Digital Commons Network^™

Life Admin When Life Turns Upside Down: A Book Review (Of Sorts), Sarah J. Schendel, Dyane O'Leary

Suffolk University Law School Faculty Works

Prof. Elizabeth Emens is a law professor, a parent, and the author of Life Admin: How I Learned to Do Less, Do Better, and Live More - a book published in 2019. Life Admin made its way into our stack of “life improvement to-reads” (not to be confused with our stack of educational pedagogy to-reads, our parenting to-reads, our for-enjoyment to-reads, our legal education to-reads, or our political and non-fiction to-reads). As we face luxurious 10-30 minutes between Zoom classes, Zoom faculty meetings, Zoom student counseling, and Zoom parent-teacher council, we wondered in the context of a COVID Cares academic …

Owning Frida Kahlo, Lario Albarrán

Emory International Law Review

Mexican painter Frida Kahlo died a feminist, anti-capitalist, queer, disabled, gender fluid, revolutionary. Today, Kahlo continues to captivate the public through her art, her life, and—her Barbie. Released in 2018, Mattel’s Frida Kahlo Barbie faced its harshest criticisms from none other than Kahlo’s family. Turning to social media, the family showered Mattel with questions on its audacity to release a Barbie in Kahlo’s likeness. Enraged over the Barbie’s features, complexation, and design, Kahlo’s family rushed to a court in Mexico where a judge issued a temporary injunction preventing the Barbie’s sale in Mexico. The resulting media coverage pit Kahlo’s family …

The Deborah Jones Merritt Center For The Advancement Of Justice, Claudia Angelos, Mary Lu Bilek, Joan W. Howarth

Scholarly Works

When invited to write an essay on clinical legal education honoring our friend, we were struck by the importance of a focus on clinical legal education in any collection of work paying tribute to Professor Deborah Jones Merritt. Legal education has benefited from a fifty-year movement for clinical education. This movement necessarily interrogates and seeks to overcome the anachronistic, inherited Langdellian paradigm that dominates and continues to define the curricula and policies of our law schools. But the movement for clinical education has been exponentially confounded by contemporary legal education’s shape as a pyramid of statuses and privileges accumulated over …

Seismic Shifts: The Covid-19 Pandemic's Gendered Fault Lines And Implications For International Law, Shruti Rana

Faculty Publications

As we look towards the pandemic's end, this article examines the pandemic's impacts on the international legal order through a gendered lens. It argues that in the short-term, the pandemic reinforces public-private divides in international law, reinvigorating previous debates over the state's power in social relations-its role in protecting people from, as opposed to perpetrating, harm. It argues that in the long-term, these developments threaten to unravel the most recent gains in international law and global governance that have operated to support and expand the recognition of human rights to marginalised groups. Left unaddressed, this unraveling will further entrench such …

Playing At The Crossroads Of Religion And Law: Historical Milieu, Context And Curriculum Hooks In Lost & Found, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

This chapter presents the use of Lost & Found – a purpose-built tabletop to mobile game series – to teach medieval religious legal systems. The series aims to broaden the discourse around religious legal systems and to counter popular depiction of these systems which often promote prejudice and misnomers. A central element is the importance of contextualizing religion in period and locale. The Lost & Found series uses period accurate depictions of material culture to set the stage for play around relevant topics – specifically how the law promoted collaboration and sustainable governance practices in Fustat (Old Cairo) in twelfth-century …

“Let Those Who Have An Experience Of Prison Speak”: The Critique & Praxis Of The Prisons Information Group (1970-1980), Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

As the May ’68 revolution reached a boiling point, a remarkable assemblage of philosophers, writers, and incarcerated persons, doctors, nurses, social workers, and sociologists, activists and organizers, and militants in France turned their attention to the problem of the prison. At a time when prisons were mostly hidden from view, practically impenetrable in France to outsiders, at a time long before we recognized mass incarceration in countries like the United States, the Prisons Information Group (the Groupe d’information sur les prisons or the “GIP”) coalesced to spotlight the travesty of justice that is the prison – one that continues unabated …

Origin Stories: Critical Race Theory Encounters The War On Terror, Natsu Taylor Saito

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Stories matter. They matter to those intent on maintaining structures of power and privilege, and to those being crushed by those structures. In the United States, the space to tell, and to hear, our stories has been expanding. This means that the histories and lived realities of those who have been excluded, particularly people of color, are seeping into mainstream discourse, into the books our children read, the movies and television shows they watch, and the many websites comprising social media. Critical race theory has played a role in this expansion. It insists that we recognize the legitimacy of the …

Teaching Law Online: Yesterday And Today, But Tomorrow Never Knows, Ira Steven Nathenson

Saint Louis University Law Journal

Although the role of “online” in legal education has grown over the past several decades, online teaching became a lifeline in Spring 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered classrooms nationwide. Online teaching is now necessary, but also problematic. Schools and teachers therefore need to carefully consider how to make effective use of online tools and techniques. This essay reflects on the author’s career-long experiences in online law teaching, much of which predates the COVID-19 pandemic. “With a little help” from a Beatles song or two, the essay reflects the yesterday, today, and tomorrow of online legal education. It closes with …

What We Teach Is Who We Become: A Historical Exploration And Legislative Comparison Of States’ History Curricula Incorporating Black Experiences In America, Aleksandra Syniec

Student Works

No abstract provided.

Attitudes Toward Withholding Antibiotics From People With Dementia Lacking Decisional Capacity: Findings From A Survey Of Canadian Stakeholders, Gina Bravo, Lieve Van Den Block, Jocelyn Downie, Marcel Arcand, Lise Trottier

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Background

Healthcare professionals and surrogate decision-makers often face the difficult decision of whether to initiate or withhold antibiotics from people with dementia who have developed a life-threatening infection after losing decisional capacity.

Methods

We conducted a vignette-based survey among 1050 Quebec stakeholders (senior citizens, family caregivers, nurses and physicians; response rate 49.4%) to (1) assess their attitudes toward withholding antibiotics from people with dementia lacking decisional capacity; (2) compare attitudes between dementia stages and stakeholder groups; and (3) investigate other correlates of attitudes, including support for continuous deep sedation (CDS) and medical assistance in dying (MAID). The vignettes feature a …

Images Of Reach, Range, And Recognition: Thinking About Emotions In The Study Of International Law, Emily Kidd White

Articles & Book Chapters

There is much critical potential in bringing together the philosophy of emotion and the study of international law. Narratives about legitimate political and legal authority have tended to either assume that it is possible to extricate emotions from political judgement, or to rest upon uncomplicated (and wholly demystified) assumptions about the legibility of emotions over time and place. Philosophers interested in emotion have regularly grappled with questions concerning an emotion’s reach and range (insofar that the emotion in question bears an intersubjective component), and recognition (comprehensibility) of emotions beyond one’s own social and political communities (or even beyond one’s self). …

America’S Presidential Crisis Of Legitimacy: How The Electoral College Became Obsolete And How We Can Fix It, Julia Rose Foodman

Scripps Senior Theses

The goal of this thesis is to critique the current American Presidential electoral system, the Electoral College, and to show what an alternative could potentially mean for the American people. This paper seeks to answer the following questions: What are the main arguments for the Electoral College, why are they troubling, and how can we mend American Presidential elections for the greater purposes of political equality, democracy, and freedom? To do so, core arguments made by conservative pundits in favor of the Electoral College are outlined in order to bring attention to their logical, political, and moral inconsistencies. The inequalities …

Notes From The Periphery: Finding More Than (Non)Ownership In Property Law?, Estair Van Wagner

Articles & Book Chapters

Property law structures the way we make decisions about how we live together and with the world around us. In doing so, it shapes, but is also shaped by, our relationships with the places we inhabit and encounter. Traditionally, non-owners are defined by their distance and exclusion from the primary legal relationship and their lack of enforceable interests. Yet, land use conflicts continue to arise because people routinely assert relationships with land and resources that they are not formally recognised as owning but with which they are deeply entangled. This chapter touches briefly on three examples: the relations of Indigenous …

Deep Cuts: Four Critiques Of Legal Ideology, Justin Deystone, Akbar Rasulov

Publications

This Article begins an effort to rekindle the intellectual tradition of critical legal theory. The context for the project is significant. On the one hand is the grip of a social crisis, the contours of which continue to confound the commentariat. Racism, xenophobia, gendered violence, migration and nation, climate change, health pandemics, political corruption. The parade is as intimidating as it is spectacular. On the other hand, the very tools of criticism we depend upon in identifying these characters in the parade, much less the spectacle of the parade itself, are themselves in crisis. There is, in a word, a …

Constitutional Revolutions: The People, The Text, And The Hermeneutic Of Legitimation, Howard Schweber

Maryland Law Review

No abstract provided.

Emotions And Intellectual Property Law, Margaret Chon

Faculty Articles

Emotions constitute an integral part of the diverse approaches that we bring to bear upon our most pressing law and policy issues. This article explores the role of emotions in intellectual property, information, and technology law (IP). Like other areas of law, IP commits to, prioritizes, and even honors, reason, logic, and facts—which can result in the sidelining of the affective components of law. Yet our affective responses to legal and other phenomena influence both cognition and reason. Part I of the article provides a general overview of the field of law and emotions, pointing out how this approach to …

History, System, Principle, Analogy: Four Paradigms Of Legitimacy In European Law, Paul Linden-Retek

Journal Articles

The constitutional dimension of European Union law promises—in its most ambitious forms—reflexive structures of post-national democratic community. But this ambition poses profound philosophical challenges for how we think about the legitimacy of European judiciaries—the relation between legal decision-making and the ideal of post-national self-authorship. European constitutional law not only coordinates new forms of public power, but its jurisprudence also normatively justifies (or fails to justify) that power in what must be similarly reflexive discourses of legitimation.This article argues that theorists of European law have thus far paid too little attention to the thicker socio-cultural registers through which this legitimation occurs. …

Demystifying The Legitimacy Of International Tribunals: Case Study Of The International Court Of Justice And Its Decisions On Armed Activities In The Congo, Roger-Claude Liwanga, Casondra Turner

Emory International Law Review

Over the last seven decades, there has been a proliferation of international tribunals. Yet, they have not received unanimous approval, raising questions about their legitimacy. A legitimate international tribunal is one whose authority to adjudicate international disputes is perceived as justified. Using the case study of the International Court of Justice (I.C.J.), this Article highlights the three criteria that should be considered in assessing the legitimacy of an international tribunal, which include legal, sociological, and moral elements. It also contends that the I.C.J. cannot claim “full” legitimacy if any of these components are missing in its decisions. The Article further …

Hannah Arendt Meets Qanon: Conspiracy, Ideology, And The Collapse Of Common Sense, David Luban

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

A June 2020 survey found one in four Americans agreeing that “powerful people intentionally planned the coronavirus outbreak.” In fall 2020, seven percent said they believe the elaborate and grotesque mythology of QAnon; another eleven percent were unsure whether they believe it. November and December 2020 found tens of millions of Americans believing in election-theft plots that would require superhuman levels of coordination and secrecy among dozens, perhaps hundreds, of otherwise-unconnected and unidentified miscreants.

Conspiracy theories are nothing new, and they raise a question that preoccupied Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism: whatever happened to common sense? Arendt …

Past Prescient, Christopher Tomlins

University of Colorado Law Review

No abstract provided.

Pandemic Emotions: The Good, The Bad, And The Unconscious —Implications For Public Health, Financial Economics, Law, And Leadership, Peter H. Huang

Publications

Pandemics lead to emotions that can be good, bad, and unconscious. This Article offers an interdisciplinary analysis of how emotions during pandemics affect people’s responses to pandemics, public health, financial economics, law, and leadership. Pandemics are heart-breaking health crises. Crises produce emotions that impact decision-making. This Article analyzes how fear and anger over COVID-19 fueled anti-Asian and anti-Asian American hatred and racism. COVID-19 caused massive tragic economic, emotional, mental, physical, and psychological suffering. These difficulties are interconnected and lead to vicious cycles. Fear distorts people’s decision readiness, deliberation, information acquisition, risk perception, and thinking. Distortions affect people’s financial, health, and …

Catalan Identity And Paradiplomacy Strategy In Catalonia’S Independence Movement, Windy Dermawan, Akim Akim

Global: Jurnal Politik Internasional

This article seeks to analyse how Catalan identity, within the context of its conflict with the Spanish government, contributes to its foreign relations with the global public through paradiplomacy. This article uses qualitative research method with literature study. It finds that Catalonia, as one of Spain’s autonomous regions, have a distinct history, language, and culture from other Spanish regions. To protect their identity, there have been an emergence of movement for greater Catalan autonomy, even independence. This conflict reached climax on 1 October 2017 when the Catalan government initiated an independence referendum amongst Catalan people, with the majority voted for …

Pirate Radio Proves Invaluable To Immigrant Communities During The Pandemic — But The Fcc Isn’T Having It, May Olvera

Capstones

In January 2020, congress passed the PIRATE Act into law, expanding the legal consequences for operating pirate radio tenfold. Although the FCC claims that the reason they are cracking down on pirate stations — that is, stations broadcasting on regulated airwaves without an FCC license — is that they could interfere with emergency messaging, the pandemic has proven otherwise; there is no evidence of pirates interfering with official safety warnings. In fact, most pirate stations are run by immigrants speaking in their native tongue and they have been able to provide vulnerable and underserved communities with the information they need …

Resilience Theory And Wicked Problems, Robin Kundis Craig

Vanderbilt Law Review

This Article posits, first, that resilience theory offers important insights into our understanding of wicked problems and, second, that to understand the value of resilience theory to wicked problems, we should start by going back to the context of Rittel’s and Webber’s 1973 delineation of the ten characteristics of a “wicked problem.” Rittel and Webber were in fact among the vanguard of researchers beginning to articulate the realization that social and ecological systems—now social-ecological systems (“SESs”)—do not follow the predictable and mechanistic rules of Newtonian physics. As a result, SESs do not yield, at least not over the long term, …

Survivor: An Analysis Of The Term From India, Pravin Patkar

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

This article discusses the need for greater conceptual clarity of the term survivor. It raises questions about the propriety of the term to refer to the victims of sex trafficking. It points out that in the Indian context, the term victim is legally and operationally defined. It cautions against the hasty incorporation of the term survivor into public policies addressing the trafficked victims' problems. Different social platforms use the term survivor differently, and the difference is not nominal. The use of the term survivor is both casual as well as intentional. The term survivor trivializes the exploitation and makes invisible …

Debunking Intellectual Property Myths: Cross Cultural Experiments On Perceptions Of Property, Gregory N. Mandel, Kristina R. Olson, Anne A. Fast

BYU Law Review

For decades, the prevailing view in the United States and many Western countries has been that China does not appropriately respect intellectual property rights. These beliefs lie at the heart of President Donald Trump’s current trade war with China. Despite substantial geopolitical debate over differences between American an d Chinese attitudes towards intellectual property rights, and despite the critical effects that such attitudes have on international economic markets and the function of intellectual property systems, empirical evidence of these attitudes is largely lacking. This Article presents original experimental survey research that explores cross cross-cultural differences between American and Chinese attitudes …

Table Of Contents, Antonio Medina-Rivera, Lee F. Wilberschied Ph.D.

Cultural Encounters, Conflicts, and Resolutions

No abstract provided.

On The Basis Of Sex: Personal Status Law Reforms And Economic Growth, Kylie Bring

Honors Theses

The purpose of this thesis is to analyze how law reform toward gender equity has an impact on economic growth in Arab countries in the Middle East. Personal status law reform granting women economic, social, and personal freedoms is spreading across the region and showing substantial change. Using case studies of major PSL reforms in Tunisia and Morocco, this thesis outlines qualitative and quantitative evidence to support the case that gender equity benefits the economic growth of the given country.

Law And Popular Culture: A Course Book (3rd Edition), Jessica Silbey, Michael Asimow

Books

This book is the reader for a course with the general theme of “Law and Popular Culture” or “Law and Film.” It is about the interface between two these two enormously important subjects. It is suitable for undergraduate and graduate classes or seminars in American studies, criminal justice, political science, film studies, or many other academic programs, as well as in law schools. The course can be taught by anyone interested in law as well as film and television and requires no specialized academic training. This is the third edition of the book which has a new co-author (Jessica M. …

Furtive Blackness: On Blackness And Being, T. Anansi Wilson

UC Law Constitutional Quarterly

Furtive Blackness: On Blackness and Being (“Furtive Blackness”) and The Strict Scrutiny of Black and BlaQueer Life (“Strict Scrutiny”) take a fresh approach to both criminal law and constitutional law; particularly as they apply to African descended peoples in the United States. This is an intervention as to the description of the terms of Blackness in light of the social order but, also, an exposure of the failures and gaps of law. This is why the categories as we have them are inefficient to account for Black life. The way legal scholars have encountered and understood the language of law …