Digital Commons Network^™

Private Canvas, Government Expression: Protest Art & The Government Speech Doctrine, Melanie P. Rigden

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

The note argues that protest art is fundamentally incompatible with the government speech doctrine and should not be subject to its principles. It contends that applying this doctrine to political expression allows the government to suppress dissenting viewpoints and engage in censorship under the pretext of exercising its own speech rights.

The Devil Is In The Det[Ai]Ls: Ai Agents, Ghost Students, And The Crisis Of Verified Presence In An Agentic Ai World, Aras Bozkurt, Helen Crompton, Caroline Fell Kurban

STEMPS Faculty Publications

The transition from reactive Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) to agentic AI systems marks a categorical shift in digital education, moving beyond simple content generation to goal-oriented, autonomous execution. This paper explores the emergence of the “ghost student”: a digital surrogate created by the coupling of Large Language Models (the “mind”) and agentic AI browsers (the “body”). These entities are capable of navigating Learning Management Systems (LMS), engaging with content, and completing assessments with human-like mimicry, often rendering the actual learner’s presence optional. We argue that this phenomenon creates a verification gap that traditional proctoring and detection tools are structurally unable …

Risk And Releasability: Rethinking “Suitable” Support Networks For Former Foster Youth In Ontario Bail Courts, Marsha Rampersaud

Journal of Law and Social Policy

Contemporary societal trends indicate many young adults rely on their families for financial and other support for longer than in the past, often well into their 20s. Youth leaving the child welfare system, however, do not have similar supports to rely on when they reach the age of majority (eighteen in Ontario). In bail court, the experiences of those who have familial support differ markedly from those who do not. Qualitative interviews with youth, lawyers, and social workers illuminate the experiences of young adults (ages eighteen to twenty-four) who have exited the child welfare system and come into conflict with …

The Closed Door At 301 Wellington Street, Tom Nichini, Kim Brooks

Journal of Law and Social Policy

Although women and racialized lawyers comprise significant proportions of the Canadian bar, they and other equity-deserving lawyers remain markedly underrepresented among counsel making oral submissions before the Supreme Court of Canada. This article presents findings from a five-year empirical study (2017–2021) examining who appears before the Court through an observational analysis of 273 cases and a survey of 279 counsel. The research reveals that presenting counsel are predominantly white, cis-male, and have extensive experience at the bar: e.g., women account for only 26.9% of appearing counsel, while racialized lawyers comprise 12.8%. After evaluating whether this gap can be attributed to …

Restrictions On Party Status In Interpretations Of An Act Respecting First Nations, Inuit And Métis Children, Youth And Families, Jamesy Patrick, Alana Cattapan, Brenda Yuen

Journal of Law and Social Policy

An Act respecting First Nations, Inuit and Métis children, youth and families came into force in January 2020 with the stated objectives of affirming Indigenous jurisdiction over child and family services, reducing the overrepresentation of Indigenous children in state care, and advancing Canada’s commitments under the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Central to achieving these objectives are the Act’s National Standards, which are intended to ensure Indigenous communities are meaningfully included in decision-making processes. While these standards were upheld by the Supreme Court of Canada in 2024 as constitutional, emerging jurisprudence reveals significant shortcomings in the …

Element Of Accountability: Strengthening Enforcement Of California’S Housing Element Law, Jonathan D. Bremen

Chapman Law Review

California’s housing crisis, marked by a severe shortage of affordable housing, soaring costs, and rising homelessness, has reached alarming proportions. Despite decades of efforts, the state continues to grapple with a housing market that significantly underserves low- and middle-income residents, forcing many to devote high portions of their income to housing. On paper, California’s Housing Element Law appears to be a valuable tool to address the crisis by requiring cities and counties to plan for housing needs across all economic segments. Widespread noncompliance with the law, however, has prompted both the state Attorney General and private parties to seek judicial …

Arbitration Overcorrection? Interpreting Arbitration Clauses After Morgan V. Sundance, Peter Constable Alter

Chapman Law Review

In 2022’s Morgan v. Sundance, Inc., the Supreme Court ruled that the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) does not allow courts to “devise novel rules to favor arbitration over litigation.” Applying that principle, the Court held that the Eighth Circuit erred by grafting an arbitration-specific prejudice requirement onto the generally applicable waiver standard when deciding whether a defendant waived its right to arbitrate by proceeding in court. The Supreme Court traced this error to a misunderstanding of the FAA’s core purpose. While courts, including the Supreme Court itself, routinely interpreted the FAA as establishing a liberal “policy favoring arbitration,” the …

Escaping The Labyrinth: Cutting Through The Maze Of Federal Sector Employment Laws To Streamline Appeals, Allow Faster And More Consistent Decisions, And Level The Playing Field Between Agencies And Employees, Christopher Ligatti

Chapman Law Review

Federal employees and their job protections have gained increased media attention due to the current presidential administration. Criticism has long been aimed primarily at the property interest and accompanying due process protections that federal employees have in their employment. However, this Article argues that while the federal sector employment law system is badly in need of reform, the issue is not the constitutionally required due process protections afforded to employees, but rather the additional statutory and regulatory protections Congress has granted employees. Currently, federal employees have multiple overlapping forums in which they can bring employment actions, may cross-appeal negative decisions …

The Military Discharge Review Boards’ Irregular Presumption Of Regularity, Jessica Lynn Wherry

Chapman Law Review

“There is a presumption of regularity in the conduct of governmental affairs.” With these twelve words in the Department of Defense’s Code of Federal Regulations, the military discharge review boards (DRBs) have denied relief to thousands of veteran-applicants seeking a discharge upgrade. While seemingly innocuous, this administrative principle has become a nearly insurmountable barrier to relief for veterans with a less-than-honorable discharge. Veterans with a less-than-honorable discharge are generally ineligible for a range of veterans benefits, including health care and education benefits, and they have higher suicide rates compared to honorably discharged veterans.

For most veteran-applicants, the administrative path to …

Tilting The Playing Field: Executive Attacks On Big Law Firms As A Mechanism Of American Competitive Authoritarianism, Sajah Ali

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis examines how President Donald Trump’s executive campaign against elite law firms, collectively known as “Big Law,” serves as a concrete case study of competitive authoritarianism in action. Drawing on Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way’s framework in their work The Path to American Authoritarianism, this thesis applies their four pillars of competitive authoritarianism to the administration’s executive orders targeting major law firms and maps those pillars onto three distinct firm responses: fighting back, capitulation, and quiet retreat. Situating this case study within the broader political context of Trump’s second term, this thesis finds that while the United States has …

Death By Discretion: Executive Power And The Arbitrary Machinery Of Federal Capital Punishment, Reem Haikal

Chapman Law Review

This Article argues that the federal death penalty is not merely at risk of being cruel; it is increasingly at risk of becoming arbitrary and lawless. Despite the procedural safeguards embedded in the Federal Death Penalty Act (FDPA), executive practices have reintroduced many of the same constitutional flaws that the Supreme Court identified in Furman v. Georgia. Through detailed analysis of the FDPA’s structure, this Article shows that the statute fails to meaningfully constrain the Attorney General’s charging discretion, allowing life-and-death decisions to hinge on opaque and often politicized processes. The Trump administration’s revival of federal executions, culminating in sweeping …

Clean Hands, Dirty Money, And The Codification Of Sec Disgorgement, Stephanie Palma

Fordham Law Review

Disgorgement is the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) most powerful enforcement tool and among its most controversial. For decades, federal courts treated disgorgement in securities enforcement actions as an equitable remedy, a view that the U.S. Supreme Court confirmed in Liu v. SEC. Months after Liu, Congress passed the William M. (Mac) Thornberry National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021, which codified disgorgement in SEC enforcement actions. The codification of disgorgement sparked a circuit split between the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the Fifth and Second Circuits over whether Congress created a new statutory form of …

Developing Your Research Project: Writing An Annotated Bibliography, Fabiola Ceballos-Durham

Open Educational Resources

Students build the foundation for a criminal justice research project by evaluating and summarizing scholarly articles and websites in an APA-style annotated bibliography.

What Beginning Law Students Learn When Ai Gets Personal, Kristina Swanson

Journal Articles

From the Introduction

While legal writing and research professors wrestle with artificial intelligence (AI)'s impact on the skills we teach, one thing is clear: beginning law students cannot discern whether AI answers to legal questions are correct. AI-generated responses to legal questions sound right and are designed to bolster the beleaguered law student's confidence. Deliberately programmed to hook customers, AI-generated answers often begin by praising the brilliant question and expressing electronic empathy for the difficulty the student may have had answering it. The end result: students with the wrong legal answer and misplaced confidence.

Odious Debt And The Legal Mechanisms Of Imperialism, Jaylen Spears

Emory International Law Review

No abstract provided.

International Human Rights Intervention: Collective Self-Defense Of Humanity, Anthony J. Colangelo

Emory International Law Review

No abstract provided.

Bridging The Gap: Predictors Of Alignment Of Parent And Caseworker Perceptions Of Engagement, Jianchao Lai, Michelle I. Graef

Center on Children, Families, and the Law: Faculty Publications

This study examined predictors of alignment between parents’ and caseworkers’ perceptions of family engagement in child welfare services. Using data from 2,274 Alternative Response (AR)–eligible families randomized to AR or Traditional Response, engagement was assessed across the domains of Receptivity, Buy-in, Worker-family Relationship, and Mistrust using a modified Yatchmenoff (2005) scale. Multinomial logistic regression models identified factors associated with agreement and discrepancy between ratings of family engagement within the parent and worker dyad. While both parents and workers valued engagement, workers were more likely to provide higher overall engagement ratings, although the direction of discrepancy varied across specific subscales. Greater …

Mandatory Cooperation Under International Law, Evan J. Criddle, Evan Fox-Decent

Faculty Publications

Humanity in the twenty-first century faces serious global challenges and crises, including pandemics, nuclear proliferation, violent extremism, refugee migration, and climate change. None of these calamities can be averted without robust international cooperation. Yet, national leaders often assume that because their states are sovereign under international law, they are free to opt in or out of international cooperation as they see fit. This book challenges conventional wisdom by showing that international law requires states to cooperate with one another to address matters of international concern – even in the absence of treaty-based obligations. Within the past several decades, requirements to …

From Recruitment To Breach: The Impact Of Employment-At-Will On Psychological Contracts, Krystal N. Porlles

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Employment-at-will is the default legal framework governing most private-sector employment relationships in the United States, yet little research has examined how explicit employment-at-will language influences applicants’ psychological expectations before organizational entry. Drawing on signaling theory and psychological contract theory, the present study investigated whether the inclusion of an employment-at-will statement in a job advertisement affected relational psychological contract development, anticipated job insecurity, organizational attractiveness, perceptions of psychological contract breach, emotional reactions, and withdrawal intentions. Undergraduate students (N = 253) were recruited through the University of Central Florida’s SONA research participation system. After data screening, the final analytic sample consisted of …

Gender Therapy False Equivalency, Scott Skinner-Thompson

Publications

One critical dispute surrounding the rights of LGBTQ people and societal recognition of their existence is the legal debate regarding very different types of gender therapy. On the one hand, several states have banned the provision of gender-affirming medical care to transgender youth, positing that it is a dangerous form of mutilation. A separate set of states has banned the practice of so-called gay or gender conversion therapy that seeks to transform youth away from their queer identities, concluding that it is a form of abuse. Both sets of laws have been challenged in courts with the Supreme Court recently …

The Internet And The Lost Law Of Transit, Vivek Krishnamurthy

Publications

For centuries, the law of transit has specified when states must permit foreign persons and goods to traverse their territory on journeys beginning and ending beyond their borders. Transit is a right — not a privilege — that tempers territorial sovereignty. Though largely forgotten today, the right to transit springs from states’ responsibilities to the international community when their territory hosts infrastructure of global utility.

Yet the internet stands as a striking exception to this tradition. Despite its importance, no doctrine of transit constrains states’ power to block or disrupt internet traffic that merely passes through their territory. This is …

Advocacy Matters, Richard B. Collins

Publications

The Supreme Court’s 2022 Castro-Huerta decision was wrong on the points it discussed. It was doubly wrong for a reason it ignored. But the latter error was shared because all briefs and the dissenting opinion ignored it as well. The question presented was whether a nineteenth-century federal Indian country statute provided for exclusive federal jurisdiction over interracial crimes, or for concurrent authority with states. The Court held that the statute allowed concurrent jurisdiction. But it ignored the fact that Congress and the Court, until fairly recently, avoided concurrent federal-state jurisdiction over crimes. Had the self-styled originalist Justices taken their theory …

Adversarial Certification Of Evidentiary Software, Nicholas G. Vincent, Bryan H. Choi, Eli Siems, Clay Halbert, Katherine J. Strandburg

Publications

No abstract provided.

State Constitutionalism's Fragile Wall, Adam B. Sopko

Publications

The adequate and independent state grounds (AISG) doctrine has long demarcated the perimeter of the U.S. Supreme Court’s authority to review state court decisions, limiting review to questions of federal law. AISG maintains the Court’s primacy over federal law and state courts’ supremacy over state law. A comprehensive review of all filings on the Court’s docket from state courts over the last twenty years reveals that recent applications of AISG consist of subtle but significant departures from existing norms that, together, suggest a reformulation of the Court’s power over state courts that threatens their sovereign law development role. This Essay …

Coached By A Custom Chatgpt And Ready For Trial, Staci J. Pratt

Publications

No abstract provided.

Developer Perspectives On Licensing And Copyright Issues Arising From Generative Ai For Software Development, Trevor Stalnaker, Nathan Wintersgill, Oscar Chaparro, Laura A. Heymann, Massimiliano Di Penta, Daniel M. German, Denys Poshyvanyk

Faculty Publications

Despite the utility that Generative AI (GenAI) tools provide for tasks such as writing code, the use of these tools raises important legal questions and potential risks, particularly those associated with copyright law. As lawmakers and regulators respond to these questions, the views of users can offer relevant perspectives. In this article, we provide: (1) a survey of 574 developers on the licensing and copyright aspects of GenAI for coding, as well as follow-up interviews; (2) a snapshot of developers’ views at a time when GenAI and perceptions of it were rapidly evolving; and (3) an analysis of developers’ perspectives, …

The Specter Of Jury Nullification, Anna Offit

Faculty Publications

Attention to the trial of Luigi Mangione has renewed debate about nullification—the jury’s inviolate power to acquit a defendant contrary to the evidence presented. Jury nullification proponents hold that it is a mechanism of last resort for refusing to apply laws that conflict with the public conscience. Opponents, by contrast, argue that nullification undermines the law by diminishing its legitimacy. To prosecutors and defense attorneys, however, these arguments are immaterial: Jury nullification is part of the institutional landscape of the contemporary jury trial and thus must be treated as a potentiality—a feature of the agnostic, strategic, and ethical terrain of …

The Police Archipelago: Decentralization, Police Violence, Over-Punishment, And Crime, José F. Girón

Faculty Publications

A strong consensus has taken hold in the legal academy. Criminal Justice Localism, espoused by scholars of every stripe, promotes greater local control of every facet of the criminal justice system. But Criminal Justice Localism largely overlooks an institution that plays a critical role in the criminal justice system, and which has been the subject of intense public criticism: the police. That oversight is remarkable for two reasons. First, calls for increased local control of the police seem to ignore that America operates one of the most—if not the most—decentralized policing models in the world, with its thousands of local, …

Faces Of Formalism, Jeffrey A. Pojanowski

Journal Articles

Formalist approaches to legal interpretation, such as textualism and originalism, are ascendant in federal statutory and constitutional law. Yet with success have come uncertainty and dissatisfaction. Formalists and their critics observe that textualism and originalism can seem as open-ended as the purposive and dynamic methods they were supposed to replace. This Article tries to diagnose the source of this discontent. It does so by identifying two different faces of formalist interpretation: the formalism of authority—adherence to original sources of law—and the formalism of method—constraint through predictable, rule-bound interpretation. Defenses of formalism often assume these two paths to constraint run together, …

Rebooting Administrative Enforcement For The Information Economy, Nina-Simone Edwards

Library Scholarship

This concept paper considers how to strengthen the enforcement of public mandates to deter harmful practices and business models. The paper offers principles for reinvigorated enforcement such as enhanced visibility, the increased use of design as a remedial lever, and personal responsibility for responsible individuals, not only the corporations that employ them.

To advance these principles, we call for new or amended laws that require companies to document how policy becomes code, grant agencies authority to order design changes to products and services, create pathways for charging responsible individuals, and cabin some forms of prosecutorial discretion. We would support these …