Digital Commons Network^™

No Remedy For Colonization, Sigrid Vendrell Polanco

City University of New York Law Review

The United States purports to maintain a democratic relationship with its inhabited territories, yet the Supreme Court continues to uphold twentieth century laws that affirm rather than abrogate colonial policies. The gap between how the United States idealizes democracy and its real world application, especially in its five colonized territories (Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, the United States Virgin Islands, and American Samoa), is not just growing – it is becoming a chasm. These colonies are currently referred to as United States territories. In 2023, the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico experienced a controversial sovereignty challenge …

Beyond Wall Street: Inside The Legal Battles Of Private Companies, Jessica M. Erickson

Law Faculty Publications

Boardroom battles on Wall Street command national attention. Yet the vast majority of business disputes in the United States do not take place on Wall Street and do not involve public companies. Nearly all American companies are privately held, and the disputes between the owners of these Main Street businesses seldom make headlines. Nor do they receive much attention in legal scholarship. While scholars have examined these disputes from a theoretical perspective, there have been no empirical studies analyzing lawsuits between the owners of private companies. As a result, we do not know why these business relationships fail or the …

Mind The Gap(S): Mitigating Harassment In A Post-#Metoo Workplace, Jamillah Bowman Williams, Elizabeth C. Tippett, Anu Ramdin

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In a post-#MeToo workplace, harassment remains pervasive, and harassment law still fails to provide protection for the harms experienced by many workers—particularly those in the most vulnerable jobs. Even when reform efforts are introduced through legislation, courts, and agency guidance, it often does not provide greater power, autonomy, and dignity to women in ways that would more meaningfully protect them from workplace abuse. We are the first to create a database of state legislation, including over three thousand bills, that allows us to empirically analyze the extent to which lawmakers comprehensively address harassment following the rise of the #MeToo movement. …

Integration Over Institutionalization: Addressing Rhode Island’S Institutionalization Of Developmentally Disabled Children Through An Olmstead Compliance Framework, Anna Macgillivray

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.

From Ambiguity To Overreach: The Ftc's Questionable Authority To Ban Non-Competes, Taylor Ray Pelton

Cybaris®

No abstract provided.

Man On Mars: How Can International Space Law Limit The Environmental Consequences Of The Coming Rush For Resources In Space, Elizabeth Anne Henderson

Michigan Journal of International Law

The body of international law governing space has stood at a standstill for decades. The five central treaties regulating this area of law are not only vague, but they have also become a hindrance to the global community’s ability to address the rapidly intensifying second space race. The treaties do not adequately state who space belongs to, who is entitled to take advantage of the natural resources of celestial bodies, or what protections are afforded to celestial environments in the face of impending mining and resource extraction projects. This impasse within international law has not stopped entrepreneurs and corporations from …

Conservative Family Values As Constitutional Law: Private Regulation And The Erosion Of Fundamental Rights, Spera, Clara, Fleming, Katherine

Santa Clara Law Review

This Article examines a paradox in contemporary constitutional law: While constitutional rights traditionally protect minorities against majority preferences, the Supreme Court has increasingly enabled certain private actors to override others’ constitutionally protected family formation choices through what this Article calls “private regulation.” The Court’s decisions allow individual private actors to impose traditional religious and moral views on others who do not share those beliefs, while simultaneously embedding those very views in constitutional jurisprudence. This dual approach creates a troubling inversion. Instead of constitutional rights serving their traditional function of protecting minorities from majority overreach, they are being used to empower …

Anchoring Digital Sovereignty, Vivek Krishnamurthy

Publications

For a quarter-century, a consensus has prevailed that territorial sovereignty applies online as it does offline. Since practically all the Internet's infrastructure and its billions of users reside on the territory of states, conventional wisdom holds that sovereignty must extend to cyberspace. Such accounts ignore how people experience cyberspace as a distinctive place, and how current international law lacks safeguards to prevent states from exercising their sovereignty to splinter the Internet into a set of national networks. Territorial sovereignty is also hard to square with pledges by the world's democracies to keep the Internet free, open, and global; yet it …

Patriarch Kirill Of Moscow And All Russia: A True Patriarch Or A False One, A Senior Cleric Or A Senior Politician Of The Russian Federation? The Russian Patriarch And The War In Ukraine, Dilyan Nikolchev

Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe

This paper focuses on the behavior of the current Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill (Gundyaev) in the context of the Russia’s military aggression against sovereign Ukraine – a religious leader who fully supports the war policy of the Kremlin. The pro-war and pro-Putin views and messages of Patriarch Kirill proved him in the eyes of the Orthodox world more as a false Patriarch and a politician than as the primate of the Russian Orthodox Church. To a large extent, the Russian political narratives and ideology of the “Russian Peace” and “Holy Rus” doctrine are a product of the senior leadership of …

The Lasting Impact Of Ring V. Arizona On Capital Jury Trials, Kevin M. Morrow

Wyoming Law Review

The final decision on the imposition of the death penalty in the United States is made by either judges or juries. A wealth of empirical study has gone into comparing these two methods. Arizona, with its change to a jury-based system immediately after the landmark Supreme Court decision Ring v. Arizona, is divided into discrete eras of capital sentencing. For the first time, this article catalogs, and examines, the post-Ring capital trials that reached the question of life or death to explore systemic differences between jury and judge sentencings. The study revealed that while Arizona’s rate of death sentences increased …

The Economics Of Healthcare Fraud, Jetson Leder- Luis, Anup Malani

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

Healthcare fraud imposes a sizable cost on U.S. public healthcare budgets and distorts health care provision. We examine the economics of health care fraud and enforcement using theory and data and connect to a growing literature on the topic. We first offer a new economic definition of health care fraud that captures and connects the wide range of activities prosecuted as fraud. We define fraud as any divergence between the care an insurer says a patient qualifies for, the care a provider provides, and the care a provider bills for. Our definition clarifies the economic consequences of different categories of …

The Genesis Of Constitutions: A Natural Language Processing Approach, Tejas Ramdas, Patrick Chung-Chia Huang, Nuno Garoupa, Martin T. Wells, Yun-Chien Chang, Tom Ginsburg

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

The diffusion of constitutional ideas and models has been the subject of extensive scholarship. In this paper, we use natural language processing methods to examine the persistence of constitutional ideas and models, focusing on how 16 core and iconic constitutions influence 572 newer constitutions over a long period (1900–2020). Our findings indicate that “old” core constitutions (such as those of the U.S. of 1789, Spain of 1812, France of 1848, and to a lesser extent France of 1791) have maintained significant influence over those 121 years. Austria of 1920 and France of 1946 are the most influential among the 20th …

The "Not Seen" Effect Of International Financial Centers: Innovation In The Global Financial Ecosystem, Charlotte Ku, Andrew P. Morriss

South Carolina Journal of International Law and Business

International Financial Centers (IFCs) are hubs of legal and financial innovation, developing specialized frameworks that facilitate cross-border investment, enhance global capital mobility, and support economic growth. Through jurisdictional competition, professional clustering, and adaptive regulatory frameworks, IFCs have pioneered legal structures that enable enterprises of all sizes to participate in the global economy. Using case studies of the International Business Company, the Limited Liability Company, the Protected Cell Company, and advances in trust law and applying the theoretical frameworks of social scientist Richard Florida and psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, this article illustrates how IFCs serve as laboratories for financial experimentation, generating widely …

Evolutive Regime Assertion For The International Military Laws Of Outer Space: U.S. Legal Problems And Solutions Relating To The International Law Of Space Warfare, Matthew Lively

South Carolina Journal of International Law and Business

This article has three interrelated purposes. It 1) makes several novel contributions to and unite problematically disparate pieces of space law scholarship, 2) illustrates a disconnection between U.S. strategic space policies and the U.S. practice of military operations in outer space, 3) offers a new framework for international military space law, Evolutive Regime Assertion, that could remedy that connection and advance U.S. strategic interests while enhancing the safety of space operations for all the world. Evolutive Regime Assertion is mostly a prescriptive framework, but some of its elements are descriptive as well. In advancing the utility of the framework, this …

Navigating The Seas Of History In International Law, Valentina Vadi

South Carolina Journal of International Law and Business

Inquiries into questions of time, history, and international law have recently come to the fore. So far, however, many studies have only examined developments in international law from a temporally and thematically fragmented, brief, and narrow perspective. Due to international law’s growing normative and institutional fragmentation and emphasis on specific crises, episodes, and events, many analyses focus on transient trends and particular facets of international law. This study suggests an alternative to these constrained viewpoints: a thorough, multilayered, and broad perspective to questions of international law, drawing on Fernand Braudel’s tripartite theory of time.

Braudel’s theory of time provides valuable …

Backdoor Nepa Proceduralization: Less Environmental Substance Begets More Environmental Procedure, Cade Mallett

Natural Resources Journal

The National Environmental Policy Act (“NEPA”) tasks the government with fully analyzing the environmental consequences of the actions it plans to take before those actions can be performed. This procedural function of NEPA is much maligned by the development community for imposing paralyzingly high costs on government action. At the same time, the statute is disparaged by environmentalists as a toothless and ineffective tool which cannot compel the government to conform its actions to the environment’s best interests. So, which side is right? Arguably, both are. By interpreting NEPA to be a purely procedural statute, the Supreme Court’s holdings on …

Party Commitment And Flexibility In Corporate Restructuring, Robert K. Rasmussen

Emory Bankruptcy Developments Journal

No abstract provided.

Reproductive Rights: How Voting Behavior Illustrates Shifting Political Attitudes, Keavy Callwood

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This research project intends to explore a causal link between the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022) and shifting political attitudes as modeled through voting behaviors. Research will be conducted by using data from government and reputable sources that are representative of the general public to show that political attitudes have shifted since the release of the Dobbs decision. Additionally, the question will be analyzed through discussing several political theories and applying them to the current issues being studied. This research could help show how the Supreme Court is an important actor in the political …

An Analysis Of The Constitutionality Of Florida's 2024 Hb 3: “Online Protections For Minors,” Comparative To Other State Regulations Of The Internet, Evan J. Siegel

Honors Undergraduate Theses

This thesis examines the constitutionality of the Florida House of Representatives’ 2024 priority bill, HB 3: “Online Protections for Minors,” through its ongoing litigation in North Florida. The broad nature of the bill, which is now Florida law, and its burden on accessing constitutionality protected speech and/or expression may not be consistent with the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution. How the law defines and shapes what material may be accessible to people on the Internet, or the means they would need to use to create a social media account, are questions many other courts have begun …

Can The Sec Mandate Disclosures That Contain Both Financial And Social Information? The Case Of The Human Capital Management Disclosures, Patrick M. Corrigan

Journal Articles

Human capital contributes directly to the top and bottom line of corporate financial performance. However, theory predicts, and empirical studies suggest, that firms underinvest in human capital because of a classic public goods problem: since employees can always leave to work for another employer, firms cannot expect to bear all the fruits of investments they make in human capital. As human capital becomes more important in the modern service and technology economy, the ills of this public good problem are growing and the deficiencies of underinvestment becoming more apparent. This Article studies the potential role of human capital management disclosures. …

Algorithmic Governance And Nondiscrimination Rights In The Workplace, Pauline Kim

Scholarship@WashULaw

This chapter analyzes existing legal responses to the problem of discriminatory algorithms in the workplace. As firms increasingly rely on algorithms or automated decision systems, a type of artificial intelligence, to manage their workforces, concerns have grown that these tools can systematically exclude historically disadvantaged groups. One response is to rely on traditional anti-discrimination law. These laws clearly prohibit certain forms of algorithmic discrimination; however, the complex, opaque nature of algorithms makes identifying and proving discriminatory harms challenging. Another response looks to broader frameworks of data protection and algorithmic regulation to protect against workplace discrimination. These initiatives are promising, but …

A Liberty-Balancing Approach To Crime, Sheldon Evans

Scholarship@WashULaw

At its core, the criminal legal system is an ecosystem of institutions that seek to balance liberty interests. The insightful theories and complex practices of crime policy coalesce around questions on how crime impacts the liberties of individuals and communities to be safe, and how this correlates with the deprivation of liberty from offenders through our punishment system. But modern criminal policy, most often associated with the problems of overcriminalization and mass incarceration, has wholly abandoned any such delicate and nuanced balancing. Instead, the system thrives on sacrificing the liberties of offenders in a perverse and ineffective regime that leads …

Framing Legal Systems In New And Emerging Statelets: Autonomous Projects Of The Zapatistas Of Chiapas And The Democratic Autonomous Administration Of Northern And Eastern Syria, Samuel Wolff

Emory International Law Review Recent Developments

Autonomous movements within states are disruptions in the normal order and control that a state exerts over its territories. While there are some groups that aim to achieve autonomy and recognition while staying within the structure of the existing state, other groups seek to succeed and establish their own autonomous area completely succeeding and divorcing from the state. For a variety of reasons- from mistrust of a corrupt central government to violent repression of ethnic minorities- movements arise offering an alternative to the existing state. As these movements break, sometimes violently, from the state, they also break from the legal …

Comparative Federalism In The Us And The Eu — The Winemaker's Legal Perspective, Clement Xu

Emory International Law Review Recent Developments

In our lives, many of us will intersect with wine at some point, be it an aged bordeaux presented in elaborate fashion, or a box of nondescript cooler doled out at a backyard cookout. Beyond analyzing a wine for the complexity of its bouquet, or the strength of its tannins, the wine market as a whole beckons a nuanced study from the perspective of comparative law. The radical differences in business models, consumer base, and even expectations, between the “old world” and the “new world” give rise to a number of topics ranging from authenticity, legal protection, and government regulatory …

Flawed Framework, Fatal Discretion: Unraveling Implicit Bias In Capital Punishment Decisions, Justin D. Levinson, Rachel G. Schaefer

Case Western Reserve Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Cost Of Inaction: How Medicaid Reform Can Target Racial Disparities In America’S Pregnancy-Related Mortality Crisis, Lauren Mallaber

Case Western Reserve Law Review

No abstract provided.

One, Two, Three Strikes You're Out Of The Old Tax Game: Reevaluating The Income Source Tax Prohibition In Light Of Shohei Ohtani's Record-Breaking Deal, Brendan J. Baird

Case Western Reserve Law Review

No abstract provided.

Leadership In The Digital Economy: An Investigation Into How Digitalisation Is Changing The Role And Practice Of Leadership In The Australian Defence Industry, Rhogan Aitken

Theses

Digitalisation is a phenomenon that is transforming society and is the process that moves an organisation to become digital. Research was conducted on senior leaders in the Australian defence industry with the purpose of investigating how the role and practice of leadership was changing because of digitalisation. A two-phased qualitative methodology was employed. An initial Delphi study on 13 experts in digital transformation was adopted to gain consensus on key issues, with the results informing a second stage of semi-structured interviews with 32 senior leaders in the Australian defence industry. The results identified factors that were influencing leadership, including increased …

Ai And Tribal Court Practice, Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Articles

American Indian tribal court practice resides at the intersection of two difficult legal problems. First, because tribal justice systems are usually very young and dynamic, awareness and analysis of tribal law is underdeveloped. Second, because tribal nations are not governed by state or federal law, tribal law is culturally unique. Tribal court practitioners often find that even routine legal matters will involve questions of first impression in the jurisdiction. All of this is to say tribal court jurisprudence is intensely jurisgenerative.

Because tribal law is often unsettled or indeterminate, the costs of discovering and applying this law are occasionally high. …

Geographies Of Trauma And Healing: Resistance, Resilience, ‘Ustawi Wa’, And The Lived Experiences Of African Women Refugees From The Ehagl Region In Canada, Rosemary Njeri Kimani-Dupuis Dr., Rosemary Kimani-Dupuis

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

This dissertation explores the lived experiences of African women refugees from the East and Horn of Africa and Great Lakes (EHAGL) region resettled in Ontario, Canada, with particular focus on the complex intersections of trauma, resilience, and healing within global refugee governance. It asks: How do the gendered and spatial dynamics of refugee protection and Canadian settlement systems sustain structural violence against African women refugees, and how do their transnational experiences challenge and reshape dominant frameworks of care, well-being, and institutional response?

Through a multi-scalar analysis—macro (legal governance frameworks), meso (institutional actors), and micro (women’s narratives)—the study explores how trauma …