incomplete rehabilitation. Part III explains why recovery may be possible for those braininjured patients who are told it is not. Part IV demonstrates how the fear of a brain-injured patient oddly affects my perspective on Tort and Criminal Law, which are being influenced by neuroscientific advances. Part V examines the new developments …

“Spinning Wheel Got To Go Round”: Developments In The Law Affecting Electronic Payments And Financial Services, Sarah Jane Hughes, Tom Kierner, Stephen T. Middlebrook

Articles by Maurer Faculty

The past year reminds us of the rock lyrics from “Spinning Wheel” on Blood, Sweat & Tears’s 1968 self-titled record—“What goes up, must come down/Spinning Wheel got to go round”—because there have been many changes in strategy and reversal of policy since President Trump’s inauguration in January 2025. Our Survey documents these changes and reversals as they affect electronic payments and financial services. This year’s Survey also reports on warnings from state and federal regulators aimed at bank and non-bank providers of consumer financial services. Part II examines an FTC enforcement action related to the unfair and deceptive marketing of …

Two Cheers For Cox V. Sony, James Gibson

Law Faculty Publications

There’s a lot to dislike about the Supreme Court’s opinion in Cox Communications, Inc. v. Sony Music Entertainment. It mischaracterizes, oversimplifies, and ignores precedent. It fails to engage with important arguments. It mangles the meaning of “intent.” And it introduces uncertainty into the workings of secondary liability across other intellectual property regimes.

For these reasons, the decision doesn’t deserve three cheers. But it deserves two. Because in two important ways, the Supreme Court has succeeded. First, the opinion fixes some misguided appellate court holdings by articulating a relatively workable standard for future copyright cases involving secondary liability. Second, despite …

Lethal Injection Then And Now: A Topsy-Turvy Moment For The Abolition Movement, Corinna Barrett Lain

Law Faculty Publications

At first glance, how states execute prisoners is an entirely unattractive question for those who think that states shouldnot be executing prisoners at all. Indeed, one might reasonably take the position that discussions about how states execute presume that executions can be carried out in ways that are acceptable and unacceptable, which is antitheticalto the very core of the abolitionist position. As the renowned Henry Schwarzschild-longtime director of the ACLU's Capital Punishment Project and founder of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty-wrote in 1980, "Theworst sin of all is to do well that which should not be done …

Titletown Madness: Title Insurance Through The Lens Of Tribal Jurisdiction And The Lasting Legacy Of Allotment, Nicholas Stamates

Marquette Law Review

American Property Law and Federal Indian Law have a conjoined history going back to Johnson v. MʻIntosh, 21 U.S. (8 Wheat.) 543 (1823), where the Supreme Court ruled that private citizens could not purchase aboriginal title from Indians. Decades later, the Dawes General Allotment Act of 1887 resulted in non-Indian fee simple landowners purchasing what the Federal Government deemed “surplus” federal land in the un-allotted former Indian land, which is still part of the Reservation’s legal jurisdiction. An unintended consequence of this process, which resulted in a checkerboard pattern of land title in Indian Reservations across the country, has recently …

The Boundaries Of Law And Politics: Disputes Over Wisconsin's Maps For Political Districts Have A Long History, But The Last Few Years Have Brought Especially Intense Court Battles, John D. Johnson

Marquette Law Review

Wisconsin’s 2020 redistricting cycle was long, bitterly contested, and subject to dramatic reversals of fortune. Yet perhaps the most unusual feature of the whole process was how it ended in 2024: with a legislative redistricting plan passed by Republican legislators and signed by a Democratic Governor. Redistricting of the Wisconsin Legislature by divided political branches had occurred only three times prior in state history—in 1852, 1856, and 1971.

Redistricting may once have seemed a matter primarily of interest to political insiders. But the boundaries of legislative districts have great impact on politics and power, as the events of the last …

Justified: Reasonable Beliefs, True Beliefs, And Self-Defense, Michael D. Cicchini

Marquette Law Review

A defendant is charged with criminal battery and asserts self-defense at trial. The defense calls witnesses who would testify that, about ten minutes before the fight, the alleged victim said he was going to “find” the defendant and “end him.” But the trial judge excludes the testimony because the threat, while heard by several witnesses, was not communicated to the defendant. Therefore, the judge says, the threat cannot be relevant in determining whether the defendant “reasonably believed” he was in imminent danger at that time.

This Article explores the theoretical foundation for this common ruling and demonstrates why it is …

Toward A Framework For A Law Of Electronic Intangibles Liability, James M. Beck, Alexander M. Deguire

Marquette Law Review

Products liability law was built for a world of gears, levers, and physical failure. It now confronts a marketplace dominated by software, data, algorithms, and artificial intelligence—objects that do not break, shatter, or wear out, but nevertheless cause real and sometimes catastrophic harm. Courts and commentators increasingly respond to this tension by asking whether these digital systems are “product-like” enough to be squeezed into existing strict liability frameworks. This Article argues that this is the wrong question.

The Article traces the historical foundations of strict products liability; explains why courts have traditionally excluded intangibles from its reach; and examines recent …

Access Denied: The Injustice Of Plra Exhaustion, Rachel Kincaid

Marquette Law Review

Law students learn to “think like a lawyer” by studying appellate decisions that contain extensive reasoning and result from vigorous advocacy by lawyers on both sides. These well-reasoned decisions allow students to learn how to distill legal rules from judicial opinions: to focus on the rationale behind a court’s decision so that they might be able to predict how the court would deal with a different factual scenario. But this focus on extensively reasoned and argued appellate court opinions obscures the access-to-justice crisis plaguing our legal systems; most people cannot even afford to pay a lawyer to represent them, let …

A Matter Of Life And Death: Give Me All Of Your Money And I'Ll Give You Healthcare, Shilanka I. Lewis

Marquette Law Review

The Medicaid Estate Recovery Program (MERP) is a federal mandate requiring states to recover costs of long-term care and related services provided to Medicaid beneficiaries from their estates after death. This Article explores the core arguments supporting and opposing MERP, offering a balanced analysis of its ethical, legal, and economic dimensions. Proponents argue that estate recovery ensures fiscal responsibility by recouping taxpayer dollars and preventing wealth transfer from those who received public assistance to their heirs. Proponents contend that MERP upholds the principle that Medicaid is a need-based program and a payor of last resort. Conversely, critics argue that MERP …

Arbitrating Discipline Without Due Process Or Training: Procedural Injustice In The United States Postal Services Grievances, Wendy R. Ball-Jeter

Mitchell Hamline Law Journal of Public Policy and Practice

No abstract provided.

Implementing Young Adult Court In Minnesota, Sarah Dohm

Mitchell Hamline Law Journal of Public Policy and Practice

No abstract provided.