Digital Commons Network^™

Moral Panic Or Public Health Crisis? Lessons From Drugs And Gambling For “Addictive” Design, Matthew B. Lawrence, Haomin (Kevin) Yan

Faculty Articles

In her important book, Unwired: Gaining Control Over Addictive Technologies, Gaia Bernstein illustrates the value of a comparative approach, drawing lessons from fights around the regulation of tobacco and ultra-processed food for the regulation of social media. Building on Bernstein’s work, this symposium contribution aims to draw additional insight from experience with drug and gambling regulation for the regulation of social media, video games, AI, and other potentially-addictive technologies.

Specifically, after introducing Bernstein’s book and the foundation it lays, we draw six lessons from the study of psychoactive drugs and gambling. As we elaborate below: Lesson one is that …

Extramural Absolutism, Deepa Das Acevedo

Faculty Articles

As battles over academia escalate, an area of intensifying concern is the speech faculty engage in outside their professional functions—what is often called “extramural” speech. Professors have been criticized, disciplined, pressured to resign, and even terminated for extramural speech that is deemed offensive by individuals inside and outside university communities. And yet, academics generally remain committed to a principle that this Article identifies as extramural absolutism.

The Article explains extramural absolutism’s unpopularity outside academia as a reasonable consequence of the way supporters have presented and justified it. Contrary to widespread scholarly portrayal, extramural absolutism is not a moderate concession justified …

Healing Communities With Police Divestment: Seeking Abolition Through Transformative Reform And Community-Government Collaboration, Jessica E. Gillson

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Concerns about the efficacy and sustainability of the U.S. carceral system have persisted throughout the country’s history, recently fueling renewed activism and bipartisan calls for reform. However, proposed solutions remain divisive. This thesis first defines the current status of our prison systems, then explores collaborative alternatives to incarceration and policing that support communities and break cycles of incarceration.

Focusing on partnerships among local governments, community organizations, justice-involved individuals, and law enforcement, this study examines holistic approaches to crime prevention, reentry, and reintegration. Using an interdisciplinary framework incorporating restorative justice, community resilience, and systems theory, it investigates how community-based strategies can …

Web Of Exploitation: The Psychological Need For Comprehensive Federal Law To Combat Cyber Sexual Abuse, Sarah E. Bahrenburg

Journal of Race, Gender, and Ethnicity

Cyber sexual abuse inflicts deep and lasting psychological harm on victims, often exacerbating the trauma of traditional sexual abuse due to the permanence and reach of digital content. Survivors may experience depression, anxiety, PTSD, and suicidal ideation as intimate images, videos, or messages resurface indefinitely online. Despite the severity of its impact, current state and federal legal protections are limited and inconsistent, leaving many victims without adequate criminal or civil remedies. This article argues for the creation of comprehensive federal legislation specifically targeting cyber sexual abuse. Such laws would not only provide clearer paths to justice and accountability but also …

Judicial Reform From The Inside Out, Daniel Epps, Marin K. Levy

Faculty Scholarship

The Judiciary Act of 1925, the subject of this Symposium, is known as “the Judges Bill” for a reason. The Justices of the Supreme Court, and Chief Justice Taft in particular, produced the Act and persuaded Congress to enact it. To modern eyes, such efforts seem indecorous, perhaps even scandalous. But in fact, Supreme Court Justices and other federal judges have been extensively involved in judicial reform throughout American history. This Essay examines participation by federal judges in judicial reform efforts—what we call judicial reform from the inside out.

We survey examples of judges participating in reform debates from across …

As They Think Best: A History Of The "One Crowded Hour" Autograph Manuscript, Jennifer L. Behrens

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Introduction To Perspectives On The International Criminal Court And International Criminal Law And Procedure: A Symposium In Memory Of Megan Fairlie, Howard Wasserman

FIU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Liberty Before Party: The Courts As Transpartisan Defenders Of Freedom, Yunsieg P. Kim

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

Like many legislative acts in the United States, election laws are subject to judicial review, often by unelected judges with life tenure. This precipitates what Jacob Eisler calls the counterpopular dilemma. If the laws governing self-rule are dictated by courts that are unaccountable to the people—in the case of Article III judges, by design—they intrude upon democratic autonomy. But without arbiters who are resistant to popular pressure, elections can end up facilitating a mob rule or a tyranny in democratic disguise by enabling elites to manipulate democratic procedures for their own political gain. How, then, can judicial review of election …

The Reasonable Pregnant Worker, Madeleine Gyory

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

Pregnant workers often need changes to their work responsibilities to stay healthy during pregnancy while earning a paycheck. Congress passed the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA) in December 2022, entitling many workers for the first time to “reasonable accommodations” for their pregnancy, childbirth, and related medical conditions—so long as they do not impose an “undue hardship” on their employer. The PWFA dictates that the law’s key terms, “reasonable accommodation” and “undue hardship,” should be construed as they are under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), ADA caselaw, and PWFA regulations issued by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in April …

How And Why Western Europe Avoided Mass Incarceration, Michael Tonry

Articles

Western Europe knows not “mass incarceration.” Scholars and professionals worried, as crime rates rose for two decades through the 1990s, that America’s imprisonment boom portended something similar. That was avoided, partly by adoption of American innovations intended to divert people from prosecution or imprisonment. Sometimes policy transfer succeeds. Prosecutorial diversion programs, pioneered in New York and Washington, DC, in the 1960s and later adopted in many places, soon languished. European equivalents were widely adopted or expanded beginning in the 1970s and remain in extensive use. The prison alternatives trajectory is similar. Community service, restitution, victim-offender mediation, and electronic monitoring all …

Inventing Birthright: The Nineteenth-Century Fabrication Of Jus Soli And Jus Sanguinis, Sam Erman, Nathan Perl-Rosenthal

Articles

Formal membership in a state has been an essential political status for well over a century. It is typically gained at birth, either jus soli or jus sanguinis. Jus soli assigns nationality by birth in a nation's territory; jus sanguinis assigns children their parents’ nationality. This article provides an alternative intellectual history of the modern dominance of these principles for attributing nationality. Contrary to prior scholarship, soli and sanguinis were not restatements of existing principles. The soli/sanguinis binary was a nineteenth-century invention. Old-regime European empires attributed membership in the community under one or another single natural law principle. Parentage and …

Reckoning With Social Policy In Utility Regulation, Alexandra B. Klass, Gabriel Chan

Articles

State public utility regulation in the energy sector is undergoing a rapid transformation driven by public and private investment in clean energy deployment, the corresponding threat to incumbent fossil fuel interests, and growing demands for energy justice. This transformation will impact many aspects of societal well-being—from energy insecurity in disadvantaged communities to dramatic shifts in energy-sector employment—so it is unsurprising that public utility commissions would engage with social policy concerns. However, for decades, state courts and utility stakeholders have admonished commissions that they are economic regulators and that their jurisdiction does not include social policy. This Article shows that state …

The Sovereignty Problem In Federal Indian Law, Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Articles

There is a sovereignty problem in federal Indian law-namely, that the federal government's sovereign defenses prevent tribal nations and individual Indian people from realizing justice in the courts. Often, compelling tribal and Indian claims go nowhere as the judiciary defers to the interests of the United States, even where Congress has expressly stated its support for tribal interests. Conversely, tribal judiciaries allow claims to proceed to the merits, invoking customary and traditional law to hold tribal governments accountable.

Sovereignty theory helps to explain why justice can be done in one court system but not another. But federal, state, and tribal …

The Birth Of The Franchised Dealer Model, Daniel A. Crane

Book Chapters

Chapter 1 traces the history of the franchise dealer model of car distribution, from the early wild west days of the internal combustion automobile to the political confrontations between Detroit’s Big Three and the “mom and pop” car dealers during the mid-twentieth century. The chapter examines the thinking of legendary management figures such as Henry Ford and Alfred P. Sloan, explains the dealer protection rationale behind state franchise dealer laws, and shows how the legacy car companies largely acquiesced in those laws until Tesla’s entry onto the scene.

Business Law In The Ring: Nevada's Rebel Rules Versus Delaware's Corporate Crown, Kalin Sokell, Collin Weires

Nevada Law Journal Forum

This White Paper will begin with an analysis of specialized courts, starting with the Delaware Court of Chancery. It will then compare Delaware’s courts with the business courts in Texas and Nevada and will provide a detailed implementation plan for a specialized business court in Nevada. Next, this White Paper will address the differences between the corporate laws in Nevada and Delaware, including the benefits of incorporating in Nevada versus Delaware. The White Paper will then briefly discuss the proposed general jurisdiction bill in Nevada, and why it ultimately failed. Finally, this White Paper will end with remarks on where …

Choice Of Law In The American Courts In 2024: Thirty-Eighth Annual Survey, John F. Coyle, William S. Dodge, Aaron D. Simowitz

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This is the Thirty-Eighth Annual Survey of American Choice-of-Law Cases. It was written at the request of the Association of American Law Schools Section on Conflict of Laws. It is intended as a service to fellow teachers and to students of conflicts law, both inside and outside of the United States. Its purpose remains to inform, rather than to advocate. This Survey covers cases decided by American state and federal appellate courts during 2024.

Hierarchies Of Violence, Victimhood, And Remedy In The Pursuit Of Women's Rights After War, Marie Berry, Milli Lake, Sinduja Raja, Soraya Zarook

English Faculty Publications

Recent postwar recovery efforts have paved the way for reforms that advance women's participation in politics, inclusion in the economy, and access to justice. In this article, we show how a singular emphasis on gender reforms after war that are inattentive to other societal cleavages can leave various forms of marginalization in the shadows. Subnational interviews on the reverberations of gender reforms in five postwar countries expose three hierarchies that structure access to rights for war-affected communities. We reveal which violence is privileged, whose violence is privileged, and which responses are privileged from the perspectives of differently situated war-affected women, …

Crisis Pricing, John F. Duffy, Richard M. Hynes

Emory Law Journal

Extraordinary times beget extraordinary measures. Multiple national emergencies during the past quarter century have generated a pitched debate as to whether, and to what extent, a crisis justifies deviations from fundamental legal rules. That debate has often focused on constitutional law and has produced sharply divergent views. Some theorists advocate a “business-as-usual” approach, eschewing emergency deviations, but societies rarely hold that course. More pragmatic scholars would permit some emergency measures but also defend fundamental social structures that have great value even during emergencies.

Emergencies, however, pose challenges not only to constitutional rules but to law generally, including the basic structures …

The New Constitutional Challenge To Qui Tam, Emily Mitchell

Emory Law Journal

Following the June 2023 Supreme Court decision in United States ex rel. Polansky v. Executive Health Resources, Inc., the ability of qui tam relators to litigate False Claims Act actions faces renewed challenges on multiple constitutional grounds. Specifically, in his Polansky dissent, Justice Thomas raises a novel Article I concern that Congress does not have the authority to partially assign the government’s litigation claim to relators, thus leaving them without standing to sue. Defendants in False Claims Act cases have already begun raising Thomas’s constitutional arguments in federal courts. What is heralded as the government’s most effective tool to …

Rethinking Misdemeanor Incompetence, Susan A. Mcmahon

Emory Law Journal

The competence to stand trial system is a “slow-moving tsunami” that has grown exponentially in recent years, capturing far more people than jurisdictions have the capacity to handle. As a result, individuals who are incompetent become trapped in pretrial competence purgatory, often detained in jail for months or even years. The harms of this system can be tragic. Competence detainees have died by suicide, starvation, and beatings. They are placed in solitary confinement, experience neglect and abuse, and deteriorate mentally and physically while confined. Often, these individuals are accused of misdemeanors. Often, they go through the competence process only to …

In Re Firstenergy Corp. Securities Litigation: Where Macquarie Meets Affiliated Ute, Elizabeth Cosenza, Amanda M. Payne

Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law

The central question this Article seeks to address is whether there is any world in which the Affiliated Ute presumption can still apply to cases under Rule 10b-5(b) after the Supreme Court’s decision in Macquarie? Put differently, if only half-truths and affirmative misrepresentations remain actionable under Rule 10b-5(b), is the Basic presumption the only pathway left for securities plaintiffs? The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit will likely be the first court to address this issue in In re FirstEnergy Corp. Securities Litigation. The case will test the availability of the Affiliated Ute presumption post-Macquarie in cases based …

John Roberts’ Supreme Court: The Triumph Of Partisanship And Ideology Over Precedent, David Schultz, Jacob Bourgault

Minnesota Law Review Headnotes, Vols. 107 onward (2022-present)

No abstract provided.

Refundable Tax Credit Design: Cohabitating Parents And Gender Presumptions, Michelle Lyon Drumbl

Scholarly Articles

This Essay is meant to encourage further thinking to improve upon design options for unmarried cohabitating parents. Are there better ways to recognize the needs of unmarried co-parents (whether living together or not) and to provide support for shared parenting? The policy considerations for providing support to unmarried cohabitating parents are different than those for supporting married couples, given that these individuals lack the financial protections of a formal partnership.

One solution is to have a default rule whereby the CTC is awarded to the primary caregiver. Canada’s gender presumption provides a degree of administrative simplicity, but the IRS could …

Space For The Departed: Burial, Land Scarcity, And Bone-Ash Apartments In China, Xinyi Wu

Pitzer Senior Theses

The rise of bone ash apartments in China reflects a layered response to urban land scarcity, shifting funeral policies, and real estate speculation. As the state mandates cremation and restricts private cemetery development, traditional burial customs are increasingly reshaped by spatial limitations, economic pressures, and political regulation.

For some families, bone ash apartments function as modern ancestral halls—domestic spaces for remembrance and ritual continuity. For others, they represent a pragmatic investment strategy, offering long-term storage of ashes within assets that retain market value.

This thesis examines how urban planning, state funeral policy, real estate dynamics, and the disintegration of neighborhood …

The 'Realness' Key To Compelled Passcode Production, Gabriel Pell

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

This Article explains how the Foregone Conclusion exception to the Fifth Amendment’s privilege against self-incrimination applies to compelled passcode production. The Supreme Court fashioned the Foregone Conclusion exception in connection with the compelled production of documentary evidence. It facilitates government access to real evidence despite the implicit factual communications inherent in a target’s act of producing it (i.e., that the real evidence exists, is accessible, and is what the state demanded). Engaging with the ‘real evidence’ limitation for compelled acts of production, the Article shows that focusing on unlocked devices and/or stored passcodes as the real evidence to be produced …

The State[S] Of Confession Law In A Post-Miranda World, Eve B. Primus

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

Police interrogators often use lies, threats, subterfuge, and psychological pressure to coerce vulnerable suspects to speak. These tactics produce false confessions, contribute to racial injustice, and undermine the legitimacy of the criminal process. Despite a documented need for better regulation, theU.S. Supreme Court has watered down constitutional protections in the interrogation room, signaling its intent to delegate most regulation of police interrogation practices to the states. Reformers and scholars must think about how best to push states to fill the void left by the absence of federal oversight.

This Article catalogues four different state approaches to regulating confession law: procedural …

Crimes Without Law: Administrative Crimes And The Nondelegation Doctrine, Nicolas Elliott-Smith

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

The future of the nondelegation doctrine is clouded with uncertainty. Despite the Supreme Court’s insistence that the nondelegation doctrine is an axiom of constitutional law, the doctrine remains an illusory constraint on Congress. Indeed, almost a century has passed since the Court invalidated a congressional delegation under the nondelegation doctrine. But several Justices appear eager—or at least willing—to revive the nondelegation doctrine.

This Comment charts an originalist path forward. It primarily argues that the original meaning of legislative power restrains Congress from delegating legislative authority to write criminal law. The constitutional enactors believed that core private rights—to life, liberty, and …

Military Justice: The Forgotten Jurisdiction In Capital Punishment, Erica C. Medley

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

The military capital punishment scheme for murder in peacetime is unconstitutional. It does not meet the Eighth Amendment’s requirement of heightened reliability for capital cases because it fails to include a trial by jury. The Supreme Court identified concerns about court-martial panels compared to juries in Reid v. Covert and United States ex rel. Toth v. Quarles. These concerns are exacerbated by the research from the Capital Jury Project regarding how the race and gender of jurors can affect capital sentencing determinations. Specifically, as the number of white males increases on a jury, the likelihood of a death sentence increases. …

Islamic Finance, Commercial Law, And Economic Justice: Apocalyptic Challenges To The Global Order, Ali Rod Khadem

Emory International Law Review

This Article engages with the heated debates about the Islamic finance industry, which range from praise as an ethical model of ESG principles to sharp criticism as a vehicle for financing terrorism. Offering a novel lens, this Article examines several case studies of Islamic thinkers and movements that have disrupted global politics, exploring how they deploy apocalyptic ideology to promote vastly different visions of future economic orders. Some of these case studies reinterpret key concepts from Islamic commercial law—like unjust enrichment, limited liability partnerships, insurance, almsgiving, and inheritance—while others call for a return to abandoned practices, such as slavery, discriminatory …

The Public Policy Exception In Choice Of Law, Symeon C. Symeonides

Emory International Law Review

No abstract provided.